SOMETHING HAPPENED EVERY DAY.  IT MIGHT HAPPEN during the morning, while the two men were taking their readings and observations and the two women busy with the domestic routine: the big faces had come during the morning.  Or, as with the little faces and the coloured fires, the strange thing would happen in the afternoon, in the roiddire of Bruno's maintenance programme and Clovis's transmission to Base, Lia's rounds of the garden and Myri's work on her story.  The evening was often undisturbed, the night less often.

They all understood that ordinary temporal expressions had no meaning for people confined indefinitely, as they were to a motionless steel sphere hanging in a region of space so empty that the light of the nearest star took some hundreds of years to reach them.  The Standing Orders devised by Base, however, recommended that they adopt a twenty-four-hour unit of time, as was the rule on the Earth they had not seen for many months.  The arrangement suited them well: their work, recreation and rest seemed to fall naturally into the periods provided.  It was only the prospect of year after year of the same routine, stretching further into the future than they could see, that was a source of strain.

Bruno commented on this to Clovis after a morning spent repairing a fault in the spectrum analyser they used for investigating and classifying the nearer stars.  They were sitting at the main observation port in the lounge, drinking the midday cocktail and waiting for the women to join them.

"I'd say we stood up to it extremely well," Clovis said in answer to Bruno.  "Perhaps too well."

Bruno hunched his fat figure upright.  "How do you mean?"

"We may be hindering our chances of being relieved."

"Base has never said a word about our relief."

"Exactly.  With half a million stations to staff, it'll be a long time before they get round to one like this, where everything runs smoothly.  You and I are a perfect team, and you have Lia and I have Myri, and they're all right together - no real conflict at all.  Hence no reason for a relief."

Myri had heard all this as she laid the table in the alcove.  She wondered how Clovis could not know that Bruno wanted to have her instead of Lia, or perhaps as well as Lia.  If Clovis did know, and was teasing Bruno, then that would be a silly thing to do, because Bruno was not a pleasant man.  With his thick neck and pale fat face he would no be pleasant to be had by, either, quite unlike Clovis, who was no taller but whose straight, hard body and soft skin were always pleasant.  He could not think as well as Bruno, but on the other hand many of the things Bruno thought were not pleasant.  She poured herself a drink and went over to them.

Bruno had said something about its being a pity they could not fake their personnel report by inventing a few quarrels, and Clovis had immediately agreed that that was impossible.  She kissed him and sat down at his side.  "What do you think about the idea of being relieved?" he asked her.

"I never think about it."