Rite of Passage
                   by Alexei Panshin
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                                    Contents
Part 1: Getting Unfrozen
|1|2|3|4|5|6|
Part 2: Inside My World
|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|
Part 3: A Universal Education
14|15|16|17|18|19|
Epilogue: Rite of Passage
|20|


   ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y.
   10036
   Copyright 1968, by Alexei Panshin
   A portion of Part III appeared in substantially different form in the
   July 1963 issue of If under the title Down to the Worlds of Men and
   is copyright, 1963, by Galaxy Publishing Co., Inc.
   An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.


                THIS BOOK IS FOR CHARLES AND MARSHA BROWN


       They that have power to hurt and will do none,
       That do not do the thing they most do show,
       Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
       Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow;
       They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
        And husband nature’s riches from expense;
        They are the lords and owners of their faces,
        Others but stewards of their excellence.
        The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
        Though to itself it only live and die,
        But if that flower with base infection meet,
        The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
        For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
        Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
        SONNET XCIV
        William Shakespeare



            PART I: GETTING UNFROZEN

                                  Chapter One
                                                                              ^»
To be honest, I haven’t been able to remember clearly everything that happened to
me before and during Trial, so where necessary I’ve filled in with possibilities— lies,
if you want.
    There is no doubt that I never said things half as smoothly as I set them down
here, and probably no one else did either. Some of the incidents are wholly made up.
It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the
important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started
taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on.
Without them, I wouldn’t be studying to be an ordinologist, I wouldn’t be married to
the same man, and I wouldn’t even be alive. The changes are given exactly— no lies.
   I remember that it was a long time before I started to grow. That was important to
me. When I was twelve, I was a little black-haired, black-eyed girl, short, small, and
without even the promise of a figure. My friends had started to change while I
continued to be the same as I had always been, and I had begun to lose hope. For
one thing, according to Daddy I was frozen the way I was. He hit upon that when I
was ten, one day when he was in a teasing mood.
  “Mia,” he said. “I like you the way you are right now. It would be a real shame if
you were to grow up and change.”
  I said, “But I want to grow up.”
  “No,” Daddy said thoughtfully. “I think I’ll just freeze you the way you are right
now.” He waved a hand. “Consider yourself frozen.”
   I was so obviously annoyed that Daddy continued to play the game. By the time
that I was twelve I was doing my best to ignore it, but it was hard sometimes just
because I hadn’t done any real growing since I was ten. I was just as short, just as
small, and just as fiat. When he started teasing, the only thing I could say was that it
simply wasn’t true. After awhile, I stopped saying anything.
  Just before we left Alfing Quad, I walked in with a black eye. Daddy looked at me
and the only thing he said was, “Well, did you win or did you lose?”
  “I won,” I said.
   “In that case,” Daddy said, “I suppose I won’t have to unfreeze you. Not as long
as you can hold your own.”
   That was when I was twelve. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have anything to
say. And besides, I was mad at Daddy anyway.
   Not growing was part of my obvious problem. The other part was that I was
standing on a tightrope. I didn’t want to go forward— I didn’t like what I saw there.
But I couldn’t go back, either, because I tried that and it didn’t work. And you can’t
spend your life on a tightrope. I didn’t know what to do.
  There are three major holidays here in the Ship, as well as several minor ones. On
August 14, we celebrate the launching of the Ship—last August it was one hundred
and sixty-four years ago. Then, between December 30 and January 1, we celebrate
Year End. Five days of no school, no tutoring, no work. Dinners, decorations hung
everywhere, friends visiting, presents, parties. Every fourth year we tack on one
more day. These are the two fun holidays.
   March 9th is something different. That’s the day that Earth was destroyed and it
isn’t the sort of thing you celebrate. It’s just something you remember.
   From what I learned in school, population pressure is the ultimate cause of every
war. In 2041, there were eight billion people on Earth alone, and nobody even had
free room to sneeze. There were not enough houses, not enough schools or
teachers, inadequate roads and impossible traffic, natural resources were going or
gone, and everybody was a little bit hungry all the time, although nobody was
actually starving. Nobody dared to raise his voice because if he did he might disturb
a hundred other people, and they had laws and ordinances to bring the point home—
it must have been like being in a library with a stuffy librarian twenty-four hours a
day. And the population continued to rise. There was a limit to how long all this
could go on, and that end was reached one hundred and sixty-four years ago.
  I’m lucky, I know, even to be alive at all. My great-great-grandparents were
among those who saw it coming and that’s the only reason I’m here.
   It wasn’t a case of moving elsewhere in the Solar System. Not only was Earth the
only good real estate in the vicinity, but when Earth was destroyed so was every
colony in the system. The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the
eight that were in service as well as two more that were uncompleted went up with
everything else in 2041. Between those two years we Ships planted 112 colonies on
planets in as many star systems. (There were 112 at the beginning, but a fair number
simply failed and at least seven acted badly and had to be morally disciplined, so
around ninety still exist.)
   We in the Ships learned our lesson, and though our Ship has only a small, closed
population, we won’t degenerate. We won’t become overpopulated, either. We have
a safety valve. Within three months of the day you turn fourteen, they take you from
the ship and drop you on one of the colony planets to survive as best you can for
thirty days. There are no exceptions and a reasonably high percentage of deaths. If
you are stupid, foolish, immature, or simply unlucky, you won’t live through the
month. If you do come home, you are an adult. My problem was that at twelve I
wasn’t afraid to die, but I was afraid to leave the Ship. I couldn’t even face leaving
the quad we lived in.
   We call that month of survival “Trial,” and I don’t think there was a day from the
time I was eleven that it wasn’t in my thoughts at least once. When I was eleven, a
man named Chatterji had a son due to go on Trial, and he had serious doubts that
the boy would make it. So he went to a great deal of trouble to try to ease the boy
through. He found out where his son was to be dropped and then he coached him
on every danger that he knew the planet had to offer. Then, before the boy left, he
slipped him a whole range of weapons that are not allowed to be carried on Trial,
and he advised him to find a protected spot as soon as he landed and to hole up
there for a month, not stirring at all, thinking the boy might have more of a chance
that way.
   The boy still didn’t make it. He wasn’t very bright. I don’t know how he died—
he may not have been able to cope with one of the dangers he knew was there; he
may have run into something unexpected; he may accidentally have blown his head
off with one of those weapons he wasn’t supposed to have; or he may simply have
tripped over his own feet and broken his neck— but he didn’t live to come home.
  And Mr. Chatterji was expelled from the Ship. He may have died, too.
   This may sound harsh— I can’t judge. It doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s
harsh, because it was necessary and I knew that it was necessary long before I was
even eleven. At the time, however, this made a great impression on me, and if I had
been able to force myself to face things outside the confines of the quad in which I
lived I would have rested much easier.
  There may have been other reasons, but I suspect that all this is why when Daddy
became Chairman of the Ship’s Council he decided that we had to move.
   Boys and girls, all of us in the Ship grew up playing soccer. I’m sure I knew how
to play by the time I was four or five, and I was certainly kicking the ball around
earlier than that. We used to play every chance we got, so it wasn’t surprising that I
was playing soccer in the quad yard— Alfing Quad, Fourth Level— when I got
word to come home. The yard stretches three floors high and two hundred yards in
each direction. There’s a regulation-sized soccer field, green and beautifully kept, in
the yard, but some older kids newly come back from their month of Trial and feeling
twice as tall because of it had exercised their privileges and taken the field for
themselves. We had moved down to the smaller field set up in the far end and were
playing there.
  In soccer you have a five-man front line, three halfbacks who serve as the first line
of defense and who bring the ball up so the forward line can take it and score, two
fullbacks who play defense only, and a goalie who guards the nets. It’s a game of
constant motion that stops only when a penalty is called or when a ball goes out of
bounds or when a score is made, and then stops only for a moment.
   I was playing the inside left position on the forward line because I have a strong
left-footed kick. It’s my natural kicking foot.
   From midfield, trying to catch my breath after running hard, I watched our goalie
dive on a hard boot at the nets. He was up almost instantly, bounced the ball once,
then held it and kicked it high and long. The goalies are the only players on the field
who are allowed to touch the ball with their hands. The rest of us have to use our
heads, elbows, knees and feet. That’s what makes the game interesting.
    Our right halfback knocked the ball down and trapped it with his foot. The instant
he had control, he passed the ball over to Mary Carpentier at center halfback and we
all started ahead on a rush for the goal.
   The ball criss-crossed between our halfbacks running behind us up the field
almost as though it had a life of its own, a round brown shape that darted and
dodged and leaped in the air, but always was caught and controlled, never quite
getting away.
   Once the other team intercepted the ball and it went back past midfield, but Jay
Widner picked off a bad pass and we began to rush again. Finally Mary Carpentier
headed a pass to me when I was in the clear for a moment. I had a step on Venie
Morlock, who was playing fullback against me. She was big, but slow. Even having
to concentrate on keeping the ball moving in front of me, I was faster than she was. I
had a good opening for a shot at the goal when Venie saw she couldn’t get the ball.
She swerved into me, gave me a neat hip, and sent me skidding onto my face. I was
running full tilt and couldn’t help myself. I went flying and hit hard. My kick went
bouncing out-of-bounds wide of the white posts and the net of the goal.
  I looked up, sputtering mad. “Soccer is not a contact sport!” I said.
   It was like Venie to pull something like that if she saw no other way to keep from
losing, and especially to me. We were confirmed old enemies, though I think it was
more of a deliberate policy on her part than on mine. Just as I scrambled up from the
floor the wallspeakers whistled twice for attention.
   There were always announcements coming over the speakers. This time they were
calling for me. They said, “Mia Havero is wanted at home. Mia Havero is wanted at
home.”
   Ordinarily Daddy didn’t have me paged and let me come home when I was good
and ready. There was a woman named Mrs. Farmer who used to tell Daddy that I
was undisciplined, but that wasn’t true. When Daddy did call for me, he only had to
call once.
  “Time for you to go home,” Venie said. “Run along.”
  The immediate flash of anger I had felt when I was skidding along had passed,
but I was still smoldering.
  “I’m not ready to go yet,” I said. “I have a fresh kick coming.”
  “What for?” Venie demanded. “It’s not my fault that you ran into me.”
  If it was my own fault that I’d wound up on the ground, I had no reason for
complaint. If it was Venie’s fault, then I had a shot at the goal coming on a major
penalty. That’s soccer. I guess Venie thought if she denied doing anything long
enough and loudly enough somebody would take her seriously.
   Mary Carpentier, my best friend, spoke up then. “Oh, come off it, Venie,” she
said. “We all saw what happened. Let Mia take her shot so she can go home.”
  After some fruitless argument on Venie’s part, everybody agreed I had a free kick
coming. I set the ball on the X-mark on the ground in front of the goal.
   The goalie was Mrs. Farmer’s son, Peter, who was younger than I and slow
enough to be put in the goal. He poised himself with his hands on his knees and
waited. The goal is eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, and the ball is set down
thirty-six feet away. The goalie has a big area to cover but in two quick steps he can
reach any ball aimed at the goal. It takes a good shot to get by him.
   Both teams stood behind and watched as I backed off a step or two from the
ball. After a moment I ran, faked a kick with my good left foot, and put a weak
right-footed kick dribbling just past the goalie’s outstretched fingers into the corner
of the nets. Then I left.
   I dodged into the outside corridor and made straight for my shortcut. I unclipped
a wall grate that provided an entrance to the air ducts, lifted it off and skinnied
through the hole into the dark, and then from the inside pulled the grate back into
position. That was always the hardest part, clipping the grate in place from inside. I
had to stick a finger through, then turn my elbow out and up so my finger could
reach the clip, then wiggle the clip until it caught. My fingers just weren’t long
enough, so it was always a frustrating moment or two until I succeeded. When I had
the grate in place, I turned and walked through the dark with a light steady breeze
tickling my cheek. I concentrated on counting the inlets as I passed them.
   Changing the Ship from a colony transport into a city was as big a job as turning
my mother into an artist— her project ever since I could remember. And they had
this much in common: neither was completely successful, so far as I’m concerned.
In both cases there were a lot of loose ends dangling that should have been tied into
neat square knots.
   As an example, the point where our quad left off and the ones on either side
began was completely a matter of administration, not walls. The quad itself, and
they’re all this way, was a maze of blank walls, blind alleys, endless corridors, and
staircases leading in odd directions. This was done on purpose— it keeps people
from getting either bored or lazy, and that’s important on a Ship like ours.
   In any case, there are very few straight lines, so in order to save yourself
distances, you have to know which way to go. In a strange quad it’s quite possible
to get lost if you don’t have a guide, and every so often they broadcast a general
appeal to be on the lookout for some straying three-year-old.
   I was in a hurry to make up lost time when I left the quad yard, so I had gone
straight to my shortcut. If the Ship were a person, the air ducts would be the
circulatory system. Your blood travels from your heart to your lungs, where it
passes off carbon dioxide and picks up oxygen; back to the heart; into the body,
where the oxygen is used and carbon dioxide is picked up; and then back to the
heart again. The air in the Ship goes through the ducts to the Third Level, where it
picks up oxygen; then through the ducts and into the Ship, where the air is breathed;
then back into the ducts and down to Engineers, where water and dirt, carbon
dioxide, and germs are removed, and a touch of clean water is added. They kick it
around a little more, and then they blow it back up to the Third Level.
   The ducts moved in straight lines, and walking within them you could move
through walls and arrive almost anywhere faster than you could through the halls.
Anybody bigger than I was was too big to squeeze through the grate openings—
there were larger openings for repairmen, but they were kept locked— and all the
other kids I knew were too frightened to follow me, so the shortcut remained my
own private route. They all thought I was foolish to go where I did, and for the sake
of prestige I liked to pretend that they were right, though they weren’t. As long as
you avoided the giant fans you were all right. It was simply that it was people, not
things, that frightened me.
   When I got to our corridor, I slipped the grate out and pulled myself up and out
on the floor. I reset the grate and gave a swipe to my hair to teach it to behave and lie
down flat again. I inherit my hair and eyes, my straight nose and my complexion
from my Spanish and Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I
wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.
  “Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”
   The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the
floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in
look, but this was far worse than usual.
    Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He
is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp
mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for
years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.
  He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”
  “I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.
  “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”
  I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both
were streaks of dust and grime.
  The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the
quad yards isn’t real dirt-and-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a
milled fiber and plastic base— when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a
new one, just like in your living room floor. The only place there is dirt in any
quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of
dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship.
Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on
the First Level, where it is used to feed the Convertors to produce heat, light and
power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity
to get filthy.
    I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only
source— the Third Level— instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after
it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.
   He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”
   “Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle
the Colonies— I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it
may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.
   Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters— Colons, rather— were packed in at
very close quarters. They weren’t clean people— try to convince a peasant to
wash— and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink
anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and
air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so
we no longer need that system.
   Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.
   “Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then? I asked.
   “Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure
things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.
   I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to
scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of
another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.
   I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.
   “I took a shortcut home,” I said.
   Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I
was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a
Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely
that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking— he has
to tell me what’s on his mind.
  He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good
news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”
   I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.
  This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship,
we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow after I left the dorm and moved in
with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a
larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked
most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space— they feel they have
to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for
myself. Daddy had promised I could.
  “Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”
    The population of the Ship is about 30,000 now, but once we had transported
thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had
fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra
space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have
moved next door.
  Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo
Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.
  I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just
want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked
out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up
everything I had gained since then.
   Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would
skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was
living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do,
seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the
way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t
stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know
quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.
   I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the
distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccupping and I
couldn’t stop.
  “What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.
  He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and he finally got me calmed
down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took awhile, but finally I
was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccupping occasionally.
  “I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things
were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a
dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”
  “No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.”
  He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said,
“All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”
  Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count
on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy
wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the
Fourth Level— it was on the Fifth.
   The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical—
Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration.
Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals and weeds— it’s where
they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth
are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids
knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a
Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to
being human.
   I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be
serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking—
not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment
longer.
   “Certainly I am,” he said, as though it were nothing. “I had to hunt for a long time
before I found this apartment. I’ve already started getting us ready to move. You’ll
like it there, I think. I understand there’s a boy your age in the school there who’s
somewhat ahead of you. It will give you a chance to scratch for awhile instead of
coasting along with no competition the way you do here.”
  I was afraid, and so I started to argue desperately, naming all the places we could
move into inside Alfing. I even cried— and I didn’t do that often anymore— but
Daddy was unshakable. Finally I dragged my sleeve across my face to dry my eyes
and folded my arms and said, “I’m not going to go.”
   That wasn’t the right tack to take with Daddy. It just convinced him that I was
being stubborn, but it wasn’t stubbornness now. I was truly frightened. I was sure
that if we moved things would never be the same for me again. They couldn’t be.
  But I couldn’t say that to Daddy. I couldn’t admit to him that I was afraid.
   He came to the chair where I was sitting defiantly with my arms crossed and fresh
tears lurking in the corners of my eyes, and he put both of his hands on my
shoulders.
   “Mia,” he said. “I realize that it isn’t easy for you, but in less than two years you
will be your own master and then you can live where you please and do as you like.
If you can’t take an unpleasant decision now, what kind of an adult will you make
then? Right now— no arguments— I am moving. You have a choice. Move with me,
or move into the dormitory here in Alfing Quad.”
  I’d lived in a dormitory and I had no desire ever to go back. I did want to stay
with Daddy, but it was still a hard decision for me to make. It was a question of
which of my two certainties I wanted to give up. In the end, I made my decision.
   After I wiped my eyes once again with the lower edge of my shirt, I walked slowly
back down to the quad yard. When I got there, both soccer games had broken up
and the whole yard was a turning kaleidoscope of colored shirts and shorts. I didn’t
see Venie Morlock anywhere in the mass of playing kids, so I asked a boy I knew if
he had seen her.
  He pointed, “She’s right over there.”
  “Thank you,” I said.
   I got her down. I rubbed her nose in the ground. Then I made her beg to be let
up. I got a black eye for my trouble, but it was worth it to make her remember who
was who, even if I did live on the Fifth Level now.
  After that, Daddy and I moved.


                                  Chapter Two
                                                                           «^»
The people who run our schools are very conservative— that probably holds true
just about everywhere, not just on our Ship. In any case, usually once you get
assigned to a tutor you don’t change to another for years. In fact, I knew a boy in
Alfing Quad who hated his tutor and got along so badly with him that they could
both show scars, and it took him three years to change to another.
   Compared to that, anything less has to seem frivolous.
   Monday morning, two days after we moved, I reported to my new school
supervisor in Geo Quad. He was thin, officious, prim and exact, and his name was
Mr. Quince. He looked at me standing in front of his desk, raised his eyebrows as he
took in my black eye, finished examining me, and said, “Sit down.”
    The supervisor is in charge of all the school’s administrative work— he assigns
tutors, handles class movements, programs the teaching machines, breaks up fights,
if there are any, and so on. It’s a job with only a minimum of appeal for most people
so they don’t make anybody stay with it for longer than three years.
   After looking through all my papers with pursed lips, and making a painstaking
entry in a file, Mr. Quince said, “Mr. Wickersham.”
  “I’m sorry,” I said, puzzled.
   “Mr. Wickersham will be your tutor. He lives at Geo C/15/37. You’re to meet him
at his home at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and thereafter three times a week
at your mutual convenience. And please, let’s not be late on Wednesday. Now come
along and I’ll show you your room for first hour.”
   School is for kids between the age of four and fifteen. After fourteen, if you
survive, they let you give up all the nonsensical parts. You simply work with a tutor
or a craft master and follow your interests toward some goal.
   I was due to make a decision on that in about two years. The trouble is that
except for math and reading old novels I had a completely different set of interests
than I had had a year before, and since I didn’t really have a solid talent for math and
reading old novels isn’t much use for anything, I had to find something definite. I
didn’t really want to specialize. I wanted to be a synthesist, knowing a little about
everything and seeing enough to put the pieces together. It’s a job that had appeal
for me, but I never talked about wanting it because I suspected I wasn’t smart
enough to handle it and I wanted room to back down in if I had to.
   At my moments of depression I thought I might well wind up as a dorm mother
or something equally daring.
   At some point between fourteen and twenty everybody finishes his normal
training. You pick something you like and start doing it. Later, after twenty, if you’re
not already in research, you may apply for educational leave and work on a project
of some sort. That’s what my mother keeps herself busy with.
   I followed Mr. Quince to the room I was scheduled to be in first hour. I wasn’t
anxious to be there at all, and I was half-scared and half-belligerent with no way of
knowing which part would dominate at any given moment. When we arrived, there
was a lot of sudden moving around. When the people unsorted themselves, I saw
there were four kids in the room, two boys and two girls.
  Mr. Quince said, “What’s going on here?”
  Nobody said anything— nobody ever does to a supervisor if they can avoid it.
  He said, “You, Dentremont. What are you up- to?”
   The boy was red-headed and even smaller than I, with very prominent ears. He
looked very young, though he couldn’t have been since he was in the same class as
I.
  He said, “Nothing, sir.”
   After a moment of sharp gazing around, Mr. Quince accepted that and unbent
sufficiently to introduce me. He didn’t introduce anybody else, apparently assuming
I could catch on to the names soon enough on my own. The buzzer for the first hour
sounded then and he said, “All right. Let’s set to work.”
  When he left, the red-headed boy went behind one of the teaching machines and
busied himself in tightening down the back plate.
   The girl nearest me said, “One of these days Mr. Quince is going to catch you,
Jimmy, and then there really will be trouble.”
  “I’m just curious,” Jimmy said.
   Everybody more or less ignored me, probably no more knowing how to take me
than I knew how to take them. They did watch me and I have no doubt they took
their first opportunity to tell everyone their idea of what that new girl from the Fourth
Level was like. It was soon clear to me that they eyed us as suspiciously as we on
the Fourth Level regarded them, with the added note that in our case it was justified
while in theirs it was not. I took no pleasure in having girls look at me and then put
their heads together and whisper and giggle and if I had been a little more sure of
myself I would have challenged them. As it was, I just dug into my work and
pretended I didn’t notice.
   After first hour, three of the kids left. Jimmy Dentremont stayed where he was,
and since my schedule card called for me to stay here second hour, I didn’t move,
either. He looked closer at me than I could like. I didn’t know quite what to say. But
then people had been staring and prying and even prodding from the moment we
arrived in Geo Quad.
   Our furniture had been moved over on Saturday morning— the pieces we wanted
to keep— and Daddy and I came up on Saturday afternoon bringing everything else
that we owned. I had four cartons full of boxes, clothes, and my personal things. I
also had a pennywhistle that I’d salvaged. It was about eight inches long and had
brass ends and finger holes. It turned up when we were going through our things, in
some old box of Daddy’s, and he had put it on his “to throw” pile, from which I
immediately rescued it. Sometimes I don’t understand my father at all.
   The cartons went in my new room, which was larger than my old one. Larger,
plus having more book shelves, which pleased me because I like my books out
where I can use them, not piled away for lack of space.
   I stood looking at the cartons, and not having the courage to attack them
immediately, I began experimenting to see what sounds I could get out of the
pennywhistle. Three minutes— that was the time we had in peace before the door
rang.
    First it was our neighbors. They crowded in and said, Oh, Mr. Havero, it’s such a
thrill to have you here on our corridor, we hope you love it here as much as we do,
and some of us men get together once in awhile, you know, for a little evening, keep
it in mind, and oh, so that’s your daughter, she’s sweet, she’s adorable, Mr. Havero,
I mean that, I really do, and you know Havero, there are some things I’ve been
meaning to talk over with our rep on the Council, but now that you’re here, well, I
might as well say it right to you, go right to the top, so to speak…
   After that came the sightseers and the favor askers. A lot of favor askers. I could
tell them from the neighbors because they tried to butter me up, as well as Daddy.
The neighbors just buttered up Daddy.
   I don’t know why it is, but in a case like this, the very people you’d enjoy meeting
are the ones who have the good taste to stay home and not bother you. I think it may
be an unsolvable problem.
   Within minutes, Daddy retreated to his office and the people took over our living
room while they waited to talk to him. The new apartment had two wings with the
living room in between like the meat in a sandwich. One wing had three bedrooms, a
bath and a kitchen/dining room. The other had a study for Daddy and an office.
Adjoining the office on the far side was another smaller, empty apartment.
Eventually, this was supposed to be a waiting room, but it wasn’t ready yet and so
the people were camping themselves inside our house.
  I watched the people for awhile, and then I pushed my way through the crowd
and went into the bedroom wing. I called up Mary Carpentier from there.
  “Hello, Mia,” she said. “Seeing you on the vid like this, you might still be home.”
  “I am still home,” I said. “I haven’t moved yet.”
  “Oh,” she said, and her face fell. She must have had her heart set on a call from a
distance.
  “I was just fooling,” I said. “I have moved.”
  That brightened her up again and we talked for awhile. I told her about all the
people who were squatting in our living room, and we got giggling like madmen
about all the imaginary errands we made up for them to have come about. We also
swore again that we would be true-blue friends forever and ever.
  When I was done, I went out in the hall just in time to see a heavy-set man coming
out of my bedroom. I knew I’d never seen him before.
  “What are you doing in there?” I asked.
  Before he answered, he stuck his head into the next room for a moment to take a
good look around in there. Then he said, “I’m just poking around, same as you.”
  “I’m not poking around,” I said quietly. “I live here.”
   He realized then that he’d made a mistake. He didn’t say anything. He just turned
red and pushed by me hastily. And that’s the way things had been ever since.
  Now, Jimmy Dentremont, looking closely at my face, asked, “What happened to
your eye?”
  I don’t believe in answering leading questions if I can avoid them, but even
beyond that I had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to my eye.
  “How old are you?” I asked in an even voice.
  “Why?”
  “If you’re as young as I think you are, you have no business asking me anything.
Children should be seen and not heard.”
  “Well, I’m older than you are,” he said. “I was born November 8, 2185.”
  If he was telling the truth, then he was right by three weeks to the day.
  “How do you know how old I am?” I asked.
  “I asked about it when I found you were moving here,” he said quite openly.
  See what I mean? Staring and prying.
  The buzzer in the schoolroom sounded to signal the start of the second hour.
  “Is this First Room?” I asked.
  “I don’t know,” Jimmy Dentremont said. “They don’t tell you that.”
   Well, I knew they didn’t. They don’t want anybody feeling bad about what level
he’s studying at— or feeling too good, either— but since it’s simply a matter of
comparing notes, everybody knows just exactly what level his room is.
   Jimmy Dentremont was simply being contrary. So far we had been feeling each
other out, and I had no idea of how to take him or even whether or not we could get
along. I thought not.
  Mr. Quince called me in again after lunch, raised his eyebrows once more at my
black eye— I had the feeling that he didn’t approve of it— and informed me that he
had a change to make in my schedule.
  “Mr. Mbele,” he said, handing me an address.
  “Excuse me,” I said.
   “Mr. Mbele is your tutor now. Not Mr. Wickersham as I told you this morning. I
assume everything else I told you this morning will apply. Show up at two o’clock
on Wednesday and please remember what I said about being late. I don’t want the
students in my charge being late. A bad reputation always gets back and I’m the one
who has to think up explanations.”
  “Can you tell me why I’m being switched?” I asked.
  Mr. Quince raised his eyebrows. With acerbity, he said, “That doesn’t seem to be
any of my business. I was informed of the change, and I am informing you. You
may believe that it wasn’t my idea. I’m going to have to alter two assignments now,
and I do not deliberately make work for myself. So don’t expect any answers from
me. I don’t have any.”
   It seemed like an odd business to me— switching me from one tutor to another
before we’d even had a chance to inflict scars on one another. Almost frivolous.
   In spite of myself, I was glad to meet Jimmy Dentremont on Wednesday
afternoon. I was having trouble finding Mr. Mbele’s apartment and he helped me
find my way.
   “That’s where I’m going, as a matter of fact,” he said. Standing there in the hall
with a slip with the address in his hand, he seemed almost friendly, perhaps because
there weren’t any other kids around.
  So far, I hadn’t won any friends in Geo Quad, and by being quick-tongued had
made one or two enemies, so I didn’t object to somebody being pleasant.
  “Is Mr. Mbele your tutor, too?”
  “Well, only since yesterday. I called Mr. Wickersham to find out why I was being
switched around, and he’d only just been told about it by Mr. Quince, himself.”
  “You didn’t ask to be switched?”
  “No.”
  “That does seem funny,” I said.
  Mr. Mbele opened his door to our ring. “Hello,” he said, and smiled. “I thought
you two would be showing up about now.”
   He was white-haired and old— certainly well over a hundred— but tall and
straight for his age. His face was dark and lined, with a broad nose and white
eyebrows like dashes.
  Jimmy said, “How do you do, sir.”
  I didn’t say anything because I recognized him.
  No name on the Ship is completely uncommon and I knew as many Mbeles as I
knew Haveros. I just didn’t expect my tutor to be Joseph L. H. Mbele.
   When he sat on the Ship’s Council, he and my father were generally in
disagreement. Daddy led the opposition to his pet plan for miniaturized libraries to
be distributed to all the colonies. The third time it was defeated, Mr. Mbele resigned.
   When I was in the dorm, I once got into a namecalling, hair-yanking fight with
another girl. She said that if Mr. Mbele wanted something to be passed, all he had to
do was introduce a resolution against it, and then sit back. My father would
immediately come out in favor of the proposal and ram it through for him.
   I don’t think this girl knew what the joke meant, and I know I didn’t, but she
intended it to be slighting, and I knew she did, so I started fighting. I didn’t know
Daddy very well in those days, but I was full to the brim with family loyalty.
  Assigning me Mr. Mbele as a tutor seemed like another poor joke, and I
wondered who had thought of it. Not Mr. Quince, certainly— it had cost him extra
work and his time was precious.
 “Come inside,” Mr. Mbele said. Jimmy prodded me and we moved forward. Mr.
Mbele tapped the door button and the door slid shut behind us.
   He motioned us toward the living room and said, “I thought today we’d simply
get acquainted, arrange times that are convenient for all of us to meet, and then have
something to eat. We can save our work for next time.”
  We sat down in the living room, and though there wasn’t much doubt as to who
was who amongst the three of us, at least in my mind, we all introduced ourselves.
  “Yes, I think I’ve met both of your parents, Jimmy,” Mr. Mbele said, “and, of
course, I knew your grandfather. As a matter of interest to me, what do you think
you might like to specialize in eventually?”
  Jimmy looked away. “I’m not positive yet.”
  “Well, what are the possibilities?”
  For a long moment, Jimmy didn’t speak, and then in a row and unconfident
voice, he said, “I think I’d like to be an ordinologist.”
   If you think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by
vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom
are eccentric recluses, then an ordinologist is somebody who comes in every so
often to clean up. He picks up the books around the room and puts them where they
belong. He straightens everything up. He throws away the junk that the recluses have
kept and cherished, but for which they have no use. And then he leaves the room in
condition for outsiders to visit while he’s busy cleaning up next door. He bears
about the same resemblance to the middle-aged woman who checks out books in the
quad library as one of our agriculturists does to a primitive Mudeater farmer, but if
you stretched a point, you might call him a librarian.
  A synthesist, which is what I wanted to be, is a person who comes in and admires
the neatened room, and recognizes how nice a copy of a certain piece of furniture
would look in the next room over and how useful it would be there, and points the
fact out. Without the ordinologists, a synthesist wouldn’t be able to begin work. Of
course, without the synthesists, there wouldn’t be much reason for the ordinologists
to set to work in the first place, because nobody would have any use for what they
do.
   At no time are there very many people who are successful at either one job or the
other. Ordering information and assembling odd scraps of information takes brains,
memory, instinct, and luck. Not many people have all that.
  “How much do you know about ordinology?” Mr. Mbele asked.
  “Well, not very much at first hand,” Jimmy said. And then, with a touch of pride,
“My grandfather was an ordinologist.”
   “He was, indeed. And one of the best. You shouldn’t feel apologetic about trying
to follow him unless you’re a complete failure, and you won’t be that,” Mr. Mbele
said. “I’m not in favor of following ordinary practice simply because it’s done. If
you don’t tell anybody, we’ll see if we can’t arrange to give you a detailed look at
ordinology, and some basis for you to decide whether you want it or not. All right?”
   It was plain that Mr. Mbele was going to be an unorthodox tutor. What he was
proposing was something you don’t ordinarily have the chance to do until you’re
past fourteen and back from Trial.
  Jimmy grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
  Then Mr. Mbele turned to me. “Well, how do you like living in Geo Quad?”
  “I don’t think I’m going to like it,” I said.
  Jimmy Dentremont shot a look at me. I don’t think he’d expected me to say that.
  “What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Mbele.
  I said, “There hasn’t been one moment since we arrived here in this quad that we
haven’t had strangers all over the house. They don’t leave us any privacy at all. It
was never like this back in Alfing Quad, believe me.”
   Mr. Mbele smiled openly. “It isn’t Geo Quad that’s to blame,” he said. “This
always happens when somebody becomes Chairman. The novelty will wear off in a
few weeks and things will be back to normal again. Wait and see.
  After a few more minutes of talk, Mrs. Mbele brought us something to eat. She
was somewhat younger than her husband, though she wasn’t young. She was a large
woman with a round face and light brown hair. She seemed pleasant enough.
   While we ate, we decided that we would meet on Monday and Thursday
afternoons and on Friday night, with the possibility of changes from week to week if
something came up to interfere with that schedule.
  Mr. Mbele wound up our meeting by saying, “I want to make it clear before we
begin that I think your purpose is to learn and mine is to help you learn, or to make
you learn, though I doubt either of you has to be made. I have very little interest in
writing out progress reports on you, or sticking to form charts, or anything else that
interferes with our basic purposes. If there is anything you want to learn and have the
necessary background to handle, I’ll be ready to help you, whether or not it is
something that formally falls among the things I’m supposed to teach you. If you
don’t have the background, I’ll help you get it. In return, I want you to do something
for me. It’s been many years since I was last a tutor, so I expect you to point out to
me when I fail to observe some ritual that Mr. Quince holds essential. Fair enough?”
  In spite of my basic loyalties, and contrary to them, I found myself liking Mr.
Mbele and being very pleased that I had been lucky enough to be assigned to him,
even though I couldn’t admit it publicly.
  When we were in the halls again and on our way back home, Jimmy said
suddenly, “Hold on.”
  We stopped and he faced me.
  “I want you to promise me one thing,” he said. “Promise not to tell anybody
about my grandfather or about me wanting to be an ordinologist.”
  “That’s two things,” I said.
   “Don’t joke!” he said pleadingly. “The other kids would make it hard for me if
they knew I wanted to be an odd thing like that.”
   “I want to be a synthesist,” I said. “I won’t say anything about you if you don’t
say anything about me.”
    We took it as a solemn agreement, and after that anything that was ever said in
Mr. Mbele’s apartment was kept between us and never brought out in public. It was,
if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we
could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or
trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.
   Jimmy said, “You know, I’m glad now that I was switched. I think I’m going to
enjoy studying under Mr. Mbele.”
  Cautiously, I said, “Well, I have to admit he’s different.”
   And that was about all that we ever said to anybody who ever asked us about our
tutor.
   I saw Daddy after he closed his office for the day. That is, he closed our living
room to new people at five o’clock, and by almost eleven he’d seen the last person
who was waiting.
  Excitedly, I said, “Daddy, you know my new tutor is Mr. Joseph Mbele!”
  “Mmm, yes, I know,” Daddy said, matter-of-factly, stacking papers on his desk
and straightening up.
  “You do?” I asked in surprise. I sat down in a chair next to him.
   “Yes. As a matter of fact, he agreed to take you on as a personal favor to me. I
asked him to do it.”
   “But I thought you two were against each other,” I said. As I have said before, I
don’t fully understand my father. I am not a charitable person— when I decide I’m
against somebody, I’m against him. When Daddy’s against somebody, he asks him
to serve as my tutor.
    “Well, we do disagree on some points,” Daddy said. “I happen to think his
attitude toward the colonies is very wrong. But just because a man disagrees with me
doesn’t make him a villain or a fool, and I sincerely doubt that any of his attitudes
will damage you in any way. They didn’t hurt me when I studied Social Philosophy
under him sixty years ago.”
  “Social Philosophy?” I asked.
  “Yes,” Daddy said. “That’s Mr. Mbele’s major interest.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t
have you study under a man who didn’t have something to teach you. I think you
could stand a very healthy dose of Social Philosophy.
  “Oh,” I said.
  Well, there was one thing I could say for Mr. Mbele. He hadn’t done any
eyebrow raising over my black eye. Neither had his wife, for that matter. I did
appreciate that.
  Still, I wished that Daddy had warned me beforehand. Even though I had liked
Mr. Mbele, it would have saved me a few uncharitable thoughts right at the
beginning.


