“More likely de half-wit.” Vido fended off her lunge. “Hey! I thought you were on your best behavior.”
He ran for the exit pursued by Gladys. Polly soon followed. Rick and Deedee were left sitting alone.
“You look pretty wiped out,” she said. “Do you feel too tired to talk?”
The peculiar tone in her voice woke him up at once. “Talk? About what?”
“Not here.” Deedee stood up. “If you don’t mind, I’d like this to be private. Let’s go to my cabin.”
Whatever she had in mind, it was surely not what it sounded like. That was just as well. And just as well that she had not suggested his cabin. His bunk still looked as though it had been struck by a tornado. Rick trailed along after Deedee on weary legs, feeling a little uncomfortable as they passed Alice’s cabin.
“What’s the big mystery?” he said as she closed and locked her door. “Getting paranoid?”
“Maybe I am.” She sat down on her bed and gestured to him to use the chair. “I haven’t told anyone else about this, because it sounds so crazy. Promise me that what I say to you now won’t go any farther.”
“I promise. I won’t talk.”
“Not to anyone. Not even to Alice Klein.”
“Alice? What makes you think that I might. . .” Rick saw Deedee’s expression, and swallowed the rest of the sentence. “I promise. Not to Alice, not to anyone.”
“Thank you. I want to ask you a question about somebody—don’t worry, it’s not about Alice.”
“Go ahead.”
“What do you think of Jigger Tait?”
“Jigger?” It was the last name that Rick had expected. He had to stop and analyze his own feelings before he could answer. “You probably know him as well as I do,” he said at last. “I think very well of him. He helped me a lot back on CM-2, when I did something really stupid, and he never mentioned it to anyone. He keeps himself to himself, but he’s always there when you need him. What are you getting at, Deedee?”
“I’m not sure. Until two days ago I’d have agreed with everything you just said. We’ve seen a lot of weird things since we shipped up from Earth, and Jigger has been one of our only points of continuity. It’s almost uncanny, the way he shows up when anything is happening—like when you had your fight with Vido—but you always felt you could rely on him.”
“So what happened two days ago?” It seemed to Rick that she was having trouble getting to the point. Diffidence and uncertainty were not the usual Deedee. “Spit it out, Dee.”
“Remember the big group meeting with Barney, the first one we had after we got here? She started to talk about assignments, and I had left my problem set in my room. I sneaked out while she was going over the list of what came next, and I came back here to pick it up. And I saw Jigger. He didn’t see me, but it looked as though he had just come out of my room and was heading away along the corridor.”
“Why didn’t you say something to him?”
“I was too surprised—and I was in a hurry to get back to the meeting. But it looked like he was going into Goggles Landau’s room. After the meeting with Barney was over, I asked Goggles if he had been doing any work with Jigger. He said ‘Work? No. I haven’t spoken to Jigger since we got here,’ and he stared at me as though I was off the wall.”
“Why didn’t you talk to Barney?”
“And tell her what? I couldn’t see any sign in my room that Jigger had been there. I wasn’t even sure he had. Barney would have ripped me to pieces.”
“She might.” Rick tried to sound sympathetic, and failed. “She certainly ought to. You didn’t see anything. Nothing happened to your room, or Goggles’s. You don’t have a thing to go on, except some weird suspicion.”
“I haven’t finished,” Deedee said quietly. “I knew all that, but I was still worried. Today we were all together in the smelter, and it was the first time the whole group had met in two days. I don’t know if you noticed, but Gina Styan was there as well as Barney French. Everybody who came out to CM-26 with us was there—except Jigger.”
“So? He was busy elsewhere.”
“He was. I sneaked out of the SM before the meeting ended, and came back here to my room. I left my door open, but I stayed out of sight on my bunk. If Jigger came along and saw me I was going to say I wasn’t feeling good. And he did come along.”
“Into your room?”
“No. But he went into Alice Klein’s, and he went into Skip Chung’s. He was about ten minutes in each one.”
“Why didn’t you go in after him?” It was the obvious thing to do, and Rick was losing patience. “Just ask him what he was doing there.”
“This is going to sound stupid, Rick, but I was scared. I am scared. It’s like you feel you know someone really well, and then they suddenly do something so out of character that you realize you don’t know them at all. Can you understand that?”
Rick thought he understood exactly. It was his own feeling, right now. This wasn’t the Deedee Mao that he knew and liked.
“What do you want me to do, Dee?”
“I don’t know. I guess for the moment, nothing. I’m going to keep an eye on Jigger, and on anyone else who comes prowling near my room for the next few days.” She paused. “But if anything bad should happen to me—well, I want to be sure that at least one person around here will be asking questions.”
Rick didn’t forget what Deedee had said, but the activities of the next few days pushed it away from the center of his attention.
For one thing, he had grappled hard with the problem of the spinning ring, to the point where he believed that he knew what must happen. After many hours he could see that hoop, rotating in front of his eyes. It was spinning about the center of attraction. Then you cut all the strings. At that point the ring would wobble, just the tiniest bit, because any real system always did. One side of the hoop would move a fraction closer to the center of attraction. Once that happened that same part would be pulled a little bit harder toward the center by the gravitational force, because gravity was stronger with decreasing distance. At the same time, because that side was closer to the center of rotation but the rotation speed hadn’t changed, the outward centrifugal force on it would become a tiny bit less. Both those would act to make that part of the hoop move toward the center of attraction.
Meanwhile, because the hoop was strong and solid, the part on the opposite side had to be pushed a little bit farther away from the center of attraction. The gravity force on it would be less, and the centrifugal force bigger. That part of the hoop would feel a force to move it away from the center of attraction. In other words, both sides of the hoop would feel forces that amplified the original wobble. The hoop would move more and more off-center, until part of it hit the central attracting point. The strings had been absolutely essential, to prevent any asymmetry in the movement growing and growing.
That was the mental picture. Unfortunately, Rick knew there was no way he could put it into mathematics. The tools were still far beyond him, and his deadline for submission of an answer was close. He wrote out, carefully and laboriously, his train of logic, and added a note: For the same reason, if the rings of Saturn were solid hoops, their motion would be unstable. They would move until a part of every ring hit the planet and the whole thing would disintegrate.