They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land of radiation and death. Living in a kill or be killed world. Can they fin a new life and hope? A grim, grisly post-apocalypse story.
The Romantics used to say that the eyes were the windows of the Soul. A good Alien Xenologist might not put it quite so poetically. but he can, if he's sharp, read a lot in the look of an eye!
A young woman objects to being sedated into placidity, as is the norm in the overcrowded, genetically optimized future.She also refuses to be paired with a somnolent drip of a fellow, who needs medication to act at an even minimal level of energy. Then you've got the young spacer, who believes he has discovered an efficient hyperdrive that could open the stars to humanity. He is told to cool his heels in a dead-end assignment until he discovers the error in his mathematics.
Most useful high explosives, like ammonium nitrate, are enormously violent. once they're triggered. But they will remain seemingly inert when beaten, burned, variously punished--until the particular shock required comes along....