                               Chapter Three
                                                                           «^»
Two weeks after we moved, I came into Daddy’s study to tell him that I had dinner
ready. He was talking on the vid to Mr. Persson, another Council member.
   Mr. Persson’s image sighed and said, “I know, I know. But I don’t like making
an example of anybody. If she wanted another child so badly, why couldn’t she
have become a dorm mother?”
   “It’s a little late to convince her of that with the baby on the way,” Daddy said
dryly.
  “I suppose so. Still, we might abort the baby and give her a warning. Well, we
can hash it all out tomorrow,” Mr. Persson said, and he signed off.
  “Dinner’s ready,” I said. “What was all that about?”
  Daddy said, “Oh, it’s a woman named MacReady. She’s had four children and
none of them have made it through Trial. She wanted one more try and the Ship’s
Eugenist said no. She went ahead anyway.”
  It put a bad taste in my mouth.
  “She must be crazy,” I said. “Only a crazy woman would do a thing like that.
Why don’t you examine her? What are you going to do with her, anyway?”
   “I’m not sure how the Council will vote,” Daddy said, “but I imagine she will be
allowed to pick out a colony planet and be dropped there.”
   There are two points— one is population and the. other is Trial— on which we
cannot compromise at all. The Ship couldn’t survive if we did. Imagine what would
happen if we allowed people to have children every time the notion occurred to
them. There is a limit to the amount of food that we have space to grow. There is a
limit to the amount of room that we have in which people could live. It may seem
that we are not very close to these limits now, but they couldn’t last even fifty years
of unlimited growth. This woman had four children, not one of which turned out well
enough to survive. Four chances is enough.
   What Daddy was suggesting for the woman sounded over-generous to me, and I
said so.
  “It’s not generosity,” Daddy said. “It’s simply that we have to have rules in the
Ship in order to live at all. You play by the rules or you go elsewhere.”
  “I still think you’re being too easy,” I said. It wasn’t a light matter to me at all.
  Somewhat abruptly, Daddy changed the subject. He said, “Hold still there. How’s
your eye today? It’s looking much better, I think. Yes, definitely better.”
   When Daddy doesn’t agree with me and he doesn’t want to argue, he slips out by
teasing.
  I turned my head away. “My eye’s all right,” I said. It was, too, since the bruise
had faded away almost completely.
  At dinner, Daddy asked, “Well, after two weeks, how do you like Geo Quad?
Has it turned out as badly as you thought it would?”
  I shrugged, and turned my attention to my food. “It’s all right, I guess,” I
mumbled.
  That’s all I could say. It just wasn’t possible for me to admit that I was both
unhappy and unpopular, both of which were true. There are two reasons I started off
wrong in Geo Quad, one big one and one small one.
   The small one was school. As I’ve said, the only kids who are supposed to know
how you stand are the others at the same level in each subject, people just like you.
In practice, though, everybody has a pretty good idea of just where everybody else
is and those at the top and bottom are expected to blush accordingly. I’ve never
been able to blush on command, and, as a newcomer, it was all the harder for me
because of it. It’s not good to start by being singled out.
   The big reason, on the other hand, was completely my fault. When we moved, I
knew I wasn’t going to like Geo Quad, and it mattered not at all what anybody there
thought of me. By the time it sank through to me that I was really and truly stuck in
Geo Quad and that I’d better step a little more lightly, my heel marks were already
plain to see on more than one face.
   As it turned out, my position and my conduct interacted to bring me trouble. This
is how things go wrong— and this is just a sample:
   At the beginning of the week, the whole school went down to the Third Level on
an educational jaunt. The afternoon was really more in the nature of a holiday
because we older ones had seen the rows of broad-leaf plants they raise for carbon
dioxide/oxygen exchange more than once before. At the end of the day we were
coming back home to Geo Quad by shuttle and to pass the time some of us girls
were playing a hand game. I was included because I was there and they needed
everybody present to make a good game of it.
    The game goes like this: Everybody has three numbers to remember. At a signal,
everybody claps their hands on their knees, claps their hands, then the person
starting the game calls a number. Knees, hands, then the person whose number was
called calls someone else’s number. Knees, hands, number. Knees, hands, number.
It goes on, the speed of the beat picking up, until somebody claps wrong or misses
when one of her numbers is called. When that happens, everybody gets licks with
stiffened fingers on her wrist.
  The game is simple enough. It’s just that when the pace picks up, it’s easy to
make a mistake. We girls stood in a group in the aisle, one or two lucky ones sitting
down, near the front of the shuttle car.
  We started out— clap, clap, “Twelve,” said the girl starting.
  Clap on knees, clap together, “Seven.”
  Clap, clap, “Seventeen.”
  Clap, clap, “Six.” Six was one of my numbers.
  I clapped hands on knees, hands together, and “Twenty,” I said.
  Clap, clap. “Two.”
  Clap, clap, “— — — .”
  Somebody missed.
   It was a plump eleven-year-old named Zena Andrus. She kept missing and kept
suffering for it. There were seven of us girls playing and she had missed five or six
times. When you’ve had licks taken on your wrist thirty or thirty-five times, you’re
likely to have a pretty sore wrist. Zena had both a sore wrist and the idea that she
was being persecuted.
  “You call me too often,” she said as we lined up to rap. “It’s not fair!”
   She was so whiney about it that we stopped calling her number almost entirely—
just often enough that she didn’t get the idea that she was being excluded. I went
along with this, though I didn’t agree. I may be wrong, but I don’t see any point in
playing a game with anybody who isn’t just as ready to face losing as to face
winning. It’s not a game if there’s no risk.
   A moment later when somebody else lost I noticed that Zena was right up there in
line and happy to have the chance to do a little damage of her own.
    We seven weren’t the whole class, of course. Some were talking, some were
reading, Jimmy Dentremont and another boy were playing chess, some were just
sitting, and three or four boys were chasing each other up and down the aisles. Mr.
Marberry, who was in charge of us for the afternoon said, “Sit down until we get to
Geo Quad,” to them in a resigned voice every time they started to get too loud or to
make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Mr. Marberry is one of those people
who talk and talk and talk, and never follow through, so they weren’t paying too
much attention to him.
  As we reached the last station before Geo Quad, somebody noticed and we
decided to play just one last round. Since we were so close to home, the boys were
out of their seats and starting up the aisle past us to be first out of the shuttle. They
were bouncing around, swatting one another, and when they got up by us and saw
what we were playing they began to try to distract us so that we would make
mistakes and suffer for it. We did our best to ignore them.
   One of the boys, Thorin Luomela, was paying close attention to our numbers so
he could distract the right person when that number was called again. By chance, the
first number he heard repeated was one of mine.
   “Fourteen.”
   Thorin waited until the right moment and smacked me across the behind. He put
plenty of sting into it, too.
    I said, “Fifteen,” and clouted him back. I brought my hand back hard and set him
back on his heels. In those days, I was small and hard and I could hit. For a moment
I thought he might do something about it, but then his resolve wilted.
   “What did you do that for?” he asked. “I was only fooling.”
  I turned back to the game. “Fifteen” happened to be Zena Andrus and she had
missed as usual, so we started to take licks.
    When I stepped up for my turn, Zena glared at me as though I had deliberately
caused her to miss and was personally to blame for her sore wrist. I hadn’t intended
to hit her hard at all because she was so completely hapless, but that look of hers
just made me mad, it was so chock full of malice. I took a tight grip on her arm,
stiffened the first two fingers of my left hand, and whacked her across the reddened
area of her wrist as hard as I could. It hurt my fingers.
   The shuttle was just coming to a stop then, and I turned away from Zena and
said, “Well, here we are,” ignoring her whimper of self-pity as she nursed her wrist.
   We were free to go our own way after the shuttle dropped us at Geo Quad, so I
started for home, but Zena caught up with me before I’d gone very far.
   She said, “Your father’s being Chairman of the Ship’s Council doesn’t make any
difference to me. In spite of what you think, you’re no better than anybody else.”
  I looked at her and said, “I don’t claim that I’m better than everybody else, but I
don’t walk around telling everybody that I’m not, the way you do.”
   I saw immediately that I’d made a mistake. Every so often I meet somebody with
whom I just can’t communicate. Sometimes it is an adult. More often it is somebody
my own age. Sometimes it is somebody who thinks in a different way than I do so
that the words we use don’t mean the same things to both of us. More often it is
somebody like Zena who just doesn’t listen.
   What I’d said seemed obvious to me, but Zena missed the point completely.
There were lots of times when I didn’t think well of myself at all, but even when I
had cause to whisper mea culpas to myself under my breath, I would not concede
that I was inferior to other people. I knew that I was smarter than most people,
smaller than most people, clumsier than most, untalented in art (I inherited that), less
pretty than most, and that I could play the pennywhistle a little bit— at least, I owned
one, and most people didn’t. I was what I was. Why should I crawl, or cry, or be
humble about it? I really didn’t understand.
  Zena either didn’t hear what I said the way I said it or she simply wasn’t able to
understand anything that complicated.
   “That’s what I thought,” she said. “You do think you’re better than everybody
else! I didn’t think you’d admit it. I’ve been saying that’s the way you are. You’re
stuckup.”
   I started to protest, but she’d already turned away, as pleased as though she’d
been handed a cookie. I knew it was my fault, too. Not for what I’d said, but for
losing my temper and being unpleasant in the first place. You can’t stamp on people
and not get hurt in return.
    It didn’t end there, though. Zena spread what she thought I’d said, plus some
interpolations, plus some liberal commentary that demonstrated just how thoroughly
noble she was, and how objective, all over the quad and there were kids willing to
listen and to believe. Why not? They didn’t know me. And I didn’t care. Geo Quad
meant nothing to me.
   By the time that I realized that it did matter, I’d backed myself neatly into a
corner. I had a few enemies— perhaps even more than a few— and a fair number of
neutral acquaintances. I had no friends.
  The major reason that I found it hard to think of leaving the Ship is that the
Mudeaters, the Colons, are so different from us. They are peasants, farmers mostly,
because that sort of person was best equipped to stay alive on a colony planet,
some of which are pretty rough places. On the other hand, we people on the Ship
mostly have technical training.
   We could have joined them, I suppose, when Earth was destroyed— as, in fact, it
was planned that we would— but if we had it would have meant dropping the better
part of 5000 years of advance. You see, you have to have time for science, and
working every minute through the day just to stay alive in order to be able to do the
same thing tomorrow leaves no free time at all. So we never left the Ship, and none
of the other Ships were abandoned, either.
  Now when we need something from one of the colonies, we trade some of the
knowledge we have preserved all these years, or some of the products our science
has worked out, and in exchange we get raw materials— what we have for what they
have. It’s a fair trade.
   The truth is, I guess, I just find it easier to cope with things than with people.
When I came to Alfing Quad, I got to know everybody. I thought I was settled for
good and I set down roots. Or, you might say, I dug in my fingernails and held on
for dear life. But then we came to Geo Quad and I had to face all these new people.
I might not have done it very well, but I could do it because they were Ship people.
People-type people. But they aren’t like us on the planets.
   I really think I could have faced Earth. I think I could understand anybody who
could take an asteroid roughly thirty miles by twenty by ten and turn it into a Ship.
They split it into two halves, carved out forty or fifty percent of the rock in the two
parts, leaving matching projections, and then put them back together again and
restuffed the interior with all the fittings needed to make a Ship. All in one year.
   To me, these people were fantastic and wonderful and it still hurts me to think that
they had to cap it all by blowing themselves to pieces. But that was Earth. Not the
Mudeaters.
  On the second Sunday after we finished moving to Geo Quad, I was reading a
book in my room when Daddy knocked on my door. I put the book aside when he
came in.
  “Did you have any plans for next weekend, Mia?” he asked.
  “No,” I said. “Why?”
  “I had an idea I thought you might like.”
  “Oh?”
   “I’ve just finished talking with the Supply Steward. We’re going to have to make
a barter stop, so we’re laying by Grainau this weekend. The Council has given me
the job of dealing with them. I thought you might enjoy coming along with us.”
   He ought to have known better than that. I shook my head and said, “I don’t
think I want to see the Mudeaters.”
  “Don’t use that word,” Daddy said. “They may be primitive, but they’re still
people. You might be surprised at what you could learn from them. The world
doesn’t end with a quad. It doesn’t end with a Ship, either.”
   My heart pounding, I said, “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m interested,” and
picked up my book again.
   “You might think about this,” Daddy said. “In twenty months you’re going to be
alone on a planet with people like these, doing your best to live with them and stay
alive. If you can’t stand to be near them now, what are you going to do then? I think
you ought to be interested.”
   I shook my head, but then I suddenly couldn’t pretend to be indifferent any
longer. With tears in my eyes, I said, “I am interested. But I’m scared.”
  “Is that all?”
  “What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’”
   Daddy said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I can see how the
thought might frighten you. Most of the colony planets are pretty unpleasant places
by any civilized standard. What I meant was, is that your only reason for not wanting
to come along?”
  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not the planets that scare me. It’s the people.”
    “Oh,” Daddy said. He sighed. “You know, I was afraid of something like this.
One of the reasons I had for moving was that I thought you were too dependent on
Alfing Quad. You were living in too small a world. The trouble is that you don’t
know that there is anything real beyond the things you are familiar with at first hand.
If I could take you down on Grainau and show you something new, and show you
that it isn’t all that bad, I think you’d get over this fear of yours.”
   My stomach lurched with fear. “You’re not going to make me go, are you?” I
asked desperately.
  “No. I won’t make you go. I won’t ever force you to do anything, Mia. I’ll tell
you what, though,” he said, his manner changing abruptly. “If you come along, if
you go down to Grainau with me this weekend, I promise I’ll unfreeze you. How
about that?”
  I had to smile, but I shook my head.
  “Think about it,” Daddy said. “You may change your mind.”
  When he went out, I had the feeling he was disappointed, and suddenly I felt
depressed and even more unhappy. It was as though having my fingers dug in and
holding on as best I could to my security, suddenly I wasn’t to be allowed it
anymore, and Daddy was prying my fingers loose one-by-one. That wouldn’t have
been so bad if he weren’t disappointed that I wouldn’t let go.
   So, not quite knowing why, I went back to Alfing Quad. Perhaps it was because it
was the one place where I knew that they were satisfied with me as I was. I took the
shuttle to the Fourth Level and then the cross-level shuttle to Alfing Quad.
   First I went to our old apartment and let myself in with the key I should have
turned in and hadn’t. There wasn’t a bit of furniture there. No books, no book
shelves. I wandered through the rooms and they all seemed identical. It didn’t seem
like home anymore, because all the things that had made it home were gone. It was
just another empty corner of my life and I left very shortly.
   Mrs. Farmer was standing in the hall when I went out, looking at me and noting,
no doubt, that I had a key that I shouldn’t have had. She and I had never cared too
much for each other. She always had made it a point of honor to tell Daddy when I
did something that she would never have let her Peter do, in some cases things that
Daddy had told me specifically that I could do. Daddy always listened politely to
her, then closed the door behind her and forgot about the whole thing. She just
looked at me; she didn’t say anything.
   I went to the quad yard next, and nobody was there, so I went to the Common
Room. It was odd, but I felt like a stranger here in these familiar halls, as though I
ought to tiptoe and duck around corners to avoid meeting somebody who might
recognize me. I felt like an intruder. That isn’t the feeling that you ought to have
when you go home, but somehow in the process of our moving Alfing Quad had
become an uneasy place for me.
   I could hear the kids making noise in the Common Room before I even got there,
and I hesitated to wind up my courage before I went in. The Common Room was
not just one room, actually. It was a complex of rooms: a lounge, a library, two
game rooms, study rooms, a music practice room, a music listening room, a small
theater, and a snackery. The snackery was where I expected to see my friends.
   It seemed to be my day for meeting Farmers, because Peter Farmer came out as I
was hesitating. He isn’t one of my favorite people and his mother keeps him on a
very short leash, but I saw no reason not to be friendly.
  I said, “Hello.”
  Peter stared frankly at me, and then he said, “What are you doing back here? My
mother said that she was glad you were gone because you’re such a bad example.”
  So I looked straight at him and lied. “How can you say such a thing, Peter
Farmer? I just saw your mother and she was perfectly sweet. She said if I ran into
you I was to tell you it was time to run along home.”
  “Oh, you never met my mother.”
  “Of course I did,” I said, and went into the Common Room.
   There is a firm social line drawn between kids over fourteen and kids under. As
adults and citizens, they have rights that the younger ones don’t have and they are
not slow to let the younger ones know it. In a place like the Common Room where
both come, the older ones have their area, and the younger ones their area. Though
there isn’t any real difference between them, somehow the adult area has a mystique
and attraction that the younger area lacks. I went over to the corner where my friends
gathered.
   Mary Carpentier was sitting at a table with Venie Morlock and two or three of the
other kids, and I headed over to them.
  When she saw me, Mary said, “Well, hi, Mia. Come on and sit down. What are
you doing here?”
    “I just thought I’d visit and see how you were doing,” I said, sitting down at the
table. I wasn’t going to say how unhappy I was in Geo Quad— not with Venie
sitting there listening to every word and ready to shout hallelujah.
  I said, “Hi,” and everybody at the table said, “Hi, Mia,” back.
   Mary said, “Gee, Mia. I didn’t expect you to turn up back here. Why didn’t you
call and tell me you were coming?
  “It was a sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” I said.
   “Well, it’s good to see you. Hey, how do you like it where you are now?”
  “It’s all right, I guess,” I said. “I’m still getting used to things. I haven’t met
everybody or been everywhere yet.”
  “Hey, do you still do that crazy business of walking around in the collecting
chutes over there?” one of the others asked.
   “No,” I said. “I haven’t gotten around to it, but I expect I will.”
   “Which quad did you move to, now?”
   “Geo Quad,” Mary answered for me.
   “That’s on the Fifth Level, isn’t it?” another of the kids asked.
   “Yes,” I said.
    “Oh, yes,” Venie broke in. “I remember. I’ve heard of Geo Quad. That’s where
all the oddballs live.”
   “Oh, you know that isn’t so, Venie,” I said sweetly. “You haven’t moved there
yet. By the way, why don’t you? We’ve got a place on our third-string soccer team
waiting for you.”
   “I may not be very good,” Venie said, stung, “but I can outplay you any day of
the week with both eyes closed.”
   “Mary,” I said, “how has your family been?”
   ‘All right, I guess,“ she said unhappily.
  “At least my parents didn’t dump me in a dormitory to get rid of me while they
were still married,” Venie said.
  Without turning to look at her, I said, “Venie, if you want another punch in the
nose, keep saying those things. Mary, why don’t we go over to your place? Then we
won’t have any interruptions.”
   “Oh, don’t leave on my account,” Venie said. “I’m going myself. The air is
getting a little close in here. You kids coming with me?”
   She pushed back her chair and the other three girls got up and started after her as
she eased her way out between the red, yellow, green, and blue topped tables.
   I said, “Shall we go over to your place, Mary?”
  Unhappily, she said, “Gee, Mia, I can’t. We were just about to go over and play
soccer.”
   “Well, that’s good,” I said and stood up. “Let’s go play.”
   Mary said, “I don’t think Venie would like that.”
   I asked, “What’s the matter with you? Since when did it ever matter what Venie
thinks?”
  Mary stood there looking at me, and finally she said, “Mia, I love you dearly, but
you just don’t live here anymore. I do. Can you understand that? I’ve got to go now.
Will you call me up sometime?”
   “Yes,” I said, and watched her hurry out after Venie Morlock. “I will,” I said
softly, but I knew I wouldn’t. I knew, too, that one more finger had just been pried
loose.


                                Chapter Four
                                                                             «^»
Lacking anything else to do, I left the Common Room and went back to Geo Quad.
I may have seemed outwardly calm— I think I did— but inside I was frantic. Once,
when I was about ten, I had been on an outing on the Third Level and gotten into a
patch of nettles. I didn’t discover what they were until I was well into them, and I
had no choice but to continue pushing my way through. By the time I came out on
the other side my legs and arms were itching furiously and I was dancing up and
down, driven almost into a frenzy by the fiery prickling, wishing for anything that
would make it stop. What I was feeling mentally now was something very similar. I
had an itch I couldn’t stop and couldn’t locate, I was jumpy and unhappy, and very
depressed.
   I wanted to get away. I wanted someplace dark to hide. I wanted something to do
to occupy my mind. When I got back to our apartment— a place that held the
furniture but not the feel of home— I hunted up a piece of chalk and one of those
small lights that dorm mothers use to count heads with, after lights-out. Then I went
out again. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon then, and though I hadn’t eaten
for hours I was far too agitated to think of food.
    I didn’t just pick the nearest grate to our apartment and pop into it. I wandered a
little until I found a quiet bywater of a hall not too far away. I was in no mood at all
to try to explain myself to some uncomprehending adult, so I did some looking
around before I decided on a particular grate to use as my entrance into the Fifth
Level collecting chutes.
   I knelt down by the grate and began to take it off. It was hung by clips on both
sides and they hadn’t been worked for such a long time that they were stiff and
unmoving. Once I started to use them regularly they wouldn’t be any problem, but
right now they refused to yield to my prying fingers. I worked at it in a very
slow-paced way, not feeling up to much more, and it was fully five minutes before
my judicious wiggling of the left-hand clip unfroze it. I was about to start on the
other when a voice asked, “What are you doing?”
  I had my face in my hand at the moment, and I jumped guiltily at the sudden
sound. I composed myself as best I could before I looked around. It was Zena
Andrus standing there.
  I said, “What are you doing?”
  She said, “I live back there,” pointing to a door not so far down the way. “What
are you doing?”
  I pointed through the grate at the collecting chute. “I’m going down in there.”
  “You mean down in the ducts?”
  “Yes,” I said. “Why not? Does the idea scare you?”
  She bristled. “I’m not scared. I can do anything you can.
  With deliberate malice, I said, “In that case, come on along with me.”
   She swallowed a little bit hard, then knelt down beside me and looked through the
grate, feeling the indraft and becoming conscious of the distant sound of fans. “It’s
awfully dark down there.”
   “I have a light,” I said. “We won’t need it much, though. It’s more fun running
along in the dark.”
  “Running?”
  “Well, walking.”
  Uncertainly, she looked back at the grate again. They say that misery loves
company, and I was bound to make someone else miserable.
  “Oh, well,” I said. “If you’re afraid to come along…
  Zena stood up. “I am not.”
  “All right,” I said. “If you’re coming, stand aside and let me get the grate off.”
  In a minute I had the other clip pulled to the side. I set the grate on the floor and
pointed to the black hole. “After you.”
  “You’re not going to shut me up in there?”
  “No,” I said. “No, I’ll be right behind you. Go through feet first.”
    Since she was a butterball, it was a tight fit for her, but after she did some earnest
wriggling, she popped through. I handed the chalk and the light down to her and then
I slid through myself. When I was standing on the floor of the duct, I took the chalk
and light back.
   “Put the grate on,” I said, and while she was doing that I made an X-mark and put
a neat circle around it, the chalk squeaking lightly on the metal.
   “That’s the mark for home,” I said. The ducts corresponding to arteries have
pushing fans, the ducts corresponding to veins have sucking fans. Between the chalk
marks I make and the direction and feel of the wind, I always have a good enough
idea where I am, even in a strange place like this one, to at least find my way home
again. There was certainly more similarity here to the ducts at home than there was in
the layouts of Alfing and Geo Quads proper. I didn’t think it would take me long to
get my bearings.
  When Zena had the grate in place, we set off.
  I walked first down the metal corridor. Zena followed uncertainly behind me,
tripping once and skidding, though there was nothing there to trip on except her feet.
The duct itself, fully six feet wide and six feet high, was made of smooth metal. The
darkness was complete except for the occasional grille of light cast into the dust at a
grate opening, and the beam cast by my little light. As we passed them, I numbered
the grates and the cross-corridors to give me a ready idea of how far from home I
was.
  As we passed the grates, occasionally noises penetrated from the outside world,
but it was clearly another world than the one that we were in. The sounds of our
world were the metallic echoes of our whispers, the sound of our sandals padding
dully, and the constant sound of the fans.
   I had read more than one novel set in the American West two hundred years
before Earth was destroyed, where conditions were almost as primitive as on one of
the colony planets. I remembered reading of the scouts who even in strange territory
had the feel of the country, and I felt much the same way myself. The feel of the air,
the sounds, all meant something to me. To Zena they meant nothing and she was
scared. She didn’t like the dark at all.
   At those points where the corridors joined there were sometimes fans to be
ducked. The corridors also sloped at the junctions so that there were no straight
corners, and this was disconcerting when the corridor you were meeting ran
up-and-down, even when it was the equivalent of a capillary and could be gotten
over with one good jump.
   Zena balked at the first of these that we encountered and had to be prodded
before she would cross it.
   “I don’t want to,” she said. “I can’t jump that far.”
   “All right,” I said. “But if you don’t come along, you’ll just be left here all alone
in the dark.”
   That made her mind up for her and she found that she could jump it, and with
very little effort, either.
   But I’ll have to admit that old-collecting-chute-hand or not, I wasn’t prepared for
what we found next. In the darkness, there was no floor in front of us. Above us, no
ceiling. My light showed our own corridor resuming on the far side of the gap, fully
six feet away. The floor sloped sharply down and the air rushed strongly along. I
had never encountered an up-and-down duct of this size before.
   “Well, what is it?” Zena asked.
  There were handholds at the side on which to cross the gap, and holding onto
one of these, I leaned over and dropped a piece of broken chalk in a futile attempt to
gauge the depth of the cross-duct. I listened, but I never heard a sound.
   “It must connect one level with the next,” I said. “A main line. I bet it goes
straight down to the First Level.”
   “Well, don’t you know?”
  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I’ve never been here before.”
   I wasn’t about to jump that distance, so I examined the hand- and footholds
carefully. If you slipped and fell, and it was as far down as I suspected, all that
would be left of you would be jam. I shone my light up and down, and the beam
only managed to nibble at the blackness. The holds went up-and-down, too, as well
as across, a ladder that went much farther than I could see.
  “Maybe it connects with the Fourth Level down there,” Zena said, “but where
does it go to up there?” She pointed straight up the duct.
  I didn’t know. The Fifth Level was the very last, the outside, but this duct went
beyond the Fifth. Air chutes don’t lead into blind corners and air doesn’t come from
nowhere.
  “I don’t know,” I said. “But as long as we’re here, why don’t we see where it
goes?”
   I reached over and put my toe in the inset in the wall. Then I grabbed the first
handhold I could reach and swung out. They were good firm holds and while the
distance straight down bothered me a little, as long as I couldn’t see how far down it
was I wasn’t really scared. I once had the experience of walking along a board three
inches wide while it was set on the ground— I went the whole length and probably
could have walked on for a mile and never fallen off. Then the board was raised into
the air and I was challenged to try again. When it was set on posts ten feet high, I
wouldn’t even try it because I knew I couldn’t make it. This was something of a
similar situation, and as long as I couldn’t see I knew I wouldn’t worry.
  I grabbed the next hold and started up. Before I could get anywhere, Zena leaned
over and held me by the foot. “Hey, wait up,” she said, and gave my foot a tug.
  “Watch it!” I said sharply. “You’ll make me fall.” I tried to jerk my foot loose,
but she wouldn’t let go.
  “Come on back down,” Zena pleaded.
  Reluctantly I came down. I said, “What is it?”
  “You can’t go and just leave me.”
  “I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Just follow me and you can’t be left behind.”
  “But I’m scared,” she said.
   That was really the time for her to finally admit it. We had both known that from
the beginning, but she had refused to admit it until things were getting interesting.
   “It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. “All we have to do is climb until we find out
what’s up there.” I could see she was wavering, caught between the fear of climbing
the ladder and the fear of being left behind. “Come on,” I said. “You first.” I wanted
her to go first. That way she couldn’t grab me again.
   After a moment, I edged her down the beginning of the slope to the first
handhold. I got her onto the ladder and actually moving again. I followed her. I had
the light clipped at my waist, pointing upward and giving both of us some idea of
what and where to grab as we continued to climb.
  I could hear Zena whimpering as she climbed, making scared noises in her throat.
To get her mind off her troubles, I said, “Can you see anything up there?”
   She was clinging tightly to the ladder as we went up, and now she stopped,
flipped her head up for just the shortest instant and then brought it down again.
  “No,” she said. “Nothing.”
   I should have known better, I told myself as we continued to climb. You don’t
bring somebody who has a habit of choking up into a situation like this.
   Suddenly, without any warning, Zena stopped moving. Before I could help
myself, my head rammed so hard into her foot that a shock of pain ran through my
neck. If I’d had my head up, I would have seen that she’d stopped, but you can’t
climb indefinitely with your head thrown back without getting a crick in your neck. I
stopped immediately and went down one step.
  “What’s the matter?” I asked.
  “I just can’t go any farther. I can’t.”
  I lifted my head and peered upward. I couldn’t see anything beyond Zena that
would hold her up. She was just clinging to the ladder, her face pressed close to the
metal. I could hear her breath rasp in her throat.
  “Did you run into something?”
  “No. I just can’t go any farther,” she said tearfully. “I’m scared.”
  I reached up and put my hand on her leg. It was rock-hard and trembling. I said,
“Move ahead, Zena,” in a firm but gentle tone— I didn’t want to frighten her— and
pushed at the calf of her leg, but she didn’t move.
   I could see that it had been a mistake to be in the lower position on the ladder. If
Zena let go and fell, I would be swept along no matter how hard I tried to hold on.
That would save me trying to explain what had happened— and it might be difficult
to explain if I came back by myself without Zena: “Oh, she fell down one of the air
chutes”— but that wasn’t anything to be happy about. I was genuinely frightened.
My heart was beginning to speed up and I could feel a trickle of sweat running down
my back.
  “Don’t let go, Zena,” I said carefully.
  “I won’t,” she said. “I won’t move.”
    I unclipped the light at my belt and then I leaned back as far as I could until I
could see beyond her. It would take twenty minutes to go down the ladder— in her
state, probably longer— and even if I could start her moving, I doubted she could
hold on that long. I held the light up at arm’s length over my head. About forty or
fifty feet above us I could see something black at the side of the duct. A
cross-corridor, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was hope that it was.
  “I want to go down,” Zena said.
  We couldn’t go down. We certainly couldn’t stay where we were. I didn’t know
what was ahead of us, but it was the only direction in which we could go.
  “You’re going to have to climb a little more,” I said.
  “But I’m scared,” Zena said. “I’m going to fall.”
  I could feel sweat on my forehead now. A runnelet ran down and caught in my
eyebrow. I wiped my brow.
   “No, you’re not going to fall,” I said confidently. “I just looked up above, Zena,
and there’s a cross-corridor just thirty feet or so over your head. That’s all you have
to climb. You can do that.”
  Zena just screwed her face in against the metal even harder. “I can’t.”
   “Yes, you can. I’ll help you. Keep your eyes closed. That’s right. Now, move
your foot up one step. Just one step.” I pushed at her leg. “That’s right. One step.
All right, now reach your hand up— no, keep your eyes closed. Now move your
other foot.”
  One foot, one hand at a time, I got her moving again. For the first time since I
could remember, the darkness seemed oppressive, a place where anything could
happen. It was the way it must have seemed to Zena all along.
   In a minute, I said, “It’s not more than twenty feet or so now,” but Zena was
blocking my view and I couldn’t do anything but hope I was right. “You’re doing
fine. It’s only a little bit farther.”
   I continued to urge her on, and she went up slowly, a rung at a time. It was more
than twenty feet, but not too much more than that, when Zena gave a little cry and
was suddenly no longer above me. I looked up, and in the beam of the light clipped
at my waist I could see the cross-corridor just over my head.
   All I could do, sitting on its floor, was try to catch my breath and calm my heart.
My heart was thumping away, sweat was continuing to drip from my forehead, and
now that I was safe my mind was thinking of all that could have happened in full
detail. Beside me, Zena was sobbing soundlessly.
  After a minute, in a voice filled with wonder, Zena said, “I did make it.”
   I breathed through my open mouth, trying not to pant. Then I said, “I told you
that you would, didn’t I? Now all we have to do is get you back down again.”
   Zena said, in a determined tone that surprised me, “I can make it back down
again.”
  I said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we may as well have a look around.”
   In a minute or two, we walked down the corridor until we came to the first grate
opening. The opening was there, but not the grate, and there was no light shining into
the duct from outside as there would have been in Geo Quad or Alfing. I snaked
through the hole and then gave a hand up to Zena. And we were standing in a hall on
the Sixth Level, the level that shouldn’t have been there.
   I shone my light around and all was silent, and dark, and deserted. The corridor
was bare. All the fixtures were gone. Anything that could be removed was gone, only
the holes remaining after. There was a doorway showing in the beam of my light.
  “Let’s go look at that,” I said.
   There was no door— that was gone, too. Nothing had been yanked ruthlessly or
broken off. Everything had simply been removed.
   The room into which the doorway led was bare, too. It was a very long room,
longer than anything else I had seen in any quad, short of a quad yard. Its closest
resemblance was to a dormitory, but it was as though somebody had taken all the
rooms in a dormitory and torn out all the walls in order to make one long room.
There were holes bored in the walls at regular intervals, columns of holes. But the
room was bare.
  “What is it?” Zena asked.
  “I’m not sure,” I said.
   We went back into the hall. It was long and straight, without any of the dead ends,
stairs, or sudden turns that you ordinarily expect to see in any normal hallway. It was
straight as a string. That was strange and different, too.
  I noticed the numbers 44-2 painted neatly on the wall by the door of the room.
There was a red line that started at the doorway, moved to the center of the hall and
made a sharp right turn to run beside green, yellow, blue, orange and purple lines that
continued past, running down the center of the hall.
  “Let’s see where the lines go,” I said, and set off down the corridor.
  It was late, past dinner time, when we got back to Geo Quad. We came out of the
ducts from our original opening just down the hall from Zena’s home. My stomach
was starting to notice how long it had been since I had eaten and I had a healthy
appetite.
   Zena hesitated for a minute outside her door, and then she said, “You’re much
nicer than I thought you were at first.” And then, rapidly, as though to cover that
statement up, she said, “Good night,” and went quickly into her apartment.
   When I walked in, Daddy was just getting ready to go out for the evening. He and
some of his friends used to get together regularly and build scale models and talk.
Models of machines, animals (bones and all), almost anything imaginable. This
group had met on Sunday nights for as long as I had lived with Daddy, and he had a
whole collection of the models he had made, though they hadn’t yet been unpacked
since we had moved here from Alfing.
  Actually, I had no fault to pick with his models. Daddy used to say that
everybody needs to have at least one mindless hobby to occupy himself with, and I
had several.
  Daddy asked, “Where have you been?”
  “Up on the Sixth Level,” I said. “What do we have on hand to eat?”
  “There’s some Ham-IV in the kitchen, if you want that,” Daddy said.
  “That sounds good,” I said.
   I liked Ham-IV very much. It comes from one of the two or three best meat vats
in the Ship, though some people find it too strong for their taste. Gamey, I think they
say. Still they have to put up with it, because it’s one of the best producing meat
cultures on the Ship. It doesn’t hurt to like the inevitable.
  I started for the kitchen and Daddy followed.
    “Isn’t the Sixth Level completely shut up?” he asked. “I didn’t know you could
still get up there.”
  “It’s not that hard,” I said, and started getting food out. “Just why did they tear
everything out the way they did?”
  “Nobody has ever told you why they closed it down?”
  I said, “Before today, I didn’t even know that there was a Sixth Level.”
   “Oh,” Daddy said. “Well, it’s simple enough. At the time they converted the Ship
it was pretty Spartan living here. We had more space than we needed with all the
colonists gone, but not enough of everything else. They stripped the Third and Sixth
Levels and used the materials to fix up the rest of the Ship more comfortably. They
changed the Third to as near an approximation of Earth as they could, and closed
the Sixth down as unnecessary.”
  “Oh,” I said. That seemed to make sense out of the tomb that we had seen.
   Daddy said, “I guess I’d forgotten how barren the Sixth Level is. If you want to
find out more about it, I can tell you where to look it up. Right now, though, I have
to be on my way or I’ll be late.”
  Before he got out of the kitchen, I said, “Daddy?”
  He turned around.
   I said, “I changed my mind today. I think I’d like to go with you next weekend
after all.”
   Daddy smiled. “I was hoping you’d change your mind if I gave you a little time.
You make your share of mistakes, but most of the time you show good sense. I
think you did this time.”
   Daddy is nice, so he wouldn’t say, “I told you so,” but I was certain that he
thought that it was seeing the Sixth Level and not getting stricken dead for it that had
changed my mind. It wasn’t, though. I think I changed my mind on the ladder—
there are times when you have to go forward whether you like it or not, and if Zena
Andrus could do it, as scared as she was, so could I. That’s all.
   I smiled and said, “Do I get unfrozen?” I was at least half-serious. For some
reason, getting Daddy to say so was important to me.
  Daddy nodded. “I guess you do. I guess you do.”
  I was still smiling as I sat down to eat. It was just about time I started to do a little
growing. It was then that the thought struck me that if I did start to grow, in not very
long at all I wouldn’t be able to squeeze my way into the ducts.
  Well, you can’t have everything.


