"You'd have stopped her?"
"No. I'd have broken you in two." Jigger grabbed Rick by the arm and led him to a pair of rowing machines, the only place where the two of them could sit down facing each other. "How old are you, kid?"
"Sixteen."
"Thought so. Know how old Gina is?"
"Nineteen?"
"She's twenty-two. You're like a baby to her. Hell, you are a baby. Back in school you probably felt like a real big shot—I know I did. I'd had girls, I'd busted teachers, the whole bit. But to Gina a kid from Earth is still in diapers. I'd say each year in space, 'specially in the Belt, is like three on Earth. You were a little kid making a pass at a grown-up."
"But she didn't report it to Gossage. And she passed me on the test I took."
"Sure she did, if you did well on it. Why wouldn't she? You didn't really upset her. How'd you feel if a ten-year-old girl came on strong to you? You'd think it was ludicrous. And you were being tested for proficiency, not maturity. Anyway, believe it or not, Gina likes you. If she didn't she'd have ripped your balls off and stuffed them down your throat. She'd have got away with it, too. What ever made you think for one second that she might be interested in you?"
"She looked at me like she was really fond of me."
"Yeah. Know why? Because you remind her of her kid brother. He's back on Earth and going nowhere, just the way she was before she tripped up and was sent out here. Gina admits it, she used to be a real tearaway. Her parents couldn't do a damn thing with her. But her brother's less of a rebel, and she's afraid he'll just stick in school to the end and finish up in the Pool."
"You don't think she'll tell anyone about what I did?"
"Don't see why she should. But I'll talk to her and make sure."
"Will she listen to you?"
"I think so." Jigger stared at Rick for a second, his head to one side. "You're not too observant, are you? I mean, you've never noticed that Gina and me are an item, have been for a year and a half. That's why I came to CM-2 instead of heading right out for the Belt. That's why I know about her, and what a hellcat she used to be, and all about her kid brother."
Rick gazed at Jigger in horror. He had just remembered what Jigger said about breaking him in two. "I didn't know—I didn't notice. I'm sorry. I mean, if I'd had any idea that you two—"
"You know now. Nothing wrong with feeling horny, either—it means you're physically adjusting to space. But stick to trainees. And don't forget one other thing. California where you came from has the strongest laws in the known universe against sexual harassment and rape, but they still don't work worth a damn. Out here we do things differently. A woman is taught a few tricks so she can look after herself. Deedee and Monkey and Gladys are getting special training you'll never hear about. All the girls are being taught how to look after themselves. Remember that, if you want to keep your balls." Jigger stood up from the rowing machine, came across, and patted Rick on the shoulder. "And while your jewels are still sore, use what happened with Gina to remind you of one other thing: If you want to survive in space, it's not enough to be able to read and write and calculate. You have to learn to notice things—the sort of stuff you won't find in any book."
Rick skulked for a week. He hid away in the privacy of the study cubicles, until finally and inevitably he had the dreaded face-to-face meeting with Gina. She came into the cafeteria with a group of trainees while he was taking a hurried meal.
Rick froze. But her casual greeting suggested that nothing unusual had ever happened between them. Rick breathed a prayer of thanks and decided that he could return to the normal harassed life of a trainee on CM-2.
It didn't work out that way. He didn't hide away any more from Gina, but soon he had even less free time than usual, as two new things happened in quick succession.
The first came when he ran into Jigger Tait, and the big man was again on his way for a session in the gym.
"Every day," said Jigger in answer to Rick's question. "So does Gina, and so does Turkey Gossage."
"But why? None of you is fat or anything."
"No. But we're in space, in a low-gee environment. Regular exercise is absolutely essential, otherwise you suffer calcium loss. Keep that up for a while and your bones get weak. When that happens it's a real bugger to get back to normal."
"But nobody's making us exercise."
"Give it another week and they will. You've only been excused because Turkey likes trainees to get their space legs before he lets them loose in the gym. Otherwise they run into walls or fall over things or tear muscles using the exercise equipment." Jigger studied Rick as they moved along side by side. "You seem to handle space pretty good. Take a bit of advice from me. Get a head start right now, and use the gym regular. The sooner you do, the less chance you'll have of long-term space problems."
Rick nodded, but he might have ignored Jigger if he hadn't run into Vido Valdez half an hour later. They converged in the quiet study area. Exactly one cubicle was vacant.
They stood together in front of the sliding door, with Rick a few inches in front. "Guess we could take turns," he said. "You—"
He didn't finish the sentence. Vido sideswiped him from behind. Rick went sprawling forward into the wall, and before he could get up Vido was inside and had closed the door.
"Bastard!" Rick tugged at the handle, then hammered hard on the panel. "Open up!"
"Go screw yourself."
