Vectors

by Charles Sheffield

  "Sorry, Beth. I should have warned you. There's a slight gravity gradient—a change in effective gravity—as we move out. If you don't like it we can slow down."

  "It's all right," I said. "Now that I know what it is. Tom, why does the corridor spiral round like this, instead of going straight out like a spoke?"

  "Some of the corridors are straight," he said. "I picked this one to help you get your space-legs."

  I stood still, turned and looked at him.

  "Oh, all right," he said. "Damn it, Beth, I forgot about your built-in lie detector. We always bring people this way, the first time on the Colony. We try and impress them with the size of it. I did it out of habit. It's a four kilometer trip this way, before we get to the outer rim."

  "I am impressed. No wonder it took fifteen years to build this."

  "It would have taken twice that long, if Bjorling hadn't discovered the surficial metal deposits on the Moon. The whole project is ten years ahead of schedule. We could start work on the second Colony, the big one, tomorrow if we had the funds."

  There was a defensive tone in his voice. Inevitable, perhaps, for one who had spent so many years of his life developing and defending a colony whose existence came up for constant questioning in government budget circles.

  "Think you'll get money for that second colony, Tom?" I said. I was sorry I had asked, before the words were all spoken.

  His shrug was loose-jointed, a rippling movement that he could never have managed back on Earth.

  "We have to get it, Beth," he said. "This is the future, out here. There's no way that we'll go back to the mess down there. Nine billion in the madhouse, and more every second. That's one reason I came and asked your help. We've made space our home. No matter what the problem is here with the space-borns, we have to lick it and keep the momentum going for the second Colony."

  "You won't have much time, Tom, if there are any more deaths—particularly if you get one that's definitely a suicide."

  "I know." His voice was bleak.

  Ahead of us, the white fluorescent lights that ran the length of the corridor broke to a blue, rectangular pattern. Tom pointed to it.

  "There's the exit to the outer rim. How are you feeling? If you still have enough energy for a couple of quick introductions I'd like you to meet the head of the Education Department, Theo Hendon. Are you up to it?"

  "Let's not waste any time. I'm ready to meet people now."

  Tom sounded more tired than I did but if he could take it, I could. I squeezed his arm (thinner now than my own) and we went on into the living-quarters, set around the perimeter of the cylinder.

  I had expected to see some of the space-born children in the quarters when we emerged. After all, they made up more than half of the Colony's three thousand people. There were many people in the corridors, but no sign of any children.

  "They prefer their own choice of recreation habitat," said Tom, in answer to my question. "We try to get them to stay here, but we don't have time or people to keep track of them all the time. They have their own life-style preferences, and we only apply the discipline for key things, like diet and education."

  We might have been inside a large office building back on Earth, except for the low gravity and the inevitable slight curve of all the floors and ceilings. The latter were white, about eight feet high, and the walls were pleasant shades of buff, green and ivory. There was none of the sterile or metallic impression that some Earth people had spoken of as the main ingredient of L-5 decor. Naturally, there was no wood, but the color and shaping of the metals and plastics had been done skillfully, to give a feeling of grain and variable texture. I liked it, and Tom was obviously pleased by my reaction.

  Theo Hendon, head of Education, was reviewing course material when we reached his quarters. One look at him told me how lucky Tom had been. Naturally lean and angular, Tom had become even thinner from loss of muscle in the L-5 environment. That had countered the natural tendency to fill out with increasing years, and made him look youthful and attractive by Earth standards. Theo Hendon was much more an endomorph. He had swelled in bulk while losing both muscle and bone structure, and looked like a big, fat blob. There, I felt, was one man who skimped badly on his exercise sessions. I resolutely tried to leave Earth ideals of beauty behind me as we entered.

  "Fourth grade history and geography," Hendon said after the introductions were over. "Lena Bartels teaches it, and you'll meet her tomorrow. But maybe you'd like to have a look at the course material now, unless you are feeling too tired."