                                Chapter Five
                                                                            «^»
While I think of it, I want to excuse myself in advance. From time to time, I’m going
to say terribly ignorant things. For instance, when I come to speak of boats shortly,
anybody who has ever sailed will probably find reason to laugh and shake his head
at my description. Please forgive me. I’m not writing technical descriptions, I’m
simply trying to tell what I saw and did. When I felt the need to grab onto something,
I didn’t grab onto a “gunwale,” I grabbed onto the plain old side of the boat. That’s
what it was to me.
   In any case, through the week before we went to Grainau, my spirits slid down
again. Having decided to go on Sunday, if I had left on Monday I wouldn’t have felt
bad at all, but unfortunately I had a whole week to mull things over, worry and
imagine. Friday night,, the night before we were to leave, I lay awake for hours,
unable to sleep. I tried to sleep on my stomach, but bleak possibilities came into my
head, one after another. Then onto my side, and imaginary conversations. Onto my
back, and thoughts of all the things I might be doing tomorrow instead, if only I
could. Finally I did go to sleep, but I didn’t sleep well.
   At breakfast, Daddy advised me to eat up, but I couldn’t. My stomach was
nervous. After breakfast, we got on the shuttle and traveled down to the First Level,
and then over to the bay in which the scoutships sit waiting to take damned fools
places they’d rather not go.
   We arrived in the scout bay fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave for
Grainau. Daddy said, “Wait here, Mia. I’ll be right back.” He went over to a cluster
of men standing by the nearest scoutship.
   I stood there in a great entranceway carved in the rock, feeling just a little
abandoned. Daddy had brought me here, and now he was just going off and leaving
me. I was nervous and scared. If I could legitimately have gone back home and
crawled in bed, I would have— and not gotten up again for two days, either. If I
could have done it without losing face. Unfortunately, it was now harder to back out
than to go on, so I was going on, carried by the momentum of my Sunday night
decision.
   It was the first time I’d ever been in the scout bay. Hesitantly, I looked around.
The rock roof arched over the long single line of ships, all squatting over their tubes,
waiting for the catch bars that ringed their rims to be released so they could drop out
of sight. Scoutships are used for any errands planetside where the Ship can’t go
itself because of its size. These include delivering and picking up traded items,
tooting off on joyrides, carrying diplomatic missions like ours, and dropping kids on
Trial. The scoutships are pigeons that nest in a cote that hoves between the stars,
and some are out and away at almost any time. To keep my mind off my unhappy
stomach, which was growling sourly, I counted the ships that were home, and there
were a dozen. The ships are disc-shaped, with bulges top and bottom in the center.
Each of them had at least one of its four ramps lowered.
   In a moment, Daddy came back with one of the men he’d been speaking with— a
young giant. He was at least a foot taller than Daddy. He was very ugly, unpleasant
looking and formidable. I don’t think I’d have cared to meet him at any time.
  “This is George Fuhonin,” Daddy said. “He’s going to be our pilot.”
  I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. Daddy prodded me. “Hello,” I said in a
small, distant voice.
  “Hello,” he said, in a voice I’d have to call a bass growl. It was deep and it
rumbled. “Your father tells me that this is going to be your first trip outside the
Ship.”
   I looked at Daddy out of the corner of my eye, and then I looked up at the big,
ugly man. I nodded warily, the least little dip. He scared me.
  “Would you like to take a look around the scout before we take off?” he asked.
“As your pilot and your father’s regular chauffeur, I guarantee I’ll leave out nothing.”
   I wanted to say a definite no, and was just about to when Daddy pushed me
forward and said, “Go ahead and enjoy yourself, Mia.” He motioned toward the
other men. “I’ve got some things to settle before we leave.”
   So this man, this monster, George Whatever-His-Name-Was, and I walked up the
scoutship ramp, me feeling totally betrayed. I sometimes think that parents enjoy
putting their children in uncomfortable situations, maybe as a way of getting back
without admitting it. I don’t say that is what Daddy was doing, but I certainly
thought so at the time.
   The top of my head came to about the bottom of this George’s ribcage, and he
was so big that one of his steps was worth two and a half of mine, so that even when
he was walking slowly that half-step kept me either ahead or behind him. If I’d been
feeling better, it would have seemed like playing tag around a dinosaur. As it was, I’d
just have enjoyed a hole to hide in. Black, deep, and secret.
   The main part of the scoutship was at the level we entered. In the center,
surrounded by a circular separating partition about four feet high, were lounge beds
with sides that stuck up a foot or more like a baby’s bed, comfortable chairs,
magnetized straight chairs that could be moved, and two tables. In the exact center
was a spiral stairway that led both up and down. Around the edge of the ship were
storerooms, racks, a kitchen, a toilet, and a number of horse stalls with
straw-covered floors. Two horses were being led into place as we came up the ramp
and into the ship.
  The monster said, “Those are for your father and his assistant after we land.”
  I didn’t say anything. I just looked stonily around.
   When the colonies were settled, they took horses to work and ride, because
tractors and heli-pacs have such a low reproductive rate. There weren’t any
opportunities to set up industries on the colonies, simply time enough to drop
people and enough supplies to give them a fair chance to survive. Then the Ships
would head back to Earth for another load and another destination. Those supplies
included very little in the way of machines because machines wear out in a few years.
They did include horses. Nowadays when we land on a planet where they haven’t
made any progress in the last 170 years, we ride horseback, too.
 At that time, of course, I hadn’t learned to ride yet and I was a little shy of horses.
When one was led past me and wrinkled its lips and snorted, I jumped back.
   I noticed the toilet then. We were only a few feet away from it. I looked up at the
giant and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
  Before he could say anything, I was inside with the door locked. Escaped, for the
moment. I didn’t have to go to the bathroom at all. I just wanted to be left alone.
    I looked around at the bare-walled room. I ran the water and washed my hands.
Altogether, I managed to stay inside for a full five minutes before being alone in the
little empty room with my nervousness got to be too much for me. I kept imagining
that Daddy was on board by now, and I even thought I could almost hear his voice.
Finally I was driven outside to see.
  When I opened the door, the giant was standing exactly where I had left him,
obviously waiting for me. There were people moving things on board, the horses
were locked in their stalls and moving around, and Daddy was still outside
somewhere.
  Exactly as though I’d never been gone, the giant said, “Come on upstairs,” in his
deep voice. “I’ll show you my buttons. I keep a collection of them there.”
    Resignedly, I preceded him up the flight of metal stairs that led upstairs, winding
around a vertical handpole like threads winding around a screw. It was obvious that
he was determined to keep me in his charge, and I wasn’t feeling up to arguing, even
if I’d dared to. At the top we came out in a bubble-dome in which were two seats
hung on swivel pivots, a slanting panel directly in front of them with inset vision
screens, dials and meters— the slant of the panel low enough so as not to obscure
vision out the dome— and beside these, perhaps enough room to turn around twice.
   The giant waved a paw at the console at the base of the panel. “My button
collection,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll bet you didn’t think I had any.”
    They were there. Enough buttons to keep a two-year-old or a pilot occupied for
hours. It was obvious that in his way this George was trying to be friendly, but I
wasn’t in the mood to be friendly with any large, ugly stranger. After one brief glance
at the panel and console I turned away to look outside.
   Through the dome I could see the rock roof glowing gently all above us. The ring
of the scoutship’s body cut off the view directly beneath us and I couldn’t see
Daddy or the men with him at all. It’s no fun to be deserted. It’s a miserable feeling.
   This George said, “Your father will be a little while yet.” Feeling caught, I stopped
looking for him and turned back around.
   “Sit down,” the giant said, and somewhat warily I did. The chair bobbed on its
pivot as I sat down. I kept my eyes on George.
  He leaned carelessly against his panel and after a moment he said, “Since you
don’t seem to want to talk and we have to be here together for awhile yet, let me tell
you a story. It was told to me by my mother the night before I went on Trial.”
   And with that, he launched full into it, ignoring the fact that I was too old for such
things:
   Once upon a time (he said) there was a king who had two sons, and they twins,
the first ever born in the country. One was named Enegan and the other Britoval, and
though one was older than the other, I don’t remember which it was, and I doubt
anyone else does, either. The two boys were so alike that not even-their dear
mother’s heart could tell one from the other, and before their first month was out
they were so thoroughly mixed that no one could be sure which to call Britoval and
which Enegan. Finally, they gave the whole thing up as a bad lot, used their heads
and hung tags on the boys and called them Ned and Sam.
   They grew up tall and strong and as like each other as two warts on the same
toad. If one was an inch taller or a pound heavier at the beginning of the month, by
the end of it they were all even again. It was all even between them in wrestling,
running, swimming, riding, and spitting. By the time they were grown-up young men,
there was only one way to mark them apart. It was universally agreed that Sam was
bright and Ned was charming, and the people of the country even called them Bright
Sam and Charming Ned.
   “Hark,” they would say as a horse went by on the road. “There goes Prince
Charming Ned.” Or, alternatively, “Hey, mark old Bright Sam thinking under yon
spreading oak.”
   The boys did earn their names, and honestly. Ask Sam to do a sum, parse a
sentence, or figure a puzzle and he could do it in a trice, whereas Ned just wasn’t
handy at that sort of thing. On the other hand, if you like charm and heart, courtesy
and good humor, Ned was a really swell fellow, a delight to his dear mother, and a
merry ray of sunshine to his subjects, while Sam at his best was a trifle sour.
   Then one day the Old King, their father, died and the question arose as to which
son should inherit, for the kingdom was small and the treasury was empty, and there
simply was not enough for both.
   The Great Council of the Kingdom met to consider the problem. They met and
considered, considered and voted, voted and tied. At first they said it was obvious
that the elder son should inherit, but they found that no one at all could say which
was the elder. Then an exasperated soul proposed that the younger should inherit,
and all agreed that was a fine way out until they discovered that it was equally
problematic which was the younger. It was at this point that they decided to vote to
settle the question— but the vote turned out a tie, for half said, “A king should be
bright so as to be able to rule intelligently and deal wisely with the friends and the
enemies of the kingdom. Nobody really has to like him,” and the other half said, “A
king should be beloved by his subjects and well thought of by his neighbors and
peers. The Council can always provide the brains needed to run things if brains are
ever required.”
   At last, finally, and in the end, it was decided by all that there was only one way to
settle the matter. Charming Ned and Bright Sam must undertake a Quest and
whichever of them was successful would become King of the Realm, and take his
fine old father’s place. If neither was successful, they could always bring in a poor
second cousin who was waiting in the wings, hat in hand. Kingdoms always have
second cousins around to fill in when they’re needed.
   The Quest decided upon was this: it seems that many miles away— or so the
story had come to them in the kingdom— there was a small cavern in which lived a
moderate-sized ogre with a fine large treasure, big enough to handle the kingdom’s
budget problem for some years to come. It was agreed that whichever of the two
boys could bring the treasure home where it belonged would have proved to the
satisfaction of everybody his overwhelming right to be king.
   At this point the story was interrupted. One of the three crewmen stuck his head
up through the stairwell and said, “We’re all tight, George. Miles says we can leave
any time now.”
  George said to me, “Strap yourself in there,” and pushed the button that locked
himself into his own seat. Humming slightly to himself, he rapped a switch with the
back of his hand and rumbled, “Ten seconds to drop. Mind your stomachs.”
   In ten seconds, the rim bars pulled back and we dropped slowly into our tube and
then out of the Ship. I was leaving home for the first time. Geo Quad, even at its
worst, was still “Us” rather than “Them.” As we dropped into the tube, the dome
went opaque around us and lights came on. There was none of the stomach
upsetting moment of transition as we shifted from the artificial gravity of the Ship to
the artificial gravity of the scoutship of which George had just warned us, though
there might have been. Which meant that whatever else he might be, this George
creature was a relatively effective pilot.
   I still didn’t know how to take him. I have that problem when I first meet
people— I have to get used to them slowly. For the moment, too young for me or
not, I was content to have him go on with his story, because it gave me something to
think about instead of Grainau and whatever I would find there.
  He punched buttons for a minute, and then said, “Well, that ought to hold us for
awhile. Now where was I?”
  “The ogre and the treasure.”
  “Oh, yes,” he said, and continued with his story:
   Well, the two young men set off the very next morning, when the sun was up and
the air was warm. Sam, intelligent as always, had loaded food and supplies into a
knapsack and put it on his back, and buckled a great sword about his waist. Ned
took nothing— too heavy, you know— but simply put his red cap on his head and
walked on down the road, whistling. Everybody in the kingdom came down to the
road to wave and see them off. They waved until the boys were around the first
bend in the road, and then, like sensible folk, they all went home to breakfast.
   Sam was loaded so heavily that he couldn’t walk as fast as his dear brother, and
Ned was soon out of sight ahead of him, without even the sound of his whistle to
mark him. This didn’t seriously bother Bright Sam, because he was sure that
preparation and foresight would in the end more than make up for Ned’s initial brisk
pace. When he got hungry, not having any food would slow him down.
  But Sam walked a long time, day and night, and never saw his brother. Then he
came on the skinniest man he’d ever seen, sitting by a great pile of animal bones.
   “Hello,” Sam said. “I’m looking for an ogre who lives in a cave and owns a
treasure. Do you know where I can find him?”
   At the question, the man began to cry. Sam asked him what the trouble was, since
sour or not, he hated to see people cry. The man said, “A young fellow stopped a
day or two ago and asked me the same question exactly. And he brought nothing but
trouble on me. I had a flock of sheep, and fine ones, too, and I was roasting one for
my dinner when he stopped, and he was such a nice, pleasant fellow that I asked him
to eat with me. He was still hungry after the first sheep, so I killed another, and then
another, and then another. He was so friendly and charming, and so grateful, that I
never noticed until he had gone that he had eaten every last one of my animals. Now
I have nothing at all. And I’m starting to get hungry myself.”
   Sam said, “If you will tell me where the ogre lives I will give you some of the food
that I have with me.”
   The man said, “Give me some of your food and I will tell you just what I told that
other young fellow.”
  So Sam gave him food and when the hungry man was done eating, he said, “The
answer is that I don’t know. I don’t have any truck with ogres. I just mind my own
business.”
   Sam went on down the road with his pack a little lighter than before. He walked a
long time, day and night, and never saw his brother. Then he came on a little castle in
which lived a princess well, perhaps not a princess as most people reckon it, but
since she lived there alone there wasn’t a single person to say she wasn’t. That is
how royal families are founded.
   This little castle was being besieged by a very rude and unpleasant giant. As a
passing courtesy, Sam drew his sword and slew the giant, lopping off his great hairy
head. The princess, and pretty indeed she was, came out of her castle and thanked
him.
   “It was very nice of you,” said she, “but ‘I’m afraid that the giant here,” and she
nudged his head with the toe of her dainty slipper, “has seven brothers and the
whole lot take turns besieging my castle. This will no doubt make them a bit angry. I
used to have a charm that kept my land protected from all such creatures, but alas
no longer. A young man with a red cap came whistling down the road last week
looking for an ogre and he was so sweet and charming that I gave him the charm to
protect himself with and keep him from harm, and ever since these horrid giants have
been attacking my castle.”
   “Well, why don’t you move?” said Sam. “There aren’t any giants where I live,
though we do have a dragon or two, and we have some very nice castles looking to
be bought.”
  The princess said that sounded like a very nice idea,. and she just might take his
advice.
  “By the way,” said Sam, “do you know, by chance, where I can find the ogre you
were speaking of just a minute ago?”
  “Oh, certainly,” she said. “It’s not far at all. Just follow your nose for three days
and nights and you’ll be there.”
   Sam thanked her, slew a second giant come to look for his brother, and went on
his way. He followed his nose, and after three days and nights it told him that he had
found the ogre’s cave. He knocked politely and the ogre came out. The cave was a
bit small for him. He was covered with hair, and he had three red eyes and two great
yellow fangs. Other than his appearance, he seemed friendly enough.
   Sam drew his sword and said, “Excuse me, but I’ve come for your treasure.”
   “Well, if you can tell me a riddle I can’t guess,” said the ogre, “I’ll give all I have
to you. But if I do answer it, I want your money and all that you have.”
  Sam agreed. It is common knowledge that ogres are not bright as a rule, and Sam
knew some very hard riddles indeed.
   He thought, he did, and finally he said, “What is it that is not, and never will be?”
   The ogre turned the question over in his mind. Then he sat down to really think
about it. For three whole days and three whole nights they sat there, and nobody
thought it odd of them because nobody lived nearby. The ogre tried a dozen
answers one by one, but each time Sam said, “I’m sorry, but that’s not it.”
  Finally, the ogre said, “I can’t think of any more answers. You win. But don’t tell
me the answer. Write it on a piece of paper. I can think about it after you’re gone.”
   So Sam wrote his answer down on a piece of paper and gave it to the ogre. Then
he said, “And now, could I trouble you for your treasure?”
   The ogre said, “You won all that I have fair and square. Just a minute.” He went
inside the cave and in just a moment he was back with a single brass farthing. “I’m
sorry, but that’s all there is. There used to be more, but I gave it all to a nice young
man who was here just a week ago. I had to start all over again after he left, and now
that you’ve beaten me, I’ll have to start even another time.”
   Because he knew his brother well, Sam asked disbelievingly, “This young fellow
didn’t ask you any riddles you couldn’t answer, did he?”
   The ogre drew himself up and said in a wounded tone, “Of course not. But he
was such a nice young fellow that I couldn’t bear to let him go away emptyhanded.”
   Well, that left Sam with something of a problem. He’d beaten the ogre and won
his treasure, but nobody was likely to take a single brass farthing as proof of that. So
he thought for a minute, and then he said, “And how do you find your cave for size,
my friend?”
  “Cramped,” said the ogre. “But good caves are hard to find.”
  “And do you have much company here?”
  “No,” said the ogre. “I think on my riddles to pass the time.”
   “Well,” said Sam, “how would you like to come along home with me? When I’m
king at home I can provide you with a fine large cave and pleasant neighbors, and
send people with riddles to you from time to time. How about that?”
   The ogre could hardly turn an offer like that down, so he agreed readily and they
set out together. When they got near home, it was apparent to Sam that a celebration
was going on in the kingdom.
  He said to his ogre friend, “How would you like to go to a party?”
  “Oh, fine,” said the ogre. “I’m sure I’d like a party, though I’ve never been to
one.”
  “Well, I’ll go in first, and then I’ll come out for you in a minute,” said Sam.
   He went inside to find that there was a double celebration in progress. His brother
Ned was about to be crowned king and to marry the sweet princess that Sam had
sent home. Sam thought that was most unkind.
  “Stop the wedding,” said Sam. They stopped the wedding and looked around at
him. He said, “I succeeded at the Quest, and I claim the right to be king.”
   Everybody laughed at him. They said, “Charming Ned brought home the ogre’s
treasure. What did you bring?”
   Sam showed them his single brass farthing. “I brought this,” he said and they all
laughed the more. “And I brought one more thing,” he said, and threw open the
doors. In walked the ogre, looking for the party he’d been promised.
   Sam explained to the ogre that the party would begin straight away the moment he
became king. Since the ogre was standing in the only doorway, Sam was made king
in no time at all.
   Well, after that, Sam set the ogre up in a cave of his very own, and after the
neighbors found he wasn’t a bad sort he got on quite well. The ogre became a
regular tourist attraction, one of the finest in the kingdom, and brought in a nice
regular bit of revenue. Sam opened a charm school with his brother Ned in charge,
and that brought in even more money. Sam married the princess himself and
everybody lived quite happily from then on. If they haven’t moved away, and I don’t
know why they would, they’ll be living there still.
  Oh, yes. It took the ogre a full ten years to decide he couldn’t answer Sam’s
riddle. Every week he would bundle the answers he’d thought of together and send
them to Sam and Sam would send them back. Finally the ogre decided he would
never find the right answer to the question, “What is it that is not and never will be?”
He opened the paper Sam had given him so long before and took a look. The
answer was, “A mouse’s nest in a cat’s ear.” (And that, my little friend, is the only
real, true answer there is.)
  “Oh, hell,” said the ogre. “I was just about to guess that.”
   “There’s a moral, too,” George said. “My mother told it to me and I’ll tell it to
you: If you’re bright and use your head, you’ll never go too far wrong. Just keep it
in mind, and you’ll get along.”
    Right after that, we reached the atmosphere of Grainau. George was busy with his
buttons. I was thinking that he meant well enough and I was feeling a bit more
friendly toward him.
   I had gathered that entering a planet’s atmosphere was a tricky business, but
George didn’t seem particularly concerned. The main problem was the same as
when leaving the Ship: to strike a balance between one gravity field and the other, so
that the people aboard were not plastered against ,the floor or left suddenly without
any feeling of weight at all. Besides that, he had to take us to the point on the planet
to which we were going, and how he did that, I couldn’t tell. Apparently he got
bearings from his instruments. The dials and meters said incomprehensible things to
me, but by some strange gift of tongues, he understood them. He switched on the
vision screens and they showed nothing but a billowy gray blankness beneath us.
Without any coaxing from George, the dome above our heads became first
translucent and then gradually transparent, our interior lights fading in
correspondence to the increasing light from outside.
   As we descended, I looked all around through the dome. I was still feeling
apprehensive, but my curiosity was getting the better of me. I freed myself from my
chair and strained to see all I could, but it wasn’t heartening. In every direction the
view was the same, a slightly rolling gray-whiteness that looked soft and bouncy, lit
uniformly by the red-orange sun that was low in the sky ahead of us as we traveled,
and gradually rose higher. It was the first sun I had seen at close range and I didn’t
like the glare it gave off. The automatic polarizer in the dome reduced the brightness
until it was bearable to look at the bright disk, but I could see its light was
unpleasant. The vision screens showed the same bouncy amorphous whiteness
directly beneath us as we moved.
  I said, “That isn’t what a planet looks like, is it?”
   George laughed and said, “Those are clouds. The planet’s down underneath. It’s
like frosting with cake under it.”
  He reached to rap at the same switch he’d turned on before and saw it was on.
He frowned and then made an announcement to the people below: “We’ll be setting
down in about ten minutes.” He hit the switch and it popped up.
  “I’m going downstairs,” I said.
  “All right,” George said. “I’ll see you later.”
   He turned his attention back to his job and we suddenly sliced down into the
gray-white clouds and were surrounded by the sick, smothering mass. The lights
came up a little in the dome to restore the life that was missing in the grayness
outside. It was the most frightening stuff to be lost in that I could imagine and I
didn’t want to look at it. I went down the spiral stairs and in the warm haven of the
room below I looked for Daddy. He was sitting in an easy chair by himself in the
center section. Mr. Tubman, Daddy’s assistant, was watching while the horses were
saddled. Men were bustling around doing those last-minute things that people always
discover five minutes before it will be too late to do them. Daddy had a book and
was reading quite calmly, as I might have expected. Daddy ignores confusion.
   I sat down in a heavy brown chair beside him and waited until he looked up. He
said, “Hello, Mia. We’re just about there. How are you doing?”
  “All right, I guess.” Meaning I was nervous.
  “Good. And how are you getting on with George?”
  I shrugged. “All right, I guess.”
  “I’ve asked him to keep an eye on you today while I’m in conference. He’ll show
you around the town. He’s been here before.”
  “Are you going to be busy all day long?” I asked.
  “I think so. If I wind things up before dark, I’ll find the two of you.”
   I had to be satisfied with that. A few moments later we touched down smoothly
for a landing. Grainau had heavier gravity than home— that was the first thing I was
certain of after all our motion had ceased. I could feel the extra weight as a strain on
my calves and arches when I stood up. Something that would take getting used to.
  George came downstairs and walked over to us. Daddy stood up and said,
“Well, all ready to take over, George?” Meaning me.
  George towered over both of us. He nodded.
   Daddy smiled and said, “That was a pretty good story, George. You have talents
I never suspected you of having.”
  “Which story?” I asked.
   “The story George was just telling you,” Daddy said. “The speaker was on from
the time we left the Ship.”
  George grinned. “I didn’t notice that until just a minute ago.”
  “It was a fine story,” Daddy said.
   I flushed, thoroughly embarrassed. “Oh, no,” I said. To listen to a story like that
was one thing, but to have everybody else know it was something else and
thoroughly disconcerting.
  I shot George an accusing look and then ran for cover, heading for the toilet
again. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody.
   Daddy was after me and caught me before I got to the separating partition. He
grasped my arm and brought me to a stop.
  “Hold on, Mia,” he said.
  I struggled to get loose. “Let me go.”
  “Don’t make a scene, Mia,” he said.
  “Let go of me. I don’t want to stay here.”
   “Quiet!” he said sharply. “I’m sorry I made the mistake of telling you, but George
didn’t do it intentionally. Besides, I enjoyed his story and I’m more than six times
your age.”
  “That’s different,” I said.
   “You may be right, but whether you’re right or not doesn’t make any difference
right now. It’s time to go outside. I want you to put yourself together and walk
outside with me. When we face these Colons, I want you to be somebody I can be
proud of. You don’t want to show up badly in front of these people, do you?”
  I shook my head.
  “All right,” he said, and let go of me. “Put yourself together.”
   Keeping my head averted, I did my best to get a grip on myself. I straightened my
blouse and hitched my shorts, and when I was ready, I faced around.
  The ramp was down on the far side of the ship, and I could hear noise from
outside. People shouting.
    “Come along,” Daddy said and we walked across the center area. George was
still standing there and I gave him a hostile glance as we passed, but he didn’t seem
to notice. He fell in behind us.
   We paused for a moment at the top of the ramp, and that seemed to be taken as a
signal for a band to start playing and for people to yell even louder.


