Higher Education

by Charles Sheffield

  "I'll do my best."

  "How come you keep males and females separated at night? And you run a curfew, and you hit people. One of the paramedics slugged me yesterday, just 'cause of something I said. That's against the law! I know we signed off on a deal that says you're like parents, but parents can't do that stuff. I could sue you, same as I could them."

  "Are you planning to?"

  "We-e-ell. I dunno. But I could."

  "I'll save you the time and effort. You'd lose if you tried."

  "I still got my rights. I never signed those away."

  "Of course you have, and of course you didn't." Bretherton rubbed at his broken nose, and looked more like an old street bruiser than ever. "But you don't seem to know where you are. Can anyone tell Monkey where she is?"

  There was another silence, while everyone stared at each other.

  "We're at Vanguard Mining's medical facility, in New Mexico," Chick Teazle said at last. "Least, that's what the sign says outside the front fence."

  "And it's telling the truth. But we lease our space from someone else. This land belongs to the Mescalero-Apache Sovereign Nation. You, Monkey, like me and everyone else, are governed by the laws of that nation while we're here. Their laws and civil rights are not the ones you're used to, but we like some of 'em a whole lot better. For instance, parental authority over children. Tess Shawm had every right to pop you one yesterday, when you told her she had great T&A and she'd make a good hooker. You're lucky that's all she did."

  Monkey gaped at him. Rick felt that his suspicion was confirmed. Absolutely no secrets here, of any kind, and therefore no privacy. There must be hidden monitors all over, too small and sneakily hidden to be found and smashed like the ones at school. This place was like a jail—worse than a jail! Nobody would dare hit a prisoner in a jail, or he'd be up on a dozen charges and have civil liberty lawyers biting his ass before he could turn round. The sooner Rick was out of here, the better.

  "Does anyone else have a question?" said Bretherton at last. He had a grin on his battered face. "No questions? And no complaints? Well, then, let's get on with the party. I suspect it's the last one you'll have for quite a while."

  He waved his hand toward a long table at the side of the room, loaded down with food and drink, and headed that way himself. Rick estimated the amount of food, counted heads, and made a decision. If he ran out for a quick trip to the head there would be plenty of everything left for him when he got back, and not so many people crowding round the table to get it.

  He went in the opposite direction from everyone else, left the room, and headed along the white-walled corridor that led to his dormitory and beyond that to the men's room. When he came out, thirty seconds later, he could already hear laughter from around the corner. The fun hadn't taken long to start. He was hurrying back along the corridor when someone stepped suddenly out of the dormitory. Rick was grabbed by the shoulder, pulled into the dormitory, and spun back against the wall.

  "In a hurry?" said a gruff voice.

  It was Vido Valdez. Rick dropped into a defensive crouch.

  "No fighting while the tests were on," Vido went on. "But that's all over now. Time for you and me to have a little talk, here where it's nice and quiet."

  He was standing in front of Rick, hands raised. Rick knew from watching Valdez perform on the tests that he was fast. He was also a couple of inches taller, had a longer reach, and outweighed Rick by thirty or forty pounds. Rick assumed they both had plenty of streetfighting experience.

  The only good news was the lack of knives and guns at the Vanguard Mining facility. This was going to be straight hand-to-hand—or foot-to-foot.

  As Vido came at him Rick braced himself against the wall and kicked out with his heavy-shod right foot. His target was Vido's testicles, but Vido sidestepped and grabbed for Rick's leg. He almost had it. The only way that Rick could make him miss was to hurl himself forward, using the wall as a push-off point, and slam into Vido's chest. His skull came up under Vido's chin, but it was not a clean hit. He heard a grunt and knew he had done no serious damage. That was confirmed when he was pushed away one-handed and Valdez's other fist came round to swipe him on the side of the head.

  Rick jumped out of reach, ear ringing. He now knew for certain what he had suspected before: he could not compete with Vido for raw strength. And he was not sure he could compete on speed.

  Valdez was coming in again, crouching to protect his head and testicles. Rick tried a stab with stiffened fingers at the eyes and only managed to hurt himself on Vido's hard skull as the other ducked. An uppercut from Vido missed, but a second later his other fist delivered a swinging roundhouse punch to Rick's other ear. For a second he could not see straight. The only way he could be sure that Vido would not hit him again was to close in and grapple body to body.

  He hugged Valdez and tried to butt him and knee him. At the same time Vido was trying to knee Rick in the balls. Their legs tangled together and threw them both off balance.

  Clutching each other, they fell to the dormitory floor. Rick's head just missed the solid metal leg of one of the beds, but he landed on top.

  He heard the wind whoosh out of Vido. He tried to follow up with a punch to the solar plexus, but they were too close for him to get any real force behind it. And then Vido had him in a bear hug and was squirming around so that Rick was underneath. He fought to get back on top, and they went rolling over and over until they came to the wall.

