Nona was standing before the instrument panel when they came back. There was an impressive array of dials, lights and levers in front of her, but she wasn't interested in these. A single small dial, separate from the rest, held her complete attention. She seemed disturbed by what she saw or didn't see. Disturbed or excited, it was difficult to say which.

Anti stopped. "Look at her. If I didn't know she's a freak like the rest of us, the only one, in fact, who was born that way, it would be easy to hate her—she's so disgustingly normal."

Normal? True and yet not true. Surgical techniques that could take a body apart and put it back together again with a skill once reserved for the repair of machines had made beauty commonplace. No more sagging muscles, wrinkles; even the aged were attractive and youthful-seeming until the day they died. No more ill-formed limbs, misshapen bodies. Everyone was handsome or beautiful. No exceptions.

None to speak of, at least.

The accidentals didn't belong, of course. In another day most of them would have been candidates for a waxworks or the formaldehyde of a specimen bottle.

Nona fitted neither category; she wasn't a repair job. Looking at her closely—and why not?—she was an original work as far from the normal in one direction as Anti, for example, was in the other.

"Why is she staring at the little dial?" asked Anti as the others slipped past her and came into the compartment. "Is there something wrong with it?" She shrugged. "I would be interested in the big dials. The ones with colored lights."

"That's Nona." Docchi smiled. "I'm sure she's never been in the control room of a rocket before, and yet she went straight to the most curious thing in it. She's looking at the gravital indicator. Directly behind it is the gravital unit."

"How do you know? Does it say so?"

"It doesn't. You have to be trained to recognize it, or else be Nona."

Anti dismissed that intellectual feat. "What are you waiting for? You know she can't hear us. Go stand in front of her."

"How do I get there?" Docchi had risen a few inches from the floor, now that Jordan had released him from his grip.

"A good engineer would have enough sense to put on magneslippers. Nona did." Anti grasped his jacket. How she was able to move was uncertain. The tissues that surrounded the woman were too vast to permit the perception of individual motions. Nevertheless, she proceeded to the center of the compartment, and with her came Docchi.

Nona turned before they reached her.

"My poor boy," sighed Anti. "You do a very bad job of concealing your emotions, if that's what you're trying to do. Anyway, stop glowing like a rainbow and say something."

"Hello," said Docchi.

Nona smiled at him, though it was Anti that she came to.

"No, not too close, child. Don't touch the surgery robe unless you want your pretty face to peel off like a plastiwrapper."

Nona stopped; she said nothing.

Anti shook her head hopelessly. "I wish you would learn to read lips or at least recognize written words. It's so difficult to communicate with you."

"She knows facial expressions and actions, I think," said Docchi. "She's good at emotions. Words are a foreign concept to her."

"What other concepts does anyone think with?" asked Anti dubiously.

"Maybe mathematical relationships," answered Docchi. "Though she doesn't. They've tested her for that." He frowned. "I don't know what concepts she does think with. I wish I did."