                                 Chapter Six
                                                                          «^»
The horses had already been led outside and were being held there by Mr. Tubman.
Standing beside him was an officious-looking man in a tall hat in which was placed a
great wilted white feather. At another time he might have been funny. There were two
children with him, a boy and a girl, both somewhere near my age. We had set down
in what must have been the main square of the town, and there were ranks of people
yelling and staring up at us from either hand. It made me feel on display. The sky
was low and gray above us, the yellow bricks of the square were wet and shining,
and there was a warm, damp breeze. The band was directly in front of us, all of the
band members dressed in dark green uniforms. They played enthusiastically—
loudly, that is— but badly.
  I was looking all around at this, but Daddy took my arm and said, “Come on.
You can gawk later.”
   We started down the ramp and all the people in the square increased the volume
of their noise. I didn’t like it and started to feel very nervous. I wouldn’t like being
yelled at by large numbers of people in any case, but this was all the more
discomfiting because I couldn’t tell from the noise whether they were friendly or not.
Whatever tune the band was playing became indistinguishable and simply added a
small contribution to the general hubbub.
   Daddy and the officious-looking man shook hands. Daddy said, “Mr. Gennaro.
It’s good to see you again.”
   The man said, “You timed things well, Mr. Havero. The rain stopped here less
than an hour ago, though I won’t guarantee that it will stay stopped.”
   Daddy nudged me forward. “This is my daughter, Mia. I believe you’ve already
met Mr. Tubman and George Fuhonin, my pilot.” As I shook hands, I took a good
look at him. He had an eager-to-please manner that I didn’t know how to take, and I
couldn’t get any clue from Daddy’s face or tone.
   Gennaro indicated the boy and the girl with him. “These are my children, Ralph
and Helga. When you said you were bringing your daughter, I thought she might like
to meet some children of her own age.” He turned on a smile and then turned it off
again.
   The boy had dirty-blond hair. He was just a shade taller than I, but much more
squarely built. The girl was also squarely built, and about my size. They both said
hello, but not in an overwhelmingly friendly way.
  I said hello just as cautiously myself.
  “That was very thoughtful,” Daddy said to Mr. Gennaro.
   The man said, “Glad to do it. Glad to do it. Anything to keep up good will. Ha,
ha.”
   The people and the band continued to make noise. “Shall we be going?” Daddy
said.
  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Germaro said. “Children, mind your manners.”
   Daddy didn’t say anything to me, but simply gave me a sharp look. Mr. Gennaro
mounted his horse, and Daddy and Mr. Tubman swung up on theirs. The band, still
playing, backed off enough for them to pass through, and they clattered off and out
of the square. The band followed after, still playing loud and tinnily, and a good
portion of the crowd trailed them.
  I said, “Why is everybody following after Daddy?”
   “Your father is a celebrity,” George Fuhonin said in an ironic rumble, standing
just behind me.
  I hadn’t been speaking to him, just voicing my thoughts, but I was reminded that I
had determined not to speak to him, ever again. So I moved away a little.
   A section of the remaining crowd pressed forward toward the scoutship, bent on
getting a good close look at us. George looked out at them with no particular sign of
pleasure, as though he’d like to shoo them away.
  “Stay here,” he said to me. “I’ll be right back.”
  He walked up the ramp to the place where the three crewmembers were standing.
They were lounging in the mouth of the ship and getting a big kick out of the crowd.
When George came up, they said something that sounded like a joke, and laughed.
George didn’t laugh. He shook his head irritatedly and motioned them to go inside.
   “What do we do now?” the boy, Ralph, said to his sister, and I turned back to
look at them.
    On the Ship we have such long lives and low population that you never see
brothers and sisters closer than twenty years apart, never as close together as these
two. All the kids I know are singletons. I don’t know what I was expecting to see,
but except for build, this brother and sister didn’t look much alike at all. I had
thought they would— in books they always do; either that or exactly like their
long-lost Uncle Max, the one with all the money. Helga had dark hair, though not as
dark as mine, and it was quite long, hanging down to her shoulders and tucked in
place with combs. She wore a dress with a yoke front. Her brother wore long pants
like those Daddy had put on to wear today, and a plain shirt. They had both
obviously done some grooming for this little ceremony, and it made them look as
stiff as their manners.
   I suppose I looked just as odd to them as they did to me. I was a short, dark little
thing with close-cut black hair, and I was wearing what I usually wore, a white blouse
with loose sleeves, blue shorts, and high-backed sandals. It was a costume I would
have felt comfortable in at almost any sort of gathering within the Ship. I wouldn’t
have worn exactly that to play soccer in— something a little less formal, actually,
and harder shoes— but I was presentable. My clothes were clean and reasonably
neat. However, after the glory of all those dark green uniforms, I could see that these
kids might consider what I was wearing just a bit lacking in elegance.
  We looked at each other for a long starchy moment. Then the boy unbent a little
and said, “How old are you?”
  “Twelve,” I said.
  “I’m fourteen,” he said. “She’s twelve.”
  Helga said, “Daddy told us to show you around.” She said it tentatively.
  I took a deep breath and said, “All right.”
   “What about him?” she said, pointing to the ramp. George was standing just
inside the ship with his back to us. “He told you to stay here.”
   “He’s supposed to watch me, but I don’t have to pay any attention to him,” I
said. “Let’s leave before he comes back.”
  “All right,” Ralph said. “Come on then.”
   He ran under the high rim of the scoutship, in exactly the opposite direction from
Daddy and his own father. Helga and I followed him. George saw me as I started
off, and yelled something, but I just kept on running. I’d be damned if I’d pay any
attention to him.
   Ralph made a slight detour to tag the lower bulge of the ship— maybe to be brave
and have something to tell about afterward, maybe just to do it— and then dashed
on. We went all the way under the rim of the ship and out the other side. There were
a few people there, but a much smaller crowd than on the side where the ramp was
lowered, possibly because there weren’t any Ship people to stare at over here. We
charged through them, and I noticed that they were all squarely built, too. We left
them looking after us and dashed around the first corner we came to. I was feeling
pretty daring in my own way, as though I were cutting loose on a great adventure.
   We took a couple of quick turns from one street into another, and if George was
following after, he was soon left behind. By that time, I had no idea of where we
were. It was a street like the others we’d been in, made of rounded stones and about
the width of a large hallway at home, with buildings of stone and wood, and a few of
brick, on either side.
   “Hold on,” I said. “I can’t run any more.”
   My legs were aching and I was out of breath. It took a lot more effort to get
around here than it did at home, and I had no doubt that if I fell down it would hurt
more. Grainau was a planet that was what they called. “Earth-like to nine degrees,”
as were all the colony planets, but that one degree of difference offered a great deal
of latitude for the odd or uncomfortable, including Grainau’s slightly stronger
gravity. That “slightly stronger” was enough to tire me in almost no time.
   “What’s the matter?” Ralph asked.
   I said, “I’m tired. Let’s just walk.”
   They exchanged looks, and then Ralph said, “Oh, all right.”
   The air was a little hard to catch your breath in, it seemed so thick and warm. It
felt wet. Something like walking through stew, and about as pleasant as that.
   “Is the air always like this?” I asked.
   “Like what?” Helga asked, with the barest hint of a defensive edge in her voice.
   “Well, thick.” I could have added, “and smelly, too,” since it carried an odd
variety of odors I couldn’t identify, but I didn’t. They always prate about planetary
fresh air, but if this was it, I didn’t like it.
   “It’s just a little humid today,” Ralph said. “This breeze that’s coming up now
should clear the air.”
   We started that afternoon by all being a little afraid of each other, I think. But very
quickly Ralph and Helga found out how silly their fear was, and pretty soon, when
they didn’t think to mind their manners, the contempt that replaced the fear slipped
out. It took me awhile to see what it was. All I knew was that they found a lot of
what I said foolish, and made it clear that they found it foolish, and that they did a lot
of exchanging of significant glances.
  I found I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what time it was. I said
something about the morning, something that made it clear that I thought it was
morning and they both turned on me. Turned out it was after lunch here. No
matter that I had stared at my breakfast just before we left.
  I pointed at a building and asked what it was.
  “That’s a store, silly. Haven’t you ever seen a store?”
   Well, I hadn’t. I’d read about them, and that’s all. We have such a small society
on the Ship that buying and selling aren’t really practicable. If you want something,
you put in a requisition for it and in a little while it comes. You can live as simply or
as lavishly as you want— there’s a limit as to how much you can jam into one
apartment, though some people do live up to the limit. In a society where anybody
can have just about anything he wants, there’s no real prestige in having things unless
you use them or get some esthetic pleasure from them, so I would say the tendency
in general is toward simple living.
   I can think of only one regular program of exchange on the Ship. Kids under
fourteen are given weekly allowance chits to draw against in the Common Room
snack bars; that way none of them get a chance to ruin their health. After fourteen,
they assume you know what you’re about and leave you alone.
  “Can I take a look?” I asked.
  Ralph shrugged. “All right, I guess.”
  It was a clothing store, and most of the clothes looked very strange to me. There
were even some items I couldn’t figure out.
  After a minute, the man who ran the place came up to Ralph and said in a loud
whisper, “What’s he dressed like that for?”
  “She’s a girl,” Helga said. “And she doesn’t know any better.”
   My ears went red, but I pretended I didn’t hear and just kept poking through the
rack of cloaks I was looking at.
  “She’s down from that Ship,” Ralph said in a whisper as good as a shout. “They
don’t wear clothes up there. She probably thought that junk she has on is what we
wear.”
   The man sneered and quite deliberately turned away from me. I wasn’t sure why
and I was puzzled, because it was obviously meant to be offensive. He only stopped
short of spitting on the floor at my feet. It seemed excessive if it was only because I
didn’t have the sense to dress like a proper girl in the horrible things he had to sell.
   As we went out, the storekeeper muttered something about “grabbie” that I didn’t
catch. Ralph and Helga didn’t seem to notice, or pretended they didn’t, and I said
nothing.
  We had just left the store and turned the corner, starting on a long downhill slope,
when I stopped still and said, “What’s that?”
  “What?”
   I pointed at the dead gray mass tipped with white that stretched across the bottom
of the street, blocks away downhill. “Is that water?”
  They looked at each other, and then in an “any blockhead should know that
much” tone of voice, Ralph said, “It’s the ocean.”
   I’d always wanted to see an ocean, since they’re even rarer on the Ship than
stores. “Could I take a look?”
  “Sure,” Ralph said. “Why not?”
   First there was a stone wharf and warehouses stretching away on either hand. The
harbor stretched two great arms around to enclose a large expanse of water. At the
sides were wooden docks on pilings running out like fingers into the harbor. Close at
hand were boats of all sizes. Nearest were the great giants with several masts, big
enough to have smaller boats tied on board. There were medium and small boats tied
up at all the docks.
   Even in the harbor, the water ran in white-crested peaks and slapped noisily at the
stone and wood. There were birds of white, and gray, and brown, and black, and
mixtures of all these colors, all wheeling around and crying overhead, and some of
them diving down at the water. The air down here smelled strongly— of fish, I think.
Outside the harbor the water was running in mountains that made the peaks inside
look small, and it stretched away farther than I could see clearly, to join somewhere
in the distance with the gray sky overhead.
   I might have made comments about all the things I saw, the odors, the men
working, but I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t strike Ralph and Helga as
amusing, and by that time I was starting to be a little cautious about exposing myself.
I was seeing them as something less than the allies they had been when we were
running from George. We walked along the waterfront and off the quay and onto the
wooden docks. Ralph led us out onto a little spur and we stopped there.
   He pointed down at a little craft tied alongside. It was about twelve feet long, with
a mast that stood up high enough to reach above the dock. It had a boom that was
lashed in place. It was painted a serviceable white with black trim, and had the odd
name Guacamole painted on it.
  “What do you think of her?” he asked.
  “It’s a very nice ship,” I said.
   “It isn’t a ship. It’s a boat, a sailing dinghy, and it’s ours, Helga’s and mine. We
go sailing all the time. Want to go for a sail?”
  Helga looked at him, obviously pleased. “Oh, can we?”
   “If she’ll go,” Ralph said. “It’s up to her. Otherwise we’ve got to do what Daddy
said and stay with her.”
  “Oh, do come on,” Helga said to me.
   I looked at the water and tried to make up my mind. The water looked rough and
the boat looked small. I really didn’t want to go at all.
  Helga said, “We’ll just stay inside the harbor.”
  “It isn’t dangerous,” Ralph added, looking at me.
   I didn’t want him to think I was scared, so after a minute I shrugged and started
down the wooden ladder that reached from the dock down to the rear of the boat.
The ladder stood about two feet above the dock at its highest point, and I grabbed it
and backed down. I seemed to be seeing more of ladders lately than I really cared
to. Ralph and Helga started down after me.
   The boat was rising and falling on the water as the swells came in to break on the
docks and the quay. I waited until the boat was rising and then stepped in. I almost
slipped, but I held my feet and then moved carefully to the front, grabbing on when I
had to. When I got by the mast, I sat down on the seat that ran across the front.
Helga dropped into the boat as I was sitting, and Ralph was right behind her.
   I blinked a little as a trace of spray wet my cheek. “Aren’t we going to get wet?” I
asked.
  They didn’t hear, and I repeated my question in a louder voice.
  “It’s just spindrift,” Helga said. “You’ve got to expect that. We won’t get too
wet.”
  Ralph said, “Besides, the water will get you clear. I know you don’t see much
water in your Ship.”
   That was another thing that irritated me about Ralph and Helga. They had all sorts
of misconceptions about the Ship which they insisted on trotting out. Ralph was
worse, because he was dogmatic. I thought at first he was being malicious until I
realized he actually believed what he was saying, like that bit about going naked—
that wasn’t completely wrong; some people do go without clothes in the privacy of
their own apartments, but I would like to see somebody trying to play soccer while
completely bare. The point is that what he said wasn’t quite right, either, and he
wouldn’t listen. He would just say his misconceptions flatly and expect you to agree
with him.
    Right at the beginning he’d said something about how it was too bad we had to
live in crowded barracks— something along that line— and didn’t I like all the space
here? I tried to explain that that was only the way it used to be on the Ship, right at
the beginning, but then I made the mistake of bringing in the dormitories, which are a
little bit that way, trying to be honest, and that only confused the issue. Ralph finally
said that everybody knew what things were like, and I didn’t have to try to explain.
  Helga was a little more bearable because she only asked questions.
  “Is it true you don’t eat food on your Ship?”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”
  “No,” I said.
  And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”
  “Do you?”
  “Well, no. But everybody says you do.”
   The thing that really annoyed me about Ralph and his “water to get you clean”
remark is that we on the Ship had very clear memories of how dirty the colonists had
been. Ralph apparently wasn’t even able to notice the horrid odors that clung to the
whole harbor, which demonstrated how defective his sense of smell was, but I still
didn’t like the blithe, “of course” way he said it.
  Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga
came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we
pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He
put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.
   We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and
sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray
were annoying, and the grayness of the day wasn’t very nice, but I thought I could
see how, given better weather and time to get used to this sort of thing, sailing could
he fun.
   Uncharitably, though, I couldn’t help thinking that we handled weather much
better on the Third Level than they did here. When we wanted rain, everybody
knows it’s coming ahead of time. We throw a switch and it rains until we want it to
stop, and then it stops. None of this thick air with its clamminess.
   As we were sailing, Helga started a conversation, trying to be friendly I think. She
said, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I never heard of any.”
  “Well, wouldn’t you know? I mean half-brothers and half-sisters, too.”
   “I don’t know for sure, but I was never told of any. My parents have been
married so long that if I had a brother he’d be all grown or dead years ago.” This
may seem strange, but it was an idea that I’d never entertained before. I just never
thought in terms of brothers and sisters. It was an interesting notion, but I didn’t
really take it seriously even now.
   Helga looked at me with a slightly puzzled look. “Married? I thought you didn’t
get married like regular people. I thought you just lived with anybody you wanted
to.”
  I said, “My parents have been married more than fifty years. That’s Earth years.”
   “Fifty years? Oh, you know that isn’t so. I just saw your father and he isn’t even
as old as my dad.”
  “Well, how old is your dad?”
  “Let’s see,” she said. She did some obvious figuring. “About fifty.”
   I said, “Well, my dad is eighty-one. Earth years.”
   She looked at me with an expression of total disbelief. “Oh, that’s a lie.”
   “And my mother is seventy-four. Or seventy-five. I’m not sure which it is.”
   Helga gave me a disgusted look and turned away.
   Well, it was true, and if she didn’t want to believe it, too bad. I won’t say it’s
usual for people to be married as long as fifty years. I get the impression that people
tend to get tired of each other after twenty or thirty years, and split up, and there are
some people who don’t want anything as permanent as marriage and just live
together. And people who don’t even know each other who have children because
the Ship’s Eugenist advises it. Whatever Helga had heard, it had been a garbled or
twisted version of this.
   My parents were a strange pair. They’d been married for fifty years, which wasn’t
usual, and they hadn’t lived together for eight years. When I was four, my mother
got an opportunity she had been looking forward to for the study of art under
Lemuel Carpentier, and she’d moved out. I guess that if you’ve been married as long
as fifty years, and apparently expect it to go on for maybe fifty years more, that a
vacation of eight years or so is hardly noticeable.
   To tell the truth, I didn’t know what my parents saw in each other. I liked and
respected my father, but I didn’t like my mother at all. I’d like to say that it was
simply that we didn’t understand each other, and that was partly true. I thought her
“art” was plain bad. One of the few times I went to her apartment to visit, I looked at
a sculpture she’d done and asked her about it.
   “That’s called ‘The Bird,’” she said.
    I could see that it was meant to be a bird. Mother was working directly from a
picture and it looked just like it. But it was so stiff and formal that it had no feel of
life at all. I said something about that, and she didn’t like the remark at all. We got
into an argument, and she finally put me out.
   So part of it was misunderstanding, but not all. For one thing, she made it quite
clear to me that she’d had me as a duty and not because she particularly wanted to. I
firmly believed that she was just waiting for me to go on Trial, and then she’d move
back in with Daddy. As I say, I didn’t like her.
   When we got to the far side of the harbor, instead of coming directly back, as I
somehow had thought we would, Ralph turned us so that we were traveling out at an
angle toward the mouth of the harbor. Traveling that way, we were running at an
angle through the waves, too, and the chop increased tremendously. We would go
up in the air, and then quite suddenly down again, and after a few minutes of this, I
was starting to feel queasy. It was a different sort of upset that I’d been suffering
earlier in the day. This was nausea and accompanied by a whirling in the head.
   I said to Helga, “Can’t we go straight back? I’m starting to feel sick.”
 “This is the quickest way back,” she said. “We can’t sail directly into the wind.
We have to tack, head into the wind at an angle.”
    “But we’re going so slow,” I said. It was the slow way we rammed into waves,
surged high, and then pitched down on the other side that threw my stomach off
stride.
  Ralph yanked on the line that was attached to the boom, and swung it over from
one side of the boat to the other, turning the tiller at the same time, and we headed
back in toward the quay in another slow tack. By that time, I was feeling miserable.
   “Don’t throw up,” Helga said cheerfully. “We’ll be back soon enough.” Then she
raised her voice. “You’ve had it your fair turn, Ralph. Let me take over.”
   “Oh, all right,” Ralph said, quite reluctantly.
  Helga ducked back to the stern, taking the tiller and the boom line from Ralph.
She nodded at me. “She’s feeling sick,” she said.
   “Oh,” Ralph said. He came forward and sat down beside me.
  He looked at me and said, “It takes awhile to get your sea-legs. After you sail for
awhile you get used to it.”
    He didn’t say anything while we completed that leg and part of the next tack. He
just watched Helga a little wistfully. I began to think that this sailing thing— provided
first that you were feeling well enough to enjoy it at all— was much more fun for the
person actually doing the sailing than for the passengers. Helga and Ralph, at least,
both seemed to be having much more fun when they were sailing than when they
were sitting up front. Perhaps it was just that they felt they had to talk to me, and that
was an effort for them.
   Ralph said, “Uh, well, how do you think our fathers are getting along?”
  I swallowed, trying to keep control of my stomach. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t
even know what they were going to trade for.”
  He looked at me in surprise. “You don’t even know that? We operate placer
mines just to produce tungsten ore for you, we ship it all the way here, and you
don’t even know it!”
  “Why don’t…” I paused, and grabbed hard onto the side of the boat (gunwale)
and fought hard to hold onto my composure as we dipped into a sudden trough.
“Why don’t you mine this stuff, whatever it is, just for yourselves?”
   Somewhat bitterly he said, “We don’t know how to reduce it. You Ship people
won’t tell us how. When we trade with you, all you give us is little bits and pieces of
information.”
   We were heeling over into our last tack then, about to head down the last stretch
to the dock.
  I said, “And why not? We preserved all the knowledge through the years since
Earth was destroyed. If we gave it all to you, what would we have left to trade with?”
  “My dad says you’re parasites,” he said. “You live off our hard work. You’re
Grabbies, and that’s no mistake.”
  “We are not parasites,” I said.
  “If things were the way they ought to be, we’d be the ones living like kings, not
you.”
   “If we live like kings, why were you saying earlier that we had to live all crowded
together in barracks?”
   He was nonplussed for a moment and then he said, “Because you like to live like
pigs, that’s why. I can’t help it if you like to live like pigs.”
  “If there are any pigs around here, it’s you Mudeaters,” I said.
  “What?”
  “Mudeaters!”
  “Grabbie! Why don’t you take a bath?” He put his hand against my chest and
gave a hard shove. In spite of our quarreling, he caught me unprepared, and I went
tumbling overboard.
    The feel of the water was shocking. It was colder than the air, though after the
first moment not unpleasantly cold. I got a mouthful of water as I went under and it
was very bad-tasting, dirty and bitter. I came up, coughing and spluttering, as the
boat swung on past me. I got a glimpse of Helga with her head turned back toward
me and a surprised look on her face. I treaded water while I coughed out the water
that had gone down my windpipe, and some that had gone down the wrong way
came up the wrong way and out my nose. It took several seconds before I was
breathing properly. The shock and choking did settle my stomach, I found to my
surprise, but it wasn’t the way I’d have chosen to do it if I had had a choice.
  Helga had spilled the air out of the canvas and turned the tiller. The Guacamole
was just rocking on the water and drifting. She stood up, looking back at me.
  “Do you need help?” she called.
  We weren’t really far from the dock, so I called, “No, I can swim in.”
   I had light clothing on. My wet, loose sleeves were a little of a problem, but I
found I could manage. I’d never swum in anything but a pool before, but I found it
wasn’t really a problem to stay on top of the waves, though I had to be careful that I
didn’t swallow any more of that bitter water. I wasn’t a fast swimmer, but I was built
enough like a cork that all I had to do was keep at it and I had no trouble going
where I wanted to.
   As it was, we were close enough to the dock when I went overboard that I was
able to reach a ladder by the time they had the Guacamole all tied up. I pulled myself
up and then found that I was very tired, collapsed in a heap and dripped water all
over the boards of the dock. I watched as thirty feet down the way, Ralph and Helga
lowered the sail and lashed the boom.
   As they finished, I got up and walked down the dock to the head of their ladder.
The gravity had taken most of the energy out of me. Ralph caught on to the end of
the ladder and started up. He had an apologetic look on his face as he saw me
waiting. When he had gotten to the top and was just about to step out on the dock, I
grabbed the ladder in both hands to brace myself, put a sandal lengthwise across his
stomach, and pushed off as hard as I could.
    He had a strong grip, but I caught him off balance. He let go of the ladder, waved
his arms in an attempt to hold his balance but then saw he couldn’t. He twisted to
guide his fall and turned it into a dive. He entered the water cleanly just behind his
little boat. I leaned over and waited until he came up. Then I gave a look to Helga.
   She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything,” she said fearfully.
  Ralph caught on to the stern of the Guacamole, and clung there. He looked up at
me, hopping mad.
  “I had a real swell time,” I said. “Both of you will have to come up to the Ship
sometime, and let me show you around.”
   Then I walked away, leaving a dripping trail. I pushed my wet hair back off my
forehead, squeezed a little water out of my sleeves, and shook myself as dry as I
could. Then I left the quay. I didn’t look back at all. Let them solve their own
problems.
   I set off up the street that we’d come down. Some of the people on the street
looked oddly at me as I passed. I suppose I was a strange sight, an odd little girl,
dressed in funny clothes and wringing wet. I wasn’t sure where I was and where I’d
find the scoutship, but I wasn’t worried about it. Somehow, during the course of the
hours I’d been here, Grainau had lost its power to scare me.
   As it turned out, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know my way around. Before I’d
even gotten to the top of the hill I ran into the monster, the dinosaur, George
Fuhonin. He’d been out looking for me, and surprisingly, I was almost glad to see
him.
   He said, “What happened to you?”
   I wasn’t dripping by that time, but I was still wet, looking, I’m quite sure, like a
half-drowned kitten fished out of the water. Thoroughly bedraggled.
   I said, “We went swimming.”
   “Oh. Well, come back to the ship and we’ll get you dried out.”
  I fell into step beside him, as best I could. We walked on silently for a few
minutes, and then he said, “You know, I really didn’t intend to embarrass you. I
wouldn’t have done that intentionally.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just make sure the switch is off next time, please.”
   “All right,” he said.
   When we got back to the ship, I went into the toilet and turned on the hot air
blower in the refresher. In a few minutes I was dry.
  Then I discovered that in spite of my various stomach upsets, I was hungry. I ate
heartily and felt much better. There’s nothing like the feeling of being comfortably
full.
  It was near nightfall outside when Daddy came back, though it was still in the
middle of the afternoon by Ship time. When it started to grow dark outside, the
people who’d been coming to stare all day had gone, I suppose home to dinner.
When Daddy came back, there was no band playing this time.
   I heard the horses and I went outside. One of the crew went by me and down the
ramp. Mr. Tubman and Daddy handed their horses over to him and then turned their
attention back to Mr. Gennaro, who was standing by his own horse. They didn’t see
me standing near the top of the ramp.
  In a very anxious voice, Mr. Gennaro said, “Now are you sure that this
unfortunate business isn’t going to make any difference to our agreement?”
   “I’m quite sure,” Daddy said, smiling. “You made your apology and I’m quite
sure my daughter got whatever satisfaction she needed from pushing your boy into
the water. Now let’s drop the whole matter. Our ship will be down for the ore you
have ready next week…”
  I didn’t wait to hear him finish. I just turned and went inside with a little glow
warming me. He wasn’t mad at me.
   “What are you smirking about?” George asked.
   “Oh, nothing,” I said.



             PART II: INSIDE MY WORLD

                                Chapter Seven
                                                                             «^»
We took off shortly after Daddy came aboard. He and I and Mr. Tubman were
sitting in the center of the downstairs lounge in easy chairs. The three crewmen were
playing cards, and George Fuhonin was upstairs piloting.
    I felt quietly pleased with myself. Viewed from one angle, my time on Grainau had
been nothing but one long mistake. I wasn’t bothering to view it that way, even
though I did realize dimly that I had made a few errors in tact and simple good
sense. It wasn’t important to me, and even now I would say that it was
comparatively unimportant in real terms.
   I think I was deservedly elated. I was filled to the brim with the discovery that I
could meet Mudeaters on their own home grounds, and if not come off best, at least
draw.
   Like the girl who first found out how to make fire, like the girl who invented the
principle of the lever, like the girl who first had the courage to eat moldy goat cheese
and found Roquefort, I had discovered something absolutely new in the world.
Self-confidence, perhaps.
  My errors had been made. My self-confidence was still in the process of
becoming. If Daddy had pointed out the errors, they would not have been mended,
and the self-confidence might have been stillborn. But Daddy just smoked and
smiled.
   I was curious enough about the things that Ralph Gennaro had said that I repeated
his comments to Daddy and asked about them.
  “Don’t worry about it,” Daddy said.
  “There’s not much sense in even listening to a Mudeater,” Mr. Tubman said.
“They have no perspective. They live in such limited little worlds that they can’t see
what’s going on.”
   “I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Henry,” Daddy said. “It’s just as thoughtless
as that silly word that Mia picked up. What did that boy say?”
  “‘Grabbie?’”
   “Mm, yes. That one. There’s no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life
and they have theirs. I wouldn’t live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I’m
sure there are good people among them.”
  “It’s their lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “I’ll bet Gennaro is
complaining right now that you cheated him.”
  “He might be,” Daddy said.
   “You didn’t cheat him, did you, Daddy? He seemed happy that you were willing
to make a deal.”
  “When did you hear this?”
  “When you rode up.”
   “Lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “He doesn’t bargain well and he was
afraid that your dad had been offended by your adventure. He gave in more easily
than he had to. He was happy at the time, but he’s probably regretting it now.”
   Daddy nodded and filled his pipe again. “I don’t see any reason to mind his
interests for him. As far as I’m concerned, the less we do for the colonists, the
sooner they’ll learn to watch out for themselves. And all the better for them when
they do. That’s where Mr. Mbele and I disagree. He believes in exceptions to rules,
in treating the colonists better than we treat ourselves. I’m not ready to accept that.”
   Mr. Tubman said, “I’ll have to admit that I’ve learned things about bargaining
from watching you, Miles.”
   “I hope so. You will be a poor trader if you underestimate the people you deal
with. And you, Mia, will be making a mistake if you underestimate a man like Mr.
Mbele. His principles are excellent— sometimes, however, he only sees one route to
a goal.”
  After a few minutes, Mr. Tubman went over to make a fourth in the card game. I
decided to go upstairs.
  Daddy looked up as I left. He took the pipe from his mouth. It had gone out
without his noticing. “Going to hear another story?” he asked.
   “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” And I went up and spent the rest of the trip
with George.
   So, I went home to Geo Quad. In my own time, I thought about things and
discovered at least some of my errors, and the discovery did not hurt me, as it might
have.
  Sometimes there is art of a subtle sort in not touching, in simply sitting and
smoking and talking of other people. When I got back to the Ship, I was still feeling
good. And it lasted until I went to sleep.
   I sat in a large comfortable chair— uncomfortably— and waited for Jimmy
Dentremont. I wasn’t twitching; I merely had a definite feeling of unease. This was
the living room of the Geo Quad dorm, and very similar to the one that I had once
lived in. The similarity didn’t bother me much, but I was a stranger here and a little
hesitant because of it. If it hasn’t become clear previously, perhaps I should say that
I always prefer to feel in command of a situation.
   The room was nicely-enough appointed, but very impersonal. Individuality in a
room comes from personal touches, personal care, personal interest, and the more
public a room is, the less individual it is bound to be. My own room at home was
more personal and individual than our living room, our living room better than the
sleeping quarters of this dorm— though I hadn’t seen them, I remembered well
enough what dorm sleeping quarters were like— and the quarters better than this
room I was sitting in. To be a stranger in an impersonal room in which there are
other people who are not strangers to one another or to the place is to have the
feeling of strangeness compounded.
   The dorm had a living room, where I was sitting, a kitchen and study rooms out
of sight, and living quarters upstairs. When I came in I looked around, and then
stopped one of the small kids who obviously belonged here, a little girl of about
eight.
  “Is Jimmy Dentremont around?”
  “Upstairs, I imagine,” she said.
   Near the door there was a buzzer board for the use of people like me who didn’t
live here. I looked Jimmy’s name up, then rang two longs and a short. Since it was
not far out of his way, Jimmy usually stopped by for me on the way to Mr. Mbele’s,
rather than me coming after him, but I had something to talk with him about today.
  He came on the screen by the buzzer and said, “Oh, hello Mia.”
  I said, “Hi.”
  “What are you doing here?”
  “I came to talk to you about something. Get dressed and come on down.”
  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be down as soon as I get some clothes on.” He rang off
and his image faded.
  So I picked a seat and waited for him. He hadn’t been living in the dorm long,
only a year or so. His birth had been a result of a suggestion by the Ship’s
Eugenist— his parents had barely known one another— but his mother had wanted
him and raised him. When he was eleven, however, she had decided to get married,
and on Jimmy’s own suggestion he had moved into a dorm.
  “I didn’t want to be underfoot,” he’d said to me. “I do go over there evenings
sometimes. And I see my father, too, from time to time.”
   Perhaps it was because he could move back with his mother if he wanted that he
didn’t find living in the dorm painful. He seemed to view it as just a temporary
situation to be lived with until he came back from Trial and could have an apartment
of his own. In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with
him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have
been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.
  There were kids playing a board game of some sort and I sat in my chair. I
watched the game and I watched the people watching the game, and I watched
people passing, but nobody watched me at all. Jimmy came down in a few minutes
and I got out of my chair, quite ready to be gone.
  By way of greeting, I said, “What I really want to know is whether you want to go
over with me on Friday.”
  “Where?”
  “What do you mean, ‘where’?”
  “Mia, you know I’d go anywhere you asked. Simply name a place and lead the
way.”
  “You’re lucky I’m not bigger than you are. If I were bigger, I’d hit you. You
don’t have to be smart.”
  “Well, where is it that you’re going?”
  “Don’t you know what I’m talking about?”
  He shook his head. “No.”
   I got out the note that had come for me yesterday and unfolded it. It said that I
was to have a physical examination Wednesday, and on Friday I was to assemble
with the others in my survival class at Gate 5, Third Level for our first meeting. I
handed the note to Jimmy and he read it.
   This first meeting of my survival class would be on Friday, June 3, 2198. My
physical would be one year and six months to the day before we would be dropped
on one colony planet or another to actually undergo Trial. There is no rule that says
a child has to attend a survival class, but in actual practice everybody takes
advantage of the training that is offered. Clear choices as to the best course to take
in life are very rare, and this was one of those few. They don’t drop us simply to
die. They train us for a year and a half, and then they drop us and find out how
much good the training has done us.
   New classes are started every three or four months, and the last one had been in
March, so this note was not unexpected. Since Jimmy had been born in November,
too, as he had been so quick to point out when we first met, he was bound to be in
the same class with me. Frankly, I wanted company on Friday.
  “I didn’t know about this,” Jimmy said. “I should have a note, too. When did this
come?”
  “Yesterday. I thought you’d call me this morning about it but you didn’t.”
   “I’d better check this out. Hold on here.” He went off to find the dorm mother
and came back in a few minutes with a note similar to mine. “It was here. I just never
looked for it and she never thought to mention it.”
   There was one thing that irritated me about Jimmy, but that in a way I admired.
Or, perhaps, something I marveled at. On at least two occasions, I had called Jimmy
and left a message, once to call me back, once to say I wasn’t going to be able to
make our meeting with Mr. Mbele. Neither time did he get the message, because
neither time did he stop to look for one. That irritates me. I also feel envious of
anyone who can be so unanxious about who might have called. Jimmy simply says
that he’s so busy that he never stops to worry about things like that.
    Jimmy liked the idea of going to the first meeting on Friday together. To this time,
at least, we were not close friends— there was an element of antagonism— but we
did know each other and we had Mr. Mbele in common. It seemed to make sense to
both of us to face the new situation together.
  As we were on our way to Mr. Mbele’s, I said, “Do you remember when I got
back from Grainau and I was talking about that boy and his sister to you and Mr.
Mbele?”
  “The one with the weird ideas of what we’re like?”
   “Yes. One of the things they said was that we went around naked all the time. I
was objecting to all the things they were saying. I wonder what I would have said if
they’d been here to see you on the vid without even your socks on.”
   “I suppose they would have thought they were right all along,” Jimmy said
reasonably.
  “Yes. But they weren’t.”
  “I don’t know. I was naked, wasn’t I?”
  “Sure, but that was in your own room. I go naked at home, too. They thought we
never wear clothes.”
   “Well,” Jimmy said brightly, “there’s no real reason we ought to, is there?” He
started to pull his shirt off over his head. “We could be just what they think we are,
and we wouldn’t be worse because of it, would we?”
  “Don’t be perverse,” I said.
  “What’s perverse about going naked?”
   “I’m talking about your contrariness. Are you going to eat dirt just because they
think we do? I shouldn’t have brought the subject up in the first place. It just struck
me as something incongruous.”
    “Incongruous,” Jimmy corrected, putting the accent on the second syllable where
it belonged.
   “Well, however you pronounce it,” I said. This comes of reading words and not
having heard them pronounced. This also was a matter of talking about the wrong
things to the wrong people. It seemed that I might do better just to leave Grainau out
of my conversations completely. Just after I’d gotten back home, I’d made the
mistake of saying what I really thought about the Mudeaters in front of Jimmy and
Mr. Mbele.
  “Do they really stink?” Mr. Mbele asked.
    Jimmy and I were seated on the couch in Mr. Mbele’s apartment. I had my
notebook with notes on my reading, subjects I wanted to bring up, and some book
titles that Mr. Mbele had suggested. I realized that I’d just said something I couldn’t
really defend, so I backtracked.
   “I don’t know if they do. Everybody says they do. What I meant is that I didn’t
like what I saw of them.”
  “Why not?” Jimmy asked.
  “Is that a serious question, or are you just prodding?”
   “I’m interested, too, Mia,” Mr. Mbele said. In his case, I could tell that it was a
seriously intended question, not just digging. Mr. Mbele never did any ganging up
with either one of us against the other.
   “I’m not sure,” I said. “We didn’t get along. Do I have to have a better reason
than that?”
  “Of course,” Jimmy said.
   “Well, if you think so,” I said, “give me one good reason you have for being so
antagonistic.”
  Jimmy half shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
   “You don’t have one,” I said. “I just said something you didn’t take to. Well, I
didn’t take to the Mudeaters. I can doggone well say they stink if I want to.”
  “I guess so,” Jimmy said.
   “Hmm,” Mr. Mbele said. “What if it doesn’t happen to be true? What if what you
say damages the other person, or if you are just building yourself up by tearing
another person down?”
  “I don’t know,” I said.
  “Would you agree that it isn’t a good policy?”
  “I suppose.”
   “Well, it’s my personal opinion that saying the Colons stink is simply a
self-justifying myth invented to make us feel morally superior and absolutely in the
right. Your statement is likely to keep me from listening to any valid arguments that
you might actually have. That certainly wouldn’t do you any good.”
   Jimmy had been following the argument. He said, “How about this? It’s all right
to dislike people for poor reasons, but not to call them names. You don’t have to
justify your dislikes, but you have to justify your contentions.”
  “That’s a little oversimplified,” Mr. Mbele said.
   For the moment I was off the hook, and since I was struck by a thought, I
brought it forward. “What about the people whom you ought to like— only you
don’t? And the people you ought not to like that you do?”
  “And what does all that mean?” Jimmy asked.
   “Well, say you and I agree on everything, and I respect you, and you never do me
any harm— like backbiting all the time for no good reason— and yet I can’t stand
you. Or say there were somebody I ought to dislike— a total rat, somebody who’ll
do anything if he sees advantage in it— and I like him. Can you separate liking from
what a person does?”
   Mr. Mbele smiled, as though the course of the conversation amused him. “Well,
do you separate them?”
  “I suppose I do,” I said.
  “Jimmy?”
  Jimmy didn’t say anything for a minute while he decided whether he did or
whether he didn’t. I already knew the answer, having just worked it out myself.
Everybody does, or there wouldn’t be charming socially accepted bastards in the
world.
  Jimmy said, “I suppose I do, too.”
  I said, “What I think I mean was should you separate them?”
   “Isn’t it more to the point to ask whether it makes any difference if you do or
not?”
  “You mean, if you can’t help it anyway?”
   “No,” Mr. Mbele said. “I meant do your emotions make a difference in your
judgment of people that you like or dislike?”
   Jimmy said, “Alicia MacReady? Everybody likes her, they say. Will that make any
difference in what the Assembly decides?”
   Alicia MacReady was the woman who was carrying an illegal baby. The question
of what to do in the case had come up before the Council, but it hadn’t stayed there.
She had apparently thought that she would get more lenient treatment if the Ship’s
Assembly were to make the judgment, so before the Council could decide, she had
opted to take the matter out of their hands. The Council had agreed, as in difficult or
important cases they were likely to.
   The Ship’s Assembly was a meeting of all the adults in the Ship, coming together
in the amphitheater on Second Level, and voting. Since she was a popular person—
I’d heard this only; until this had come up I had never heard of her or met her— the
MacReady woman wanted to face the Assembly, hoping her friendships would
count for more than they would in Council.
   “That’s a good example,” Mr. Mbele said. “I don’t know if it will make a
difference. I would suggest that since you can’t attend, you watch what goes on on
your video. Then perhaps we can discuss the decision next time. This is just part of
a larger problem, however: what constitutes proper conduct? That is, ethics. This is
something an ordinologist”— a nod to Jimmy— “or a synthesist”— a nod toward
me— “should be thoroughly familiar with. I’ll give you titles to start with. Take your
time with them, and when you’re ready to talk, let me know.”
    So he started us reading in ethics. He went to his book shelves and called off
titles and authors for us to copy: Epicureans and Utilitarians; Stoics; Power
Philosophers, both sophisticated and unsophisticated; and Humanists of several
stripes. All these not to mention various religious ethical systems. If I’d known all
this was to come out of my one simple, honestly prejudiced remark, I would never
have opened my mouth. Maybe there is a lesson in that, but if there is, I’ve never
learned it; I still have an unbecoming tendency to open my mouth and get myself in
trouble.
   I saw Dr. Jerome on Wednesday, June 1. I’d seen him once or twice a year ever
since I could remember. He was of middle height, inclined to be portly, and like
most doctors wore a beard. His was black. I’d asked him about it when I was much
younger and he’d said, “It’s either to give our patients confidence or to give
ourselves confidence. I’m not sure which.”
   As he examined me, he talked as he always did, a constant flow of commentary
directed half at me and half at himself, all given in an even, low-pitched voice. Its
effect, and perhaps its intention, was to give reassurance in the same way that a
horseman soothes a skittish colt with his voice. It was part of Dr. Jerome’s
professional manner.
  “Good enough, good enough. Sound. Good shape. Breathe in. Now, out. Good.
Hmm-hum. Yes. Good enough.”
   There’s always the question of how much you can believe of what a doctor
says— he has one of those ethical problems in how much he can tell you— but I
had no reason not to believe Dr. Jerome when he told me I was in perfectly sound
shape. I was due for no treatments of any kind before starting Survival Class. I was
in first-class condition.
  “It’s always good to see you, Mia,” he said. “I wish everybody were in as good
health. I might have a little more spare time.”
   He said one other thing. When he took my height and weight, he said, “You’ve
gained three inches since the last time you were here. That’s very good.”
   Three inches. I wasn’t sure whether it was Daddy’s doing or nature, but I wasn’t
displeased to hear it.


