Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the lock with air.

  As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”

  Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the airlock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.

  As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”

  I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”

  Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were on the First Level, which was down as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal orientation, we had to go farther ‘down’ to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder, which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  I grabbed the ladder and began to climb down. Then I remembered two other ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was. Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of the Ship cut out and the normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took over. “Down” in the Ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing from one to the other. So now I was pointed head-down, but my feet were outside the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around. Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and pinpoints of black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie, washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm, real world I was used to, but effectively in another dimension.

  Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck up out of the hole beside me, as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.

  Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon. On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign—the joke, I suspect, of somebody long dead—that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some combination.

  We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”

  Beyond the pylon, in the distance, was a long row of giant tubes projecting above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Ship’s surface the distance to the horizon was not great.

  “Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout bay.”

  “Yes, I guess.” Jimmy said.

  The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.

  “I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well yourself.”

  “It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”

  Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”

  “What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”

  There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy were hiding it would be no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.

  Then our questions were answered for us.

  Jimmy said, “What was that?”

  “What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time—a horrible retching sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.

  “Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.

  “I don’t see him,” I said.

  Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance, perhaps forty feet or more and then down. He landed lightly. But then he said, “I couldn’t see him at all. I couldn’t see a thing. Mia, go out about one hundred or a hundred and fifty feet toward the middle one of those big tubes and look for Riggy. I’ll go in the other direction. We’ll both make a half-circle clockwise.”

  I stumbled away over the rocks toward the scout bay tubes, bouncing unevenly, slipping a couple of times, and not helped at all by the sound of Riggy and his vomiturition. I wanted to turn him off, but I didn’t because then I couldn’t hear Jimmy. When I was about the right distance from the pylon, I started making my half-circle.

  Then Jimmy said, “Are you ready, Mia?”

  “I’ve already started,” I said.

  “Riggy,” Jimmy said. “If you don’t want to be left out here, you’d better get to your feet and do your best to be found.”

  What I wanted most was to shut my eyes against the silver, just sit down and try to ease my spinning head (my eyes were beginning to ache and my ears to ring) and concentrate on quelling the nausea I felt. It reminded me of my sailing experience, but this was much worse. It was all I could do to keep walking and my feet were not going where I wanted them to. I didn’t go exactly in a half-circle, either. I tried to check on my position, to look for Riggy, and just to keep going, and I wasn’t doing very well at any of them. I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a puddled heap and puke. It would probably destroy the concept of heroics for all time.

  As light as the gravity was here, I had some trouble with my traction. In jumping from one rock to another, my foot slipped, my feet tangled, and then there wasn’t a rock where I thought there was, and I took a header. Under normal gravity and without the protection of a suit, I would probably have been pretty badly hurt. As it was, I just fell. Unless you did some quiet practice first, without the distraction of this unsettling dizziness, I doubted the tremendous bounds that would be possible out here would be worth making. I lay there, fetched up against a rock that resembled nothing so much as a particularly hideous sculpture my mother onc
e made—a distorted bust of old Lemuel Carpentier himself. The only thing that was in proper proportion was his nose, and that was his worst feature. He hadn’t been pleased. Lying still, my head didn’t clear, so I forced myself to stand up again.

  Then I saw Riggy. He was on his knees, if not on his feet. He was hidden completely from the pylon by a tent-like conglomeration of rocks which had pitched together to form a sheltered area. He was still retching.

  I said to Jimmy, “I’ve found him.” Then, because it didn’t matter anymore and I wanted to save my stomach if I could, I shut off my receive line.

  I hardly looked at Riggy. I didn’t want to. I got him on his feet and then found that if I was careful about where I put my own feet as I walked, I could carry him. I kept my mind on reaching the pylon and then Jimmy was beside us and helping me.

  We set Riggy down by the lock and Jimmy pushed the lock controls on the pylon so that we could make our way inside.

  I said, “Go on through. I’ll push him inside to you.”

  Jimmy went ahead. He went headfirst down the hole and then was gone. I waited a minute and then I fed Riggy down the hole, too. I held him by the ankles. For a moment there was a feeling exactly like that feeling of invisible force when you push the similar poles of two magnets together and Riggy was neither here nor there, but then Jimmy had him and pulled him through. I went through after.

  When we were in the lock, Jimmy fed the air in. When the air was all in, the door to the lock room opened. By that time I had the headpiece of my suit off. Just in time, too. When the door opened, I took two steps forward and then threw up. It was, in a way, a considerable relief.

  * * *

  Jimmy and I had been outside for twenty minutes, Riggy for forty. We recovered our equilibrium in a bare few minutes, but Riggy could do nothing but sit and look miserable and hold his head.

  When I threw up, Venie looked down at it and then up at me. “You’re going to have to clean that up,” she said. “I’m not.” Apparently she felt she’d had enough of the dirty work on this little adventure. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t have the strength. All I did was just sit down and close my eyes and give blessings that I was back in the real world again, even including Venie.

  Jimmy and Riggy and I just sat around and the other three threw questions at us. Jimmy told them how it was.

  Riggy said weakly, “If anybody wants to go, I’ll give them this suit.”

  “It’s hardly in shape for anybody to wear,” Helen said, and that was true. For all that he had stopped being racked by heaves, Riggy and the inside of his suit were in impossible shape.

  Jimmy said, “We’d best get these things cleaned up and returned.”

  We got Riggy out of his suit and Venie was delegated to see that he got home. Helen and Att took Riggy’s suit off to clean it up, and Jimmy and I cleaned up the lock room. I don’t know how Jimmy was able to keep his stomach from first to last, but he did. His iron constitution, I guess.

