I thought for a moment. Sure, it was dangerous. So was breathing, if you did it long enough. And Ishi hadn’t been afraid.
“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said. I’ll be glad to switch over from Monitoring, if you need me.”
“Ah. Good.” Commander Aarons stood up. “Best of luck.” He shook my hand. It gave me a warm friendly feeling.
When we were out of the office and Dad had gone back to Monitoring I turned to Jenny and said, “Was this your idea?”
“Mine? Don’t be silly. Commander Aarons called me in just a few minutes before you. He wanted to know if I would mind working with you.”
“Okay. Sorry. I guess I’m just a little edgy today. The last twenty-four hours hasn’t done me a whole lot of good.”
Jenny looked sad. “I know what you mean.”
We walked down to the student rec center to get something to eat. We had to stand in line.
“I think we ought to go down to the main bay and begin going over your shuttle,” Jenny said.
“Huh?”
“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to operate it sometime. I know you’ve done some simple piloting, but—”
“You mean you’re supposed to teach me?”
“Who else?”
“Well…”
“Say, is there some reason you don’t want to work with me?”
“Uh, no,” I lied.
In the back of my mind I was thinking about Zak’s theory about what living so close together in the Can had done to us. It felt right. Jenny was like the rest of the girls I knew. Buddies, I guess you’d say. I could see she was pretty and smart and reliable, sure. And I’d been thinking of her that way for as long as I could remember. But now I wanted something else.
Something had started me thinking. Maybe it had been Zak and his comical Rebecca and Isaac, lurching around and pounding away at each other. I felt like a dummy, a goody-goody boy stuck out here around Jupiter, while back on Earth a guy my age knew about women and how to treat them. Well, that was going to change. But until I could figure out how to do that, I didn’t want to be all palsy with Jenny. Not when I could maybe be something more…
“Hey, are you paying attention?” she said.
“Huh? Oh yeah. Look, let’s get this training over with, huh?”
She looked at me curiously. “You seem a little nervous about something, Matt.”
“Naw, I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Jenny shrugged.
“It could not be because you are afraid, of course,” a deep voice said.
I turned Yuri had filled in the line behind us.
“Get away, Sagdaeff,” I said.
“Don’t be silly, Yuri.” Jenny said. “Matt isn’t afraid.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. He did not react very well under stress on Ganymede.”
“How would you like a flat nose?” I said.
“Ah ha, threatening violence. The last resort of the incompetent. I wonder what Commander Aarons would think if you were to hit me in public?”
“Let’s find out,” I said, raising my arms.
“Yuri! Matt! Stop it. Yuri, go away. You started it.”
“I merely came over to congratulate Matt on his new position.”
“How did you know?” I said.
“Rumors, rumors. And I happened to be talking to the Commander’s secretary when she was typing up the change of status report.” Yuri smiled coldly at me.
Jenny said, “Yuri…”
“All right. I am leaving.” He walked away.
“What was that all about?” Jenny said. “Did it have anything to do with what Commander Aarons said?”
So I told her about Ganymede and the air hose. It was already getting to be an old story.
“I see,” Jenny said, thoughtfully chewing a sandwich. (By this time we had been through the line.) “That explains a lot of Yuri’s behavior.”
“It does?”
“Of course. Look.” she said, tossing her head to get some brown curls out of her eyes, “it must have been a hard thing for Yuri to have to admit to himself that he made a big mistake with the air hose. It hurt him.”
“Hurt his ego, you mean. It makes a big target.”
“All right, it damaged his self-image. He is miffed. And he’s taking it out on you.”
“Why me? I saved him.”
“You saw him make the mistake, too.”
“This sounds pretty twisted to me.”
“Maybe it is, but something must be making him act this way,”
“Let’s make a deal.” I said, patting her hand. “You don’t psychoanalyze me and I promise not to run berserk. Okay?” I decided not to go into Zak’s theory about Yuri, even though I was sure it was true. What could be gained?