"I was here first." When Vido did not answer, Rick hammered on the door again. "Let me in."
There was a chorus of complaints from the neighboring cubicles. "Get the hell out of here!"
"Shut the racket!"
"Hey, this is a quiet area." And then, from a piercing female voice that Rick recognized as Gladys de Witt's: "Stop your screaming, Luban, and bugger off—or we'll call Turkey Gossage."
Rick tugged one more time at the door. It did not budge. In an absolute fury he banged again, then hurried away to another series of complaints and abuse.
It ain't over "til I say it's over.
It wasn't over between him and Vido, far from it. Rick rubbed at his shoulder. Valdez was strong, and the blow from that muscular arm had hurt. If another fight was coming—and it seemed to be—Rick would get creamed again. Unless he could somehow change the odds.
He recalled Jigger's advice. Though it was the last thing in the world—or out of it—that he felt like doing, he headed for the region where the gym was located. He couldn't make himself bigger and heavier than Vido, but maybe he could make himself harder and fitter.
He changed into shorts and a tee-shirt and went through to the hooped track with its centrifugal gravity. Someone was already there, running with an easy, floating style that appeared totally effortless. He halted. If that was Gina, and she misunderstood . . .
But it wasn't. It was Alice Klein, dressed in a black singlet and the briefest of black shorts. Rick waited until she came past where he was standing, then accelerated to the point where he could step onto the moving track. He ran until he was at her side.
"Mind if I join you?"
She turned her head and gave him that smile that never got above her mouth. Rick took it as an OK, and matched his stride to hers. Within a minute he realized there might be another reason for that smile. She was moving fast—and not even breathing hard. Low gee must suit her, she seemed to float along as though this was her natural element. Out here her thin limbs looked graceful, even beautiful.
Well, he wasn't going to put up with another fiasco, like the one on the treadmill. Instead of trying for more conversation, he looked straight ahead, lengthened his stride to one more natural to his height and the reduced gravity, and concentrated all his attention on running. The track was about a hundred meters long, forming a hoop that rotated at constant speed about its center. Centrifugal force produced an effective gravity maybe a third of Earth's. As you ran, the path ahead seemed to rise all the time in front of you; yet you always felt as though you were on level ground.
A blue strip across the floor of the hoop marked the beginning of each lap. After the first two, Rick began to look for the line of blue and count as they passed it. Three, four, five. . .
When the count reached twenty laps, he wondered how long he would be able to keep it up. He stole a sideways glance at Alice, trying to look nonchalant—and found that she had turned her head at the same moment.
"That's it for me," she said, and slowed her pace. "But you don't have to stop on my account."
She was laughing at him, Rick felt sure of it. There was a sly, satisfied tone in her voice. He slowed too, trying not to gasp for air. Still she did not seem to be out of breath.
"How long have you been doing this?" he wheezed, as they stepped together off the rotating track.
"This? You mean running? Since the third day after we got here." And then, as though reading his mind, "You'll find it gets easier fast, once you do it regularly. I had real trouble the first few days."
Instead of setting a course for the showers she was heading to the equipment room. Rick followed her. The rowing machines that he and Jigger Tait had used were right near the door, and Rick hadn't even taken a good look at the rest of the place. He watched as Alice Klein sat down on a padded seat and strapped herself in. She reached up to a horizontal bar and pulled it down with some effort to chest level. Rick had seen similar work-out equipment back on Earth, but here there were differences. On Earth, a machine like this made use of gravity. You pulled down, and a cable ran up from the bar, over a pulley, and raised a set of weights. As you allowed the bar to go back up, the weights were lowered.
Here, though, in negligible gravity, weights would not do the trick (Turkey Gossage didn't even want the trainees to use the word weight; he said the right term to use in space was mass). This exercise machine had an arrangement of multiple springs, so that as you pulled the bar it exerted a constant upward pressure all the way down for you to work against.
"You don't get fit watching," said Alice, after half a dozen pull-downs. She did not look at him, but Rick moved forward to sit at the next machine. Then there was another twenty minutes of silence, as he learned that his upper body was even more in need of conditioning than his legs and lungs.
Finally Alice allowed her bar to go all the way up to its rest position and came to stand next to Rick. She studied the settings on his machine and shook her head.
"I can't match you there. You have twice my muscle power, and you always will."
"And you'll always be able to run me into the ground."
"Could be. That's life. Horses for courses."
She nodded at Rick and headed for the showers, leaving him to wonder what on Earth she meant by that last remark. In his whole life he had never even seen a live horse. Where Alice Klein came from, in the Dakota Black Hills, life must be very different from a southern California big city.
What had she done, to get herself kicked out of school and sent up here with Vanguard Mining?
He doubted that he was going to find out any time soon. Alice Klein was not the sort of person you could easily ask a question like that.