                               Chapter Eight
                                                                           «^»
Jimmy and I got off the shuttle at Entry Gate 5 on the Third Level. This was
supposedly where our group was to meet at two o’clock. We were about ten
minutes early. The shuttle door slid open and we left the car. When we were clear,
the car flicked away, responding to a call from another level, much like an elevator.
On the cross-level line, a few feet away, there were several cars just sitting and
waiting to be called.
   The door leading out of the shuttle room was double, with both sides standing
open. Above it a sign read: ENTRY GATE 5, THIRD LEVEL: PARK. Through the
open door I could see light, grass, dirt and a number of kids about my age, all
beyond the gate.
  “There they are,” Jimmy said.
   The Third Level is divided into three distinct and separate types of areas. First
there are the areas under cultivation, producing food, oxygen, and fodder for the
cattle we raise. Beef is our only on-the-hoof meat, our other meats coming from
cultures raised in vats, also here on the Third Level. The second type of area is park.
Here there are trees, a lake, flowers, grassland, picnic areas, room to walk, room to
ride. This is what you might wish the planets were like. The last type of area is the
wilds, which is much like the parks but more dangerous. As the maps might have it,
here there are wilde beastes. The terrain is more sudden and the vegetation is left to
find its own way. It’s designed for hunting, for chance-taking, and for training
not-quite-adults. I’d never been in the wilds up to this time, only in the ag and park
areas.
  “Come on, then,” I said.
   We went through the doors, then through what amounted to a short tunnel,
perhaps ten feet long. The transparent gate dilated and we went through. Outside
there were trees and stables, a corral among the trees, and a building that had a wall
from about two feet off the ground to about seven feet, and about three feet higher
an open-gabled roof. This held lockers and showers.
   It was only here on the Third Level that you could appreciate the size of the Ship.
Everywhere else there were walls at every hand, but here your view was all but
unimpeded. It was fully miles to the nearest point where roof above and ground
below met ship-side. The roof was three hundred feet up and it took a sharp eye to
pick out sprinklers and such as individual features.
   Behind us, the shuttle tube rose out of the station and disappeared blackly into the
roof far above. The crosslevel shuttle tube went underground from the station so
that was not visible.
   It was still before two, so the kids who were there already were standing under the
trees by the corral and watching the horses. I recognized Venie Morlock among
them. I wasn’t surprised to see her there since she was only one month older than I
and I had expected that we would wind up in the same Trial group.
   Others were arriving behind us and coming out of the shuttle station. Jimmy and I
moved over to join the others watching the horses. I suppose I might have learned to
ride when I was smaller just as I had learned to swim, but for no good reason in
particular I hadn’t. I wasn’t afraid of horses but I was wary of them. There was
another girl who wasn’t. She was reaching through the fence and teasing one, a red
roan mare.
   A tall, large-built boy near us looked at her and said, “I can’t stand children and
that Debbie is such a child.”
   A moment later there was a metallic toot as somebody blew on a whistle. I looked
at my watch and saw that it was two exactly. There were two men standing on the
single step up to the locker building. One had a whistle. He was young, perhaps
forty-five, and smoothskinned. He was also impatient.
  “Come on,” he said, and beckoned irritatedly. “Come on over here.”
   He was about medium-height and dark-haired, and he had a list in his hand. He
looked like the sort of person who would spend his time with lists of one sort or
another. There are people, you know, who find no satisfaction in living unless they
can plan ahead and then tick off items as they come.
   We gathered around and he rattled his paper. The other man stood there rather
quietly. He was also medium height, but slighter, older, considerably more wrinkled,
and much less formally dressed.
   “Answer when your name is called,” said the younger man, and he began reading
off our names. He started with Allen, Andersson, and Briney, Robert, who was the
large boy who was unenthusiastic about children, and he ended with Wilson, You
and Yung. There were about thirty names.
   “Two missing,” he said to the other when he was done. “Send them a second
notice.”
   Then he turned to us and said, “My name is Fosnight. I’m in charge of
coordinating all Trial and pre-Trial programs, and that includes survival classes.
There are, at present, six classes in training, counting this one, meeting in various
areas of the Third Level. This class is scheduled to meet regularly from now on, here
at Gate 5, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons at 12:30. Third Class is
here on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. If the meeting times conflict with school,
tutorial sessions, or anything else, you’ll have to find a way out. Reschedule,
perhaps— the other, of course, not this— or skip one or the other. That is strictly
up to you to settle. It is strictly up to you whether or not you decide to attend, but I
can guarantee that almost anyone will find his chances of coming back from Trial
alive infinitely improved if he attends Survival Class regularly. Your group is
somewhat smaller than the usual one, so you should do very well. You are also lucky
to have Mr. Marechal here as your instructor— he’s one of our six best chief
instructors.” He smiled at his little joke.
   Mr. Fosnight’s manner was brisk and businesslike, as though he were checking
his mental items off. Now he turned to Marechal and handed him the whistle.
“Whistle,” he said. He handed him the list. “List.” Then he turned back to us
standing in a bunch in front. “Any questions.”
   He’d struck us so hard and fast that we just looked blankly up at him. Nobody
said anything.
    “Good,” he said. “Goodbye.” And he walked off as though the last item on his
list were settled quite satisfactorily, and another tedious but necessary little task were
out of the way.
   Mr. Marechal looked at the whistle in his hand, and then after Fosnight as he
walked to the shuttle station. He didn’t look as though he liked whistles. Then he
stuck the whistle in his pocket. He folded the list and put that away, too. When he
was finished he looked up and looked us over slowly, perhaps taking our measure.
We looked back up at him, taking a good look at the man who was going to have us
in charge for a year and a half. It wasn’t a case of taking his measure, since the
child’s side of an adult-child relationship is pretty ordinarily to assume that the adult
knows what he is about. If he doesn’t and the child finds out, then things go to pot,
but to start with he generally has the benefit of the doubt. I will admit that Mr.
Marechal was not an overwhelming figure at first sight.
   He said, “Well, Mr. Fosnight forgot something he usually says, so I’ll say it for
him if I can remember more or less how it goes. There’s an anthropological name
for Trial. They call it a rite of passage. It’s a formal way of passing from one stage
of your life to another. All societies have them. The important thing to remember is
that it makes being an adult a meaningful sort of thing, because adulthood has been
earned when you come back from Trial. That makes Trial worth concentrating on.”
  He stopped then and looked off to his right. Everybody looked that way. Mr.
Fosnight was coming back toward us. Mr. Marechal looked at him and said
questioningly, “Rites of passage?”
   “Yes.”
   “Never mind. I just finished going over it for you.”
   “Oh,” Mr. Fosnight said. “Thanks, then.” He turned around and went back
toward the shuttle station.
  He was so dogged about the whole thing that the moment he was out of sight,
everybody started laughing. Mr. Marechal let it go on for a moment and then he said,
“That’s enough. I just want to say a couple of things for myself now. Me and the
people who’ll be coming in to show you things are going to be doing our best to get
you through Trial. If you pay attention, you shouldn’t have any trouble. Okay? Now
the first thing I’m going to do is assign you horses and show you the first thing
about riding.”
   Mr. Marechal was a slow-speaking sort of person, and didn’t have a complete
command of grammar, but he did have the sort of personal authority that makes
people listen. Without consulting the list in his pocket, he called off people’s names
and names of horses. I got stuck with something called Nincompoop. That got a
laugh. Jimmy’s horse was Pet— the final t is written but not pronounced since it
comes from the French. Venitia Morlock got a horse named Slats. When Rachel
Yung was assigned her horse, we moved over to the corral, where Mr. Marechal
perched up on the top rail.
   “These horses are yours from here on out,” he said. “Don’t get sentimental about
them. They’re just a way to get from one place to another the same as a heli-pac,
and you’ll be getting practice with both. But you’ll have to take care of both, too,
and that means especially the horse you have. A horse is an animal and that means
he’ll break down easier than a machine if he isn’t taken care of. You damned well
better take care of them.”
  One of the kids raised his hand. “Yes, Herskovitz?”
   Herskovitz was a little surprised to be tagged quite that easily. “If horses are that
lousy, why do we have to go to the trouble of learning how to ride them? That’s
what I want to know.”
   Even more slowly than usual, Mr. Marechal said, “Well, I could give you reasons,
I suppose, but what it all boils down to is that you have to pass a test. The test goes
by certain rules and one of those rules is that you have to be able to ride a horse. But
don’t let it bother you too much, son. You may find that you like horses after a
while.”
   He swung over the fence and landed inside. “Now I’m going to show you the first
thing about riding. The first thing about riding is getting a saddle on your animal.”
   One of the boys said, “Excuse me, but I already know how to ride. Do I have to
stick around for this?”
  Mr. Marechal said, “No, you don’t, Farmer. You can skip anything you want to.
Only one thing, though. Before you walk out on anything you’d best be mighty sure
you know every blessed thing I’m going to show, ’cause if it’s something you
walked out on I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again for you. If you can’t help missing I
might be generous— if I’m in the right mood. If you fall behind of your own doing,
you’ll have to catch up on your own, too.”
   Farmer said that in that case he thought he’d stick around today just to see how
things went.
   Mr. Marechal caught up one of the three horses in the corral, the red roan mare,
and put a bridle on her, showing us what he was doing as he did it. Then he put on
the blanket and the double-cinch saddle. He took them off, and then he showed us
again from the beginning. When he was done, he said, “All right. Now you people
will have to try it. Go collect your tack and lead out your horses.”
   There was a scramble then to find and get acquainted with your horse, locate your
gear, and get both into a position where the second might be strapped onto the first.
Nincompoop turned out to be brown— what they call a chestnut— and not terribly
large. He was more of a pony than a horse, a pony being less than 56 inches high at
the shoulder. It seems to be an arbitrary cutoff point. His size pleased me, since a
larger animal would probably have intimidated me more than this one did. As it was,
I hardly had time to be intimidated, just time to get in line with everybody else, our
animals more or less in a row with gear on the left side. Mr. Marechal stood out in
front and told us what to do.
    The first time went badly. I got everything where I thought it should go, but when
I stood back, the saddle didn’t stay in place. It seemed to be in place for a moment
and I looked up feeling pleased, but when I looked back, it was tipped. It seemed to
be on tightly, but it was tipped.
   I figured I’d better try again. I undid the cinch, the strap that goes under the belly
of the horse to tie the saddle on, straightened the saddle, and restrapped it.
  Mr. Marechal was walking down the line inspecting and offering advice. He got to
me as I was hauling the cinch tight.
   “Let me show you something,” he said. He walked up to Nincompoop, lifted his
knee and rammed him a hard one in the belly. The horse gave a whoof of expelled
air, and he yanked the cinch tight. The horse looked at him reproachfully as he
notched it.
    “This one will swell up on you every time if you let him,” he said. “You’ve got to
let him know you’re sharper than he is.”
  We spent about an hour with saddling and unsaddling before we quit for the day.
On the way home, I asked Jimmy what he thought. We were sharing our shuttle car
with half-a-dozen others from our group.
   “I like Marechal,” he said. “I think he’s going to be okay.”
   One of the girls said, “He doesn’t seem to stand still for any nonsense. I like that.
It means we won’t waste any of our time.”
   The Farmer boy was in our car. He was the one who already knew how to ride.
“My time was wasted,” he said. “He didn’t go over anything I didn’t know already
today. That’s what I call nonsense.”
  “It may be nonsense for you,” Jimmy said, “but most of the rest of us learned
something. If you know everything already, don’t come. Just like he said.”
   The boy shrugged. “Maybe I won’t.”
   On the cross-level shuttle to Geo Quad, I said to Jimmy, “I was a little
disappointed, myself.”
   “With Marechal?”
   “No. With the whole afternoon. I expected something more.”
   “Well, what exactly?”
  I shot him a look. “You always like to pin me down, don’t you?”
  He shrugged. “I just like to know what you mean, or if you mean anything.”
  “Well, Mr. Smarty, what I meant is that it all seemed so businesslike and ordinary.
There’s got to be a better word… undramatic.”
  “Well, they say Sixth Class is likely to be pretty dull. In three months or so when
we’ve got some of the basic stuff down, it should be more exciting.”
   We rode silently for a minute while I thought it over. Then I said, “I don’t think
so. I’ll bet things stay the same whether we’re Sixth Class, Fourth Class or
whatever. It’ll be all the same, businesslike.”
  “What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy asked.
  “Nothing. I just don’t believe in adventure anymore.”
  “When did you decide that?”
  “Just now.”
  “Because today wasn’t exciting. No— ‘dramatic.’ Wasn’t going down to
Grainau an adventure? How about that?”
   “You think being pushed into a big pool of foul tasting water is an adventure?” I
asked scornfully. “Have you ever had an adventure?”
  “I guess not. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
  “Doesn’t it?”
   Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. You must be in
a bad mood. You were talking about bets— I bet if I try I can work up a legitimate,
real adventure.”
  “How?” I challenged.
   He shook his red head doggedly. “All right. I don’t know now. All I’m betting is
that I can find one.”
  “Okay,” I said. “It’s a bet.”
   There is a certain amount of organization to a Ship’s Assembly, as with most
mass gatherings— it takes somebody to be there to see that everything is in order,
that there are chairs, tables, microphones and all that. Mostly this can be just
anybody who gets saddled with the job, but the final decisions devolve on the man
who chairs the Assembly, meaning Daddy. I think, too, that he was interested that
things go smoothly in this first Assembly after he became Ship’s Chairman.
   The night the Assembly was to meet to consider the case of Alicia MacReady,
Daddy finished dinner early and left for the Second Level. Zena Andrus came over
to eat with me that night. I had found that in the right circumstances I could like her.
She had a tendency to whine at times, but that’s not the worst fault in the world. And
she did have courage.
  As we were finishing dinner, but before dessert, there was a signal at the door. It
was Mr. Tubman.
   “You said to be here at six-thirty,” he said apologetically, seeing that we were not
finished as yet.
  “That’s quite all right, Henry,” Daddy said. “I think I’m about finished. You
know where the dessert is, Mia. Clean things up and dispose of the dishes when
you’re finished.”
  “You don’t have to tell me that,” I said.
  “I know,” he said. “It just isn’t so long since I did have to and I still have the
habit.”
   Dessert was a parfait. While we were eating it after Daddy had left, Zena said,
“What is this Assembly thing about, anyway? Mum and Daddy are going but they
didn’t talk about it.”
  I said, “Everybody’s been talking about it. I would have thought you’d know.”
  “Well, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t pay much attention to things like Assemblies
and I bet you never did either before your dad became Ship’s Chairman.”
  Well, I hadn’t, but I hadn’t been completely unaware of them, either. So I
explained what I knew of things to her.
   “It doesn’t seem like very much,” Zena said. “They could always get rid of the
baby. She couldn’t have gotten away with having it, anyway. It seems like a whole
big fuss over not very much at all.”
  “It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.
   Zena shrugged, and went back to her parfait. It was her second. Things always
seemed to be much simpler for her than they were for me.
   “Must you make that noise?” asked Zena, after we had adjourned from the table.
She was sitting on the floor of my bedroom systematically taking one of my dolls
apart. As it happened, this one was meant to be taken apart, carefully of course since
it was old and worn. The doll was originally Russian and had been in the family since
before we’d left Earth. It was wooden and came apart. Inside was a smaller doll
which came apart. Altogether there were a total of twelve dolls nested one inside the
next. It’s the sort of thing you can spend a lot of time with.
   I was sitting cross-legged on my bed and playing on the pennywhistle I had
discovered a couple of months before. I was playing a very simple little tune, mainly
because I couldn’t finger fast enough for anything more complicated. Still, it didn’t
sound half bad to me.
   I said, “ ‘The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord
of sweet sounds, is fit for…’” I shut my eyes trying to remember. “‘… for treasons,
stratagems and something-or-other.”
  “What is that supposed to mean?”
  “It’s a quotation. From Shakespeare.”
  “If you’re talking about me,” Zena said, “I like music well enough.”
  I held up the pennywhistle. “Well, this is music.”
  “You ought to practice it in private until you can play it better.”
   I bounced up, put the pennywhistle away, then hopped over Zena on the floor to
get to the vid. “It’s time for the Assembly anyway.” I turned on the general channel
of the vid.
  Zena gave a sour look. “Do we have to watch that old thing?”
  “Jimmy and I are supposed to,” I said.
  “Is that Jimmy Dentremont?”
  “Yes.”
  “You spend a lot of time with him, don’t you?”
  “We’ve got the same tutor and we’re in the same Survival Class,” I said.
   “Oh,” Zena said. She began stacking the dolls together. “Do you like him? He
always seemed too full of himself to me.”
  “I don’t know,” I said. “He is bright. I guess I can take him or leave him alone.”
  I flopped on the floor and leaned my back against the bed. The vid showed the
Assembly about ready to be called to order.
   “If the Assembly doesn’t turn out to be interesting we can always turn it off,” I
said.
   We watched the Assembly for the next two hours. It seemed that just about
everybody had a firm grasp of the basic questions beforehand. It remained for
spokesmen for both sides to state their cases, for questions to be put from the floor,
for witnesses to be called, more questions to be put, and a final vote. Daddy, as
Chairman, didn’t involve himself in the argument.
   Mr. Tubman put the case for the Ship. Another member of the Council, Mr.
Persson, made the plea for the other side. Witnesses included the Ship’s Eugenist, a
lawyer giving the point of law at stake, Alicia MacReady speaking in her own behalf,
and a number of character witnesses who spoke for her.
    The Council and witnesses sat at a table at the base of the amphitheatre. Every
adult presently aboard Ship had an assigned seat in the circle above and could speak
if he so desired. Potentially the Assembly could have dragged on for hours, but it
didn’t. This was Daddy’s job. He conducted the Assembly, putting witnesses
through their paces briskly, cutting the garrulous off, giving both sides an equal share
of time. As Ship’s Chairman, it was his job to be fair and impartial, and as nearly as
I could see he was, though I did know in this case what his real opinions were. Mr.
Tubman was speaking for him.
   In truth, the MacReady side had no case. All they could do was make a plea for
leniency. Alicia MacReady cried when it was her turn to speak, until Daddy made her
stop.
    Mr. Persson said, “Once we all agree that it was a stupid thing to do, what more
is there to say? Alicia MacReady is a citizen of this Ship. She survived Trial. She has
as much right to live here as anyone else. Granted that she did a foolish thing, it’s a
very simple thing to abort the child. You all watched her crawl for you. There isn’t
any question of this sort of thing happening again. It was a mistake made in a wild
moment and heartily repented of. Can’t we say that this public humiliation is
punishment enough and drop the whole matter?”
    When Mr. Tubman had his chance to speak, he said, more crisply than I was
used to hearing him speak, “If nothing else, there are a few corrections I would like
to make. If what Mr. Persson chooses to call ‘this public humiliation’ is a
punishment, it is a self-inflicted one— discount it. Miss MacReady’s case could
have been settled before the Council. Bringing it before an Assembly was her own
choice. Secondly, her so-called repentance. Repentance when you are found out is
much too easy— discount it. ‘A mistake made in a wild moment’? Hardly. It took
more than a month of deliberate dodging of her APPs for Miss MacReady to
become pregnant. That is hardly a single wild moment— discount it. Corrections
aside, there is something else. There is a matter of basic principle. We are a tiny
precarious island floating in a hostile sea. We have worked out ways of living that
observed exactly allow us to survive and go on living. If they are not observed
exactly, we cannot survive. Alicia MacReady made a choice. She chose to have a
fifth child that the Ship’s Eugenist had not given her permission to have. It was a
choice between the Ship and the baby. The choice made, there are certain inevitable
consequences of which Alicia MacReady was aware when she made her choice.
Would we be fair either to her or ourselves if we didn’t face and help her to face the
consequences? We are not barbarians. We don’t propose to kill either Miss
MacReady or her unborn child. What we do propose is to give her what she has
elected, her baby and not the Ship. I say we should drop her on the nearest Colony
planet. And good luck to her.”
  Which was a nice way of pronouncing a probable death sentence. But then Mr.
Tubman wasn’t wrong— she had asked for it.
  Soon after they held the vote. 7,923 people voted to let her stay. 18,401 voted to
expel her.
   Alicia MacReady fainted, the reaction of an hysteric. Mr. Persson and some of
her friends gathered around. The other people began to file out of the great room,
the business of the evening behind them.
  I got up and switched off the vid. “How would you have voted?” I asked.
   “I don’t know that much about things like this,” Zena said looking up. She’d only
been half paying attention. “They don’t give her anything, a horse or weapons or a
heli-pac or anything, when they put her off on a Colony planet?”
  “I don’t think so.”
  “Well, isn’t that pretty harsh?”
  “It’s like Mr. Tubman said, we’ve got rules that have to be followed. If people
don’t follow the rules they can’t stay here. They were doing her a favor by even
letting the Assembly vote on the question.”
   Zena looked sour and said, “What will your father do if he comes home and finds
that you haven’t thrown out the dinner things?”
  “Oh, heavens,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”
   I’m likely to put off little bits of drudgery, even when they wouldn’t take long to
settle. I had managed to put the dinner remains completely out of mind.
  As I was collecting the dishes and throwing them in the incinerator, Zena, standing
by, said, “Why are you so strong on rules?”
  “What do you mean?”
   “Well, you’re so set on the rules that you won’t allow any mistakes at all. And
that MacReady woman is going to die now.”
   I stopped stacking dishes. I looked at her. “I didn’t even vote. I had nothing to
do with what was decided.”
  “That isn’t the point,” she said, but she didn’t say what the point was.
  Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he
had expected them to, and he said yes.
  “I cleared up the dishes,” I said.
  Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”
  At our next meeting I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the
way it had.
  “I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the
Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”


                                Chapter Nine
                                                                           «^»
It may sound like an anachronism to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did:
that is, July, August and September were “summer,” as an example. This never
struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors
responsible for planetary weather, and one day I really thought about the meaning of
the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their
weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year— well, for
that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we
do it anyway.
   At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine.
(Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name— he has
enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize
that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably
came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”
   He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the
original Ship Lists from the library.”
  I said, “But don’t you think this is interesting?”
  He said, “No.”
  Perhaps stupid is not the word I intended. Perhaps contentious.
   In any case, the summer when I was twelve passed. I think of it as a busy block
with a whole number of items, and I’m not sure in what exact order any of them
happened. I could invent an order, but since none of them is central, I won’t. For
instance, during that summer, I had my first menstrual period— that’s important
insofar as I took it as a sign that I was growing up, but that’s about all you can say
for it. Then there were dancing lessons. You might well wonder what we were doing
with dancing lessons, but they were actually a part of our Survival Class training.
   Mr. Marechal said, “This isn’t meant to be fun and it isn’t meant to be funny. It is
deadly serious. You stumble over your own feet. You don’t know what to do with
your hands. When you are in a position where you have to do the exact right thing in
an instant, deft movement is the most important element. You want your body to
work for you, not against you. Not only, by God, am I going to give you dancing
lessons, but I’m going to start you on needlepoint.”
   We not only got needlepoint, dancing lessons, hand-to-hand combat training, and
weapon instruction, but Mr. Marechal was our tutor in all of them. He showed us
films of people drawing hand-guns and dropping them, of people falling off horses
(I did that a couple of times myself), of people in a blue funk. The films were taken
on an obstacle course where, for instance, if you didn’t watch out, the ground might
suddenly fall out from underneath your feet. There might be a rope to grab, or you
might simply have to land without breaking your ankle. At the end of the summer,
when we moved up from Sixth Class to Fifth, we started going through obstacle
courses ourselves. The primary aim was not to teach us any individual skill, but how
to react smoothly and intelligently in difficult situations. We were shown how to do
individual things, but that wasn’t the primary aim of the instruction.
   All of this adds up to the fact that I had been wrong in thinking it would be simply
businesslike first to last. Survival Class was earnest, it was businesslike, but it was
intelligent and interesting, too. What it was not was an adventure, but since I had my
desire for an adventure settled very shortly it no longer bothered me that Survival
Class was not an adventure.
  Survival Class gave me a whole new set of friends, and they began taking up
enough of my time that I saw less of people like Zena Andrus. I did see Mary
Carpentier once more, but we found that we didn’t have a great deal to say to one
another and we never seemed to call each other again.
   Most important, though, out of the thirty-one of us in the Survival Class, there
drew together a nuclear group of six. This was hardly pure friendship since some of
my best friends were not in it and Venie Morlock was. It was just… the group. We
drew together originally through a non-adventure. At Jimmy’s urging, I took a group
of kids up to the Sixth Level and we spent the day exploring. The six of us who
went were me and Venie and Jimmy, Helen Pak, Riggy Allen and Attila Szabody.
Attila and Helen, and, I guess, Jimmy were my particular friends. Riggy was a good
friend of Attila’s, and Helen and Riggy both saw something in Venie. That was the
way the group hung together, and the trip to the Sixth Level— I guess it was
something of an adventure for some of the others and it was fun for me— provided
another bond. We usually saw each other for an hour or two after each Survival
Class and sometimes on weekends. There were a few others who joined us from
time to time, but they were just comers-and-goers.
   After Survival Class one day, five of us were sitting in the snackery of the
Common Room of Lev Quad on the Fifth Level. By shuttle this wasn’t really far
from Entry Gate 5, and it was the most convenient central point for all of us. A few
changes on the shuttle and we were all home. We didn’t know anybody in Lev Quad
and we couldn’t have found our way around it very well, but still we had our place
here, our regular corner, and after a little while we no longer felt so much like
intruders.
   The missing number was Jimmy. He’d been hurrying off one place and another
during the past week after class, mumbling and chuckling around as though he had
his little business and would be damned if he’d tell it, and in the meantime was
enjoying it thoroughly.
    I was doodling on a piece of paper, working out an idea I had in mind. We were
sitting at the table with food and drink, but not a lot of it. We were mostly taking up
table space and talking. Our regular table was this one, a red-topped affair set in a
corner on the left in the under-fourteen area.
   We were talking of a prospective soccer game to be played on Saturday morning
in Attila’s home quad, Roth Quad on the Fourth Level, if we could raise the
necessary players. I was thinking that I’d certainly come a long way from the time—
not that long ago— when all that it took to page me was a simple call on my
homequad speaker system. I was no longer quite the stick-at-home I’d been then.
   “Will Jimmy play?” Attila asked. He was the biggest amongst us, but a quiet boy
for all that. He generally didn’t say a lot, but would just sit back and then from time
to time come out with some comment that was completely surprising, and all the
more surprising because he wasn’t the person you’d pick as likely to say anything
bright or clever or knowledgeable.
  “Mia can ask him,” Helen said.
   “All right,” I said. “I’ll have him call you. Unless he’s too busy with this
whatever-it-is of his, I think he’ll want to play. He’s a good halfback.” I turned my
attention back to my scribble.
   “What is that you’re doing there?” Riggy asked, and snatched it away. Riggy is
somebody I have to describe as a meatball— he was hardly my favorite person in
the world. He’s one of those people who have no governor, who’ll do the first thing
that pops into their heads whether or not it makes a lick of sense— and then, if
necessary, be heartily sorry afterwards. He wasn’t stupid, or clumsy, or
incompetent— he simply had no sense of proportion at all.
  “And what’s that supposed to be?” he asked, pointing at the paper. Venie and
Helen on his side of the table both looked at it, too.
   After several tries, I had drawn what was reasonably recognizable as a fist seen
palm on, holding a long, clean arrow. I’m no artist and I’d had to keep sneaking
looks at my own hand to get even a moderately accurate picture. The arrow I’d
managed to draw without benefit of a model.
   I made a grab for it, but Riggy held it out of reach. “Uh-uh,” he said, passing it on
to Venie farther down the table. She looked at it with a frown, making sure at the
same time that I wasn’t able to grab it back.
   I shrugged and said, “It’s a picture with a meaning, if you must know. It’s sort of
a pictorial pun.”
  “A rebus?” Attila suggested.
  “I guess it is.”
  “Let me see it,” he said, and took it from Venie.
  “I don’t get it,” Venie said. “An arrow held in a hand.”
  “A fist,” Riggy said. “The hand’s closed.”
  Tiredly I said, “It’s my name. ‘Have arrow’— Havero.”
  “Oh, no,” Venie said. “That’s pretty poor.”
  Helen said, “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think it’s a pretty clever idea.”
  “‘An ill-favoured thing, but mine own,’” I quoted tartly.
  Venie gave me a disgusted look. “You are a show-off, aren’t you? What was that
supposed to be?”
  “Mia’s reading Shakespeare for her tutor,” Helen said. “That’s all. She’s been
memorizing lines.”
   Riggy took the doodle back and gave it another look. “You know, this is a good
idea. I wonder if I could work my name out somehow.”
  We spent some time trying, working on all our names. It didn’t come out terribly
well. By stretching we got “pack,” a little knapsack for Helen— but that wasn’t truly
homonymous. “Szabody” and “Allen” were pretty well unworkable.
   “I’ve got one,” Riggy said, after some moments of concentration during which he
wouldn’t show anybody what he was doing. Triumphantly he held up a sheet with a
series of locks drawn on it. “‘More-lock,’ ” he said. “Get it?”
  We got it, but we didn’t like it. He had covered the whole sheet with his drawings,
which is hardly what you’d call concise.
  I’d been working on the same name myself. I came up with a fair-to-middling
troglodyte.
  “What’s that?” Attila asked.
  “It’s Morlock again.”
 Venie didn’t look pleased, and Riggy immediately challenged, “How do you get
Morlock out of that thing?”
  “It’s from an old novel called The Time Machine. There’s a group of
underground monsters in it called Morlocks.”
  “You’re making that up,” Venie said.
  “I’m not either,” I said. “You can look the book up for yourself. I read it when I
was in Alfing, so all you have to do is call for the facsimile.”
  Venie looked at the drawing again. Then she said, “All right, I’ll look it up. I may
even use it.”
  I almost liked her for saying that, since I hadn’t been very kind in bringing the
subject up. If my name had been Morlock, I might have used the troglodyte idea
myself, but I hadn’t really expected Venie to stomach the idea. It took more… not
quite objectivity— but detachment from herself— than I thought she had.
  Just then Attila said, “Here comes Jim.”
   Jimmy Dentremont came between the tables, snaked up a free chair from the next
table over and plunked it down beside me.
  “Hi,” he said.
   “Where have you been?” Helen asked for all of us. Helen is a very striking girl.
She has blonde hair and oriental eyes— eyes with an epicanthic fold— and it’s a
wild combination.
  Jimmy just shrugged and pointed at our various little doodles. “What’s all this?”
  We explained it to him.
   “Oh,” be said. “That’s easy. I can get one for me with no trouble.” He picked up
a pencil and sketched two mountains, and then put a little stick figure man between
them.
  I looked blankly at him and so did the others.
  “My name means ‘between mountains,’ ” he explained.
  “It does?” Riggy asked.
  “In French.”
  “I didn’t know you knew French,” I said.
  “I don’t. I just looked my name up because I knew it was originally French.”
  “How about that?” Attila said. “I wonder if my name means something in
Hungarian.”
  Jimmy cleared his throat, looked around at us, and then said to me, “Mia, do you
remember our bet about my finding an adventure?”
  “Yes.”
  “Well, I’ve found one. That’s what I’ve been working on the past few days.”
  Helen immediately asked for an explanation of what we were talking about, and I
had to wait to ask Jimmy just what it was that I was in for until he had finished
explaining.
  “If this was a bet, what were the stakes involved?” Riggy asked.
   Jimmy looked at me questioningly. Then he said, “I don’t think we settled that. I
assumed it was that if I found an adventure, Mia would have to go along.”
  Everybody looked at me, and I said, “All right. I guess so.”
  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “This is it: we’re going to go outside the Ship. On the
outside of the Ship.”
  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Helen asked.
  “It’s an adventure,” Jimmy said. “Adventures are supposed to have an element of
danger, be fraught with peril and all that.”
  “Is it dangerous outside the Ship?” I asked.
   “I don’t know,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t know what it’s like out there. I
couldn’t find out. I did try. Finding out should be part of the fun. Besides, even if
that’s easy, there are some hard parts. We’ve got to have suits to go outside, and
we’ve got to get ourselves outside. Neither of those will be easy.”
  “I want to go, too,” Riggy said.
   Jimmy shook his head. “This is just Mia and me. We are going to need help,
though, and if you want to help us you’re welcome.”
  The kids looked at each other around the table, and then they all nodded. We
were a group, after all, and this was just too good to miss.
   The six of us walked in a body through a corridor on the First Level. Jimmy
walked a step or two ahead of us, leading the way. There is something to being a
part of a group busy on purposes of its own, something exciting. Even if it is
melodramatic, even if it is 90% hokum, it is fun. I was enjoying myself, and so were
the others. I could hardly restrain myself from practicing surreptitious glances behind
us, simply because they seemed in keeping with the part we were playing.
  Jimmy turned half around and pointed ahead and to the left. “It’s around here.”
  There was a little foyer there a couple of feet deep, and then a blank black door,
completely featureless. In our world that is unusual— people ordinarily lavish
considerable care in making their surroundings lively and personal. Consequently the
Ship is quite a colorful place to live in. A black door like this with neither design nor
decoration was obviously meant to say “Stay Out” to anybody who came by.
  “The air lock to the outside is in the room behind the door there,” Jimmy said.
   The door had no obvious button, knob, slide, latch or handle, only a single hole
for an electronic key— this sort of key when inserted would emit an irregular signal
of an established frequency and the door would open.
   Attila and Jimmy were the two of us that knew something about electronics and
they looked the door over carefully together.
  After a moment Attila said, “It’s just a token lock.”
   “What’s that?” I asked. We were standing in a halfcircle around the two boys and
the door.
   He said, “This lock is just to keep the door closed and to let people know the
door is supposed to be closed, and that’s about all. I’ll have to work on it a couple
of times and I can get through.”
  Jimmy said, “Can you be through by next Saturday— a week from tomorrow?”
  “Oh, sure.”
  “Let’s plan to go then. Helen? You work with Attila. You be his lookout and
make sure he doesn’t get caught fooling around here and ruin everything.”
   Then he turned to the other three of us. “All right, let’s go see about getting the
suits.”
  Helen said, “But can’t I go? I don’t want to miss out.”
   It was interesting— of the six of us, Jimmy was the next-to-smallest and yet he
dominated the group when he wanted to. There is something to the idea of natural
leadership ability.
  Jimmy said, “We have to have somebody be lookout. Besides, you’ll be here
when we go outside. The only thing you’re going to miss is swiping the suits.”
   To get to Salvage, our next stop, we cut through Engineers. That saved us a long
trip around. The four of us must have made considerable noise because as we were
passing down the main hall of offices, an elderly woman popped out of one of them
behind us.
  “Hold on there!” she said.
   We turned around. She was elderly— short, squarely built, white-haired and
obviously well over a hundred, perhaps even as old as Mr. Mbele. She also looked
thoroughly sour.
   “Well, what is it you’re doing here, making all this noise? Perhaps you don’t
realize it, but there is important work being done here.”
   Uneasily Jimmy said that we were just passing through on our way to Salvage and
that we meant no harm.
   “This is not a public highway,” she said. “If you have no business in Engineers,
you shouldn’t be here. You children have no sense of fitness. Why are you going to
Salvage?”
  Jimmy and I were standing just behind Venie and Riggy, and her question was
addressed to Jimmy.
  “It’s a school assignment,” Jimmy said.
  “That’s right,” I chimed in.
  Her glance shifted to the other two of us. “What about you?”
  Instead of saying the obvious thing, Riggy said, “We’re with them.”
   “All right,” the old lady snapped. “You first two go on, but don’t come through
here again. The other two of you go on home.”
   Venie and Riggy looked helplessly at us, but then they turned and went reluctantly
the other way. The old lady really had no right to chase them out, but she was so
fierce and unarguable-with that we just couldn’t say a thing. Jimmy and I scooted on
our way before she could add anything more, and she watched until both sets of us
had definitely done as she said. Some people get a feeling of power from being
unpleasant.
   Most of all, Salvage smelled interesting. Salvage and Repair are really little
enclaves almost surrounded by the much larger Engineers. There are offices and
large machines and large projects a-building in Engineers. Salvage and Repair are just
the tail end of the dog, without the personnel, resources or neatness of Engineers.
Salvage was a crowded room, full of aisles and racks and benches and tables all in a
pleasing state of disarray. It looked like the sort of place that you could poke around
in for weeks or even months and always turn up something new and interesting. And
hanging over it all was the most intriguing and unidentifiable odor I’d come upon.
The smell alone was enough to make you want to spend your spare time here.
   We peeked cautiously in. There were a couple of technicians working and moving
around.
   “Come on,” Jimmy said. “I know they have suits here somewhere, probably
locked away. We’ll have to poke around.”
    We looked around as inconspicuously as possible, Jimmy taking one aisle and me
taking the next. I was lost in a pile of broken toys when Jimmy grabbed at my elbow.
I jumped.
   “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve found them. They’re two rows over and they’re not
locked away or anything. They’re just in a rack.”
   “How do you know they’re safe to use?” I said. I nudged a broken doll with my
toe. “If they’re like that, we might as well forget it.”
   “These aren’t in for repair,” Jimmy said. “These are the ones they’d use
themselves if they had to go outside. They’ve got seals on from after the last time
they were used. The important thing is how we’re going to sneak them out. Oh-oh,
watch out.”
  I turned to look. Just down the aisle a pleasant looking technician was coming
toward us. He was a short youngish man with mouse-colored hair.
  “Well, what can I do for you kids?” he asked.
  “I’m Mia Havero,” I said. “This is Jimmy Dentremont.”
  “Hello,” he said. “My name is Mitchell.” And waited with eyebrows raised.
   I reached into my pocket and took out a couple of folded sheets of paper.
Uncertainly I said, “I don’t know if you can help us. Maybe this isn’t the right
place.”
  Jimmy stayed silent, watching my lead.
  Mr. Mitchell said, “Well, we’ll see. What is it that you’ve got?”
  I showed him the sketches, Jimmy’s and mine, that I’d taken from the table in Lev
Quad, and explained how our names were involved.
   “These are just rough,” I said. “What we wanted to do was draw them a little
better and then work up pins to wear with these as designs.”
   “Hmm,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Yes. I don’t see why not. It may not fall strictly in
our province, but it seems a worthwhile idea. I think I can help you. How does
ceramic jewelry sound?”
  “Great,” Jimmy said. “Could we come down on a Saturday morning?”
   Mr. Mitchell said, “There’s usually only one technician on duty on Saturdays, but
I suppose…
   I said, “Could we make it a week from tomorrow? We have this big soccer game
in the quad tomorrow and we really ought to be there.”
  “Oh, sure,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’ll even arrange to nave the duty a week from
tomorrow and help you myself.”
  After we had thanked him and walked away, Jimmy said, “You certainly can lie.
How did you think that one up?
  “Which?”
  “About the soccer game.”
   “I didn’t make that up,” I said. “I was supposed to tell you. The kids want to
play soccer tomorrow.”
  “Oh,” Jimmy said. “Maybe you aren’t such a good liar, then.”