  Rick was the unlucky one. He was on top when they met the wall, but that meant it was his head that smashed into the cement with the momentum from both of them. He lost his hold on Vido and saw stars. The next thing he knew he was flat on his back, wedged in the angle between floor and wall. He could not get his left hand free.

  Vido was sprawled on top of him. He gave Rick one solid punch on the left cheek, then skinned his knuckles on the wall trying to hook with his other hand.

  He swore and grabbed Rick around the neck. His thumbs dug hard into Rick's throat. Rick bucked and jerked, but Valdez was too heavy and too well positioned. Rick could not dislodge him.

  It was impossible to breathe. Rick groaned and gasped. His windpipe was constricted, the air passage cut off. He clawed at Vido's wrists but he could not break the stranglehold. The strength was going from his hands as Vido steadily throttled him. His full weight was pressing on Rick's chest. In another twenty seconds he became just a dark shape above Rick, squeezing ruthlessly.

  And then suddenly he was gone. Rick, staring upward bulging-eyed, imagined a second and even bigger form looming over him. As he took in a first long and tortured breath, he saw that Valdez was standing in an uncomfortable crouch, one arm pinned behind his back and lifted toward his neck in a half-nelson hold. Vido was gasping in pain.

  "I think that will do," said a cheerful voice. A huge hand came reaching down toward Rick. "Here, grab hold. Are you all right?"

  Rick was far from all right—but he was not going to admit that to Doctor Bretherton, and still less to Vido Valdez. "I'm—I'm fine. Bit—short of breath. Guess I'm still not in—top condition." He straightened his clothes.

  "Fine." Bretherton had been holding Vido helpless, apparently without effort. Now he released him, and Vido grunted in relief. "So all three of us can get back to the others. One thing, though, for both of you. You've had your fun now, so there'll be no more of this."

  "Who told you what was happening?" Vido asked. He was rubbing his chin, where a bruise was already forming. Rick decided it would be all right to massage his own sore throat and ears.

  "Nobody told me," Bretherton said. "I saw it coming. I knew you two would be at each other sometime, the first minute I saw you. I'm glad you held off until the tests were over, though. It would have been a shame to kick you out. And I would have. There's no point in having rules if you don't follow them. But do it again here, and you're both history."

  "So we don't get—get kicked out?" asked Rick.

  "For a little fun? Of course
not. What would a party be, without a bit of a fight?" Bretherton headed for the door of the dormitory. "It's time for me to get back there. You, too, but take time to catch your breath. There'll still be plenty of everything when you get there. Remember, though: it's over."

  He was gone. Rick and Vido stared at each other warily. Doctor Bretherton was no longer in the dormitory, but his presence seemed to hang over the room.

  "Better get back there," Rick muttered at last.

  "Yeah. I guess."

  They headed for the door at the same time and wedged into it together. Neither one was willing to give way. They turned, so that they were face to face and staring into each other's eyes as they edged through into the corridor.

  Vido raised his fist toward Rick, then dropped it to his side. "You got away this time, Luban. He saved your hairy ass, and you know it. I'm not dumb enough to do anything right now, not after what the doc said. But you better remember something, scumball."

  His hand came up, to rub at his bloodshot left eye. "This ain't over. It ain't over 'til I say it's over."

  Chapter Five

  WEEKS of mind-numbing tests, mental and physical, and the discomforts that went with them; they were all converging now, collapsing to a single and final minute.

  Rick had been strapped into his seat for more than an hour. Next to him sat Deedee Mao, another of Vanguard Mining's recent recruits. Like him she had been expelled from her school at sixteen, but as he had discovered in the last hour of conversation they had little else in common. She and a dozen other trainees had been flown to the White Sands launch site from an East Coast medical test facility, two thousand miles away, to join Rick and the rest of his group. She was big, loud, and self-confident, just the sort of aggressive female that he hated. She and Rick had found themselves arguing almost from the first sentence. As the single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle came closer to departure, however, they had both gradually quietened. For the past quarter of an hour neither of them had said a word.

  That silence suited Rick. He didn't want to talk to anybody. He could not take his eyes from the changing digits of the display. Sixty-two—sixty-one. A siren began to wail inside the ship. Only one more minute to lift-off.

  He knew, intellectually, that riding the single stage vessel to orbit was not much more dangerous than taking a PV across the city. So why was he gripping the arms of his seat so hard?

  There was an odd whirring sound and a vibration of the metal surface beneath Rick's feet. The hatch was moving to its final sealed setting. That meant that the lasers were powered up, waiting for their first discharge. The cover beneath the SSTO would have opened, to reveal the ablative layers.

  Rick tried to concentrate on factual matters. The first minute would be the most uncomfortable. That's when he and Deedee and the eighteen other trainees aboard would feel the highest acceleration. After that the ground lasers would be switched off and the onboard nuclear rocket would cut in. The acceleration force on them would drop to two gees.

  Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty. . .

  There were voices in the background: the ground crew for the ship, just three people. Their duties had been explained to Rick as part of the "informed consent" briefing.

