“Oh? Ishi’s then. What’s its name?”
“He never gave it one.” she said as we left the cafeteria. “It was entered in the log by its inventory number.”
“I’ll name it myself, then.”
“What?”
“Roadhog,” I said.
We suited up and cycled through the Can’s main lock. The vehicle bay is just outside the lock, but the bay isn’t a particular room you can point at—it’s simply the big open space in the hollow part of the Can. All the small-sized vehicles are kept there and secured at the axis with a network of elastic tie-lines, to be sure they don’t bang into each other. All along the inner face of the Can are slots for berthing; when a vehicle needs to be fueled or worked over, it’s pulled into a berth. Otherwise it’s moored a good distance from the Can’s skin, in high vacuum that does it no harm.
Jenny and I clipped on to the mooring lines and pushed off. After a moment of coasting I turned so my feet pointed toward the shuttle and squirted my attitude jets. That slowed me to a crawl and I unclipped from the line just as the shuttle swelled up to block my view of the opposite inner wall of the Can. I landed, catlike.
I swung around, found a pipe and attached my own suit tie-line to it. The shuttles are all different: each one was thrown together with whatever spare parts came to hand. The Roadhog—I’d silently christened it the moment my glove touched the pipe—looked like a conglomerate of castoffs until you studied the structure.
It was a bit like an automobile chassis, all bones and no skin. The pilot was belted into a couch at the center. He was surrounded by pipes and struts and fuel tanks, without having his view obscured. A small yellow ion-engine was mounted behind him. The whole thing was lumpy but balanced; spacecraft have to be stable.
I glided over to the pilot’s couch and perched on top of the backrest. Around us, never closer than twenty yards, were other craft. A few had their running lights on; they were being checked over or preparing to go out. A big tube-shaped cargo hauler was moored right above us. Beyond that the gray water-shield plugged the bore of the Can. Below I could see someone using a cutting torch, its flame a sharp, fierce blue diamond.
I heard a faint clank as Jenny bumped into the shuttle. She secured her suit safety line and came swarming over to me.
She touched helmets. “You know how to use the air tanks on this one, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Take us over there, then,” she said, pointing to Berth H.
I buckled myself into the pilot couch and reached out gingerly for the controls. You don’t use an ion engine inside the Can’s bay, or even nearby if you can help it. The backwash can knock a man head over heels a hundred meters away, or snarl mooring lines. So I gently thumbed in the override on the shuttle’s air tanks, switched them over to the pipe system that led to the little maneuvering jets at the rear, and reached for the release button.
“Forgotten anything?” Jenny said lightly.
“Huh?”
“Our mooring lines.”
“Oh.” I felt my face go red. I unbuckled and glided around the four corners of the Roadhog, unhooking the elastic lines. They’re on retrieval coils, so as soon as I let go a line it retracted toward the axis.
I sat back down in the couch. “All cleared. Captain.”
She didn’t say anything. I carefully bled a little air into the pipes and felt a satisfying tug as we got under way. I gave us little bursts of air to maneuver around the cargo hauler overhead and cut in the gyros to keep us from tumbling.
We inched our way across the bay. I got back into the practice of looking in three different directions at once; my neck started to ache. Human beings are built for navigating in two dimensions; our eyes are set in a line parallel to the ground, suitable for chasing wildebeests. Outer space takes some getting used to. Even after you’ve trained your stomach to stop pushing the panic button when you’re in no-g conditions, you have to keep reminding yourself that up and down are just as important as sideways. The adjustment is never perfect, because you’re trying to learn a set of reflexes your body just wasn’t programmed to take. That’s why no-g maneuvering takes a lot of energy—you’re fighting yourself all the way, whether you know it or not. I suppose that’s why kids like me are a little better at no-g work and don’t tire so fast; our reflexes aren’t totally “set” yet.
Berth H was a square-mouthed tube with bright lights lining the inside. I edged the Roadhog into the slot and brought us to a stop nearly perfectly; we couldn’t have been moving faster than a meter per second when we bumped into the buffer pads at the end.
Jenny patted me on the shoulder and bounded away to fasten mooring lines.
I felt good. I had proved that I could still handle a shuttlecraft, despite being out of practice. And most of all, I was out in space again. It had been too long.
That was the high point. The next five hours were something less than gratifying. Jenny took me over the Roadhog inch by inch, making me learn every valve and meter and strut on the contraption. I had forgotten a lot; the rest I hadn’t learned at all.
She made me draw a flowchart for the air pipes, after letting me inspect the Roadhog for five minutes. I thought I’d figured it out. When she handed the clipboard back to me, covered with red marks. I found out that I had gotten everything exactly backwards.
I checked out the works: ring laser gyros, radio, first aid, fuel feeds, hauling collars, repair kit. spare parts, search lights, electrical system, navigation, backup systems, vector integrator—you name it, I had to find it, see if it worked, explain how I would repair it if it didn’t, and relate it to all the other systems it meshed with.
“Do you think you’re familiar with these things now?” Jenny said.
“I’m surprised you don’t have me kiss each one individually,” I said. She grinned at me. I grinned back; a lock of hair had curled down between her eyes—she couldn’t reach it, of course, in a space suit—and I wondered why I hadn’t realized before how pretty she was.
My old romanticism again. The people I respected most were the ones who could do things. Most girls didn’t fit in that category, and I—ambitious Matt Bohles—looked down my nose at them. What good is a girl who is just an ornament?
For some reason I had included Jenny in that group, too. These last few hours had proven me wrong. I was intrigued. Jenny was something special.
“Do you feel ready to take her out?” Jenny said. I blinked; I had been staring at her moodily, thinking, for the last minute.
“The Roadhog is not a her, it’s a him.” I said.
“Ships are always feminine,” she said. “There are female roadhogs, too. So what’s your answer?”
“Alone?”
“Of course not. I’ll be holding your hot little hand all the way.” She looked at her watch. “The round trip should take about thirteen hours. It’s too late to leave today.”
“What’s the trip for?”
“Satellite Fourteen. A circuit component is on the fritz and the Faraday cup doesn’t give reasonable readings.”
I shrugged and then remembered that in a suit the gesture was invisible. “Fine. Tomorrow morning, then, huh?”
Chapter 10
That night we had one of our godawful Socials. The psychers have this theory: As kids approach the teenage years, there’s this natural tendency to clump. Girls in one group over here, and the boys in that gang over there. You can’t get them together in the right kind of social way without an effort, they say. So every month they have a Social and every teenager in the Can has to come. There’s no option. No begging off with a cold, no conflicting job. Nothing will get you off the hook.