                                Chapter Ten
                                                                          «^»
The score in the soccer game in Roth Quad was 5 to 3. Attila and Venie and I were
on the losing side.
   During the next week we set our plans. With some practice, Attila had that door
so well trained that it would practically pop open when he told it to, at least
according to Helen. Au looked pleased and didn’t deny it. We had borrowing the
suits set up pretty well, too. Jimmy sketched the location of the suits for Venie and
Riggy.
  “There’ll be just one technician working on Saturday,” Jimmy said, “and he’ll be
busy helping Mia and me. All you two have to do is sneak easy. As soon as we can,
we’ll join you in the air lock room.”
   I had some spare time and Jimmy didn’t, so I took Venie and Riggy down to
Salvage for a quick scout around. Mr. Mitchell was in the back, but I made sure we
didn’t attract his attention. We were in, I pointed to the suits, and we were out again
in no more than twenty seconds. On our way back, though, the same old woman
stopped us in Engineers and lectured us again. She had her desk placed so that she
could see everybody who passed in the hall— and, I guess, come out to exterminate
anyone who she thought had no business being there. Her name, displayed on her
desk, was Keithley. She more than awed me. She scared me. As soon as she turned
away, we three scooted.
  “You’d better not come this way when you have the suits,” I said. “Think what
would happen if she caught you.”
  Riggy paled and shook his head.
   “She shouldn’t have stopped us,” Venie said. “We weren’t making any noise this
time.” She agreed to make a detour when they had the suits, however.
  Things aren’t always fair, I guess.
   Actually, the old lady wasn’t the only thing I was afraid of. I didn’t really like the
idea of going outside the Ship, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. The
Ship goes faster than the speed of light (the old Einstein barrier) by becoming
discontinuous (the Kaufmann-Chambers Discontinuity Equations). 1 know the
thought of standing on the outside of the Ship and looking at the inside of nothing
excited Jimmy, but it did not excite me. It seems to be my nature to have second
thoughts, and they came to me all through the week. Since it was far too late to back
out without looking foolish, I didn’t tell any of the others, but I began to regret ever
having mentioned the word adventure.
   Perhaps the answer is that if you’re going to do something impulsive, you should
do it the way Riggy does. Act while the impulse is clear and fresh and don’t allow
any time for second thought.
   “Who won that soccer game of yours?” Mr. Mitchell said as he led the way
through the maze of unrepaired, half-repaired, and repaired whatnot in Salvage.
   “Jimmy’s side did,” I said. “Mine lost. We really appreciate your helping us like
this.”
   “Oh, it’s nothing at all,” he said. “Here we are. This is the kiln where we bake the
finished pieces. Copper— that’s for the base. Then an enamel and a surface painting
on that. We can try it a couple of times until it comes out right.”
   He pointed at each item and, in fact, seemed more than pleased to help us. I think
part of it was the chance to help out eager kiddies, partly he liked me because I was
a cute little girl, and part was the sheer joy of operating the bake oven and making the
jewelry. The pins were just an excuse for me, though I did find the idea of making
them intriguing and the process interesting. I am not a tinkerer, however. Jimmy and
Mr. Mitchell both were. They belonged to the
let’s-putter-around-and-see-what-happens school and they got on very well together.
   We started by picking the copper backing, refining our sketches, and planning the
colors we wanted to use. Gradually, I became relegated to the position of observer
while Jimmy took over the planning and execution of the jewelry with Mr. Mitchell
serving as over-his-shoulder adviser. That was after the first try, particularly mine,
turned out badly.
    The first I ever saw Jimmy Dentremont he was tinkering, or if he wasn’t at least
that’s the way I remember it. He was good at it, too, and that combined with
enthusiasm, mild mental myopia, and desire to dominate sometimes carried him
away. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten elbowed to the side by him. I didn’t care for
it particularly, either. It was one of the things that made me wonder, our necessary
association aside, if I really liked Jimmy.
   It wasn’t really an important enough thing to get more than slightly irritated about
today, since we had larger goals in mind, but I did resent mildly being put in a
position where I had to work just to see enough over Jimmy’s other shoulder to
know what was going on. But, at least, having been put in the role of an observer, I
did make an effort to observe and I saw more than either Jimmy or Mr. Mitchell.
    When our second tries were in the oven, I poked Jimmy and said, “Mr. Mitchell,
it’s about lunch time.”
   “Hmm?” Jimmy said, turning his attention from the oven to me. It was actually
something on the early side for lunch, as Jimmy was perceptive enough to be aware.
In his concentration on the job of the moment, our larger purposes had escaped him.
I gave him another prod to restore his memory.
  I said, “We can go and eat and then come back to see how the pins turned out.”
  Jimmy had the good sense to nod.
  Mr. Mitchell seemed a little bewildered, mostly I think because he and Jimmy had
been in rapport, working together to do the job, and now, all of a sudden, Jimmy
was just dropping things and dashing off. But he said, “Oh. All right. Sure.”
   When we were in the hall on beyond, Jimmy said, “What I said last week about
lies— I was wrong. Boy, did that sound weak: ‘Have to go to lunch.’”
   “Well, I didn’t notice you thinking up anything better,” I said, quite tartly. I was
walking determinedly enough that before Jimmy saw how fast I was going, I was a
good bit ahead and he had to push to catch up. It’s my
I-mean-business-and-I’m-more-than-just-an-ounce-irked pace.
  “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.”
   I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”
   Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were
on the First Level, which was “down” as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal
orientation, we had to go further “down” to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder,
which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.
   “Go ahead,” he said.
   I grabbed the ladder and began to climb down. Then I remembered— two other
ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was.
Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I
suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was
much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of
the Ship cut out and normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took
over. “Down” in the ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing
from one to the other. So now I was pointed head down, but my feet were outside
the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I
stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around.
Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and
pinpoints of a black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it
and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that
no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but
there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie,
washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as
though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground
for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm real world I
was used to, but effectively in another dimension.
  Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck
up out of the hole beside me as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the
edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.
   Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon.
On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign— the joke, I suspect,
of somebody long dead— that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE
GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable
age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some
combination.
  We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”
   Beyond the pylon, in the distance, were a long row of giant tubes projecting
above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could
not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Shin’s surface the distance
to the horizon was not great.
  “Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout
bay.”
  “Yes, I guess,” Jimmy said.
   The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t
look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.
  “I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well
yourself.”
   “It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick
to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit
was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have
surprised us by now?”
   Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one
of them to leave us wondering.
  “Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”
  “What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”
   There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy was hiding it would be
no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.
  Then our questions were answered for us.
  Jimmy said, “What was that?”
   “What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time— a horrible retching
sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of
this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight
to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.
  “Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.
  “I don’t see him,” I said.
   Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t
recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In
the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance, perhaps forty feet or more and
then down. He landed lightly. But then he said, “I couldn’t see him at all. I couldn’t
see a thing. Mia, go out about one hundred or a hundred and fifty feet toward the
middle one of those big tubes and look for Riggy. I’ll go in the other direction. We’ll
both make a half-circle clockwise.”
   I stumbled away over the rocks toward the scout bay tubes, bouncing unevenly,
slipping a couple of times, and not helped at all by the sound of Riggy and his
vomiturition. I wanted to turn him off, but I didn’t because then I couldn’t hear
Jimmy. When I was about the right distance from the pylon, I started making my
half-circle.
  Then Jimmy said, “Are you ready, Mia?”
  “I’ve already started,” I said.
  “Riggy,” Jimmy said. “If you don’t want to be left out here, you’d better get to
your feet and do your best to be found.”
   What I wanted most was to shut my eyes against the silver, just sit down and try
to ease my spinning head (my eyes were beginning to ache and my ears to ring) and
concentrate on quelling the nausea I felt. It reminded me of my sailing experience,
but this was much worse. It was all I could do to keep walking and my feet were not
going where I wanted them to. I didn’t go exactly in a half-circle, either. I tried to
check on my position, to look for Riggy, and just to keep going, and I wasn’t doing
very well at any of them. I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one
that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his
sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a puddled heap and puke. It would
probably destroy the concept of heroics for all time.
   As light as the gravity was here, I had some trouble with my traction. In jumping
from one rock to another, my foot slipped, my feet tangled, and then there wasn’t a
rock where I thought there was, and I took a header. Under normal gravity and
without the protection of a suit, I would probably have been pretty badly hurt. As it
was, I just fell. Unless you did some quiet practice first, without the distraction of
this unsettling dizziness, I doubted the tremendous bounds that would be possible
out here would be worth making. I lay there, fetched up against a rock that
resembled nothing so much as a particularly hideous sculpture my mother once
made— a distorted bust of old Lemuel Carpentier himself. The only thing that was in
proper proportion was his nose, and that was his worst feature. He hadn’t been
pleased. Lying still, my head didn’t clear, so I forced myself to stand up again.
   Then I saw Riggy. He was on his knees, if not on his feet. He was hidden
completely from the pylon by a tent-like conglomeration of rocks which had pitched
together to form a sheltered area. He was still retching.
  I said to Jimmy, “I’ve found him.” Then, because it didn’t matter anymore and I
wanted to save my stomach if I could, I shut off my receive line.
   I hardly looked at Riggy. I didn’t want to. I got him on his feet and then found
that if I was careful about where I put my own feet as I walked, I could carry him. I
kept my mind on reaching the pylon and then Jimmy was beside us and helping me.
   We set Riggy down by the lock and Jimmy pushed the lock controls on the pylon
so that we could make our way inside.
  I said, “Go on through. I’ll push him inside to you.”
   Jimmy went ahead. He went head first down the hole and then was gone. I waited
a minute and then I fed Riggy down the hole, too. I held him by the ankles. For a
moment there was a feeling exactly like that feeling of invisible force when you push
the similar poles of two magnets together and Riggy was neither here nor there, but
then Jimmy had him and pulled him through. I went through after.
   When we were in the lock, Jimmy fed the air in. When the air was all in, the door
to the lock room opened. By that time I had the headpiece of my suit off. Just in
time, too. When the door opened, I took two steps forward and then threw up. It
was, in a way, a considerable relief.
  Jimmy and I had been outside for twenty minutes, Riggy for forty. We recovered
our equilibrium in a bare few minutes, but Riggy could do nothing but sit and look
miserable and hold his head.
   When I threw up, Venie looked down at it and then up at me. “You’re going to
have to clean that up,” she said. “I’m not.” Apparently she felt she’d had enough of
the dirty work on this little adventure. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t have the
strength. All I did was just sit down and close my eyes and give blessings that I was
back in the real world again, even including Venie.
   Jimmy and Riggy and I just sat around and the other three threw questions at us.
Jimmy told them how it was.
  Riggy said weakly, “If anybody wants to go, I’ll give them this suit.”
  “It’s hardly in shape for anybody to wear,” Helen said, and that was true. For all
that he had stopped being racked by heaves, Riggy and the inside of his suit were in
impossible shape.
  Jimmy said, “We’d best get these things cleaned up and returned.”
   We got Riggy out of his suit and Venie was delegated to see that he got home.
Helen and Att took Riggy’s suit off to clean it up, and Jimmy and I cleaned up the
lock room. I don’t know how Jimmy was able to keep his stomach from first to last,
but he did. His iron constitution, I guess.
   When everything was cleaned up, we left Att and Helen to close the lock room
and go home. I had never realized before that adventures took so much doing, so
much preparation and so much cleaning up afterward. That’s something you don’t
see in stories. Who buys the food and cooks it, washes the dishes, minds the baby,
rubs down the horses, swabs out the guns, buries the bodies, mends the clothes, ties
that rope in place so the hero can conveniently find it there to swing from, blows
fanfares, polishes medals, and dies beautifully, all so that the hero can be a hero?
Who finances him? I’m not saying I don’t believe in heroes— I’m just saying that
they are either parasites or they spend the bulk of their time in making their little
adventures possible, not in enjoying them.
   Cleaning up after ourselves coupled with the lefthanded direction everything had
gone took the sparkle out of us. Jimmy and I just tossed the suits over our arms and
said goodbye to Helen and Att and went off toward Salvage. Things had gone so
unswimmingly that I suppose I should have expected that they would continue that
way. On our way, we ran into George Fuhonin. It was again a case of coming
around a corner and not being able to avoid someone, though in this case we didn’t
stumble over him. We simply turned the corner and found him close enough that we
couldn’t ditch the suits or manage to go unseen.
  “Hi, Mia,” he said from down the hall.
  “Hello,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”
   Jimmy looked up at the giant so uncertainly that I said, “It’s George Fuhonin. He
pilots a scoutship— for my dad sometimes,” in an undertone.
  “Oh,” Jimmy said.
   “I was looking for you, I think,” George said as he came up. “I’m on constable
call today and I had a complaint from a Mrs. Keithley in Engineers about two young
cubs, a red-headed boy with ears that stick out—and I take it that’s you”— pointing
at Jimmy— “and a black-haired little girl with bad manners. I’m not even making a
guess as to who that is,” he said, looking meaningfully at me. “So perhaps we’d
better go where we can talk, and while you’re about it, you might explain what
you’re doing with those suits.”
  “We were returning them,” I said.
  George looked at us quizzically.
  The aftermath I don’t care to go into detail about. Mr. Mitchell was quite
genuinely hurt to think he had been used. I could tell that he was hurt when he
handed each of us our pins, both of which turned out very nicely indeed.
   That was at a meeting in Daddy’s office with Daddy, Mr. Mitchell, Miss
Brancusik who was Jimmy’s dorm mother, and Mr. Mbele. They sat on one side of
the room and Jimmy and I sat on the other. Mrs. Keithley wasn’t there, thank
Heaven. The meeting was uncomfortable enough without her, too.
   She entered the meeting— we were told to avoid her strictly from now on. I could
see that Mr. Mitchell had been hurt, but I didn’t really understand why. It was
spelled out for us. I had been looking at it from my point of view, that he was in our
way and might have stopped us if we had just tried to ask for the suits. I hadn’t seen
things from his angle at all. That we had used him the way you use a handkerchief.
I’ve always thought more in terms of things than of people, and I’m sometimes slow
to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. When I did, I wasn’t happy about what I’d
done— which I think was Daddy’s intention.
   They didn’t question us about who used the third suit, but they did point out how
stupid and dangerous it had been for us to go outside.
   “I suppose I ought to be pleased by your initiative,” Daddy said, “but what I
think about is the permanent damage to your sense of balance that might well have
resulted if you two hadn’t come back inside in time. You might never have been able
to move again without suffering vertigo.”
  The thought alone was enough to make me queasy.
   Daddy finished by settling a punishment of not being able to go anywhere for a
month. For a month, after class with Mr. Mbele or Survival Class, I had to come
straight home and stay there. Miss Brancusik then and there meted out the same
restriction to Jimmy.
   In some ways, that was the hardest month I ever spent, cooped up in the
apartment and not able to go anywhere. Sitting at home when other people were free
to come and go, free to play soccer, to go folk dancing at night, or to sit around the
Common Room while Jimmy and I had to go check in. In other ways, it wasn’t
entirely a loss. For one thing, it gave me time to think about my character
deficiencies. I didn’t think of them in exactly those terms, but I did determine not to
be any more stupid than was absolutely necessary, which is much the same thing.
Also, since we were both stuck in our own homes, Jimmy and I did quite a lot of
talking and I got to know him better.
   The first thing we did when our month was over was to go to Salvage, detouring
around Mrs. Keithley, and apologize to Mr. Mitchell. It was one of the hardest things
I’ve ever had to do. I never wore my pin until I was back on good terms with him.
Then it was all right.


                              Chapter Eleven
                                                                           «^»
We received our automatic promotions from Sixth Class to Fifth in the fall when
First Class went off on Trial and another group of younger kids began training.
Through the fall, as we approached the end of our first six months of training, we
one-by-one turned thirteen. Not only was I the smallest one in the class— not that I
minded, since being cute little black-haired Mia Havero never hurt anything— but my
birthday was last. It came, as always, on Saturday, November 29. One of the
advantages of a permanent calendar is that it gives you something to count on.
   On my birthday, Mother made a special trip to see us— well, she spent the day
with Daddy. She presented me with one of her sculptures and I thanked her politely.
She didn’t like being thanked, for some reason— and I assure you that I was nice—
and left the room.
    Daddy, who isn’t always as single-minded or as busy as you might think, had
done something that I would never have thought of. He’d called the library and they
made a search of all their recordings and sent him a fair copy of no less than five
pennywhistle records. I once, believe it or not, went through a stage of thinking the
Andrew Johnson books were all mine and nobody else knew about them, and it was
something of a shock to learn that they did. The pennywhistle records that Daddy
gave me didn’t produce quite the same feeling of losing something private, but I
would never have dreamed that anyone would ever have recorded pennywhistle
music. I thanked Daddy and kissed his cheek. I had never been able to be
demonstrative when I was younger, but since we had moved to Geo Quad somehow
it came easier, like a lot of things.
     The biggest surprise of my birthday was Jimmy D. He asked me to go to the
theatre with him. I think he was a little frightened when he did and that surprised me.
I’d always thought that he saw me as, at best, a brother-in-arms, and not as a girl at
all.
   The play was put on in the amphitheatre where they hold Ship’s Assembly and we
actually went to it instead of watching it on the vid. It was Richard B. Sheridan’s
School for Scandal and except that I got a little sweaty in the palms of my hands,
something that had never happened at home and that I can only attribute to my being
excited, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
   I was excited all evening, too. When we got home, Jimmy took my hand and
touched the palm with his finger.
  “Your hand is sweaty,” he said.
  I looked up at him and I nodded.
  He said, “So is mine,” and he showed me, and it was.
   Jimmy kissed me then. In spite of what they say, I was a little surprised. I had no
idea that he wanted to, though I’d been hoping he would. It shows you what secret
passions you can arouse. It was the first time anybody had ever kissed me like that
and it made my heart pound and my hands sweat even more. Whatever I’ve
forgotten, I’ve remembered that birthday.
  It was almost as though Jimmy and I had invested something of ourselves
because after that we had an unspoken understanding. Instead of carping at each
other all the time, we only fought when we were mad. You can’t squabble in public
with somebody you sometimes kiss privately, or at least I found I couldn’t. Of
course I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t want them to think I was changing.
   Since I was now thirteen, Trial was less than a year away, but somehow I wasn’t
quite as awed by the thought as I once had been. It no longer seemed as deadly a
thing as it once had— though I did know that far from everyone returned. Survival
Class gave me an amazing amount of confidence. For one thing, it made what we
had to face more of a known quantity, and the unknown, unnameable,
might-be-anything is always more frightening than the known. Trial was beginning to
look more and more like thirty days amongst the Mudeaters— soonest begun,
soonest done— and not much more, though there were some moments when I was
surer of this than others. The moments when I wasn’t quite so sure that Trial would
be a waltz usually came after one of the afternoons we spent watching various
white-fanged this-and-thats come charging efficiently across the projection screen to
slice down some galumping creature three times their size, wham! But Survival Class
also taught us to deal with completely strange things. Many didn’t seem to have very
much to do with Trial, either. Dancing, needlepoint, parachuting. The thing is that
once you’ve discovered that you can do a lot of strange and demanding things, and
sometimes even do them well, then coping with the unknown doesn’t seem quite as
hard. When they ask you to raise a log cabin, you don’t object that you never expect
the opportunity to come up during Trial. You do it. You learn that you can do it.
And you even learn one or two things that might come in handy.
   In December, forty-two kids who were exactly a year older than we were, were
scattered across the Western Hemisphere of New Dalmatia. They were dropped one
at a time with horses and packs and no clear idea of where they were or what planet
they were on, then got waved goodbye to. Also in December, about one week later,
thirty-one of us kids went on a three-day field trip with Mr. Marechal and an assistant
named Pizarro, also to New Dalmatia. The differences, of course, were that we knew
where we were going, what we would find there, how long we were going to stay,
and a few other nonessentials like that.
   Four horses were taken, large draft animals. All of us kids came down to the
scout bay with good shoes on our feet, heavy clothing, and back packs. We’d been
issued these when we started Survival Class. I’d outgrown my shoes, however, and
been issued new pairs, and I was almost ready to ask for a larger set of clothes. As
we went on board, I saw Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal counting us off. They
weren’t too obvious about it because there was that set idea of the voluntary nature
of Survival Class and they make a point of not checking up. Still, they wanted to
know how many they were taking— somebody would be bound to say something if
they came back a half-dozen short.
   Mr. Pizarro was our pilot. When everybody was aboard— everybody meaning all
thirty-one of us, nobody missing; I happen to know that Robert Briney got out of
bed with a cracked rib (his horse kicked him) to come along— they raised the ramp
and took off. There was some nervous talking and joke telling. Mr. Marechal was
even tolerant enough not to tell everybody to be quiet.
   I picked a chair against the partition that separated the walk-around from the
bull-pen where we were sitting. I’ve never been at my best in groups like that—
where there are only a few people that I know well I talk, but where there are crowds
I fade into the background. Besides, I had something to do. Att and Jimmy did
come over, though.
  “What are you writing?” Att asked.
  I put down my notebook. “Ethics notes,” I said. “I’m organizing my ideas for a
paper Jimmy and I have to do for Mr. Mbele.”
  Jimmy asked, “How are you doing it?”
  I took his hand and ran a finger across the back of it. “I’m not asking you that.
You’ll see when I’m done.”
  Big Att sat down then and said, “What sort of thing does it have to be?”
   Jimmy mussed my hair lightly and said, “No one particular thing. It has to be on
the subject of ethics.”
  I ducked my head away from Jimmy’s hand and said, “You seem nervous, Att.”
  “A little, I guess,” he said. “I’ve never been down on a planet. I don’t see how
you can be so calm and just sit here and write.”
  “Scribble,” Jimmy said.
  “It’s not so new for me,” I said. “I’ve been down before.”
  “Her dad takes her when he goes,” Jimmy said.
   After a few more minutes, Jimmy and Att broke out a pocket chess set and began
to play and I turned back to my notes. I finished off utilitarianism before we landed.
   Ethics is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with conduct, questions of
good and evil, right and wrong. Almost every ethical system— and there are a great
many of them, because even people who supposedly belong to the same school
don’t agree a good share of the time and have to be considered separately— can be
looked at as a description and as a prescription. Is this what people actually do? Is
this what people ought to do?
   Skipping the history and development of utilitarianism, the most popular
expression of the doctrine is “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which
makes it sound like its relative, the economic philosophy communism which, in a
sense, is what we live with in the Ship. The common expression of utilitarian good is
“the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.”
   Speaking descriptively, utilitarianism doesn’t hold true, though the utilitarian
claims that it does. People do act self-destructively at times— they know the
pleasureful and choose the painful instead. The only way that what people do and
what utilitarianism says they do can be matched is by distorting the ordinary
meanings of the words “pleasure” and “pain.” Besides, notions of what is
pleasurable are subject to training and manipulation. The standard is too shifting to
be a good one.
   I don’t like utilitarianism as a prescription, either. Treating pleasure and pain as
quantities by which good can be measured seems very mechanical, and people
become just another factor to adjust in the equation. Pragmatically, it seems to make
sense to say One hundred lives saved at the cost of one?— go ahead! The
utilitarian would say it every time— he would have to say it. But who gave him the
right to say it? What if the one doesn’t have any choice in the matter, but is blindly
sacrificed for, say, one hundred Mudeaters whose very existence he is unaware of?
Say the choice was between Daddy or Jimmy and a hundred Mudeaters. I
wouldn’t make a utilitarian choice and I don’t think I could be easily convinced
that the answer should be made by use of the number of pounds of human flesh
involved. People are not objects.
   We set down in a great nest of trees in bright morning sunshine. The air was clear
and brisk. The season was early summer and things were in bloom. The gravity was
enough less than normal that it was noticeable, but not enough less to cause
discomfort. We landed in a valley by a quiet river. Our side of the river was gentle
with great trees rising from a springy floor, but the other side of the river was a
sixty-foot bluff, rough-edged, marked by protrusions of rock, ledges and occasional
bits of greenery.
   I grabbed up my pack by the straps, slung it over my shoulder and went trooping
outside with everybody else, down the ramp and into the sun and the cool air. In my
pack were a change of clothes, a change of shoes, manual toothbrush, hairbrush,
bedroll, and some odds and ends. We had bubble tents, but we had been told not to
bring them. I had a heavy shirt and a light shirt underneath, and since the pocket in
the outer shirt was small and the shirt was beginning to be tight through the shoulders
and across the breast, I dropped my notebook down my shirt front. It would stay as
long as I stayed buttoned and tucked. I squinted as I came into the sun.
   The trees stretched serenely upwards as though nothing could ever ruffle their
composure, the river moved silently past and then curved away, and the light made
patches of light and dark as it cut through the trees, alleys in which dust motes could
be seen swimming. The chatter of a bird was the only counterpoint to the noise we
made. Most of the kids had never been on a planet before and this was a gentle,
pleasant introduction. The wind blew lightly, toying with my hair and sleeve, and
died again. The horses were led out after us along with harnesses, ropes and chains.
  Mr. Marechal called for us to gather around.
  “The first fifteen of you will be with Mr. Pizarro,” he said. “That’s through
Mathur. From Morlock on you’ll be with me. We’re going to build cabins today,
and tomorrow, too. If it takes that long. Mr. Pizarro thinks that his group can build a
cabin faster than my group can. We’re going to see about that.”
    That was an obvious sort of appeal, but it sounded like fun, so I didn’t even
giggle. Jimmy, Riggy, Robert Briney, that Farmer boy and the Herskovitz boy were
all in my group. Venie and Helen and Att were in Mr. Marechal’s group. Jimmy
yanked at my sleeve and we followed Mr. Pizarro away from Mr. Marechal to a
place of our own. He sat down on a rock and motioned us to take places on the
springy ground around him. Mr. Pizarro was a young man with a narrow face and a
brushy red moustache.
   “All right,” he paid. “What we are going to build is a log cabin, fifteen by twenty
feet. We’re going to need about sixty logs. I want all of you kids to get some
experience in felling trees, but the boys will do most of it. This is what the cabin will
look like.”
  He sketched in the dirt with a stick. “This is going to be as good a cabin as we
can make in this short a time. We’re going to have floors, and doors and windows.
But this isn’t going to be as good a cabin as it might be— any guesses why?”
    Somebody raised his hand and Mr. Pizarro called on him. “Well, if we cut them
down, the logs are going to be green. They won’t dry evenly and the walls will let air
in.
   “Right,” Mr. Pizarro said. “We’ll chink the walls as best we can now.”
   After we had discussed the cabin for a few more minutes, Mr. Pizarro led the way
down the hill to a level place near the river. Here the cabin outlines had already been
marked, and two saw pits had been dug in the ground. Mr. Marechal’s group was
already down here.
   Mr. Pizarro said, “Mr. Marechal and I came down here last Saturday to mark our
spots, blaze our trees, and make the saw pits. This is just to make the work faster.
When you cut a tree, try to decide why we picked it rather than some of the others
around.”
   Then he assigned us to jobs: tree-felling, horse-handling and log-hauling,
log-peeling, and so on. Jack Fernandez-Fragoso and I were put on sill-laying and
lunch. Mr. Pizarro gave us a quick sketch of what we were to do and then took the
rest of the people off to get them started on their jobs. Mr. Marechal left two people
like us behind on the other cabin, and we took a look at them already at work, and
started on our own job.
   The side base logs, the long base of the cabin, are the most important because the
cabin rests on them. They have to be solidly fitted. The best way to do this is to
half-sink them into the ground.
   Jack and I got shovels and started digging shallow trenches down the long sides
of the cabin outlines. We had pegs and string to keep our trenches straight, level and
the same depth. The physical part wasn’t too bad, since we had been using hand
tools for several months in practice and our hands were not as blister-prone as they
once had been. It was somewhat painstaking, involving a good bit of measuring to
keep things even. When we were done, we leveled the interior floor of the cabin. As
we worked, we could hear axes ringing in the woods, voices, and sometimes the fall
of a tree.
   Before we had finished the floor, Mr. Pizarro, the two horses and the two base
logs were all present. The logs were dragged in along the river bank. We came out
almost in a tie with the peeling of the logs. Then Jack and I watched as the top
quarters of the ends of the logs were cut off. Across these ends would be laid the
similarly-cut tenons of the base logs of the cabin’s short walls, these logs lying on
the ground. After that, logs would be laid in alternate rows— long sides of the cabin
then short sides, the tenons allowing the logs to rest on those just below them.
   Jack and I went off to gather wood, then, and start lunch. By the time lunch was
ready, all four base logs were in place, the long ones sitting half in the ground, the
short ones standing higher, and a number of other logs had been brought up by the
saw pit. Mr. Marechal’s people had done about the same amount here, but I had no
idea how much had been done out in the woods.
   Jack and I ate before everybody else and then served. I went over and sat with
Jimmy and Riggy while they ate. Jimmy had been felling trees, Riggy cutting poles,
and they and I were both pleased to have the free hour after lunch that Mr. Pizarro
allowed us. There is nothing like doing physical labor to give you reason to think, if
only to pass the time, so I had more thoughts for my ethics paper on the subject of
stoicism. I got out my notebook and wrote them down. Jimmy and Riggy just
rested.
   The trouble with stoicism, it seems to me, is that it is a soporific. It affirms the
status quo and thereby puts an end to all ambition, all change. It says, as Christianity
did a thousand years ago, that kings should be kings and slaves should be slaves,
and it seems to me that that is a philosophy infinitely more attractive to the king than
the slave.
   It is much the same as the question of determination and free will. Whether or not
your actions are determined, you have to act on the assumption that you have free
will. If you are determined, your attempt at free will loses you nothing. However, if
you are not determined and you act on the assumption that you are, you will never
attempt anything. You will simply be a passive blob that things happen to.
  I am not a passive blob. I have changed and I think at least some of it is my own
doing. As long as I have any hope, I could not possibly be a stoic.
   In the afternoon, I walked with Jimmy behind Mr. Pizarro to chop down my tree.
We followed the skid marks of previous logs along the edge of the river bank. The
sun was bright and the air a little warmer now. I couldn’t help thinking that this was
very pleasant although it was nothing like home. After a few hundred yards we cut
away from the river and up a ridge line. The underbrush was very thin and there was
a rust brown carpet of shed tree leaves over the ground.
   The boys who had been chopping trees before went back to work. There were
several trees down and cut into logs waiting to be dragged away. Mr. Pizarro pointed
at a gray tree trunk with a white mark on it.
   “That’s your tree,” he said, as the cling of axes and the whirr-whirr of saws
started around us.
  I walked around the tree and looked up at it. Finally, just as we had been told and
shown, I picked the direction I wanted it to fall. I didn’t want it to fall on anybody,
and I wanted it to fall where it could be cut and hauled away.
   Then I braced my feet, lifted my axe and started my undercut. This is a small cut
in, the tree on the side you wish it to fall. The axe struck the tree and made a gash.
Once again and a big chip flew. When I had my undercut, I stopped to rest.
  “Very good,” Mr. Pizarro said. “When you are done, send Sonja up here. You
know what you are doing this afternoon, don’t you?”
  “Yes,” I said.
   He nodded and walked away then. He was overseeing all the different jobs that we
were doing, plus doing a good bit of the heaviest work himself. You could expect
him to be at your elbow one minute and then gone the next— he had come and
tasted a spoonful of the soup while I was making it that morning. As he walked
away, somebody yelled, “Stand clear,” and we all looked up.
   One of the trees was ready to fall. There was a ravine between us and both of our
trees were aimed to fall there, this one about thirty feet closer to the river than mine.
Mr. Pizarro moved up the hill away from it. The boy, seeing everyone clear, pushed
the tree and stepped back. It wasn’t cut completely through, but the undercut
projected beneath the major cut and the push was enough to break through the bit of
wood between and the tree wavered and then with majestic slowness toppled
forward. In the silence left by the quieted axes, there was the sound of wood
breaking, of branches crashing and then a great splintering rack as it smashed against
the ground, raising dirt. Then the axes started again.
   I moved around to the uphill side of my tree and started my major cut. I stopped
from time to time to catch my breath and kick damp aromatic chips. At last it was
beginning to waver and I knew it was ready to fall.
  I yelled, “Everybody stand clear,” and checked to see that everybody was.
   Then I pushed the tree and stepped back. My foot skidded on a chip and I sat
down hard, looking up at the tree. At first I thought I was wrong and it wasn’t going
to fall at all, but then it slowly tottered away from me. It fell and when it hit the
ground, the butt, snapped clean from the stump, leapt high and then smacked back
against the ground only a few feet away. The tree top that had been high over my
head was now fifty feet below me in the gully. The tree, landing on the slope, slid
forward a few feet and then came to a stop.
   I looked down at it with a great deal of satisfaction. Then I got to my feet, dusted
off the seat of my pants, picked up my axe and started back to where the cabin was
going up. I waved at Jimmy as I passed.
   Of the fifteen of us, seven were girls. Five had cut down their trees in the
morning, the only ones who hadn’t being me and Sonja. So I found her making a
door for the cabin with Riggy. The saw pit was now turning out slabs from
medium-sized logs— the slabs being really half-logs, flat on one side, round on the
other. The slabs were to be used for shutters, doors, roof and cabin floor. In the
case of the door, the poles cut in the morning were being nailed to the flat sides of
slabs about six feet long. I gave Sonja my axe and sent her along to find Mr. Pizarro,
looked at the saw pit in operation for a minute, and then turned to my afternoon job.
In the pit, one person gets down in it, one person stands on the ground above, and
the log is sawed between them. The only disadvantage is that the person on the
bottom gets sawdust in his hair, but if you switch off this evens out.
   My afternoon job was taking the mud and moss brought by the mud-and-moss
detail (Juanita) and chinking the cracks between the logs. By the time I got back, the
two boys on the walls were working on their third tier of logs. They had skids in
place and were now looping ropes around the logs and pulling them up the skids and
into place. I happily went along, pushing my mud and moss in place, thinking of
ethics, and whiling the afternoon away as the walls rose.
   After Riggy finished the door and shutters, Mr. Pizarro showed up and they
stopped putting up walls for awhile. By that time the walls were high enough that I
felt surrounded, tall enough that I had to stand on a cut block to do my chinking.
Where I had yet to chink the light slanted through to cut across the shadowed floor.
   Mr. Pizarro climbed over the logs then, needing a little boost, and borrowed my
block to stand on. Then he and Riggy cut through the solid logs to make the
windows. They made two cuts for each window and removed the sections of log. It
was then easier to get in and out, which was good because the logs were becoming
harder to raise into place. Riggy came inside, and instead of two boys raising logs,
there were now three boys and Mr. Pizarro, plus me when Juanita didn’t have
enough mud and moss for me and they needed a hand.
    When there were two more rows of logs in place, they cut the door in the same
way as the window and suddenly the cabin wasn’t a tight little box anymore.
Everybody was coming in from the woods then, and I went out of the cabin through
the hole that was a doorway. Juanita and I made one last trip for mud together while
they were raising the last log into place over the door. When we came back with the
mud, everybody pitched in and we finished the outside chinking. It was great fun and
at the end we just took mud and threw it at each other. I caught Jimmy a great gob
across the back and he returned the favor. All fifteen of us were running around
throwing mud while Mr. Pizarro stayed out of range and watched us.
  When we were all out of mud, he said, “What are you going to do? You only
have one spare change of clothes.”
  Jimmy looked at the river, gave an onward ho point of the finger, and said,
“There we are.”
   He sat down, pulled off his shoes, and then made a dash, fully-clothed, for the
river, plopped through the shallows and made a plunge into the water. I had my
shoes kicked off in an instant, and my notebook out of my shirt, and followed right
after. The water was clear and cold, not too swift, and just fine for swimming. It was
much better than my one previous planetary swimming experience. We all splashed
and made grampus noises in the late afternoon sun, flipped water at each other, and
had a real old-fashioned time. Very quickly we were joined by Mr. Marechal’s
group, who were not mud-covered but most of whom had gotten reasonably dirty or
sawdust covered in the course of the day and knew a good thing when they saw it.
We stayed in until we were called out, and then we came out soggy.
   Our leaders were willing to make one concession to the good usages of
civilization, and we took our clothes to the scoutship to be quickly dried. The rest of
our weekend— sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand prepared food— was
simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who
confused rustic vacations with life. We did get this one concession, though.
   After dinner, freshly dressed, full of food and a warm glow, and thoroughly tired,
I wandered over to look at the other cabin along with Jimmy. It was about as far
toward completion as ours— that is, the walls were in place and chinked, and the
door and window holes were cut— but it looked odd. One of the long walls was
higher than the other, and higher than any of our walls. It gave the cabin an odd
unfinished look, a hunchbacked look.
   We had been issued bubble tents, which can be folded to pocket size and are
proof against almost anything, but we had been told not to bring them. Instead we
unrolled our beds near the fire and took our chances in the open. I was one of those
who drew guard duty, but I was lucky enough to get second hour. I stayed awake,
relieved Stu Herskovitz, who hadn’t seen anything, and walked for an hour around
the camp. I didn’t see anything except people ready to go to sleep. I yawned my
way through the hour, then got Vishwa Mathur up and went to sleep myself.
   There were clouds over the sky in the morning and it was gray through breakfast
and cold, but then the clouds began to break into white pieces and move apart and
then the sky was clear again and it was bright.
   We raised the gable ends of the roof into place and fit the doors and shutters.
Then all of us working, we raised the three roof logs into place, the ridgepole on top,
the other two below on either side, forming a slope. As we were finishing, somebody
looked over at the Marechal cabin and saw what they were doing. They were slanting
a roof from the tall wall across the short one. “That’s not fair,” I yelled. “You’re
building a shed, not a cabin.”
  “Ho, ho— too bad,” Venie called back. We booed.
   We laid the poles that Riggy and Sonja had collected the day before over fitted
slabs to make the roof. I was inside the cabin helping to lay the floor. The slabs of
wood were laid rounded side down, side by side, to make a reasonably flat floor,
what is called a puncheon floor. If we had had the time, we would have smoothed
the flat sides, but as it was, we couldn’t. The result was a floor that I wouldn’t
recommend walking on in bare feet unless you have a genuine affection for splinters,
but it was a good solid floor. Jimmy was on the roof laying slabs, stuffing moss, and
placing poles. A little of the moss filtered through as they worked, but the roof
closed in quickly over our heads and when they were done it looked as solid as our
floor.
   We were clearly beaten by Mr. Marechal’s group, which finished almost an hour
before we did and then came over and made comments, but we were done before
noon, too. I looked over the other building when we were done along with some
curious friends and I’ll have to honestly say that I preferred our cabin to their
shed— better workmanship.
   In the afternoon we relaxed with an easy hike and then a swim, this one in suits,
not in our clothes. After that, I got out my notebook again and made some more
ethics notes— these about an easy one, the philosophy of power.
  In effect, the philosophy of power says that you should do anything you can get
away with. If you don’t get away with it, you were wrong.
    You really can’t argue with this, you know. It is a self-contained system, logically
self-consistent. It makes no appeal to outside authority and it doesn’t stumble over
its own definitions.
   But I don’t like it. For one thing, it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There
doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between “ethically good” and “ethically
better.” More important, however, stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their
actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power
simply say that the results of actions have no importance— the philosophy of a
two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
    We slept that night in the cabin with the door latched, and there was a certain
comfort and solidity in sleeping in what we had built. I can also say that the
puncheon floor was much harder than the ground had been. Or perhaps I wasn’t as
tired.
   The next day was our last of the excursion and we celebrated it by jumping off
the bluff across the river. Then we cleaned up the camp and came home.
   It was foggy in the morning, and though the fog lifted, the clouds stayed low and
gray over our heads. We set out in one big group this morning with Mr. Marechal
leading and Mr. Pizarro bringing up the rear and carrying ropes. Looking at the river,
our cabin was on the left and the shed on the right. We had gone upriver for our
logs, and Mr. Marechal’s group the other way. We went downriver along the river
bank, past the point where their skid tracks went uphill away from the river, and then
around the long slow bend where the river curved out of sight of the camp. It was a
gloomy day but we were in good spirits, chattering as we walked. Our group of six,
reunited, walked together.
   We picked our way along for more than a mile, sometimes having to leave the
river edge and move inland, but making a pretty good pace of it. At last we came out
on a sand shoal and looked across at an easy bank on the other side of the river and
a broken and easily climbed bluff.
  “We’re going to have to swim,” Mr. Marechal said. He waded out into the water
until he was standing in water to his waist about one-quarter of the way across.
   Then we were started across with both of our leaders standing guard. The water
was cold and it wasn’t half as much fun to get soaked as it had been the first time.
Our clothes are dirt and water resistant and dry quickly, but believe me, it is far nicer
to have them dry off you than to have them dry while you are wearing them. On the
far bank I dripped and shivered.
   We all gathered on the grassy bank and then Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal
splashed and swam across to join us. We climbed through the underbrush and
tumbled rock and by the time we reached the top of the bluff, if I wasn’t fully dry at
least I wasn’t shivering.
   The bluff was covered with forest, too, but standing on the edge we could see the
easy, forest-covered slope on the other side from above, a dark green rising carpet.
Then we turned into the woods and didn’t come out again until we were standing on
the bluff edge opposite our camp.
   I didn’t like standing on the edge, so I came to the lip on my knees and looked
down at the river. It looked a long way down— a drop big enough to kill you, and
after that distances are academic. At the base, there looked to be just room to stand
and no more. As it had been explained to us, the two ropes would be tied in place
here at the top of the bluff and then each of us would whip the ropes around our
waists and step off the cliff backwards. Looking down, I didn’t exactly relish the
idea. I moved back from the edge and then got to my feet.
  “Well,” Mr. Marechal said, “who’s going to be the first to try it?”
  Jimmy said, “Mia and I will.”
  Mr. Marechal looked at me and I said, “Yes.” I didn’t like the thought of doing it,
but if it was something expected of everybody and I was going to have to do it
eventually, I didn’t mind doing it first and getting it over with.
   The ropes were tied to trees and then passed around our waists, around the main
ropes, and then back around the waists again. Mr. Pizzarro and Mr. Marechal
demonstrated for everybody how this worked. The ends were finally dropped back
between our legs and over the edge of the cliff to dangle just above the river. In
effect, what we were doing was putting ourselves in a running loop that slid freely on
the rope and then moving down the rope to the river.
   At the signal, we stood with our backs to the river, the rope taut between us and
our trees. I looked down at the river and sighed, then stepped backward off the
edge. I let line pay out for a moment and then stopped it and swung in to come to a
halt with my feet against the cliff-face, my body hanging in the loop from the tree on
the cliff above. I was almost surprised that it worked. Then I pushed off again and
went down another six or seven feet. This was not hard at all, and rather fun. I
looked over at Jimmy and laughed. Then, almost before I knew it, I was at the
bottom. The bank here was wider than it looked from above, four or five feet wide,
and Jimmy and I landed at almost the same moment.
  We pulled the ropes free and waved up at the people on top.
  “It’s easy,” Jimmy called.
  “It’s fun,” I said.
  The ropes were snaked up again to the top of the bluff as we watched.
  Jimmy said, “There’s no sense in staying down here. Let’s go across the river.”
   We swam across again and then watched while the next pair rappelled down the
cliff. We sat on the last completed part of the cabin, a slab doorstep.
  As we watched, I said, “Thank you for volunteering me, by the way.”
   “I know,” Jimmy said. “You’re a reluctant daredevil. Aren’t you the person who
used to crawl around in the air ducts?”
  “That was different,” I said. “That was my idea.”


