She ushered them out. In the corridor, well away from Barney’s office, Chick stopped. “We-e-ll,” he said. “Well. . . well. . . I guess. . . shit.”
“The mot juste.” Polly Quint tried to laugh, and produced only an ugly snort. “My English teacher told me—before he decided that he was more interested in getting into my pants than into my head—that cussing is the sign of an inferior intellect and an inadequate vocabulary. But in certain circumstances, he said, it fulfills a vital function. I guess this is one.”
“But what are we going to tell the others? They’ll be waiting for us back there, wanting to know how we did.”
“We?” Polly shrugged. “It’s not we, Chick. You are our chosen spokesman and chief representative. What are you proposing to tell them?”
To that question, for one of the few times in his life, Chick Teazle had no ready answer.
Chapter Fifteen
Rick, like the rest, felt crushed and humiliated by Barney French’s anguished put-down. It took Alice Klein to offer a different perspective on what was really happening.
“You know what they’ve been telling us since day one,” she said. She nudged him with her elbow to get his attention. “Things are not what they seem. Expect zingers. I bet that’s what is happening now.”
She was snuggled at Rick’s side, naked in the darkness of his cabin. It was two days after their arrival at the new training facility, and until now the whole time had been non-stop effort—mostly mental work, which Rick found far more demanding than physical labor. He had spent all day struggling with the unfamiliar notion of moments of inertia. According to the learning machines, moments of inertia were related to advanced methods of ore melting and metal extraction. It was hard to see how, and the problems he had been assigned did not help.
A strong mid solid hoop is spinning around a massive central point to which it is connected by thin strings. All those strings are cut at once. What will happen to the hoop, and why? Comment: When you understand the answer to this question, you will know how the great Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, proved that the rings of Saturn cannot be solid but must be made up of small independent particles.
Rick had about as much interest in dead Scotsmen as Maxwell had in him; but he did have ambition. He wanted to be a success in Vanguard Mining, and visions of a solid hoop spinning around and attracted by a central mass had plagued him all day. After the excitement and horror of the CM-31 disaster, going back to the old routine seemed boring; but he could not get his mind off this particular problem.
Spin the hoop, cut the strings. And then what? What would it do—still spin around the central mass, or something else?
He had been drowsing, his mind filled with rotating rings, when Alice spoke again. “Did you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.” He grunted his reply.
She nudged him. “Wake up. I checked the qualities that successful apprentices are supposed to display. Do you know what the most important quality is, according to the manuals?”
“Intelligence?” A strong, solid hoop. That meant it was able to stand either compression or tension. As he had learned long ago, the assigned problems did not tell you things that you didn’t need to know. And gravity had to be important, too, because the central point was stated to be massive. The hoop and the central mass would attract each other.
“Wrong.” Alice wriggled closer. “You only say it’s intelligence because you think you’re smart. The most important quality isn’t knowledge, either. It’s initiative. But it seems to me that initiative is the exact opposite of doing what you’re told and following somebody else’s instructions.”
“What are you suggesting? That we ignore our assignments? Then we flunk everything and get kicked out.”
“No. I think they want us to try things for ourselves. They want us to push the envelope, keep going as far as we can until we’re stopped. Unless we’re told not to go somewhere, we should make a point of checking it out. Unless something is forbidden, we go ahead and do it.”
“Mmm.”
“Agreed?”
“Uh-huh.”
So far as Rick was concerned that was the end of the conversation. He didn’t remember any discussion after that. On the other hand he didn’t even remember Alice leaving his cabin. Her words went forgotten until three days later, when the whole group of apprentices were told to put on their suits and assemble inside the Smelting Module.
That was the official name, usually shortened to “the SM,” for the cylinder that Lafe Eklund had dismissed as a “toy” the first time that they had seen it. Close up, the SM seemed anything but a toy. Access to the interior was gained through an elaborate triple hatch, more complex than any that Rick had ever seen before. It was located near the edge of the SM’s flat circular end, and its three octagonal doors had to be passed through in series, one after another. Each chamber had a little side room with its own door, and every door had a central viewing port of thick transparent glass. From any part of the lock, and even from outside it, you could see all the way along the axis of the cylinder to the other end. That other end was partly open, showing beyond it a disk of star-filled open space.
The size of the Smelting Module was even more apparent once you were inside. Rick, passing through the lock, found himself in a gigantic empty room that towered twenty times his own height. The inner surface of the curved wall was bare, blackened and crusted with hardened ore residue and dross. The flat end of the cylinder through which Rick had entered was covered with instruments, equally dark with dirt and battered as though with long use.
Since they were in free fall it was easy to soar from the “bottom” where they had entered up to the “top,” and peer outside. Most of them did that. They saw half a dozen small asteroids, just a couple of kilometers away, co-orbiting with the SM and with the main body of Company Mine 26. They could also see that this end of the SM was made up of flat interlocking sectors, so that the whole end could either close completely or iris wide open. Like CM-31 but on a far smaller scale, the SM could stretch its maw wide enough to engulf any one of the waiting asteroids.
“All right, that’s enough boggling at nothing.” Barney French, down at the bottom of the SM, clapped her suited hands together from habit. It produced no sound at all in hard vacuum, but they heard her call through their suit radios: “Let’s get down to business.”
For the past few days she had been in her toughest and most sarcastic mood, as though she wanted to deny that she had ever displayed any sign of sentiment or human feeling. That had made the returning deputation’s job doubly difficult when they went back to the dining-area after their meeting with her. None of the other apprentices believed that Barney was capable of softness, and they had suspected Rick, Deedee, Polly, and especially Chick of being afraid to make their case. Even Alice seemed skeptical when Rick repeated to her what Barney had said during the meeting.
He stared across at her now, floating over at the other side of the group of apprentices. Within her suit visor, Alice’s icy grey glance passed over Rick, roamed over Vido Valdez standing next to him, and continued on to stare calmly at nothing.
No one would ever guess what she could be like in private. But Rick didn’t have to guess. He had absolute personal proof. He tried again to catch Alice’s eye, and was rewarded by what might have been the faintest of frowns. She would probably give him hell for that later, but he didn’t care. It was her fault for avoiding him for the past few days.