“I didn’t know you were about to.”
“Well, I might if people keep giving me advice. Come on, let’s get to work. Is the Ballerina ready?”
She got up, straightening her red blouse, and said, “Yes, but that’s not the shuttle we’ll be using to train you.”
“Oh? Ishi’s then. What’s its name?”
“He never gave it one.” she said as we left the cafeteria. “It was entered in the log by its inventory number.”
“I’ll name it myself, then.”
“What?”
“Roadhog,” I said.
We suited up and cycled through the Can’s main lock. The vehicle bay is just outside the lock, but the bay isn’t a particular room you can point at—it’s simply the big open space in the hollow part of the Can. All the small-sized vehicles are kept there and secured at the axis with a network of elastic tie-lines, to be sure they don’t bang into each other. All along the inner face of the Can are slots for berthing; when a vehicle needs to be fueled or worked over, it’s pulled into a berth. Otherwise it’s moored a good distance from the Can’s skin, in high vacuum that does it no harm.
Jenny and I clipped on to the mooring lines and pushed off. After a moment of coasting I turned so my feet pointed toward the shuttle and squirted my attitude jets. That slowed me to a crawl and I unclipped from the line just as the shuttle swelled up to block my view of the opposite inner wall of the Can. I landed, catlike.
I swung around, found a pipe and attached my own suit tie-line to it. The shuttles are all different: each one was thrown together with whatever spare parts came to hand. The Roadhog—I’d silently christened it the moment my glove touched the pipe—looked like a conglomerate of castoffs until you studied the structure.
It was a bit like an automobile chassis, all bones and no skin. The pilot was belted into a couch at the center. He was surrounded by pipes and struts and fuel tanks, without having his view obscured. A small yellow ion-engine was mounted behind him. The whole thing was lumpy but balanced; spacecraft have to be stable.
I glided over to the pilot’s couch and perched on top of the backrest. Around us, never closer than twenty yards, were other craft. A few had their running lights on; they were being checked over or preparing to go out. A big tube-shaped cargo hauler was moored right above us. Beyond that the gray water-shield plugged the bore of the Can. Below I could see someone using a cutting torch, its flame a sharp, fierce blue diamond.
I heard a faint clank as Jenny bumped into the shuttle. She secured her suit safety line and came swarming over to me.
She touched helmets. “You know how to use the air tanks on this one, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Take us over there, then,” she said, pointing to Berth H.
I buckled myself into the pilot couch and reached out gingerly for the controls. You don’t use an ion engine inside the Can’s bay, or even nearby if you can help it. The backwash can knock a man head over heels a hundred meters away, or snarl mooring lines. So I gently thumbed in the override on the shuttle’s air tanks, switched them over to the pipe system that led to the little maneuvering jets at the rear, and reached
for the release button.
“Forgotten anything?” Jenny said lightly.
“Huh?”
“Our mooring lines.”
“Oh.” I felt my face go red. I unbuckled and glided around the four corners of the Roadhog, unhooking the elastic lines. They’re on retrieval coils, so as soon as I let go a line it retracted toward the axis.
I sat back down in the couch. “All cleared. Captain.”
She didn’t say anything. I carefully bled a little air into the pipes and felt a satisfying tug as we got under way. I gave us little bursts of air to maneuver around the cargo hauler overhead and cut in the gyros to keep us from tumbling.
We inched our way across the bay. I got back into the practice of looking in three different directions at once; my neck started to ache. Human beings are built for navigating in two dimensions; our eyes are set in a line parallel to the ground, suitable for chasing wildebeests. Outer space takes some getting used to. Even after you’ve trained your stomach to stop pushing the panic button when you’re in no-g conditions, you have to keep reminding yourself that up and down are just as important as sideways. The adjustment is never perfect, because you’re trying to learn a set of reflexes your body just wasn’t programmed to take. That’s why no-g maneuvering takes a lot of energy—you’re fighting yourself all the way, whether you know it or not. I suppose that’s why kids like me are a little better at no-g work and don’t tire so fast; our reflexes aren’t totally “set” yet.