                             Chapter Twelve
                                                                        «^»
At the end of December, just in time for Year’s End, the kids on Trial on New
Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t
signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom
I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help
wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the
thought, though. Year’s End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the
unpleasant, and besides I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and
gave me something of a new perspective on my mother.
   Year’s End is a five or six day bash— five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap
Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was
reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part
of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were
in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath
January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October,
November and December.” I have a pack rat memory— I even know what a “pack
rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year’s End.
   I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year’s End. Jimmy and I made a
trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piñata in the shape
of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a
piñata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year’s
End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us,
Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having
on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party
on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in.
Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like
party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.
   In Alfing Quad I had had my friends, but I had almost never brought them home.
These days, having people around the place, particularly Jimmy, who lived in Geo
Quad, was a regular thing. Daddy has his own patterns of living— in some ways he
lives in a private world— and you would have thought that he would object to having
strange kids permanently underfoot. I’m sure his life was disturbed but he never
objected. In fact he even went out of his way to make it clear that he approved of
Jimmy.
   “He’s a good boy,” Daddy said. “I’m glad you’re seeing a lot of him.”
   Of course, this wasn’t too surprising since I had a distinct impression that Jimmy
was one of the reasons that we were living in Geo Quad. It certainly wasn’t an
accident that we had been assigned Mr. Mbele as a tutor at the same time. I even had
an impression (partly confirmed) that a talk with the Ship’s Eugenist would have
shown that Jimmy’s and my meeting was even less of an accident, but this didn’t
bother me particularly because there were moments when I distinctly liked Jimmy
and moments when just looking at him made me feel all funny inside.
   The partial confirmation as well as another discovery came when I was prowling
through the Ship’s Records. Every Common Room has a library and there is a
certain satisfaction in using them because there is something unique about the size,
and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is real discovery about running
your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow looks right.
But simple space limitations make a physical collection of all the books that the Ship
holds out of the question. So standard practice is to look over titles and contents by
vid and then to order a facsimile, a physical copy, if you really want or need one.
There are, of course, certain things that most people don’t ordinarily look at without
some special reason, like Ship’s Records, and while I had no special reason beyond
curiosity, I was quite willing to look and quite willing to presume upon Daddy’s
position in the Ship to make it possible for me to look.
   “Are you sure?” the librarian said. “They’re not very interesting, you know, and
I’m not sure that you really ought to be allowed…”
   I swear that I didn’t exactly say that Daddy, Miles Havero, Ship’s Chairman, had
told me that I could and was willing to discuss the point at length with the librarian if
he insisted, but I think if you talked to him, the librarian might have had an
impression that I had said it. In any case, I got to look at the Records.
   As I’ve said, I found some twenty-year-old eugenics recommendations that gave
me pause, but it wasn’t until I looked up me, or more properly, Mother and Daddy,
that I discovered something that really rocked me. I had a brother!
   That was a shock. I switched off the vid and it faded away, and then I turned to
my bed and just lay huddled there for a long while, thinking. I didn’t know why I
hadn’t been told. I remembered that somebody had once asked me or talked to me
or tickled me into wondering about brothers and sisters, but I couldn’t place the
memory and I never had done anything about it.
    Finally I went back to the vid and I found out about my brother. His name had
been Joe— José. He had been nearly forty years older than I and dead for more than
fifteen years.
   I dug around and found out more. Apparently he had been as conscious as I of
the lack of creative writing within the Ship. He had written a novel, something I
would never do, particularly after I read his. It was not just bad, it was terrible, and it
gave me some reason to think that perhaps the Ship just isn’t a viable topic for
fiction.
   In other respects, Joe was much more competent. He’d been regarded as quite a
corner in his branch of physics. His death had been the result of a grotesque and
totally unnecessary accident not of his own making. He had not been discovered
immediately, and when he was it was too late to revive him. His death had apparently
bothered my mother greatly.
  Now that I knew, I didn’t know what to do about it. Finally, in a quiet moment, I
approached Daddy and as impersonally as I could I asked him about it.
  He looked puzzled. “You knew all about Joe,” he said. “You haven’t asked about
him in a long time, but I’ve told you twenty times.”
   I said, “I didn’t even know he existed until a week ago.”
   “Mia,” he said seriously, “when you were three you used to beg for stories about
Joe.”
   “Well, I don’t remember now,” I said. “Will you tell me?”
   So Daddy told me about my brother. He even said that we were a lot alike in
looks and personality.
    I didn’t talk to Mother because I didn’t know what I could say about it. I cannot
really talk to her. The only person besides Daddy that I talked to was Jimmy and he
made a comment that was perceptive, whether or not it was accurate. He said that
maybe I hadn’t remembered because I hadn’t wanted to, at least until now, and that
“finding” the record of my brother wasn’t as much of an accident as I thought. To
tell you the truth, that got me mad at first, and it was my getting mad that later made
me think that there might have been some truth to it. The cost was that Jimmy and I
didn’t speak for two days.
    Thinking in psychological terms got me to thinking about my mother, about her
keeping me at arm’s length and about her becoming unhappy when I was nice to her.
I finally came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t me, Mia, the individual, that
bothered her, but just me, the physical fact, and I proceeded on that basis. I can’t
say that I liked her any better, but we did manage to deal together more pleasantly
after that.
   Something else changed that winter— what I thought I wanted from life. It came
as a direct result of the papers on ethics that Jimmy and I did.
  We met in Mr. Mbele’s apartment and talked about our conclusions over the
usual refreshments provided by Mrs. Mbele. She was a very comfortable person to
have around. Very nice. It was our regular Friday night meeting.
    My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical
systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying
that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That
is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they
were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions. This was to
say that while I found things like “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your
person or in that of another, in every case as an end and not as a means merely,”
quite attractive principles, I hadn’t run onto any system that exactly fitted my
disposition.
   In his discussion, Jimmy took another tack entirely. Instead of criticizing ethical
systems, he attempted to formulate one. It was humanistic, not completely unlike
some of the others that I had considered. Jimmy started by saying that true humanity
was an achievement, not an automatic inheritance. There were things that you could
pick at in what he had to say, but his system did have one advantage and that was
that he spoke in terms of a general attitude toward living rather than in terms of exact
principles. It is too easy to find exceptions to principles.
    As I listened, I became increasingly bothered, not by what he was saying, which
fit Jimmy’s disposition quite closely, but by the sort of paper he was giving. I was
the one who was supposed to be intending to be a synthesist, assembling castles
from mortar and bricks, only that wasn’t what I had done. It came to me then that I
had never done it— making pins or building cabins, putting things together, none of
this was really in my line, and I should have seen it long since.
  I am not a builder, I thought. I am not a tinkerer. It was a moment of pure,
unheralded revelation.
  When Jimmy was done, Mr. Mbele said, “Let’s have a discussion. What
comments occur to you? Mia?”
  “All right,” I said. I turned to Jimmy. “Why do you want to be an ordinologist?”
  He shrugged. “Why do you want to be a synthesist?”
  I shook my head. “I’m serious. I want an answer.”
   “I don’t see the point. What does this have to do with ethics or what we’ve just
said?”
   “Nothing to do with ethics,” I said. “It has a lot to do with your paper. You
didn’t listen to yourself.”
   “Do you mind explaining yourself a little more fully?” Mr. Mbele said. “I’m not
sure I follow you.”
   “After a while,” I said, “I wasn’t listening to Jimmy’s points. I got thinking about
what sort of paper he had put together and about what sort of paper I’d put
together. We had our own choice. It just struck me that if Jimmy really wanted to be
an ordinologist, he would have written a paper like mine, a critical paper. And if I
were really cut out to be a synthesist, I would have written a paper like Jimmy’s, a
creative paper. But neither of us did.”
  “I see,” Mr. Mbele said. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re right.”
  Jimmy said, “But I want to be an ordinologist.”
  “That’s just because of your grandfather,” I said.
   Mr. Mbele agreed with me almost immediately, but Jimmy had had his aims too
long set on ordinology to change his mind easily. It took some time before the sense
of it got through to him, but then he doesn’t have a critical mind, and that, of course,
was the point. I just made it clear that I now intended to be an ordinologist, and Mr.
Mbele accepted that. It was easier for me to change, because when I had thought of
the future, I had thought of synthesis, but with parentheses and a question mark
after. This change of direction was right for me, and now when I thought of
ordinology there was no question of any kind in my mind, particularly when Mr.
Mbele told me that I had the equipment to make a success at it.
  And after Jimmy got used to the idea, he finally changed his direction, too.
Because, after all, he was creative.
   I said, “You’re the one who is always thinking up crazy things for us to do. I’m
the one who should be thinking why they won’t work.”
  “All right,” Jimmy said. “You be the ordinologist and I’ll be the synthesist.”
  I kissed his cheek. “Good. Then we can still be partners.”
   My change in direction may have been part of growing up. Nearly everything was,
or so it seemed these days. I certainly didn’t lack for signs of change. One came
while Helen Pak and I were down in the Ship’s Store looking for clothes.
   There is a constant problem of stimulation in living in the Ship— if life were too
easy, we would all become vegetables. The response has been to make some things
more difficult than they might be. This means that shopping is something you do in
person and not by vid.
   Helen and I were in the Ship’s Store not because our clothes had worn out, but
because we’d outgrown them. I’d been growing steadily for the last year, but I
hadn’t caught up with anybody because they had all been growing, too. I was now
having to wear a bra, which was something new and uncomfortable, and my taste in
clothes had developed beyond light shirts, shorts, and sandals. That was partly
Helen’s doing. She had a good eye for clothes and she insisted I make more of
myself than I had been.
   “You’re pretty enough,” she said, “but who’s going to know it the way you
dress?”
   For myself, I didn’t care— I would just as soon have lived naturally— and I had
no great desire to overwhelm the world. However, there were a few people I wanted
to be attractive to, so I put myself in Helen’s hands, and by God I did come out
looking better. Among other things, she got me to wearing pink, which went well
with my black hair, and which I wouldn’t have chosen myself. It all came as a
pleasant surprise.
  Helen said, “It’s a matter of emphasizing your best points.” She was quite modest
about it, but she had reason to be proud. Even Daddy noticed, and Jimmy did, too.
No compliments, of course, from Jimmy, though I did get them from Daddy.
   We were down in the Ship’s Store picking things out, trying them on, piling things
up, giggling, rejecting, posing, approving and disapproving. I even found something
for Helen that she looked good in— that blonde hair and those oriental eyes. She
generally knows what looks good on her— it was pleasant to find something for her
that she liked.
   We were thumbing through racks when I saw somebody I knew and I said, “Just
a second.” I waved.
   It was Zena Andrus, who wasn’t quite as plump as she once had been. She was
looking quite excited and apparently trying to find someone. She saw me wave and
she came over.
  “Hi, Mia,” she said. “Have you seen my mother?”
  “No,” I said. “Is something the matter?”
  “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s nothing bad. I just got my notice. I start Survival Class
next week.”
  “Oh, that’s fine,” I said.
  After she’d gone off after her mother again, Helen and I looked at each other.
Time does pass. It was only yesterday.


                               Chapter Thirteen
                                                                            «^»
The culmination of Survival Class came when we were Class One and went on a
tiger hunt on the Third Level. It, like so much else, was designed to give us
confidence in ourselves. There is nothing like hunting a tiger almost bare-handed to
give you a feeling of real confidence in yourself. If you manage to survive the
experience.
   Come to think about it, though, we did manage to survive, so maybe there was
point to it.
   By that time, going down to the Third Level with packs was a commonplace.
Jimmy and I went down from Geo Quad in the shuttle. I was not in the best of
spirits, because I never am before something like that, and I was playing somewhat
morosely on the pennywhistle.
  Jimmy said, “You’re not going to bring that along, are you?”
  “Why not?”
  “I have to admit that you play fairly well now, but if you play like that you’re just
going to depress everybody.”
   I said, “I’ve got Campfire Entertainment tonight.” That was something we had
instituted after our second expedition in order to liven camping evenings.
  “You’re not going to play the pennywhistle, are you?”
   “No,” I said. “I was going to tell a story. You almost make me change my mind,
though.”
   “Are you afraid?” He wasn’t talking about the Camp fire Entertainment.
    “I can’t say I relish the thought of throwing rocks at a tiger,” I said, “but I guess
I’ll get used to it. How about you?”
  “I’m always scared beforehand,” Jimmy said. “That’s why I like to talk or play
chess.”
   We got off at familiar Gate 5 and joined everybody else in getting our heli-pacs.
Mr. Marechal was there with a couple of dogs, and he was being assisted again by
Mr. Pizarro, who had grown a red beard to go along with his brushy moustache.
They were loading the dogs and food into a carrier. Before we left, Mr. Marechal
lined us up and looked us over.
   “You understand,” he said, “that nobody has to come along.”
   We all nodded, but nobody made a move to leave.
   “Do you have your knives?”
   “Yes,” we said. That was it, the only weapons we had.
   “I want you to understand that at least one of you’s going to get hurt, maybe
killed. You’re going to chase down a tiger, which is about as mean and rough an
animal as you’re liable to meet anywhere you get dropped on Trial. On Trial, I hope
you’ll have the sense to avoid anything like that. This time, though, we’re going to
pick one out, track it down and kill it by hand. You can do it because you’re rougher
and meaner than it is— at least as a group. I can guarantee you that some one of you
is going to get hurt, but when you’re done, that tiger’s going to be dead. You’ll be
surprised to find how satisfying you’re going to find that. All right?”
   The wild areas of the Third Level are about as unpleasant as any you’ll find on a
planet. The terrain is perhaps not as rugged as you’ll find in places on planets, but
the wildlife is fully as unpleasant, and that’s the major factor. On this final jaunt we
were going without the bubble tents and sonic pistols that we would be allowed to
carry on Trial and we were deliberately seeking out the most dangerous animal that
we have on board the Ship. Something like this is not only a preview of Trial, it
brings home to you what is real and what is not, and quite designedly shows you that
death is real. You may call it backhanded, but as I say, the point is to lend
confidence.
   We lifted like a flock of great birds away from the Training Center toward the
roof above, and then swept away. We moved across the parkland, looking down on
the trees and bridle paths, and then finally across the thorn hedge wall that marked
the edge of wild country. At first it did not look greatly different, but then we passed
over a herd of broom-tails, our noise and shadows frightening them and sending
them careening over the grassland.
  Mr. Marechal led the way and Mr. Pizarro brought up the rear with the carrier. We
buzzed along in about the same relation to the roof, the ground rising and falling
beneath us. With the ground in small hills covered by scrub and occasional trees,
and the grassland behind us, we set down at a signal from Mr. Marechal.
   When the dogs were released from the carrier, they yapped and strained at their
leads, but Mr. Pizarro simply tied them up. We put guards around immediately and
then started to make camp. We had just about time to gather wood and set up fires
before the great lights in the roof began to fade, the air currents to die, and the
temperature to fall. The temperature didn’t fall far, but the fire was not for that— it
was for cooking and for security.
   After dinner, everybody gathered around the fire, including Mr. Pizarro and Mr.
Marechal, and I was privileged to give my Campfire Entertainment. For Jimmy’s
sake, I forbore the pennywhistle and instead told the story that I had prepared and
had intended to tell. It’s an old, old story called “The Lady of Carlisle.”
  I waited until everybody was quiet. I stood in front of the sitting people in the
wavering light of the fire and began:
         This happened a long time ago in a place called Carlisle where they had
     wild lions. Tigers, as you know, stick to themselves, but these lions lived
     together in bunches and terrorized the country.
         There was a lady living in Carlisle without a bit of family who had been
     filled with strange ideas by her long-dead mama. She was very beautiful and
     courted by all the bachelors in the district, who reckoned her a great prize
     on account of her looks and her money. However, her mama had taught her
     that to be beautiful was to be special and therefore she shouldn’t throw
     herself away on the first, or even the second, young man who came along.
     She should wait instead for a man of good family, wealth, honor and
     courage. “Test ’em,” her mama said.
         Now since her papa had made a fortune selling stale bread crumbs…
  “Oh, come on, Mia,” somebody said. “Who’d want to buy stale bread crumbs?”
  “I’ll tell you exactly, Stu,” I said. “It was to children to make trails behind them
when they went into the woods so they could find their way out again.”
         Anyway, her papa had left her enough money that she could afford to sit
     year after year waiting for her regular Sunday afternoons and her suitors to
     come calling. She always disqualified them, however, if not on one ground
     then on another. She spent a good many years this way, sitting in her parlor
     getting odder and odder, and having great fun turning down suitors on
     Sunday afternoons. In time, there wasn’t a single eligible man in forty miles
     that she hadn’t said “no” to at least once. In fact, it finally got so that when a
     stranger was in town on a Sunday afternoon, the local fellows would send
     him out to be turned down. The town was small and this provided them with
     at least one consistent amusement.
         Finally, however, it happened that on one particular Sunday there were
     two young men drinking in town. One was a lieutenant with a plumed hat
     and a fancy coat with several shiny medals. The other was a sea captain who
     had sailed around the world no less than three times, for all that he was
     young. Both were of quite unexceptionable families, were more than full in
     the pocket, were men of honor and had medals or other testimony to their
     courage— and both were single. They were, in point of fact, by a good
     margin the two likeliest candidates that had ever been in Carlisle. The local
     fellows didn’t even try to choose between them. They simply laid the
     situation straight out, and both young men had drunk enough to find the idea
appealing as well as a quite sensible method of settling the age old rivalry
between the Army and the Navy. So they went off to pay court.
    They found the lady at home and quite disposed to receive them. In fact,
it put her in quite a flutter. And she turned out to be, even after all these
years, as fine looking a woman as either of these well-traveled young men
had ever seen. She, on her side, found them both to be exactly the sort of
men that her mother had told her to watch and wait for, for she quizzed
them quite closely. That they had both shown up on the very same day,
however, gave her quite a problem to resolve, and she finally determined to
settle it by her mama’s method. “I will set you both a test,” she said, “and
the man that passes it will be the man I wed.”
    She had a span, which means a pair, of horses and a carriage brought
around, and they all climbed in. The young bloods who had sent them in
were all waiting in the yard and they followed the carriage down the road,
sporting and making bets. The carriage went over the hill and down the road,
and in time it came to the den of those lions that had been offending the
local people, and there the fair young lady brought the horses to a stop.
She’d no sooner done that than she fell rigid to the ground. They picked her
up and dusted her off, but she didn’t say a word to anybody for upwards of a
quarter hour. The two young fellows asked the local boys about that and
they were told that it was the sort of thing she was likely to do from time to
time.
    “Well, what happened to her?”
    “That’s the way the original story goes,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised
if it meant that she was a hysteric.”
    “Now, hush,” somebody said, “and let her get on with it.”
    When the lady came to her senses again, after a manner of speaking, she
threw her fan down in the den amongst the lions. That stirred them up, as
you can imagine, and they began growling and prowling around. Then, quite
satisfied with herself, the young lady said, “Now which of you gentlemen
will win my hand by returning my fan to me?”
    That really got the local boys to laying bets. The two young men looked
down at the lions’ den and then at her, back and forth, mulling the situation
over and trying to come to a good, fair decision. Finally the lieutenant, who
deserved every one of the medals he wore but who’d been taught a thing or
two about good sense by his own mama, shook his head and said he thought
he’d go back to town and have another pint of beer. He walked off down the
road muttering under his breath about women and their silly notions.
    Then everybody looked at the sea captain, wondering what he would do.
Finally he took off his coat so that it wouldn’t get mussed, straightened his
collar so that he would look at his best in spite of not being dressed
properly, and said, “I’ll do it.” And he climbed down to the entrance to the
lions’ den. There were some who said that he had more courage than brains,
and there were some who said he’d just had too much to drink. In any case,
he disappeared inside the den, and there wasn’t anybody who thought he’d
ever come back out again.
    They strained to see, but it was dark inside the den. They could hear the
lions grumbling among themselves. And then the sea captain emerged,
looking slightly rumpled, with the fan in his hand.
    Well, when the lady saw him coming, she said, “Here I am,” and
prepared to throw herself into his arms.
        The sea captain just looked her in the eye and said, “If you want your fan,
     you can get it yourself,” and threw it back to the lions.
        Then he walked back to town and stood the lieutenant the price of a beer,
     after which each of them went his own way. I don’t know if the lady ever
     got her fan back.
  When he had a chance to speak to me privately, Jimmy said, “Isn’t it lucky we’re
out here for a good reason?”
  In the morning, with the fires out, the lights high and the heli-pacs protected by a
bubble tent, we set out casting for tracks behind the leashed dogs. We followed
behind in anticipation.
   As we walked, I picked up hand-sized rocks and practiced throwing. Att and
Jimmy offered criticism.
   “Not like that,” Jimmy said. “Like this.” He threw. It looked smooth and more
effective, but I didn’t see what was different about it.
  “I don’t know quite what you’re doing wrong,” Att said, “but you twitch your
whole body when you throw.”
   “I think I see,” Jimmy said. “You keep your forearm stiff and throw with your
shoulder. You ought to be using your wrist and your forearm more. Snap them
forward.”
  Venie edged over toward us and said, “Being all sweet and helpless again, Mia?”
  I picked up another rock and threw it.
  “That’s better,” Jimmy said.
   I turned to Venie and was about to make a sharp comment when the dogs began
to yelp. It wasn’t their ordinary yapping. It was a more musical note as though they
felt they had something to sing about.
  “Come on over here,” Mr. Pizarro said, and we gathered around.
  Mr. Marechal was kneeling by a pug-mark that was a full four inches across and
more than that long. He pointed to it.
   “There we are,” he said. “Look at the grains of sand in the track. It’s not more
than two hours old. Probably less,” he added as he tested the breeze.
    Mr. Pizarro brought the dogs forward and unsnapped their leashes. They sniffed
and quivered over the tracks. It was an exciting moment as they poised and then
sprang forward, bugling as they went. Now that they were at their business, the noise
they made was more businesslike. We set out, trotting after them, up and down the
sand hills. I was glad that I was wearing sandals that emptied of sand as fast as they
filled.
   It is amazing what differences in terrain and vegetation can be produced by slight
variances in breeze, temperature and above all moisture. We ran through gullies
between sand shoulders, through scrub and around it when we could, going farther
from the grassland all the time. The tiger, in all probability, came down to the
grassland to hunt, and then returned to the scrub where it had its lair.
   There were times when we lost sight of the dogs and kept on their track only by
following their sound. Once the dogs lost their scent and had to cast back to find it.
Running became an effort. Finally, the dogs’ voices lifted and it was clear that they
had caught sight of the tiger. We came over the hillside behind them to see the purple
hindquarters of the tiger sliding behind a rock projection and the dogs winding
around the base of the rocks to find their way up.
   If making the Third Level as it is had been a matter of filling an empty volume with
rock and dirt, the job would hardly have been worth attempting. Just take a slide rule
and figure the number of scoutship loads it would take. The amount of effort is
ridiculous. But in point of fact, the Ship is nothing more than a great rock, partly
honeycombed, and making the Third Level as it is required nothing more than
blasting and chipping rock loose and then pulverizing it to a desired consistency.
The great rock jumble into which the tiger was disappearing was nothing more than a
giant rain of rock left where it had fallen. It sat there, a red tumble, and the dogs
followed the tiger into it.
    We pelted down the slope, yelling, and followed the noise of the dogs. There was
a trail into the rocks, and then it split, one branch going up and apparently away from
the noise ahead, one going directly toward the noise.
   Mr. Marechal waved breathlessly at the high trail and said, “Take some of them
that way.”
   I followed him straight ahead. In a moment we came to an opening in the rocks
and there, at bay, snarling and striking at the dogs, was the tiger. It was purple, with
high-set black shoulders and a wicked wedge shaped head. Its teeth seemed too
large for its narrow face. It was as essentially useless as a soccer professional, and
as ornamental, elegant and entertaining. We spread around in a circle. The dogs were
yapping at its flanks and then darting out of reach as it spun to strike at them. It had
been trying to break for the far side of the rock opening, but the dogs never let it get
a chance. As we encircled it, one of the dogs was too slow in anticipating the tiger
and was knocked into a broken, bloody heap where it kicked slowly.
  Then on the rocks above the tiger appeared Mr. Pizarro and four of the kids.
They looked down at the noise, blood and dust.
  One of them was David Farmer, who was almost as much of a goof as Riggy
Allen. He posed picturesquely at the top of the red rock face and, I have no doubt,
was about to yell to be looked at, and then he lost his footing. One of his legs
doubled beneath him and he went skidding down the face of the rock and landed
heavily on the flanks of the startled tiger. It sprang forward and went charging right
over the one cringing dog.
   The tiger snarled and charged at the circle of people. Unfortunately, he picked me
to charge at. Without thinking, I heaved the rock in my hand and whether I threw it
properly or not, it rapped him in the muzzle. That was the signal that set off the
barrage of rocks, and the poor bewildered tiger spun away again back toward the
rock face. Those above threw rocks down at him.
   The circle started closing on him, nobody quite daring to dash in and face him
alone, but gathering courage from those who moved in beside them. Then working
almost like the dogs, Jimmy waved his knife in the tiger’s face and it snarled and
slapped at it. And then, with the tiger’s attention held, Att, whom I’d never have
expected to do it, jumped on the tiger’s back and slid his knife between its ribs.
   The tiger hunched its shoulders and threw Att off, making a wounded cry. Then it
was swarmed under by all of us knife-wielding, screaming kids. In just a few
seconds it was dead. When we drew away, it lay there in a hot, limp pile, its purple
streaked with streams of blood.
   David Farmer came out with a badly broken leg. Bill Nieman had a clawed and
broken shoulder, the tiger having struck him almost as it died. I had one tiny scratch
and a moderately-serious knife gash, not from my own knife.
   They were right, too. It gives you a feeling of power to know that you can kill
something as alive, as beautiful and as dangerous as a tiger. But the feeling of power
can come from pushing a button at the range of five hundred yards. We killed the
tiger on his own terms. We chased him on foot, we caught him, and we killed him.
That makes you feel able.
   You also learn about yourself. You learn about the sight of a claw a foot from
your face. You learn about blood. And you learn that a tiger hunt can give you a sore
throat.
   For whatever positive effects on our minds that the tiger hunt held, nonetheless it
cannot be denied that the month of November was a time of growing uneasiness and
tension. I was not at my most cheerful. Though my mind told me, as it had for
months, that Trial would be the simplest sort of waltz, my viscera refused to be
convinced. I tried to act decently to people, but by the end of the month I could
hardly bring myself to talk to anybody at all, let alone nicely, and I was sleeping
badly. I woke myself screaming one night, something I hadn’t done in years.
   The worst thing about it was waiting. If I had had a choice, by the middle of
November I would have elected to go then, rather than later, simply to have it begun.
Instead, I just got more and more edgy.
   I even managed to get on bad terms with Jimmy, and that wasn’t easy, partly
because Jimmy is very good natured, partly because we were close. Though you are
dropped separately, one at a time, after landing you can join forces. I had been
intending to go partners with Jimmy, and I’m sure he had the same thought in mind,
but our quarrel ended that.
   It started with an intransigent remark by me about the Mudeaters. I said what I
thought, but I may have overstated my ideas for the sake of emphasis. In any case,
Mr. Mbele was moved to comment.
   “I thought you’d gotten over that, Mia,” he said. “This is a point that’s important
to me. I don’t like this over simple categorizing. Some of my ancestors were
persecuted during one period and held to be inferior simply because their skins were
dark.”
   That was plain silly, because my skin happens to be darker than Mr. Mbele’s and
I don’t feel inferior to anybody.
   “But that’s not an essential difference,” I said. “This is. They just aren’t as good
as we are.”
  On the way home, Jimmy tried to argue with me. “Do you remember those ethics
papers we did last winter?”
  “Yes.”
  “It seemed to me that you approved of Kant’s proposition that we should treat all
humans as both ends and means.”
  “I didn’t attack it.”
  “Well, then, how can you talk this way about the Colons?”
  I said, “Well, really, what makes you think that the Mudeaters are people?”
  “Oh, you sound just like your father,” Jimmy said.
   That’s where the fight started. Jimmy never physically fights anybody, at least he
hasn’t since I’ve known him, and I hadn’t been in a swinging fight with anybody in
more than a year, but we came very close to it then. We ended by going separate
ways and not speaking to each other. And I gave Jimmy back his “between
mountains” pin. That was Friday night, the night before my birthday.
  Jimmy didn’t show up on my birthday. That day, when I turned fourteen, was
completely flat. So was Sunday. On Monday, we left for Trial.



    PART III: A UNIVERSAL EDUCATION

                            Chapter Fourteen
                                                                            «^»
There are basically two ways of facing Trial— the turtle method and the tiger
method. The turtle method means that you dig yourself a hole and stay in it for a
month, looking for no trouble, looking for nothing, simply sitting. The tiger method
means that you prowl, investigating, seeing what there is to see. There is no doubt
that the tiger method is more dangerous. On the other hand, there is also no doubt
that it is more lively. None of our instructors was ever presumptuous enough to
recommend one course or the other, and there was no official stigma attached to
being a turtle, but certainly there was more prestige in being a tiger. We used to talk
about it sometimes. Riggy was determined to be a turtle.
   “I want to come home again,” he said, “and I’ve got a better chance if I’m a
turtle.” It just shows you what happens when a rash boy starts thinking.
   Att wouldn’t talk about his plans, but Jimmy said that he was going to be a tiger.
When I was thinking in terms of going with Jimmy, I was thinking of being a tiger.
When I decided that I was going by myself, I toned my projected tigerhood down
by about sixty percent. Call me a reluctant tiger.
   I got up early on the morning of the first of December and went out to get myself
breakfast. I found both Daddy and breakfast waiting for me. We ate a subdued meal.
   When I was ready to go, Daddy said, “Goodbye, Mia. Your mother and I will be
there waving when you come home.”
  I kissed him and said, “Goodbye, Daddy.”
   Then I took the shuttle down to Gate 5 on the Third Level. I was wearing sturdy
shoes, pants, light and heavy shirt. I had my knife and my handgun, my bubble tent,
my bedroll, some personal things, changes of clothes, a green, yellow and red cloth
coat, food, and, most important, my pickup signal. This, a little block three inches
by two, was my contact with the scoutship. Without it, without a signal from me at
the proper time, I might as well be dead, and as far as the Ship was concerned I
would be. Silent or dead— either way you didn’t come home.
   I collected Ninc, my stalwart and stupid pony, and his gear and loaded them on a
transport shuttle. Then I helped Rachel Yung do the same, and we went down
together to First Level and the scoutship bay. We loaded our stuff and went outside
to wait.
   There were no bands playing. There were just the scoutships standing quietly over
their tubes, men working in a businesslike fashion in the great rock gallery, and us.
We were ignored— we might not come back, you know.
   One by one the kids came, loaded their stuff aboard, and then came outside to
join us in standing around. We weren’t making much noise, except for Riggy, who
told a joke and then laughed at it, his voice echoing. Nobody else laughed.
   We were to leave at eight. At quarter to eight, Mr. Marechal came in, wished us
luck, and went on his way. His new class was to have its first meeting that afternoon
and I think he was probably already memorizing names.
   There were sixteen of us girls, and thirteen boys. David Farmer and Bill Nieman
were missing, still recovering from the tiger hunt. They would have another chance in
three months, though I didn’t envy them the wait at all. Especially after we came
back and were adults, and they weren’t.
   Just before eight, George Fuhonin and Mr. Pizarro arrived. George was quite
bright and cheerful in spite of the early hour. I was standing near the ramp and he
stopped.
  “Well, the big day at last,” he said. “I’d wish you luck if I thought you needed it,
Mia, but I don’t think I have to worry about you.”
  I don’t know whether I appreciated his confidence or not.
  Mr. Pizarro went about halfway up the ramp and then turned and waved for
attention. “All right,” he called. “Everybody aboard.”
  We took our seats in the bull-pen. Before I went in, I paused at the head of the
ramp and took a good long look at home, possibly the last look I would ever have.
After we were settled, George raised the ramps.
   “Here we go,” he said over the speaker. “Ten seconds to drop.”
   The air bled out of the tubes, the rim bars pulled back, and then we just…
dropped. George didn’t have to do that. He would never have dared to do that with
Daddy aboard. My stomach flipped a little and then settled again. George has an odd
sense of humor and I think he thinks it’s fun to be a hot pilot when he can get away
with it.
   Att was sitting near me and he turned then as though he had finally gotten up the
nerve to say something difficult.
   “Mia,” he said, “I wondered— do you think you might want to go partners?”
   After a moment I said, “I’m sorry, Att, but I guess not.”
   “Jimmy?”
   “No. I think I’ll just go by myself.”
   “Oh,” he said, and after a few minutes he got up and moved off.
   I guess it was my day to be popular, because Jimmy came over, too, a little later.
I was busy thinking and I didn’t see him come up. He cleared his throat and I looked
up.
   Almost apologetically, he said, “Mia, I always thought we’d join up after we were
dropped. If you want to, I will.”
   I still had that final crack of his in mind, the one about being a snob, so I simply
said, “No,” and he went away. That bothered me. If he cared, he would have tried to
argue, and if he’d argued I might have changed my mind.
   That crack of his continued to rankle. He had to bring Daddy into it, but Daddy
never convinced me. People who live on planets can’t be people. They don’t have
any chance to learn how to be, so they grow up to be like those characters I met the
first time I was on a planet. And I heard lots of other stories at home. If both you
and your father come to an inevitable conclusion based on facts, that doesn’t mean
he convinced you. I’d made up my own mind. And tell me, is it being a snob not to
like people who aren’t people?
   The planet that we were being dropped on was called Tintera. Daddy told me that
one thing at breakfast, sailing a little close to the edge of the rules. But it was hardly
much of an admission on his part since he well knew that I had never heard of the
place. Our last contact with the planet, and we were aware of none recently, had
been almost 150 years before. We knew the colony was still extant, but that was all.
The Council always discusses Trial drops before they are made, and this much time
out of contact had given them something to talk about. But the planet was
conveniently at hand, so in the end they went ahead. Actually, for them not to,
Daddy would have had to make some objection, and speaking practically, he
couldn’t object because of me.
   When we reached Tintera, George began dropping us. We swung over the sea
from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested hills. George
spotted a clear area and swung down to it. When we came to a stop, he lowered the
ramp.
   “Okay,” he said over the speaker. “First one out.”
   The order in leaving the scoutship is purely personal. As long as somebody goes,
they don’t care who it is. Jimmy had all his gear together before we set down. As
soon as the ramp was lowered, he signaled to Mr. Pizarro that he was going, and led
his horse down the ramp. It was what you would expect Jimmy to do. Mr. Pizarro
checked him off, and in a minute we were airborne again.
    I began to check my gear out then, making sure I had everything. I’d checked it
all before and I had no way to replace anything missing, but I couldn’t help myself.
   At the next landing, I said to Mr. Pizarro, “I’ll go now,” cutting out Venie, who
sat down again. I grabbed Ninc’s reins. I didn’t lash my gear on, but just slung it
over the saddle, and then walked down the ramp with Ninc. It had nothing to do with
Jimmy. I just wanted to go. I didn’t want to wait any longer.
   I waved at George to show him I was clear, and that I was going, and he waved
back as he lifted the ramp. Then the scout rose impersonally away as I held Ninc
tightly to keep him from doing something foolish. In just a moment it was gone. Its
gray-blue color was almost the color of the overcast sky, so I was never sure when I
saw it last.
   It left me there, the Compleat Young Girl, hell on wheels. I could build
one-fifteenth of a log cabin, kill one-thirty-first of a tiger, kiss, do needlepoint, pass
through an obstacle course, and come pretty close (in theory) to killing somebody
with my bare hands. What did I have to worry about?
   I lived through that first day— the first of my thirty. It was cool, so the very first
thing I did was put on my colored coat. Then I slung Ninc’s saddle bags, strapped
my bedroll on, and swung aboard. I didn’t push things, but just rode easily through
the forest making a list of priorities in my mind, the things I had to do and the order I
should do them in. My list ran like this:
   The first thing was to stay alive. Find food beyond the little supply I had. Any
shelter better than a bubble tent— locate, or if necessary, build.
   Second— look over the territory. See what the scenery and people looked like.
  Third— see some of the other kids if things should happen to go that way. I
hadn’t been dropped a great distance from Jimmy, after all, and Venie or somebody
wouldn’t be terribly far the other way.
   The gravity of Tintera was a shade on the light side, which I didn’t mind at all. It
is better, after all, to be light on your feet than to be heavy. Or worse— to have a
horse with sore feet. The country under the forest top was rugged. There were times
when I had to get off and walk, picking my way through the trees or around a rock
formation.
   I stopped fairly early in the day. Being alone and lonely, feeling a little set at odds
by the change from warm, comfortable Geo Quad to this cold, gray forested world,
I was ready to make a fire, eat and go to bed at a time I would have found
unreasonably early at home.
   I located a little hollow with a spring and set up my bubble tent there. I finished
eating by the time dark fell and went into the tent, but I didn’t turn on the light. Even
in the shelter I felt unaccountably cold, something like the way I had felt in the week
after I got my general protection shot. I ached all over. If it weren’t the wrong time
of the month, I would have thought I was having my period. If it weren’t so unlikely,
I would have thought I was sick. But I wasn’t having my period and I wasn’t sick—
I was just miserable.
   I huddled and I cried, curled up in my bedroll. I hated this wretched planet, I was
mad at Jimmy for letting me be alone like this, and I wasn’t any too happy with
myself. I hadn’t expected Trial to be like this. So lonely, so strange. As I’d been
riding during the afternoon, I had scared up some large animals. They were ungainly
things with knobby knees and square, lumpy heads. When they noticed Ninc and
me, they threw up their heads and stared at us. They had the kind of horns that
sprout— antlers. After a moment, they bolted in a wobble-legged gallop that carried
them crashing into the brush and then out of sight. They knew an outsider when they
saw one, and I knew I didn’t belong. I didn’t get to sleep easily.
   The sun was up in the morning. The morning was cold, but the day was brighter.
As I moved around and as the sun rose higher, it became almost warm, the heat of
the sun and the cold of the breeze balancing each other.
   I wasn’t feeling much better, but I did keep busy and that took my mind off my
troubles. I was recognizing a disadvantage to being a turtle that I hadn’t previously
reckoned on. It gave me far too much time to appreciate the awfulness of planets in
general and the specific failings of this particular place, not to mention the misery of
being alone and deserted. I couldn’t stand that. I had to be a tiger to occupy my
mind, if for no other reason.
   So I packed up early in the morning, and I started Ninc in a great widening circle,
the most efficient sort of search pattern. The country continued to be rough. If I had
been following the line of the land, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but trying to go in
a spiral was difficult. There were any number of times that I had to get off Ninc and
lead him.
   At one of these times, a small animal came bounding across my path. I’d seen
other small ground animals and gliders in the trees once or twice, but never this
close. I pulled my gun the instant I saw it. My first shot with the sonic pistol missed,
the sighting beam slapping left, because Ninc chose that moment to toss his silly
brown head. I shot again and dropped it this time. A sonic pistol is a nice short
range weapon.
    I led Ninc over and as I bent to pick it up, there was a loud noise of something
moving in the bushes. I turned to look. The thing that stood poised there was
nothing short of startling. It stood on two legs and was covered with gray-green hair.
It had a square, flat animal mask for a face. I had a feeling that I had just killed its
intended dinner.
   We looked at each other. Ninc snorted and started backing away. I dropped the
reins and hoped Ninc wouldn’t run. I took a deep breath to quiet my pounding heart,
and then I walked straight at it with my pistol in hand. I yelled, “Shoo. Get out of
here,” and waved my arms. I yelled again, and after an uncertain moment, the thing
shook its head and plunged away.
   I turned back and grabbed Ninc, feeling surprisingly good. I’d been thinking
about my general misery, my feeling I’d just had a shot. It struck me that if I had a
choice, I’d be better off without a gun than without immunization. I’ll bet more
explorers on old Earth died from the galloping whatdoyoucallits than were killed by
animals, accidents and aborigines put together.
   I kept going until the light began to fade. The animal I shot turned out to be
edible. It’s all a matter of luck. In the course of Survival Training I’d had occasion
to eat things that were so gruey that I wonder how anybody could choke them down
(the point under demonstration, of course, being that the most astounding guck will
keep you alive). I’d done better than just find something that would keep me alive,
so I hadn’t done badly at all. By the time I had eaten, I was thoroughly tired, and I
had no trouble at all in falling asleep.
   It was the next day that I found the road. I was riding along and singing. I don’t
like the idea of people who don’t sing to themselves when they’re all alone. They’re
too sober for me. At least hum— anybody can do that. So I was riding and singing
as I came to the crest of a hill. I looked down and through the trees I saw the road.
   I brought Ninc down the hill, losing sight of the road for a time in the trees and
rocks, and then coming clear of the welter of brown and gray and green to find the
road. It curved before and behind, following the roll of the land with no attempt
made to cut the land for a straighter, more even way. It was a narrow dirt road with
marks of wagons and horses and other tracks I couldn’t identify. There were
droppings, too, that weren’t horse droppings.
   We had come in over the ocean from the west and I knew we weren’t terribly far
from it now. It seemed likely that one of the ends of this road was the ocean. I, of
course, had no intention of going in that direction since I had already seen one ocean
and counted that sufficient. My quota of oceans had been filled. It is an axiom that
roads lead somewhere, so I oriented myself and headed eastwards— inland.
   I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined bend, and
pulled Ninc to a stop. Ahead of me on the road, going in the same direction that I
was, were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures alive. The
creatures were making a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
   I looked after them, my heart suddenly fluttering. For a brief moment I wanted to
turn and head back the way I had come. But I knew I had to face these locals
sometime if I was going to be a tiger, and after all, they were only Mudeaters. Only
Mudeaters.
   Ninc set into a walk as I kicked him. I got a better look at the creatures as we
approached, and it seemed likely to me that they were brothers of the thing I had
encountered in the woods the day before. They were quite unhuman. They were
green and grotesque with squat bodies, knobby joints, long limbs and square heads.
But they did walk on their hind legs and had paws that were prehensile— hands—
and that was enough to give an impression of humanity. A caricature.
   All the men on horseback had guns in saddle boots and looked as nervous as cats
with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line, and he saw me and
called to another who seemed to be the leader. That one wheeled his black horse and
rode back toward me.
   He was a middle-aged man, whatever middle age was here. He was a large man
and he had a hard face. It was a normal enough face, but it was hard. He pulled to a
halt when we reached each other, but I didn’t. I kept riding and he had to come
around and follow me.
   I believe in judging people by their faces, myself. A man can’t help the face he
owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man looks mean, I generally
believe he is unless I have reason to change my mind. This one looked mean, and
that was why I kept riding. He made me feel nervous.
   He said, “What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head? There be
escaped Losels in these woods.”
    I had short-cut hair and I was wearing my cloth coat against the bite in the air, but
still I wondered. I wasn’t ready to dispute the point with him, though. I had no desire
to linger around him. I didn’t say anything. I believe I said once that I don’t talk
easily in strange company or large crowds.
  “Where be you from?” he asked.
  I pointed to the road behind us.
  “And where be you going?”
  I pointed ahead. No other way to go except crosscountry. He seemed
exasperated. I have that effect sometimes.
  We had caught up to the others and the animals by then, and the man said,
“Maybe you’d better ride on from here with us. For protection.”
   He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a mouthful of
mush. It was imprecise, but I could understand him well enough. He wanted me to
do something I didn’t want to.
   One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they’d been watching
us all the while. He called to the hard man.
  “He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel’d even notice him at all. We
mought as well throw him back again.”
   The rider looked at me. When I didn’t dissolve in obvious terror— I was
frightened, but I wasn’t about to show it— he shrugged and one of the other men
laughed.
   The hard man said to the others, “This boy will be riding along with us to
Midland for protection.” He smiled, and the impression I had of a cat, a predatory
cat, was increased.
   I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving along. One of
them looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes. I felt uncomfortable
to look at it.
  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
   What the man did then surprised me. He said, “I do think so,” and reached for
the gun in his saddle boot.
   I whipped my sonic pistol out from under my coat so fast that he was caught
leaning over with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He recognized the pistol for
what it was and he had no desire to be fried.
  I said, “Ease your guns out and drop them gently to the ground.”
  They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions. When all the rifles
were on the ground, I said, “All right, let’s go.”
  They didn’t want to move. They didn’t want to leave the rifles. I could see that.
Horst didn’t say anything. He just watched me with narrowed eyes and made me
anxious to be done and gone.
  One of the others held up a hand and in wheedling tones said, “Look here, kid…”
   “Shut up,” I said in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It surprised
me a little. I didn’t think I sounded that mean. Perhaps he just didn’t trust that crazy
kid not to shoot him if he prodded too hard.
   After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and harder walking for the creatures, I
said, “If you want your rifles, you can go back and get them now.”
   I dug my heels into Ninc’s sides and rode on. At the next bend I looked back and
saw four of them holding the packhorses and creatures, while the last beat a dust
raising retreat down the road.
   I put this episode in the “file and hold for analysis” section of my mind and rode
on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes I even convince myself that
I’m hell on wheels.


