“I know.” Deedee came to his side, put an arm around him, and hugged him. She leaned her helmet against his as they moved into the lock together. “We gave it our best shot. Nobody can take that away from us.”
The lock pressure equalized. They reached up to remove their helmets as the inner door opened—and found themselves staring at the anxious face of Turkey Gossage. Turkey glanced at once at his watch.
“Don’t say it.” Rick moved out of the lock. “Six minutes late.”
“I wasn’t going to. Did you come around the outside?”
“Part of the way.” Deedee came to stand at Rick’s side.
“Let me see your dosimeters so—”
“No problem. We did the first part in the interior, and we only came outside when CM-2 was shielding us from the Sun.”
“Smart move.” Gossage relaxed visibly. “Of course, even in the Sun the dose you’d have received in the short time you were there would have been tolerable.”
“We weren’t sure.” Rick was suddenly more tired than he had ever been. “We didn’t know how to calculate it.”
“I can show you that in five minutes.”
“I’m sure you can. But not today, sir, if you don’t mind.” Rick slumped against the chamber wall and allowed his arms and legs to go limp. “We did our best, we really did.”
“And we came so close.” Deedee flopped down by Rick’s side. “If there had been one less problem to solve—just one.”
“I see. Would you agree with that, Luban?” Turkey seemed more amused than sympathetic.
“Yes. But I don’t see why it matters.”
“It matters very much. To me, at least.” Gossage squatted down so that he was facing the two of them. “You see, it’s not every day that people mistake me for a deity.” And, when Rick and Deedee stared at him with dull and exhausted eyes, “I gave you a test that I thought would stretch you right to your limits. If you did everything right, and fast, and clean, you could make it back before the deadline—just. I rigged the shape of the sintered blocks. I fixed the drive so it would go wonky on the return trip. I turned off the power on the main entry door so you couldn’t get back inside and would have to come around the outside. But if there’s one thing that even Turkey Gossage can’t do, it’s to arrange a solar flare for his special convenience. I’d have to be God Almighty to do that. The flare wasn’t in my plans, any more than it was in yours.”
He reached out, taking Deedee and Rick’s right hands in his. “If it hadn’t been for the flare you’d have beaten your deadline with time to spare. That’s good enough for me. You did well, better than I expected. You’ve passed. Now, don’t go to sleep on me!”
Rick and Deedee had simultaneously closed their eyes. They showed no sign of opening them again.
“All right.” Gossage stood up. He was still holding their hands and his movement lifted them to their feet. “You’ve passed the practical test, the pair of you, but you don’t seem to care. Eat and rest, rest and eat. We’ll talk later.” He released them, turned, and headed for the tunnel. As he reached it he added, without turning his head, “Just don’t get cocky. You still have theory finals—and I guarantee they’ll be tough. You won’t have things this nice and easy all the time.”
Chapter Ten
Turkey Gossage was as good as his word and better. The theory final was more than tough. It was murderous. Rick staggered out of a private cubicle—no chance to “borrow” your answers on CM-2—and saw his own despair mirrored on everyone’s face. They had been asked questions far beyond anything taught in class. Jigger Tait’s early warning had been right: if you didn’t learn how to browse all around a subject, you were in trouble at Vanguard Mining.
Give the formula for the velocity, v, achieved by a ship accelerating with acceleration a for a time t.
That was fair. Turkey had pounded the simple formula, v = at, into their heads a dozen times. He said they had to remember it for the rest of their lives.
But then came the zinger: State circumstances when the formula that you have just given does not apply.
That had definitely not been mentioned anywhere, in any lesson. Rick had a vague feeling that things went wrong if you kept on accelerating until the calculated velocity was near the speed of light. He knew for sure that the formula couldn’t work if the answer you got was more than the speed of light, because nothing could go faster than that. But he had absolutely no idea what the right relation between speed and acceleration would be in such a case.
Stating all those thoughts, clearly and precisely, was just about impossible. Rick decided that he had waffled. Whoever listened to his spoken answer would know it. It all came back to what Mr. Hamel had said on the far-off day Rick had been kicked out of schooclass="underline" it’s a lot easier to be exact when you write something than if you try to speak it.
The good news was that the tests were finally over. The one he had just taken was the last. Now came the wait to learn how badly he had done. Turkey Gossage knew they would all be in agony until the final results were tallied. He had promised not to keep them hanging longer than one day.
What Turkey could not guarantee was the subjective length of twenty-four hours. As Deedee had said, time didn’t proceed at a uniform rate. When you were having fun, it flew by. When you were waiting for something, every minute dragged.
Like now.
The exam had finished at midday. Afternoon had been occupied in chores just tricky enough to keep a person from brooding over other things. The makework tasks were all done by dinnertime, and no activities had been set for later. Some instinct for solitude took over. The usual evening group session in the cafeteria, where people met to talk about the events of the day, never happened. Tonight everyone quietly picked up cartons of carry-out food and left at once.
Rick sought out his own private place, an abandoned outer chamber of CM-2 where he could sit and watch the stately rotation of the starfield. He was not sure he could stand the idea of going back to the dorm at all until tomorrow morning.
The asteroid training station made one revolution every twenty minutes, too slow to notice unless you were looking outside. As Rick was eating he idly took his drinking straw and released it. The straw drifted steadily downward, to land on the glassy floor of the observation room. There should be a way to calculate the effective gravity in which the straw fell, using the size of CM-2 and the time it took for the planetoid to turn on its axis. Jigger Tait or Gina Styan would rattle off a formula, but Rick did not know it.
The steady turn of the station was bringing Earth into view on the left. He watched it mindlessly, all the way until it slowly vanished from sight on the right. Then he realized that his mind had not been blank at all. He was thinking again about that damned theory exam, mentally reviewing his answers—and revising them, even though there was no way to change anything! It was a sure way to go crazy.
Rick left the observation room. He went wandering around the exterior paths of CM-2, until he came to the radiation-proof chamber where he had once tried to jump Gina Styan. He paused outside the door. He might have flunked the training course, but he’d learned at least one thing since he came to Vanguard Mining. He felt his testicles draw upward in his scrotum, his body’s reminder of the agony he had felt when Gina showed who was really the boss. It would be a long time before he tried anything like that again.
The door to the shielded chamber was open. Someone was sitting inside with the lights off. Apparently Rick was not the only one who didn’t want company. He was all set to retreat when a voice said, “Come on in. I felt sure you were heading this way. Don’t put the light on if you don’t want to.”