Berth H was a square-mouthed tube with bright lights lining the inside. I edged the Roadhog into the slot and brought us to a stop nearly perfectly; we couldn’t have been moving faster than a meter per second when we bumped into the buffer pads at the end.
Jenny patted me on the shoulder and bounded away to fasten mooring lines.
I felt good. I had proved that I could still handle a shuttlecraft, despite being out of practice. And most of all, I was out in space again. It had been too long.
That was the high point. The next five hours were something less than gratifying. Jenny took me over the Roadhog inch by inch, making me learn every valve and meter and strut on the contraption. I had forgotten a lot; the rest I hadn’t learned at all.
She made me draw a flowchart for the air pipes, after letting me inspect the Roadhog for five minutes. I thought I’d figured it out. When she handed the clipboard back to me, covered with red marks. I found out that I had gotten everything exactly backwards.
I checked out the works: ring laser gyros, radio, first aid, fuel feeds, hauling collars, repair kit. spare parts, search lights, electrical system, navigation, backup systems, vector integrator—you name it, I had to find it, see if it worked, explain how I would repair it if it didn’t, and relate it to all the other systems it meshed with.
“Do you think you’re familiar with these things now?” Jenny said.
“I’m surprised you don’t have me kiss each one individually,” I said. She grinned at me. I grinned back; a lock of hair had curled down between her eyes—she couldn’t reach it, of course, in a space suit—and I wondered why I hadn’t realized before how pretty she was.
My old romanticism again. The people I respected most were the ones who could do things. Most girls didn’t fit in that category, and I—ambitious Matt Bohles—looked down my nose at them. What good is a girl who is just an ornament?
For some reason I had included Jenny in that group, too. These last few hours had proven me wrong. I was intrigued. Jenny was something special.
“Do you feel ready to take her out?” Jenny said. I blinked; I had been staring at her moodily, thinking, for the last minute.
“The Roadhog is not a her, it’s a him.” I said.
“Ships are always feminine,” she said. “There are female roadhogs, too. So what’s your answer?”
“Alone?”
“Of course not. I’ll be holding your hot little hand all the way.” She looked at her watch. “The round trip should take about thirteen hours. It’s too late to leave today.”
“What’s the trip for?”
“Satellite Fourteen. A circuit component is on the fritz and the Faraday cup doesn’t give reasonable readings.”
I shrugged and then remembered that in a suit the gesture was invisible. “Fine. Tomorrow morning, then, huh?”
Chapter 10
That night we had one of our godawful Socials. The psychers have this theory: As kids approach the teenage years, there’s this natural tendency to clump. Girls in one group over here, and the boys in that gang over there. You can’t get them together in the right kind of social way without an effort, they say. So every month they have a Social and every teenager in the Can has to come. There’s no option. No begging off with a cold, no conflicting job. Nothing will get you off the hook.
I got there as late as I could. Everybody does. Good music was floating out of the corners of the H-deck rec room. A couple of adults were welcoming kids as they came in the door. The adults were basically good people, warm and understanding and always willing to talk to you. Everybody knows they’re part-time “adolescent specialists”—you can look it up in the Can work chart—but that’s okay, because that’s what they’re honestly interested in. It’s no fake. “Good evening. Matt,” Mr. Neugyen murmured to me. “I believe the correct theme for tonight is a quiet, reflective time.” He gestured to the rec room. “We are all saddened by the passing of Ishi. But to reaffirm our—”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, mostly to cut him off.
Dr. Matonin turned to me. “I know it has affected you greatly.” she said.
I scuffed one shoe into the other. “Uh huh.” They were only trying to help, and they were right, but I didn’t want to talk about it. “Uh, I think I’ll get something to drink.” I said, and moved off with a kind of phony smile.