  His manner was friendly, but he couldn't disguise his worry and nervousness. I already knew that he was one of the people that I'd have to be extra nice to, since it was his area of responsibility that had first triggered Tom's worries and brought me up to L-5. I think I managed to put him fully at ease in about five minutes (a behavioral scientist who can't make people accept her is, like an insolvent economist, inexcusable).

  "I'd like to see the courses," I said to Hendon. "But more than that, I'd like to see a few of the children. Where are their living quarters and play areas? I'd like to see those, before I see the children in school tomorrow. That may be more important than looking at the written material—I already saw a fair amount before I came here."

  The two men looked at each other.

  "I'll take her," said Tom after a moment. He turned to me. "We set up the living quarters for the space-borns on the outer rim, along with the rest of us. But they have access to all of the Colony, except for the power and utility sections, and they seem to prefer their own choice for recreation, in towards the Hub. They've taken over an empty storage section there and converted it to a sort of maze. I won't try and describe it—you'll have to see it for yourself. But it means another walk—uphill this time—before the sleep period."

  While he was speaking, he looked at me with a certain, familiar expression. I felt warm inside. We had been increasingly at ease with each other since we left Stanford, and now the last reserve was gone. I smiled back at him.

  "I'm not fatigued, Tom," I said. "But I am sleepy—I spent most of the night before we left re-arranging my teaching schedule. Let's wait until tomorrow."

  "Sure. I forgot that you have those mighty Earth-trained muscles. You could carry me up to the Hub, I'll bet, and not notice the effort. But let it wait a few hours, and you'll feel more alert when you do take a look round."

  Theo Hendon nodded his agreement. He had—not surprisingly—missed all the second level of communication between us, and he didn't seem to notice that I had suddenly and inexplicably changed my priorities completely.

  Irresponsible on my part, to put pleasure before professional work? Sure—but as I get older carpe diem gets more and more reasonable as a motto for life. Tom wanted to show me that his physical collapse in the soupy air and full Earth gravity of Portola Valley was irrelevant in the airy palaces of Laputa. I wanted to help him do it.

  * * *

  The classroom looked conventional enough, even though the furniture was thin and insubstantial by Earth standards. We had gone to a good deal of trouble to find me a hiding place behind a wall projector panel where I could see and hear without being seen. I didn't want to induce atypical behavior in either teacher or students. It had taken me a while to persuade Theo Hendon that I was really not spying on Lena Bartels, but he had finally agreed that there was no way of guaranteeing normal behavior on her part if she suspected that she had a hidden witness.

  I was in position early, well before the lesson began. Soon after I had settled myself, the first child floated in through the classroom doorway and made her way to the front row of the fixed benches. She was about nine years old, dressed in a brief, daffodil-yellow costume like a loose, one-piece bathing suit.

  The frequent televison and film coverage from L-5 couldn't do justice to the reality. The long, skeletal limbs were the same. So was the delicate looking, eggshell-thin skull, with its thin-boned features and sparse covering of fine hair. The factor th
at the cameras failed to catch at all was the unworldly grace of movement. When the space-born moved, I realized how clumsy Tom and his colleagues were in low gravity. As the child moved, all of her moved. There was a curious symmetry to the motion, an overall balance that was pleasing to the eye while apparently functionally unnecessary (except that my experience has taught me that there is no such thing as 'unnecessary' behavior). I had no idea of the child's name, but in my mind she was Cobweb, Moth, Mustard-seed.

  I found out the basis for that graceful symmetry later, but while I was still puzzling and admiring the rest of the children began to arrive. Lena Bartels came in last. By contrast, her movements, though they were economical and practised in low gravity, appeared crude and awkward. She came to the front of the room, checked the class roster just as though it were any schoolroom back on Earth, and began the lesson.

  No one ever approaches a problem with a completely open mind. I had read the reports that the children had written, and deep inside me I had blamed the teachers. Only biased and malicious indoctrination, I felt, could lead to such alienation, such misery, in the children's work. I hadn't sensed that bias in Tom, or in Theo Hendon, so subconsciously I expected it to show up in the teachers who had most of the actual classroom contact.