  The moving display in front of him seemed to have slowed, minutes passing between each second. Before he got here, Rick had imagined that travel to and in space would be conducted wearing spacesuits. The first White Sands briefing had taught him that was an idiotic idea, as out-of-date as the notion that aircraft passengers all wore parachutes. Rick was dressed in the same informal uniform of blue shirt and slacks that had become familiar to him since the day he arrived in New Mexico for the medical tests.

  Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . .

  Almost as safe as a trip on the PV, the briefings said. But every day the media carried news of PV accidents. The vehicle he was sitting in felt far more vulnerable. Laser power could fail; the nuclear rocket could refuse to cut in; or it could refuse to turn off at the right time and hurtle the passengers away to oblivion. You could sometimes walk away from a PV accident. Had anyone ever walked away from an SSTO failure? There had been failures, he knew that for a fact.

  Rick tried to steel himself for anything. He failed. It was with total astonishment that he suddenly felt a hand on his thigh.

  You were supposed to keep your arms and hands flat on the padded seat support during launch. Rick turned. Deedee Mao was staring straight ahead of her. Her high-cheekboned, yellow face was oddly pale and rigid, but her fingers were squeezing and rubbing his leg.

  "Wanna get it on when we're at the transfer station?"

  She could only be speaking to him, but he could hardly hear her or see her lips moving. "Y'know, in freefall. I hear it's somethin' special."

  It was the worst possible time for a sexual proposition. Even if he had known Deedee well, even if had liked her, Rick was far too nervous to feel horny.

  But he wasn't going to admit to her or anyone else just how he did feel.

  "Sure." His voice sounded like an old man's. He cleared his throat. "Sure." Then he couldn't say any more.

  Twelve, eleven, ten. . .

  "I'll be in c-cabin t-t—." Deedee's fingers on his thigh were trembling. "Cabin t-t-twenty-eight."

  Five, four, three—

  "Oh, sweet Lord—"

  Her hand was trembling worse. With fear, not passion. Rick felt an unexpected sympathy. Deedee was seeking distraction, anything to help her through the first seconds of launch.

  "She's tracking," a crewman's voice said.

  "Mirror's free."

  Two, one. . .

  Anything to help. And he needed distraction as much as she did.

  Zero.

  "Up ship."

  As the final digit flickered into sight, Rick broke the rules, too. He lifted his arm from the padded support, placed his hand on top of Deedee's, and patted it.

  Within half a second he knew that he had made the mistake of the century. Lift had begun. Deedee's hand and his own were suddenly welded together, pressed down by more than five gees of acceleration. His leg was tilted slightly upward and their joined hands inched up his thigh toward his groin.

  Rick gasped with pain. If that monster weight kept moving up his body, it would turn him into a eunuch. He tried to lift his hand and arm and found them sheathed in lead. He could not raise his hand, let alone Deedee's. All he could do, with one desperate jerk, was push their hands a couple of inches away along his leg and hold them there.

  The pain and pressure was excruciating. Deedee's whole forearm lay across his thigh. He could feel bruises forming there in real-time. He sat silent and sweating, pushing and pushing forever, until without warning all weight vanished completely. His stomach at once came free of its moorings and started to float up into his throat, but before he had time to gag he was again pressed back into his seat. This time the force was endurable. It had to be the two gees of the nuclear drive, but compared with the laser-boosted liftoff it felt like nothing.

  Rick lifted his hand away from Deedee's, closed his eyes, and relaxed. After a few moments he felt her hand leave his thigh.

  "Luban. That your name?"

  "Yeah?" He opened his eyes and glanced across at her. Deedee Mao's smooth face was still pale but now it bore its old belligerent expression.

  "Don't get no funny ideas, Luban."

  "Like what?"

  "I mean, about what I might have said back there at liftoff."

  "I won't."

  "I mean, I was just making conversation."

  Rick couldn't let that pass. "Like hell! You were scared white. You should change your name from Deedee to pee-pee. You were ready to pee in your pants."

  "Making love to you appeals less than screwing a swamp toad."

  "I guess you've tried that. Tough on the toad."

  She reached over and grabbed his arm. "Listen, if you want to have this out when we get to the station that's fine by me. I've eaten smart-ass jerks like you—"
<
br />   She paused. The steady roar beneath them had ended. Suddenly they were in freefall, gliding upward in dead silence. Rick once more felt his stomach start to move up his throat.

  "—eaten them for breakf—" Deedee couldn't complete the word. Her brown eyes bulged and her mouth clamped shut. She turned away from Rick, reaching forward and trying to hold off long enough to get her suction mask into position.

  Rick clenched his own teeth and closed his eyes again. He wished he could close his ears, too. Any smart-ass jerks that Deedee had eaten for breakfast were coming up again, along with everything else; and from the sound of it Deedee was just getting into her stride. Rick didn't want to watch.

  Sex in freefall—or, fighting, or anything else with the possible exception of dying—didn't seem to be in Rick and Deedee Mao's immediate future.