It was just like every other Social. A knot of boys was talking, occasionally letting out a bark of laughter. The girls sat around low toadstool-shaped tables, the kind you can knock a drink off of with your knee if you’re not careful. They looked bored and uncomfortable. Just a few hours earlier we’d all seen them in jumpers or skinsuits or overalls. Now they had on dresses and long floaty skirts. And they’d done something to themselves. I mean, we’d been seeing the same dresses for years, redone to keep up with Earthside styles. But tonight the girls managed to look different—softer and curvier and sexier somehow. I don’t know how they did it.
I went over to the punchbowl and got a cup of the usual yellowish stuff. No alcohol in it, of course. Nothing more exotic, either. I’d never heard of anybody in the Can using any of the mild euphorics, such as cannabis or Lucogen. Those are legal on Earth, but reality-twisting isn’t allowed out here.
“Hey, got one for me?” Jenny said at my elbow.
I handed her my cup. “Oh, I didn’t see you.” I poured myself another.
“Or didn’t try to, ummmm?”
“Aw, come on.”
“Well, I wondered if there was some reason. Do you realize that you never approach a girl at these things?” She sipped her punch, holding it in two hands, and peered over the cup at me.
“Let’s be precise,” I said, “I don’t very often, okay, but not never. I…well, there’s something I don’t like about these things.”
“They’re not the greatest,” she admitted.
“Why can’t we have square dances instead?”
She shrugged. “Dr. Matonin says these are part of the, the socialization program.”
“That’s right.” Dr. Matonin said. “Socialization.” She had come over at the sound of her name. We smiled and exchanged a few pleasantries. Then I looked straight at her and said, “Look, we already know each other. Why do we have to go through these dances?”
Dr. Matonin has a motherly look and smiles a lot. It’s impossible not to like her. Her face crinkled with concern. “Social dancing is the way boys and girls learn to, ah, interact with each other.”
“We interact every day,” Jenn
y pointed out.
“I mean in a context that will develop and grow in later years. We want to bring you youngsters together in a way that will break down the tendency you have to avoid the other sex during adolescence.”
“But we get along fine.” I said.
“In a more sophisticated way, I mean, Matt.”
By that I guessed she meant the long ritual of dating and engagement and marriage, with a dollop of sex thrown in somewhere along the way to keep your interest up. Playing the game, Zak called it.
“Why can’t they be square dances, then?” Jenny asked. “We used to have those and they were fun.”
I nodded. I liked square dancing. It wasn’t such a hassle. You could wear anything you felt like. That usually meant the guys wore whatever they had on at the moment, and maybe half the girls did the same. The other girls came in skirts. For square dancing the skirts made sense—they were cooler. In fact, it always seemed too bad that boys couldn’t wear something like a skirt, too. I mean, to have some freedom of dress.
“I agree, they were fun.” Dr. Matonin’s face lit up. “But you young men and women are getting older and it is time to move on to other kinds of, ah, socialization processes.”
“Like this?” I waved a hand at the decorations and subdued lighting.
“Yes, indeed. This seems to us to be what is needed.”
“Needed by who?” Jenny asked.
“By the less mature among you. They do not easily make contact with the other sex. There are shy people, you know—they’re not all like you, Matt,” she said merrily.
I stared at her. She’s a tremendously bright fusion physicist, sure. But she didn’t seem to see that I felt awkward at these Socials, just like everybody else. I had a sudden moment of insight there, catching a glimpse of how other people saw me. A little jolt of unreality.
I was kind of brash and self-confident, I knew that. But underneath I had doubts and uncertainties. There were moments when I was nervous or shy or afraid to say things. But from what Dr. Matonin said, I guessed that nobody saw me clearly at those moments. They didn’t think that a kid who was good at his job and pretty fast with his mouth could have any problems. Well, I had news for them.
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