“What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy asked. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“Well, what is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. Then, “They got the suits about half an hour ago. Venie waved at me. You two had your heads down over the table.”
“I hope they got the smallest there were,” Jimmy said.
Suddenly, I put my hand on his elbow and stopped. “Hold on there. We’d better go back and go around.” I gestured at the hail ahead. “I don’t want to get bawled out by that old witch again.”
Jimmy looked at me with an impish expression. It’s the sort of expression his face, topped by red hair and set between prominent ears, is really fitted for.
“Let’s take a chance,” he said. “Let’s just run for it, and if she comes out we won’t stop at all.”
Maybe it was my moment to be impulsive. The hall stretched before us like a gauntlet. The door to old Mrs. Keithley’s office was open and we were far enough out of her line of sight to allow us a running start. We had to go about thirty yards beyond it, turn a corner left, and then we’d be out of sight and out of practical reach.
“All right,” I said. Feeling like little blonde-haired Susy Dangerfield running between the lines of hostile Iroquois braves, I took off. Jimmy was right with me, on my left, and we pounded along. As we passed the old lady’s office, I shot a glance right, but didn’t see her.
Jimmy out-accelerated me, and as we made for the corner, he was a step or two ahead.
“Hey, slow down,” I said. “She isn’t even there.”
He turned his head to look back as he reached the corner, and still moving at considerable speed crashed blindly into someone. Jimmy bounced off and into the wall, but didn’t fall down. I skidded to a stop at the corner and looked down. It was Mrs. Keithley, white hair and all, sitting flat on her bottom with an expression of affronted dignity on her face. She looked up at me.
“Hello,” I said. “Nice day, isn’t it?” I stepped over her and walked at a very sedate pace down the hail.
Jimmy was stunned momentarily, but then he made the best of things. “It was nice to see you again,” he said politely to the dear old lady, and then walked after me. I shot a glance back at her and then Jimmy caught up with me and we both broke into a run and left her looking speechlessly after us.
When we were out of breath and out of sight, we stopped running and flung ourselves down panting on a flight of stairs. Then we started laughing, partly because it seemed terribly funny and partly from sheer relief.
When I’d caught my breath and stopped laughing, I looked soberly at Jimmy and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take the long way around from now on.”
“That’s a pretty obvious thing to say,” Jimmy said.
“Well, I’m not a very brave person.”
“Oh, I’m not blaming you. I’m going to be careful, too.”
When we got to the lock room, Helen was waiting in the hallway. All of us looked in both directions, and then Helen stepped up to the black door and gave a knock that was recognizably a signal and not a casual rapping by some passerby with an unaccountable desire to tap on black doors. The door swung open immediately and we all piled inside. Att, standing behind the door, gave us just time enough to get completely in and then shut the door behind us.
The room was green-colored, small and bare. The lock door was directly opposite the door we’d come in. The suits had been hung on racks that apparently were designed to hold them.
Jimmy looked around in satisfaction. “Ah,’ he said. “Very, very good. Let’s get the suits on, Mia.”
I looked around at Venie and Helen and Att and said, “Where’s Riggy?”
Att said, “I couldn’t talk him out of it. He brought along an extra suit. You know how he wanted to go outside, too. Well, he went.”
Looking very unhappy, Jimmy said, “Well, couldn’t you stop him, Venie? You could have kept him from taking an extra suit.”
Venie said defensively, “If you only wanted one suit between the two of you, I could have made him leave one behind. He said he had as much right to go out as you two did.”
Att said, “You know how mad he can get. We told him it wasn’t a good idea but he wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
Helen said, “He’s going to ‘surprise’ you.”
“I guess so,” Jimmy said, somewhat sourly. “Well, let’s go ahead with what’s left of this adventure.”
He was obviously quite disgruntled, but trying not to let it show. Or, perhaps, trying to let it show just enough so that he could be a good sport about it all. I’ve not been above that one myself.
We put on the suits. They were about as similar to the old-time pressure suits described in the novels I liked to read as the Ship is to that silly sailboat I once got so sick in. (In passing, I want to say that it used to strike me as odd the way nobody in the Ship wrote novels at all; nobody had for years and years and years, so that what I read dated from before the Population Wars. Right now I’m not even sure why I liked to read them. Most of them weren’t very good by any objective standard. Escapism, maybe…) Anyway, our suits were an adaptation of the basic discontinuity principle that the Ship used, too. To be analogous (and thereby inaccurate), remember that old saw about reaching inside a cat, grabbing it by the tail, and turning it inside out? The discontinuity effect, as far as the Ship is concerned, grabs the universe by the tail and turns it inside out so as to get at it better. Strictly a local effect, but in the process getting from here to there becomes a relatively simple matter instead of an intensely difficult one. The discontinuity effect doesn’t work the same way in the suits — they are more of a self-contained little universe of their own. They were originally invented, my reading tells me, to fight battles in — part of a continuing effort to render individual soldiers invulnerable — and hence were light in weight, carried their own air, heat, air-conditioning, light, etc., plus being proof against just about everything from concentrated light beams to projectiles to any of the unpleasant battery of gases that had been invented. Turned out, of course, that the suits were far more useful for constructive purposes (building the Ships) than they had ever been in wartime. Militarily, of course, they were a bust — everybody on Old Earth who fought in one was long dead — but in their peaceful adaptations they were still useful and still in use, as witness.
Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the air lock with air.
As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”
Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the air lock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.
As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button-pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”