  When everything was cleaned up, we left Att and Helen to close the lock room and go home. I had never realized before that adventures took so much doing, so much preparation and so much cleaning up afterward. That’s something you don’t see in stories. Who buys the food and cooks it, washes the dishes, minds the baby, rubs down the horses, swabs out the guns, buries the bodies, mends the clothes, ties that rope in place so the hero can conveniently find it there to swing from, blows fanfares, polishes medals, and dies beautifully, all so that the hero can be a hero? Who finances him? I’m not saying I don’t believe in heroes—I’m just saying that they are either parasites or they spend the bulk of their time in making their little adventures possible, not in enjoying them.

  Cleaning up after ourselves coupled with the left-handed direction everything had gone took the sparkle out of us. Jimmy and I just tossed the suits over our arms and said goodbye to Helen and Att and went off toward Salvage. Things had gone so unswimmingly that I suppose I should have expected that they would continue that way. On our way, we ran into George Fuhonin. It was again a case of coming around a corner and not being able to avoid someone, though in this case we didn’t stumble over him. We simply turned the corner and found him close enough that we couldn’t ditch the suits or manage to go unseen.

  “Hi, Mia,” he said from down the hall.

  “Hello,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”

  Jimmy looked up at the giant so uncertainly that I said, “It’s George Fuhonin. He pilots a scoutship—for my dad sometimes,” in an undertone.

  “Oh,” Jimmy said.

  “I was looking for you, I think,” George said as he came up. “I’m on constable call today and had a complaint from a Mrs. Keithley in Engineers about two young cubs, a redheaded boy with ears that stick out—and I take it that’s you”—pointing at Jimmy—“and a black-haired little girl with bad manners. I’m not even making a guess as to who that is,” he said, looking meaningfully at me. “So perhaps we’d better go where we can talk, and while you’re about it, you might explain what you’re doing with those suits.”

  “We were returning them,” I said.

  George looked at us quizzically.

  The aftermath I don’t care to go into detail about. Mr. Mitchell was quite genuinely hurt to think he had been used. I could tell that he was hurt when he handed each of us our pins, both of which turned out very nicely indeed.

  That was at a meeting in Daddy’s office with Daddy, Mr. Mitchell, Miss Brancusik who was Jimmy’s dorm mother, and Mr. Mbele. They sat on one side of the room and Jimmy and I sat on the other. Mrs. Keithley wasn’t there, thank Heaven. The meeting was uncomfortable enough without her, too.

  She entered the meeting—we were told to avoid her strictly from now on. I could see that Mr. Mitchell had been hurt, but I didn’t really understand why. It was spelled out for us. I had been looking at it from my point of view, that he was in our way and might have stopped us if we had just tried to ask for the suits. I hadn’t seen things from his angle at all. That we had used him the way you use a handkerchief. I’ve always thought more in terms of things than of people, and I’m sometimes slow to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. When I did, I wasn’t happy about what I’d done—which I think was Daddy’s intention.

  They didn’t question us about who used the third suit, but they did point out how stupid and dangerous it had been for us to go outside.

  “I suppose I ought to be pleased by your initiative,” Daddy said, “but what I think about is the permanent damage to your sense of balance that might well have resulted if you two hadn’t come back inside in time. You might never have been able to move again without suffering vertigo.”

  The thought alone was enough to make me queasy.

  Daddy finished by settling a punishment of not being able to go anywhere for a month. For a month, after class with Mr. Mbele or Survival Class, I had to come straight home and stay there. Miss Brancusik then and there meted out the same restriction to Jimmy.

  In some ways, that was the hardest month I ever spent, cooped up in the apartment and not able to go anywhere. Sitting at home when other people were free to come and go, free to play soccer, to go folk dancing at night, or to sit around the Common Room while Jimmy and I had to go check in. In other ways, it wasn’t entirely a loss. For one thing, it gave me time to think about my character deficiencies. I didn’t think of them in those terms, but I did determine not to be any more stupid than was absolutely necessary, which is much the same thing. Also, since we were both stuck in our own homes, Jimmy and I did quite a lot of talking and I got to know him better.

  The first thing we did when our month was over was to go to Salvage, detouring around Mrs. Keithley, and apologize to Mr. Mitchell. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I never wore my pin until I was back on good terms with him. Then it was all right.

  Chapter 11

  WE RECEIVED OUR AUTOMATIC PROMOTIONS from Sixth Class to Fifth in the fall when First Class went of
f on Trial and another group of younger kids began training. Through the fall, as we approached the end of our first six months of training, we one-by-one turned thirteen. Not only was I the smallest one in the class—not that I minded, since being cute little black-haired Mia Havero never hurt anything—but my birthday was last. It came, as always, on Saturday, November 29. One of the advantages of a permanent calendar is that it gives you something to count on.

  On my birthday, Mother made a special trip to see us—well, she spent the day with Daddy. She presented me with one of her sculptures and I thanked her politely. She didn’t like being thanked, for some reason—and I assure you that I was nice—and left the room.

  Daddy, who isn’t always as single-minded or as busy as you might think, had done something that I would never have thought of. He’d called the library and they made a search of all their recordings and sent him a fair copy of no less than five pennywhistle records. I once, believe it or not, went through a stage of thinking the Andrew Johnson books were all mine and nobody else knew about them, and it was something of a shock to learn that they did. The pennywhistle records that Daddy gave me didn’t produce quite the same feeling of losing something private, but I would never have dreamed that anyone would ever have recorded pennywhistle music. I thanked Daddy and kissed his cheek. I had never been able to be demonstrative when I was younger, but since we had moved to Geo Quad somehow it came easier, like a lot of things.

  The biggest surprise of my birthday was Jimmy D. He asked me to go to the theatre with him. I think he was frightened when he did and that surprised me. I’d always thought that he saw me as, at best, a brother-in-arms, and not as a girl at all.