“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.”