  It wasn't there. Lena Bartels was kind, competent and sympathetic.

  Some of the children seemed restless, wriggling in their seats while she presented the lesson to them, but I could find no fault with the material, either in the facts or in the manner of its presentation. The facts of history were given clearly, without distortion or personal views of rights and wrongs. Lena Bartels knew how to pace her class so that the children were neither bored nor bewildered.

  I sat through five classes, one after the other, given by five different teachers. By the end of the fifth I was baffled. All the teachers were excellent. Had I thought about it before I left Earth, I would have concluded that it was inevitable. The screening processes for the L-5 Colony were so stringent, so exhaustive, that no psychopath, child-hater or simple incompetent would ever get near the place.

  I went back to my room and re-read some of the children's class reports. After looking carefully at a time sequence of them, I could dispose of Tom's original question about 'critical mass' in the children's group behavior. The disquieting undercurrent of misery had been there for a long time. It was Tom and Theo Hendon's awareness that had triggered suddenly, and after that—naturally—they saw the problem everywhere. I checked a few dates in the history of the Colony, then queried a couple of others through the terminal in my room. After that I went to look for Tom.

  He wasn't in his office. I tracked him down finally in the high-gee track, a four meter band that ran on air bearings right around the cylinder and rotated faster than the rest. Effective gravity on the track was a little more than half a gee. Tom, along with a hundred other men and women scattered along the nineteen hundred meters of rubberized surface, was pounding out his daily quota of one complete circuit.

  He waved to me as he came off the track, jumped to the catch net, and dropped back to the main floor of the exercise section. He looked exhausted.

  "Any progress yet?" His voice was weary, but I could hear the hope in it.

  I had ideas, but they were still half-formed and in a pre-verbal state. I would have offered a flat 'No' to most people, to avoid discussion before I was ready, but Tom and I had been too close for that. In all our time together, we had only one major disagreement—one that had eventually driven us apart. I felt that my duty lay on Earth, trying to understand and improve the interaction of the teeming billions of a tired planet. As our resources dwindled, that loomed bigger every day as a practical problem. Behaviorists were more important each year, providing the lubricating mechanisms that kept Earth functioning.

  Tom had disagreed with me, flatly and completely. As soon as the chance arose, he had applied for a position with the Colony development team.

  "This world has had it, Beth," he would say, as we walked around the campus. "You can't see it yet, but it's beginning to run down. This was our cradle, but you can't spend your life in a crib. We have to get off-Earth, up where we have lebensraum, up where power and materials are unlimited. I want to be part of the future, not the custodian of an over-packed museum."

  We had finally parted, but the sense of instinctive understanding between us was flooding back. Tom would see through a lie of mine as easily as I would read one of his.

  "I have some ideas," I replied, as he towelled his face and arms in the changing-rooms of the exercise section. "But I really don't want to talk about them yet. I need more evidence that I'm heading in the right direction."

  He nodded.

  "Still a witch, are you?" he said.

  I smiled. I used to plead supernatural powers back in our college days, when I couldn't be bothered to fill in all the steps of some long, tortuous train of reasoning that had preceded an 'intuitive' conclusion about a tough problem or a delicate decision. Most people seemed to be quite happy with a magic answer. Tom was one of the few people who knew how my head really worked, but he had always kept my secret. I was Beth, the Witch of Berkeley.

  "If you're not worn out," I replied, "I'd like you to take me up to the section near the Hub where the children have their recreation area."

  "Give me another five minutes. The high-gee track is rough going."

  I looked at his body, pale and skinny, and I thought of the other reason why I didn't care to talk yet. True, I needed more evidence—but equally true, if I were right there was grief ahead for many of us.

