Thruster settings flashed onto the suit displays. Obviously, Barney had computed and stored them in advance. The necessary counter-thrust was small. Rick realized that nothing catastrophic would have happened, even if Polly had proceeded as she originally planned. The smelter would have moved away from CM-26 at a modest pace, and a ship would have been forced to go out and bring it back. Barney had interfered to make a point, not to prevent an accident.
“Let’s do it,” said Barney. “Go ahead, Polly.”
At last, there was something to see. The end of the smelter began to open, and a cloud of incandescent gas spewed out into space. At the same moment half a dozen thrust units on the side of the SM flared briefly into action. To Rick’s eyes, calibrating the position of the smelter against the starry background, nothing moved so much as a millimeter. From where he was hanging in space he could see into the open maw of the smelter. The inside shone a brilliant white, which as he watched faded to orange, to bright cherry-red, and at last to the dull glow of a dying ember.
“Don’t even think of it,” Barney said. A few of the suited apprentices were already floating in the direction of the smelter. “You won’t be able to go inside and see what it’s like without frying for another couple of hours. Let’s go and have a meal and come back later. You should be feeling good about things. I told you that the last group of apprentices finished the cleaning job in two days—but I didn’t tell you that they needed until nearly midnight.
“You beat them by"—she consulted her suit chronometer—"more than six hours. You’ve earned a reward. You can tell me later what it will be. Polly gets a veto vote, because you couldn’t have done this without her brainwave.”
A reward. All through the meal the preferences had been kicked around. A party, a dance, a feast, a day without work assignments.
The knock-’em-dead idea did not emerge until they were back in their suits, examining the results of the fiery purge of the SM.
Those results were spectacular. The smelter wasn’t just clean, it was immaculate. Not a trace of grime or metal residue or dust of any kind could be seen anywhere. The instruments and walls shone like new.
“So what do you think?” Polly sounded diffident, but Rick could see her eyes, bright behind her visor.
“Super-colossal-amazing.” Deedee was standing next to her, and she reached down and ran her glove over one of the plane surfaces. It came away spotless. “Clean enough to eat off.”
She paused, and she and Polly stood staring at each other.
“That’s it!” Polly exclaimed.
“If we’re allowed to,” said Deedee.
“Allowed to what?” Obviously, Polly and Deedee had communicated an idea. Just as obviously, Rick had been present but somehow left out.
“Party, of course,” said Polly, in tones that suggested any fool would know.
“In here,” Deedee added. “We said it’s clean enough to eat off the floor—so let’s do it.”
“Eat, and dance, and riot.”
“If Barney will let us.”
“Why shouldn’t she? We’d have to fill it with air, of course, so we won’t need suits.”
“And we’d have to bring food and drink over—no way we could prepare it here.”
“And a little cylinder rotation, to give enough gravity to dance.”
“And we’d want partitions, for privacy.”
“And couches in them, for you-know-what.”
They were off and running, while he was totally ignored. After another couple of exchanges he gave up and moved away. It was obvious that they didn’t need him.
Not for the first time, Rick decided that males and females spoke different languages. It was a mystery that they were even considered the same species.
Chapter Eighteen
Chick Teazle had been put in charge of arrangements; not, as Barney French explained to him, because he was especially competent, but because he was so obnoxious that people would do what he asked rather than get into an argument with him.
He was also, though Barney did not mention it, a natural organizer who loved jobs like this. For the past twenty-four hours he had hardly slept, planning out the work needed to make a Cinderella transition from ore smelter to dance hall.
“We spin it first, and get some decent internal gravity,” he said to the apprentices, assembled in the main training hall of CM-26. “We need gravity for good dancing, and for sitting comfortable. And we fill the SM with air last. That way we can bring in partitions and food and drink and everything else through the big open end, and not have to keep using the airlock.”
“Suits all the time?” asked Deedee. Even after months of experience, no one really liked working in suits.
“Well, not for the party itself. Just for setting it up. Once that’s done and the SM is airtight, we take off our suits.” Chick produced a gigantic sheet of hardboard, covered with minute writing. “Here’s the schedule for everything, with names attached to individual tasks. We’ll eat tonight over in the SM, but that means we have to be finished with everything here before dinner time.”
Gladys de Witt was studying the board. “I see my name, and most people’s; but I don’t see Vido or Alice or Deedee or Rick.”
“They go anywhere we have to go, do whatever needs to be done. They’re the troubleshooters, along with me.”
“What trouble?”
Chick sighed. “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be trouble, would it? It would be shown on the board. Trouble is what you don’t expect. We’ve never done anything like this before, I bet we’ll run into a hundred things that don’t work out quite the way I planned it. Look, do you want a debate, or do you want a party?”
“Party!” Anything that Gladys might have said was drowned out by the shout from everyone else.
“So let’s get going.” Chick held out the hardboard sheet. “If anybody has questions at this end, Vido and Alice will be here to answer them. Deedee and Rick will handle problems over in the SM. I’ll be floating all over.”
Any notion that the troubleshooters might have it easier than anyone else was dispelled in the first half-hour. Spinning the smelter on its central axis, to give a comfortable and familiar quarter-gee field at the outer surface, was easy and went exactly as planned. But when the work team went inside they were out again within seconds.
Lafe Eklund came floating over to where Rick and Deedee were waiting. “We’re all right for the moment,” he said, “because we’re getting sunlight in through the open end. But when we close that, the partitions we want will make it too dark for the party. We’re going to need more internal lights.”
Deedee looked at Rick. She seemed to have something on her mind, and he thought that she had been tentatively working her way around to discussing it. But now she said abruptly, “The lights will have to come from the main base. I’ll go get some.”
She jetted away, leaving Rick to wonder what was going on. Alice had been with him in his room the previous night. Did Deedee know that? Alice’s room was next to hers. Even if she did, why did she care? He thought of the last party, back on CM-2, when he had danced all evening with Deedee. Was she expecting or hoping that he would do the same again? Would he do the same again? Did he want to?
Rick was having trouble sorting out his own feelings, but he had no time to brood on personal matters. Lafe Eklund had been gone less than two minutes, and already he was coming back.