Randy considered this, weighing the reduced workload against whatever he had been planning to do with his morning.
He sat up slightly.
"How many people are you bringing through?" he asked.
"Just me," Neil said. "The others will come in a different way."
Randy looked at him for a moment, reading the particular simplicity of that answer, and then made the sound he made when he had decided to stop asking questions that were going to produce answers he couldn't fully process.
"Give me an hour," he said.
"You have forty minutes," Neil replied.
The teleportation room was in the settlement's administrative center, a proper installation rather than the portable versions used for short-range travel, and Randy had managed the clearances with the particular efficiency he produced when he genuinely applied himself to something instead of finding reasons to postpone it.
Neil stood in the center of the platform alone.