  This time we went up to the Hub in an elevator, a continuous belt that we grabbed as it came by and rode up the shaft holding on to it. We used an exit point about thirty meters short of the Hub itself. I thought the gravity there was zero, but Tom assured me that we were still experiencing a fiftieth of a gee—I weighed about a kilo, Tom a little less. We pulled ourselves along, hand over hand, to a transparent plastic flap in the section wall, about two meters square. Tom pulled it aside and we floated ourselves through, Tom easily, I with a good deal more effort and less grace.

  We had entered a large, open, octahedral section, about thirty meters in diameter. The walls were unfinished grey metal, smooth and unmarked except for a large number of yellow metal bosses. Tied to these, and criss-crossing the interior space in a complex, bewildering web, were numerous plastic cables, color coded and intricately tied at their many crossing points. The ties themselves were focal points for the attachment of hammocks, cabinets, tent-like enclosures and cloth screens. In the room were about fifty children, singly and in small groups, ranging in age from about four to eleven.

  I paused and looked about me.

  "They did all this themselves?" I asked.

  Tom nodded without speaking. The children looked at us warily as we drifted through the section, moving and guiding ourselves with the aid of the web of taut cables.

  We stopped near a child of about six years, painting on a blue, rough-textured plastic sheet. His 'brushes' were small aerosol cylinders, each giving a controllable color spray that ranged in thickness from a fine line to a broad, diffuse swath. His movements as he painted were like an elaborate ballet. As his hand went forward to his canvas, the other thin arm and the long, slender legs moved also. When he looked around at us, I noticed that his arms and legs made small, precise movements at the same time as his head. The effect was very beautiful, and totally alien. I saw that he was painting a flowing pattern of lines, converging on a blue center. The common structure of Earth paintings, into horizontal and vertical elements, was lacking completely.

  "Tom, why do the children move that way?" I asked softly, as we left the child and moved on through the maze of cables. "They seem to move every part of them, all at once."

  "They do." Tom looked back at the child. His expression was a strange mixture of affection, worry and sadness. "They learn it when they are very young. They move to keep their heads facing the way
they want to, by balancing the linear and angular momentum of each part of the body. I've tried to do the same thing, but never been able to master it. Of course, it's really useful up here, in zero gee. On the outer sections, it doesn't matter so much. They spend so much time up here, they all learn to do it by the time they are four years old."

  "But what about the calcium loss, Tom? If they spend all their time in low gee, isn't it uncomfortable for them on the outer rim—their bones won't take it, will they?"

  The worry was evident on Tom's face. "That's one of the big problems, Beth. They don't like the outer sections, and they hate to exercise. Every chance they get, they are up here. The first of them are supposed to go down to Earth to complete their education in just two more years. They don't have the bone and muscle to take it. Even if they exercise hard now, it will be very hard on them physically. We've tried every argument. They don't argue back, but they don't change their ways. I've tried every persuasion—their parents, their teachers. Nothing seems to make any difference."

  We moved on past a group of four children, completely absorbed in wrapping a sheet around a group of light struts, to form a neat, silver enclosure.

  "See there," said Tom. "That's the same thing, on a higher level. Only the older children can do it. They are moving to keep their total momentum right, their bodies and the cube they're making. Don't ask me how they do it."

  I had seen enough for my theories, but I stayed to watch for esthetic pleasure. It was like the finest choreography, danced with unearthly skill by a group of fairy-folk, delicate-bodied and frail. I knew now what I had to do. But I still had to decide on the right way of doing it.

  * * *

  I never did find that right way. Events overtook me. Tom and I had just been to the outer levels, the 'basement' of the Colony, and Tom had taken me on a long guided tour of the agricultural sections. All the food that we ate was produced on the Colony, with almost perfect recycling. The small losses were made up by occasional shipments of raw materials from the lunar surface. Tom estimated the total materials loss from the Colony at less than one percent of recycled substance per century, which made it effectively self-sufficient for the foreseeable future, even if Earth cut off support for a second and larger Colony. According to Tom, it was the psychological effect of that second Colony which was so important—the Colonists had to feel that they were in space to stay, that it was their natural and real home.