“Now use your brains if you have any.” Barney’s voice in Rick’s headphone brought his attention away from Alice. “You may wonder,” she went on, “why we came in through that odd triple hatch. What is its purpose? Did any of you happen to have your eyes open when you came in, or is that too much to hope for?”
She sounded in savage mood. It was Goggles Landau—always sensitive to any suggestion that he might not see as well as anyone—who risked ridicule.
“It’s not just a hatch,” he said. “It’s an airlock, too.”
“Indeed it is. But anybody inside the SM when smelting begins wouldn’t last two minutes. Would you like to take the next step, and tell me why a smelting facility needs an airlock?”
Rick was just a couple of people along from Goggles and could see his face through the visor. There was a mortified look there that said, Trapped! Why didn’t I keep my big mouth shut?
Rick didn’t feel much sympathy. Hadn’t Goggles learned the basic rule back in kindergarten? Never volunteer. The nail that sticks up gets the hammer.
And sometimes the nail that doesn’t stick up gets it, too. Because Barney was saying, “You do not know, Landau? Then how about you, Luban? That smarmy grin on your face suggests you are feeling highly pleased with yourself. So you tell me why SM needs an airlock.”
Another rule, one that Rick had learned more recently: On a test, any answer at all was more likely to be right than no answer at all. He tried the obvious. “It has an airlock so that if the top end of the SM were closed, the inside could be filled with air.”
“True, but hardly an earth-shaking conclusion. You are evading the real question. Why fill the SM with air? Air would be nothing but a nuisance during smelting.”
Rick cast his eye around the interior for inspiration, and saw the grimy and blackened instruments on the flat end of the cylinder. “You fill it with air so that crews can work in here. For—for maintenance.”
“Close enough. Of course, maintenance crews could work very well in suits. But I’ll accept your answer, because I doubt that any of you could get much closer.” Barney looked away from Rick, to his huge relief, and addressed the whole group. “The right answer is, the airlock was put here for you. The airtight interior of SM exists for your benefit, and for the benefit of past and future apprentices. I hope you are suitably appreciative.
“This is a real live smelter, although a small one, but it’s also intended as a training facility. To this point, you’ve worked alone or in pairs. Now it’s time for a practical effort where you will all work together. That’s easiest done when you don’t have to wear suits. In the next two weeks we—or rather, you—are going to do three things. First, you are going to clean all the muck out of the SM. Be prepared to eat your meals dirty and go to bed dirty. Second, once this place is clean you are going to learn how each instrument works. You are going to take them apart and put them back together until you can do the whole thing blindfold. And third—the big scary treat—you’ll get into your suits, go outside, and work together to bring one of those waiting asteroids in here. You’ll melt and centrifuge and tap, and when the molten metal flows I guess you’ll feel like genuine miners. And then, assuming that goes well, you’ll advance to Level Four—and be ready for something difficult. Any questions?”
This time everyone had enough sense to keep quiet. Barney nodded.
“Very well. You are free to make your way back to your quarters and continue with regular assignments. I will post a schedule for SM cleaning and maintenance later today, and work will begin here tomorrow.”
She turned and led the way back through the triple-locking hatch. Rick was all set to follow with the others when Alice turned to look directly at him and jerked her head inside her suit. He hung hack and waited, until just the two of them were floating in the cavernous interior of the smelter. She gestured to him to turn off his suit radio and moved so that their helmets were touching.
“What?” He knew she would hear him through their direct contact, although no one else would even if they were only a foot away.
“Remember what we agreed? If it’s not forbidden, we assume it’s permitted. Barney said we were free to go back, but she didn’t say we had to. Let’s stay and have a look around this place.”
Rick had seen as much of the SM as he wanted to. The chance of finding a cozy place where he and Alice could snuggle up and have some fun was as low here as you could get. He wanted her back at the main station, and into his bunk. But he couldn’t tell her that, because she had already broken the contact between their helmets and was soaring up toward the other end. He trailed along behind, staring with no relish at all at the SM’s crusted sides. In another day or so he would be scraping that crud away—and for what? So that they could melt down an asteroid, and make the whole smelter dirty again.
Alice headed to the very top, out of the open end of the SM and into open space. He followed her, and for the next minute or two they simply hovered, side by side. Rick stared around him, subdued by what he saw. Space felt quite different in a suit than when you looked at it through an observation port. The Sun was far off and small, a brilliant shrunken disk to his lower left. Close to it he picked up Venus and Earth, distinguishable from each other only because Venus was brighter and a little whiter. From this distance you would never know that the two worlds were so different, one bursting with life, the other a dead inferno.
Alice apparently had no interest in surveying the solar system. She was studying the way that the whole top of the smelter could either open wide, or be closed completely to provide an airtight seal. She moved close to Rick and placed her helmet next to his.
“You know, this end could operate as an emergency exit if it had to. There must be control panels, inside and out. I bet that’s the external one, under that plate.”
Rick had been scanning the starscape for other planets. Mars and Jupiter were easy, but he had not been able to find Saturn. The biggest thing in the sky was the lumpy ovoid of CM-26. From this distance, it and the smelter were the dominant features of the whole solar system.
He brought his attention reluctantly to the feature that Alice was pointing out. It was a white plate, small and almost insignificant, at the extreme outer edge of the flat circular end. Rick could see the big segmented plates that retracted as they opened, into a thick annulus. The white plate sat on the fixed outside edge of that annulus.
“Let’s take a look at it.” Before Rick could object Alice again had moved away and was zooming down. By the time that he joined her she had the plate cover open and was studying what lay beneath.
Rick put his head next to hers. “Alice! Don’t you think—”
“Nothing to it. See.” She directed the flashlight in her suit at one part of the exposed panel and placed a gloved finger on a pair of switches. “Here’s the control to open the end of the SM, and here’s the safety. This sensor tells you if there’s air pressure inside the SM—that light goes on—and if there is, the command to open is automatically cancelled. You’d have to override that manually, if you ever had reason to, and set this timer so you could get away before it opened. But how do you close it?”
Rick had been examining the rest of the panel while she was pondering the controls to open the SM.
“Like this,” he said. He pointed out another pair of switches. “This moves the plates that seal the end. No need for a safety to test for air pressure, because when the end of the SM is open there can’t be any air inside. But there is an obstruction safety, here. The end won’t close if there’s anything standing in the way. That’s so you can’t destroy the plates by asking the end to close when an asteroid or anything else is sitting between them. Agreed?”