Chapter Seventeen
You may feel SICK, you may feel SAD, you may feel STUPID, you may feel SUPERIOR, you may even feel SEXY. . . The sign hung prominently displayed at the entrance to the airlock.
…but unless you are feeling SUICIDAL you will check every element of your suit before you operate this lock. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Rick was feeling somber, which was not on the list, but he did not ignore the sign. He carefully made sure of every seal and function of his suit. He had not felt much like eating, and less like talking, and while all the others were still at lunch he had left to come straight here. It would be another hour before the operation at the SM was due to begin, but he wanted to spend time alone. The best place for quiet solo thinking, better even than his cabin, was outside the busy main body of CM-26. Inside the asteroid there was always the subterranean grumble and growl of heavy machinery, a reminder that apart from being a training facility CM-26 was also a producing mine.
It was a surprise and a nuisance to Rick to make his exit from the airlock and see the faint beacon of another suited figure flashing red near the smelter. While he watched it disappeared around the curve of the cylinder, then a couple of minutes later came into view again on the other side.
Who on earth was it? All the apprentices had been in the dining-room. He saw no way that they could have arrived here ahead of him.
There was an easy way to find out: use his suit radio. But then he would be forced into unwanted conversation. Maybe the other would simply go farther away, off toward the cluster of small waiting asteroids beyond the SM, or perhaps around to the other side of CM-26 where the final products of the mine were launched on their trajectories toward distant Earth.
Rick dimmed his own beacon, hovered in space, and watched. The other person’s suit was invisible whenever it was in shadow, but the beacon allowed Rick to track every movement. It went round and round the smelter, starting at the bottom and steadily spiraling up to the top. When that was done the flashing red light made a double traverse of each end of the cylinder, and finally the suited figure turned to jet back toward Rick and the main airlock.
He could not avoid contact now. But at least the question of identity would be answered. Rick waited, and knew the exact moment when the other saw him. There was a reflexive jerk in the suit’s arms and head, followed by a slight alteration of thrust vector.
“You’re pretty early,” said a voice in Rick’s headset.
It was Jigger Tait, heading straight toward him.
“Yeah. You too.” Rick at once thought of Deedee’s worried face. There was no reason at all why Jigger should not be out here—he was senior enough to go anywhere he pleased—but that did not explain why he would choose to be wandering around outside, alone.
“You mean for heat-cleaning the smelter?” Jigger spoke casually, as though meeting Rick was the most natural thing possible. “Oh, I won’t be staying for that. I’ve seen it before, with other apprentice groups, and anyway I have work that needs doing inside. I’ll see you later.”
He jetted off and entered the open outer door of the airlock, leaving Rick perplexed. Jigger had offered not one word of explanation as to what he was doing. Rick could think of no reason why Jigger needed to be wandering around—prowling around, in Deedee’s word—the smelting module. On the other hand, if Jigger wanted to prowl the interior unobserved, he would soon have the perfect opportunity with the apprentices all busy outside.
Hopes for a quiet half-hour of serious thinking had faded at the first sight of that red spacesuit beacon. It faded farther when the airlock opened again and another suited figure emerged.
Rick’s initial thought—Jigger returning—vanished with one look at the newcomer. She was as slim as Jigger was muscular, and considerably shorter. He also knew exactly who it was. An apprentice’s style in manipulating the motion controls of a spacesuit was as individual as a walk.
“Hi, Alice.” Rick moved toward her. “We’re early.”
She must have expected to be alone, because he saw the instinctive jerk of surprise.
“Rick? I didn’t think there would be anybody else out here yet.”
“Me neither.” He advanced until they were within a few feet of each other. “But you were exactly right. Initiative is the name of the game, and Polly sure grabbed it.”
“For today she did.” Alice didn’t sound upset, the way that Rick felt. “What was it you told me Vido Valdez said, when the two of you were always fighting? Are you still fighting, by the way?”
“No. We get on just fine.”
“But you’re not close?”
“No, I wouldn’t say we are.” The conversation wasn’t making a lot of sense to Rick. “What Vido said to me when?”
“When Dr. Bretherton told the two of you to cool it, or get thrown out.”
“Oh, yeah. Vido told me, ‘It ain’t over ’til I say it’s over.’ ”
“That’s what I meant. Well, I feel the same about Polly. She’s riding high at the moment, but she hasn’t won until we say she has. We just have to come up with better ideas.”
“Great.” Rick knew his skepticism was showing through. “Got any?”
“Not yet. That’s why I’m here. But we will have. Come on.”
She led the way over to the smelter. It was open and airless and they wandered inside it together, examining the odd airlock, the places where suits could be stored, and the array of monitoring instruments on the lower flat end. They looked at the great inductive heating coils, which would soon raise the whole interior to a temperature of thousands of degrees. At the other end of the smelter Alice made another inspection of the control panel that allowed the segmented metal sectors to iris open or to close for an airtight seal. Finally they moved together along the curved outer surface of the cylinder, studying the little fusion drives that caused the cylinder to spin on its central axis or to slow to a halt.
“Ideas?” Rick asked as they cycled back to their starting point at the base of the cylinder.
“Some. I don’t want to talk about them, though—they’re still half-baked.”
Rick understood that completely. You might get what seemed like the world’s greatest idea for the first half hour, and a day later you’d realize that it was a complete crock. In any case, this was no time for discussing secrets. The rest of the apprentices were beginning to appear from the lock, wandering in small groups over to the smelter. Because Rick and Alice were already there, it was natural for the others to treat them as a group center and gather around them.
Polly arrived last, followed by Barney French. “I would like to describe the plan for today,” she said in a wobbly voice, while she was still approaching the rest of the group.
She was nervous, and no wonder. Everyone would have a role, but this was Polly’s show. Barney wouldn’t let her do anything that might destroy or damage the smelter, but it would be almost as bad to be given a public warning, or to have one of the other apprentices point out why what she was suggesting was crazy and dangerous.
Polly moved to stand in front of the triple airlock. “The good news,” she said, “is that we won’t have to worry about rotating the smelter, because we don’t have ore to melt and centrifuge. That means we don’t need to inspect the fusion engines on the outside. The other good news is that we won’t need to go to four thousand degrees, even though the structure can stand it. Twenty-eight hundred degrees will be enough to oxidize and vaporize all the residues that line the smelter.