Chapter Eight
RICK did not exactly avoid Vido Valdez for the next two weeks. He preferred to think that he was so impossibly busy that they did not run into each other. With the increasing difficulty of the assignments set by Turkey Gossage and Rick's self-imposed work-out schedule, there was no time to do more than study, exercise, and collapse exhausted into bed.
On the other hand, Rick knew that he was not going any place where he was likely to run into Vido. That made him secretly uncomfortable with himself.
He kept exercising, but he didn't feel either fitter or stronger. He was surprised when after ten days he went to the gym and again found Alice Klein there, and they ran thirty silent laps side by side with Rick hardly aware of either his legs or his breathing. Apparently physical fitness crept up on you.
After they had showered they walked back to the school area together, discussing the latest horror that Turkey Gossage was trying to inflict on them: algebra. It produced the greatest outburst of eloquence that Rick had ever seen in Alice.
"Useless!" she said. "Why does he make us learn it? I'll never get the hang of all his a's and b's and x's. It's not as though you would ever run into a situation where you might want to use it."
Rick was not quite so sure. Certainly, he could see zero value in the equations that Turkey made them set up and solve. But Turkey Gossage did not strike Rick as someone likely to make anybody learn things just for the sake of learning. Every activity on CM-2 seemed to have a defined goal.
"It's like the ladder thing this morning," Alice went on. "He told us how long it was and how far the end was from the wall, and he asked us to find how high up you could reach with it. I don't know how to do that, but it doesn't matter. Out here you don't need a ladder. You just jump!"
She was trying to justify the fact that she didn't know how to solve the problem. Rick was pretty sure that he did. It raised a real question: Should he explain to her what she had to do to get an answer? Just as in the physical tests back in New Mexico, the trainees were in competition with each other. Some were going to fail. If Rick helped Alice Klein, or anyone else, might he be ruining his own chances?
On the other hand, Alice had encouraged him to run and to work out with the exercise equipment. She didn't have to do that.
Rick sighed. "The ladder isn't really the point," he said. "Turkey put it that way, but really it's just an equation we have to set up and solve. All you need is that formula we did the other day about the sides of triangles with a right angle. See, think of the ladder as the long side of the triangle. . . ."
Alice listened in silence as Rick explained and they walked to the study cubicles. "You're right," she said at last. "That does it. But it doesn't change my basic point. You can solve dumb problems with algebra, but it isn't something anybody needs in the real world. Thanks anyway."
She left, leaving Rick to go on into one of the cubicles, close the door, and wonder. He also couldn't see any practical use for what they were being taught. But Vanguard Mining was not an organization to waste money. More importantly, you did what you were told on CM-2 if you wanted to eat and rest.
He bent over the day's assignments. His own trouble spot wasn't the math, it was the reading. He was sure he was falling behind. Why wasn't anything written the way it sounded? Why were words that were spelled almost the same and ought to sound almost the same completely different when you spoke them?
bough cough rough though thought through cow off stuff owe taut few
Rick, hard at work, heard the cubicle door slide open behind him. He turned, suddenly nervous, then relaxed. It was only Monkey. She had lost a few pounds since arriving on CM-2, and it suited her. The uniform showed off her new and slimmer figure, and with her thinner face her brown eyes looked gigantic.
She slid the door closed behind her. Rick wasn't worried—but he was puzzled. Perpetually horny or not, Monkey had shown not the slightest interest in him. It went both ways. He knew she was attractive, but she didn't light his fires the way a couple of the other trainees did. Attraction between the sexes was a total mystery, but it was a definite reality.
Which left the mystery of what Monkey was doing in Rick's cubicle. Study cubicles were supposed to be private, not the place for social chit-chat.
Monkey answered that at once, by setting the printout sheet she was holding down on the working surface in front of Rick. It showed an array of blank squares, with writing alongside. She touched the sheet. "I got no idea what any of this means."
"Yeah? Well what the hell has that got to do with—"
"Alice says you're real good at explaining math stuff. She says you just helped her."
"So what if I did? What you think I am, some free service center? I got my own work and my own problems."
"If you'd help me, I'd pay you back." Monkey saw the look on Rick's face, and shook her head. "I'm not talk
ing about anything like that. I'd help you with your assignments."
"What makes you think I need any help?"
"I got a look at your history paper. You trying to tell me you don't need help?" Monkey smiled. "I like that stuff, and I know it. I can show you. So what do you say?"
Rick had already taken a look at the sheet that she had placed in front of him. It was one of Turkey Gossage's damnable math crossword puzzles. You had clues for across and down, but the answers were all numbers. There was enough information provided to fill in the whole thing—just—but to do that you had to work enough logical connections between the clues to pin down unique digital values for each square.
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