                              Chapter Fifteen
                                                                            «^»
I was nine when Daddy gave me a family heirloom, the painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth, the one with eleven smaller dolls inside it.
The first time I opened it, I was completely amazed, and I like to watch other people
when they open it for the first time. My face must have been like that as I rode along
the road.
   First there were fields. As I traveled along the road and the day wore on, the
country leveled into a wide valley and the trees gave way to fields. In the fields,
working under guard and supervision, were some of the green hairy creatures. That
surprised me a little because the ones I’d seen earlier had seemed frightened and
unhappy and certainly had given no sign of the ability to count to one, let alone do
any work, even with somebody directing them. It relieved my mind a little, though.
I’d thought they might be meat animals and they were too humanoid for that to seem
acceptable.
   The road widened in the valley and was cut twice by smaller crossroads. I
overtook more people and was passed once by a fast-stepping pair of horses and a
carriage. I met wagons and horses and people on foot. I passed what seemed to be a
roadside camp set between road and field. There was a wagon there and a tent with a
woman hanging laundry outside. There was a well and a great empty roofless
wooden structure. As I traveled, nobody questioned me. I overtook a wagon loaded
heavily, covered bales in the back, driven by the oldest man I’d ever seen. He had
white hair and a seamed red face. As I trotted past on Ninc he raised a rough old
hand and waved.
   “Hello,” he said.
   I waved back, “Hello.” He smiled.
    Then, in the afternoon, I came to the town. It was just an uncertain dot at first, but
at last I came to it, one final doll. I came down the brown dirt road and rode into the
town of stone and brick and wood. By the time I came out on the other side, I felt
thoroughly shaken. My hands weren’t happily sweaty. They were cold and sweaty
and my head was spinning.
   There was a sign at the edge of the town that said MIDLAND. The town looked
handmade, cobbled together. Out of date. Out of time, really, as though nothing but
the simplest machines had been heard of here.
  I passed some boys playing tag in the dirt of the street and saw that one of the
buildings was a newspaper. There was a large strip of paper in the window with the
word INVASION! in great letters. A man in rough clothes was standing outside
puzzling the word out.
  I looked at everything as I rode through the town, but I looked most closely at the
people. There were boys playing, but I saw only a couple of little girls and they were
walking primly with their families.
  There are a number of things that I’m not fond of, as you know. Wearing pants is
one. I’d been glad to have them here because they kept my legs warm and protected,
but I wouldn’t wear them except from necessity. The men and boys that I saw here
were wearing pants. The women and girls weren’t. They were wearing clothes that
struck my eye as odd, but flattering. However, they were as hampering as bound feet
and I wouldn’t have undertaken to walk a hundred yards in them. Riding would have
been a complete impossibility. I decided then that pants might be preferable to some
hypothetical alternatives.
   The number of kids that I saw was overwhelming. They swarmed. They played in
the street by squads and bunches. And these were just boys.
  The only girls I saw were a troop wearing uniforms and hobbling along under the
eyes of a pack of guardians. School girls, I guessed.
   More than half of the people I saw were kids— far more than half. When I saw a
family together, the answer hit me. There was a father, a mother, and a whole brigade
of children— eight of them. The family resemblance was unmistakable.
  These people were Free Birthers! The idea struck me hard. The very first thing
you learn as a child is the consequences of a Free Birth policy. We couldn’t last a
generation if we bred like animals. A planet is just an oversized Ship and these
people, as much as we, were the heirs of a planet destroyed by Free Birth. They
ought to know better.
   A planet is different enough from a Ship that we wouldn’t expect population to be
restricted as tightly as ours, but some planning is necessary. There is no excuse for
eight children in one family— and this just counted those present and walking. Who
knows how many older and younger ones there were? It was sickening immorality.
   It frightened me and filled me with revulsion. I was frantic. There were too many
things going on that I couldn’t like or understand. I held Ninc to a walk to the far
edge of town, but when I got there I whomped him a good one and gave him his
head.
   I let him run a good distance before I pulled him down to a walk again. I couldn’t
help wishing that I had Jimmy there to talk to. How do you find out what’s going on
in a strange land like this one? Eavesdrop? That’s a lousy method. For one thing,
people can’t be depended on to talk about the things you want to hear. For another,
you’re likely to get caught. Ask somebody? Who? You can’t afford to be too casual
about that, you know. Make the mistake of bracing a man like that Horst and you
might wind up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think of
was to use a library, and I wasn’t any too sure that they had anything as civilized as
that here. I hadn’t seen anything in Midland that looked like a library to me— only a
stone building with a carved motto over the door that said, “Equal Justice under the
Law,” or “Truth Our Shield and Justice Our Sword,” or something stuffy like that.
Hardly a help.
  There were signs along the road that said how far it was to one place and another.
One of the names, Forton, was in larger letters than the rest. I hesitated for a long
moment, caught between the sudden desire to become a turtle and the thought of
continuing as a tiger. You know, turtles on old Earth sometimes lived for a hundred
years or more— tigers nowhere near that long. But after a moment I kicked Ninc and
continued along the road. What I wanted was a town large enough for me to find out
answers without being obvious and a place large enough to get lost in easily if that
turned out to be necessary. I’ve seen days when I was glad I knew of places to get
lost in.
   In the late afternoon, when the sun was beginning to sink through its last fast fifth
and the cool air was starting to turn colder, one last strange thing happened. I was,
by that time, in hills again, though less rugged ones with slopes that had been at least
partly cleared. It was then that I saw the scoutship high in the sky. The dying sun
colored it a deep red. The only thing I could think of was that something had gone
wrong and they had come back to pick us up.
   I reached down into my saddle bag and brought out my contact signal. The
scoutship swung up in the sky in a movement that would drop the stomach out of
anybody aboard. It was the sort of movement you would expect from a very bad
pilot, or one who was very good, like George Fuhonin. I triggered the signal, not
really feeling sorry.
   The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path practically over my
head. Then it went into a slip and started bucking so hard that I knew for certain that
this wasn’t hot piloting at all, but simply plain idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the
controls. As it skidded by me overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it
wasn’t one of ours. It wasn’t radically different, but the lines were just varied enough
that I knew it wasn’t ours.
  My heart stopped turning flips and I realized that I was aching all over again.
Maybe the gravity was heavier here after all. I shouldn’t have expected it to be
George. I knew as well as anybody that they just didn’t come back for you until the
month was up.
   But this was one more question. Where did the ship come from? Certainly not
from here. Even if you have the knowledge— and we wouldn’t have given it to any
Mudeater— a scoutship is something that takes an advanced technology to build.
   A few minutes later, still wondering, I came across a campsite almost identical to
the one I’d seen earlier in the day, down to the well and the high-walled log pen.
There were several people already in the process of making camp for the night and it
looked so tempting that I couldn’t resist. There were a number of sites on the slope
and a little road led between them. So I turned off the main road. I originally picked a
spot near the log structure, but it stank horribly there and so I moved.
   I set up camp and ate my dinner. Before I was done, the wagon driven by the old
man who had waved hello to me swung into the camp. There was a tent about thirty
feet from me with three young children and their parents. The kids stared at me and
the bubble tent and one of them looked ready to talk to me, but their father came
out, shot me a look sitting there drinking my soup, and hauled them away.
   After dinner a joint fire was started up by the old man’s wagon and people
gathered around it. I was attracted by the singing. It wasn’t good but it sounded
homey. Everybody in camp was there, so I thought it was all right for me to come,
too. The kids from the next camp were given places in front and their mother, poor
helpless thing, was given a stump to sit on. I just stayed in the background and drew
no attention to myself.
   In a little while, the kids’ father decided it was time for their mother to take them
back and put them to bed, but the kids didn’t want to go. The old white-haired man
then proposed that he tell a story, after which the children would go with their
mother. In the old man’s odd accent, as I sat there in the light of the campfire
beyond the circle of people, the story seemed just right.
   He said, “This story be told to me by my grandmother and it be told to her by her
grandmother before her. Now I tell it to you and when you be old, you may tell it,
too.”
   It was about a nice little girl whose stepmother had iron teeth and unpleasant
intentions. The little girl had a handkerchief, a pearl and a comb that she had
inherited from her dear dead mother, and her own good heart. As it turned out, these
were just enough to find her a better home with a prince, and all were happy except
the stepmother, who missed her lunch.
   The old man had just finished and the kids were reluctantly allowing themselves to
be taken off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of camp. I
turned to look, but my eyes had grown used to the light of the fire and I couldn’t see
far into the darkness.
  A voice there said, “I be damned if I’ll take another day like this one, Horst. We
should have been here two hours ago. It be your fault, and that be truth.”
  Horst said, “You signed on for good and bad. If you want to keep your teeth,
you’ll quit your bitching and shut up!”
   I had a good idea then what the pen was used for. I decided that it was time for
me to leave the campfire, too. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men herded
their animals past the fire toward the stockade. I cut back to where I had Ninc
parked for the night. I threw my bedroll out of the bubble tent and knocked the tent
down.
  There seemed to be just one thing to do, everything considered. That was to get
out of there as fast as possible.
  I never got the chance.
  I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my shoulder and I
swung around.
   “Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,” he called. It was the one who had
made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He was the only one
there, but with that call the others would be up fast.
  I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he fell down. He
got up again, though, so I dropped the saddle and reached for my gun under my
coat. The saddle bounced off him and he went down again, but somebody caught
me from behind and pinned my arms to my sides.
   I opened my mouth to scream— I have a good scream— but a rough, smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a lungful of air. I
bit down hard— 5,000 lbs. per square inch, or some such figure, in a good hard
bite— but he didn’t let go. I started to kick, but it did me no good. One arm around
me, right hand over my mouth, Horst dragged me off, my feet trailing behind.
  When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped dragging
me and dropped me in a heap. “Make any noise,” he said, “and I’ll hurt you.”
   That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he’d threatened to
break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things to do if he pleased. There
was enough moonlight for him to see by and he examined his hand.
  “I ought to club you anyway,” he said. “There be no blood, at least.”
   The one I’d dropped the saddle on came up then, shaking his head to clear it.
He’d been hurt the second time and had gone down hard. When he saw me, he
brought his booted foot back to kick me. Horst gave me a shove that laid me out fiat
and grabbed the other one.
  “No,” he said. “You go look through the kid’s stuff and see how much of it we
can use and bring it all back with the horse.”
   The other one didn’t move. He just stood glaring. The last three men were putting
the animals in the pen, so it was a private moment.
   “Get going, Jack,” Horst said in a menacing tone and finally Jack turned away. It
seemed to me somehow that Horst wasn’t objecting so much to me being kicked,
but was rather establishing who it was that did the kicking around here.
   But I wasn’t out of things yet. In spite of my theoretical training, I wasn’t any too
sure that I could handle Horst, but I still had my pistol under my coat and Horst
hadn’t relieved me of it yet.
    He turned back to me, and I said, “You can’t do this. You can’t get away with
it.”
  It was a stupid thing to say, I admit, but I had to say something.
  He said, “Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of trouble. So
don’t give me a hard time.”
  He still thought I was a boy. It was no time to correct him, but it was very
unflattering of him at a time when I was finally getting some notice from people to
make a mistake like that.
  “I’ll take you to court.”
  He laughed. A genuine laugh, not a phony, curl-my-moustaches laugh, so I knew I
hadn’t said the right thing.
   “Boy, boy. Don’t talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be taking what I
can use of your gear and letting you go. You go to court and they’ll take everything
from you and lock you up besides. I be leaving you your freedom.”
   “Why? Why would they do that?” I asked. I slipped my hand under my coat
slowly. I could feel the hard handle of the sonic pistol.
   “Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off of the Ships,” Horst
said. “That be enough. They already have one of you brats in jail in Forton.”
   I was about to bring my gun out when Jack came up leading Ninc. I mentally
thanked him.
  He said, “The kid’s got good equipment. But I can’t make out what this be for.”
He held out my pickup signal.
  Horst looked at it, then handed it back. “Junk,” he decided. “Throw it away.” He
handed it back.
  I leveled my gun at them. (Hell on wheels strikes again!) I said, “Hand that over to
me carefully.”
  They looked at me and Horst made a disgusted sound.
  “Don’t make any noise,” I said. “Now hand it over to me.
   Jack eased it into my hand and I stowed it away. Then I paused with one hand on
the horn of the saddle.
  “What’s the name of the kid in jail in Forton?”
  “They told us about it in Midland,” Horst said. “I don’t remember the name.”
  “Think!” I said.
  “It’s coming to me. Hold on.”
  I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind and the gun
went flying. Jack pounced after it, and Horst said, “Good enough,” to the others
behind me.
  I felt like a fool.
  Horst stalked over, reached in my pocket and brought out my signal, my only
contact with the Ship and my only hope for pickup. He dropped it on the ground
and said in a voice more cold than mine could ever be because it was natural and
mine wasn’t, “The pieces be yours to keep.”
   He stamped down hard and it didn’t break. It didn’t even crack. Frustrated, he
stamped again, even harder, and then again and again until it finally came to pieces.
My pieces.
   Then he said, “Pull a gun on me twice. Twice! He slapped me so hard that my
ears rang. ”You stupid little punk.“
  I looked up at him and said in a clear, penetrating voice, “And you big bastard.”
   It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a hash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my face and then
nothing more than that.
  Brains are no good if you don’t use them.
                               Chapter Sixteen
                                                                               «^»
I remember pain and sickness and motion dimly, but Hell-on-Wheels’ next clear
memory came when I woke in a bed in a strange house. I had a vague feeling that
time had passed, but how much I didn’t know. I had a sharp headache and a face
that made me wince when I put a tentative finger to my cheek. I didn’t know where I
was, why I was there, or why I ached so.
    Then, as though a bubble had popped, the moment of disassociation was gone
and it all came back to me. Horst and being knocked around. I was trying to push
my way out of bed when the old man who had told the story came in the room.
   “How be you feeling this morning, young lady?” he asked. His face was red, his
hair white, and his deepset eyes a bright blue. It was a good strong face.
   “Not very well,” I said. “How long has it been?”
  “Two days,” he said. “The doctor says you’ll be well soon enough. I be Daniel
Kutsov. And you?”
   “I’m Mia Havero,” I said.
   “I found you dumped by the camp where Horst Fanger left you.”
   “You know him?”
   “I know of him. Everyone knows of him. A very unpleasant man— as I suppose
he be bound to be, herding Losels.”
   “Those green things were Losels? Why are they afraid of them?”
   “The ones you saw been drugged. They wouldn’t obey otherwise. Once in awhile
a few be stronger than the drug and they escape to the woods. The drug cannot be
so strong that they cannot work. So the strongest escape. They be some danger to
most people, and a great danger to men like Horst Fanger who buy them from the
ships who bring them to the coast. Every so often hunters go to kill as many as they
can find.”
   I was tired and my mind was foggy. My head still hurt, and when I yawned
involuntarily it was painful.
   Sleepily, I said, “It seems like slavery, drugging them and all.”
   Mr. Kutsov said gently, “Only God can decide a question like that. Be it slavery
to use my horses to work for me? I don’t know anyone who would say so. A man
be a different matter, though. The question be whether a Losel be like a horse, or like
a man, and in all truth I can’t answer. Now go to sleep again and in awhile I will bring
you some food.”
   He left then, but in spite of my aching tiredness I didn’t fall asleep. I didn’t like it,
being here. The old man was a Mudeater and that made me nervous. He was nice,
being kind, and how could I stand for that? I tried to see my way around the
problem and I couldn’t. My mind wouldn’t rest enough to see things clearly. At last
I drifted off into a restless sleep.
  Mr. Kutsov brought me some food later in the day, and helped me eat when my
hands were too unsteady. His hands were wrinkled and bent.
  Between mouthfuls, I said, “Why are you doing this for me?”
  He said, “Have you ever heard the Parable of the Good Samaritan?”
  “Yes,” I said. I’ve always read a lot.
   “The point of the story be that at times good will come even from low and evil
men. But there be books that say the story been changed. In the true version, the
man by the road been the Samaritan, as bad a man as ever been, and the man that
rescued him did good even to such a one. You may be of the Ships, but I don’t like
to see children hurt. So I treat you as the Samaritan been treated.”
   I didn’t know quite what to say. I’m not a bad person. I thought he ought to be
able to see that. I didn’t understand how he could think so badly of us.
   He added then, perhaps seeing my shock, “I be sorry. I don’t think as harshly of
the Ships as most. Without the Ships we wouldn’t be here at all. That be something
to remember in these bad times. So be sure that I won’t tell that you be a girl or from
the Ships, and rest easy. My house be yours.”
   The next day he suggested that for my own good I learn to speak so that I would
not be noticed. That was sensible. My mind wasn’t as foggy now and I was starting
to worry about things like finding a way to contact the Ship. To do it, I might very
well have to pass as a native. And if I didn’t do it, I’d definitely have to pass as a
native, damn it.
   I didn’t fully understand Mr. Kutsov. I had the feeling that there was more in his
mind than he was saying. Could he just be doing good to a despised Samaritan? No,
there was more. For some reason he was interested in me.
   We worked on my speech for a couple of hours that day. Some of the changes
were fairly regular— like shifted vowel sounds and a sort of “b” sound for “p,” and
saying “be” for “is”— but some of the others seemed without pattern or sense,
though a linguist might disagree with me. Mr. Kutsov could only say, “I don’t know
why. We just don’t say it that way, be all.”
  After he said that once, I just gave up, but he coaxed me into trying again. He
coaxed me, and that was the sort of thing that made me wonder what he had in mind.
Why did he care?
   After awhile, I began to catch on. I couldn’t tell you offhand what all the changes
were—I think rhythm was a large part of it— but I did have a good ear. I suppose
that there was a pattern after all, but it was one I only absorbed subconsciously. I
got better after we’d worked for several days.
  Mr. Kutsov said once, “Not like that. You sound as though you be talking around
a mouthful of gruel.” Not surprising, since that was what he was feeding me, but in
any case I was only repeating what I heard.
   During those hours we talked. You have to have something to correct and with no
textbooks at hand it had to be normal speech. As we talked, I made mistakes and he
corrected them.
   In the course of our talks, I got a fuller picture of the dislike of these colonists—
for some reason, Mudeaters wasn’t the word that came into my mind anymore, at
least, not most of the time— for Ship people.
   “It been’t a simple thing,” he said. “These be bad times. Now and again, when
you decide to stop, we see you people from the Ships. You be not poor or
backward like us. When we be dropped here, there been no scientists or technicians
amongst us. I can understand. Why should they leave the last places where they had
a chance to use and develop their knowledge for a place like this where there be no
equipment, no opportunity? But what be felt here be that all the men who survived
the end of Earth be the equal heirs of man’s knowledge and accomplishment. But
things be not that way. So when times be good, the Ships be hated and ignored.
When times be bad, people from the Ships when known be treated as you have been
or worse.”
  I could understand what he said, but I couldn’t really understand it.
  I said, “But we don’t hurt anybody. We just live like anybody else.”
   “I don’t hold you to blame,” Mr. Kutsov said slowly, “but I can’t help but to feel
that you have made a mistake and that it will hurt you in the end.”
   After I felt better, I had the run of Mr. Kutsov’s house. It was a small place near
the edge of Forton, a neat little house surrounded by trees and a small garden. Mr.
Kutsov lived alone, and when it wasn’t raining he worked in his garden. When it was,
he came inside to his books. He used his wagon to make a regular trip to the coast
and back once every two weeks. It wasn’t a very profitable business, but he said
that at his age profit was no longer very important. I don’t know whether he meant it
or not.
   He took my clothes away, saying they weren’t appropriate for a girl, and in their
place he brought me some clothes that were more locally acceptable. They were
about the right length, but they were loose under the arms as though they had been
meant for somebody who was broader than I.
  “There,” he said. “That be better.” But I had to take them in a little before they fit.
   I had the run of the house, but I wasn’t allowed outside. In some ways this
wasn’t so bad because it rained, it seemed, two days in three, and the third day it
threatened to. I kept busy. Mr. Kutsov continued to tutor me until he at last decided
that if I was careful I could get by in polite society. When Mr. Kutsov was outside, I
prowled around the house.
   Mr. Kutsov had a good library of books and I looked through them, in the
process finding a number of very interesting things. History— the Losels’ natural
home was on a continent to the west where they had been discovered one hundred
years earlier. Since that time they had been brought over by the shipload and used
for simple manual labor. There had previously been no native population of Losels
on this continent. Now, in addition to those owned and used for work, there was a
small but growing number of Losels running wild in the back country. Most of the
opinions I read granted them no particular intelligence, citing their inability to do
anything beyond the simplest sort of labor, their lack of fire and their lack of
language. For my part, I remembered what Mr. Kutsov had said about the ability of
the wild ones to recognize their particular enemies and that didn’t seem stupid to me
at all. In fact, I was relieved that I had come off so well from my encounter with one
that second day.
  Geography— I oriented myself by Mr. Kutsov’s maps and I tentatively tried to
copy them.
  And I found a book that Mr. Kutsov had written himself. It was an old book, a
novel called The White Way. It was not completely successful— it tried to do too
many things other than tell a story— but it was far better than my brother Joe’s
book.
   When I found it, I showed it to Mr. Kutsov and he admitted that it was his.
   “It took me forty years to write it, and I have spent forty-two years since then
living with the political repercussions. It has been an interesting forty-two years, but I
be not sure that I would do it again. Read the book if you be interested.”
   There were politics in the book, and from something else Mr. Kutsov said in
passing, I got the impression that the simple, physical job he held was in part a
result. Politics are funny.
  I found two other things. I found my clothes where Mr. Kutsov had hidden them
and I found the answer to a question that I didn’t ask Mr. Kutsov in one of his
newspapers. The last sentence of the story read, “After sentencing, Dentermount
been sent to the Territorial Jail in Forton to serve his three-month term.”
   The charge was Trespassing. I thought Incitement to Riot would have been better,
and that the least they could do would be to spell his name correctly. Trust it to be
Jimmy.
   So when I got the chance, I put on my own clothes and my coat and snuck into
town. Before I came home I found out where the jail was. On the way, I passed
Horst Fanger’s place of business. It was a house, pen, shed, stable and auction
block in the worst quarter of town. From what I gathered, it was the worst quarter of
town because Horst Fanger and similar people lived there.
   When I came back, Mr. Kutsov was very angry with me. “It been’t right,” he
said, “going on the streets dressed like that. It been’t right for women.” He kept a
fairly close eye on me for several days after that until I convinced him that I now
knew better.
    It was during the next two days, while I was being good, that I found the portrait.
It showed Mr. Kutsov and a younger man and woman, and a little girl. The little girl
was about my size, but much more stocky. Her hair was dark brown. It was
obviously a family picture and I asked him about it.
   He looked very grave and the only thing he said was, “They all be dead.” That
was all. I couldn’t help but think that the picture might have something to do with his
keeping me, and beyond that to his keeping me close at hand. Mr. Kutsov was a nice
and intelligent old man, but there was something that was either unexplainable or
irrational about the way he treated me. He expected me to stay in his house, though
he should have known that I wouldn’t and couldn’t stay. When I ran off, he was
unhappy, but then it was pathetic how little assurance it took before things were all
right again. I think he was telling himself lies. He must have been telling himself lies.
He was already preparing to make another wagon trip. His old-fashioned nature
wouldn’t allow him to take me along, so quite happily he made plans for me to stay
alone in the house until he got back. He told me where things were and what to do if
I ran out of butter and eggs. I nodded and he was pleased.
   When he went off to arrange his wagon load one afternoon, I went off to town
again. To reach the jail, I had to walk across most of the town. Although it was the
Territorial Capital, it was still a town and not a city, not as I understood the word. It
was a raw, unpleasant day, the sort that makes me hate planets, and rain was
threatening when I reached the jail. It was a solid, three-story building of great stone
blocks, shaped like a fortress and protected by an iron spike fence. All the windows,
from the cellar to the top floor, were double barred. I walked around the building as
I had before and looked it over again. It seemed impregnable. Between the fence and
the building was a run in which patrolled two large, hairy, and vicious-looking dogs.
One of them followed me all the way around the building.
  As I was about to start around again, the rain started. It gave me the impetus I
needed, and I ran for the front door and dodged into the entrance.
   I was standing there, shaking the rain off, when a man in a green uniform came
stalking out of one of the offices that lined the first-floor hallway. My heart stopped
for a moment, but he barely glanced at me and went right on by and up the stairs to
the second floor. That gave me some confidence and so I started poking around.
   I looked at the bulletin boards and the offices on one side of the hall when another
man in green came into the hall and made straight for me, much like Mrs. Keithley. I
didn’t wait, but walked toward him, too.
  I said, as wide-eyed and innocently as I could, “Can you help me, sir?”
  “Well, that depends. What sort of help do you need?”
   He was a big, rather slow man with one angled cloth bar on his shirt front over
one pocket, and a plate that said “Robards” pinned over the pocket on the other
side. He seemed good-natured and un-Keithley-like.
  “Well, Jerry had to write about the capitol, and Jimmy had to interview the town
manager, and I got you.”
  “Hold on there. First, what be your name?”
  “Billy Davidow,” I said. I picked the last name out of a newspaper story. “And I
don’t know what to write, sir, so I thought I’d ask one of you to show me around
and tell me things. That be, if you would.”
  “Any relation to Hobar Davidow?” he asked.
  “No, sir,” I said.
  “That be good. Do you know who Hobar Davidow be?”
  I shook my head.
   “No, I guess you wouldn’t. That would be a little before you. We executed him
six, no, seven years ago. Mixed in the wrong politics.” Then he said, “Well, I be
sorry, son. We be pretty caught up today. Could you come back some afternoon
later in the week, or maybe some evening?”
  I said slowly, “I have to hand the paper in this week.” Then I waited.
   After a minute he said, “All right. I’ll take you around. But I can’t spare you much
time. It will have to be a quick tour.”
   The offices were on the first floor, with a few more on the third. The arsenal and
target range were in the basement. Most of the cells were on the second, and the
very rough people were celled on the third.
   “If the judge says maximum security, they go on the third, everybody else on the
second unless we have an overflow. We have one boy up there now.”
  My heart sank.
  “A real bad actor. He has already killed one man.”
   My heart came back to normal. That, for certain, wasn’t Jimmy and his
trespassing.
   Maximum security had three sets of barred doors before you got to the cells, as
well as armed guards covering the block and the doors from wall stations. The halls
were lit with oil lamps and the light was warm and yellow. We didn’t go beyond the
first door. Sgt. Robards just pointed and told me what things were like.
   “By this time next week, it will all be full in here,” he said sadly. “The
Anti-Redemptionists be getting out of hand again and they be going to cool them
off. Uh, don’t put that in your paper.”
  “Oh, I won’t,” I said, crossing off what I was writing.
  The ordinary cells on the second floor were a much simpler affair and I got a
guided tour of them. I walked down the corridor between the ranks of cells right
beside Sgt. Robards and looked at every prisoner. I stared right at Jimmy
Dentermont’s face and he didn’t even seem to notice me. He’s a smart, lovely boy.
   Sgt. Robards said, waving a hand at the cells, “These be all short-timers here.
Just a week or a month or two to serve.” He jingled his keys. “I be letting them out
soon enough.”
  “Do they give you any trouble?” I asked.
  “These? Not these. They don’t have long enough to serve. They all be on good
behavior. Most of the time, anyway.”
  When we finished, I thanked Sgt. Robards enthusiastically. “It sure has been
swell, sir.”
   He smiled. “Not at all, son,” he said. “I enjoyed it myself. If you have time, drop
by again when I have the duty. My schedule be on the bulletin board.”
   “Thank you, sir,” I said. “Maybe I will.”
   I ran back home through the rain and when Mr. Kutsov got home about an hour
later I was dry, dressed in proper clothes and reading a book.


                            Chapter Seventeen
                                                                             «^»
Before I scouted the jail, I had only vague notions of what I could do to get Jimmy
free. I had, for instance, spent an hour or so toying with the idea of forcing the
Territorial Governor at the point of a gun to release Jimmy. I spent that much time
with it because the idea was fun to think about, but I dropped it because it was
stupid.
   I finally decided on a very simple course of action. It seemed quite possible that it
might go wrong, but I didn’t have a great many days left and I had to bring this off
by myself. Before I left the jail building, I looked very closely at the duty schedule,
just as Sgt. Robards had recommended.
   Mr. Kutsov left in the afternoon two days later, his wagon loaded.
  “I be back in six days, Mia,” he said. “Now you know exactly what to do, don’t
you?”
   I reassured him, and I stood at the back door of the house as he drove off,
dressed in pink because I knew he liked it, and waved goodbye. Then I went back
into the house. I sat down and wrote a note to Mr. Kutsov. I didn’t tell him what I
was going to do because I thought it might distress him, but I thanked him for all that
he had done for me. I left the note in the library where he would be sure to find it. I
was sorry to do it to him because I knew it would make him unhappy, but I couldn’t
stay.
    Then I went into the kitchen and started getting food together. I picked out things
I thought we would need like matches, candles, a knife and a hatchet, and I made up
a package. Finally, I changed into my own clothes.
   I set out just after dark. It was raining lightly in the night and the spray on my face
felt surprisingly good. I carried paper and pencil in one pocket as before for
protective coverage. In the other pocket of my coat I had a single sock and several
stout pieces of line, and matches.
   This is the way I had it figured. The jail was a strong place— bars, guards, dogs,
guns and spiked fences. These were primarily designed to keep in jail the people
who were supposed to be in jail. They weren’t designed to keep people out.
   In the Western-cowboy stories I used to read in the Ship, people were always
breaking into jails to let somebody out. It was a common thing, an expected part of
day-to-day life. But I couldn’t imagine that people here made any sort of practice of
breaking into jails. It wouldn’t be expected, and that was one advantage I had. I
knew whom I was up against. I knew the layout of the jail. And when I walked into
the jail, nobody was going to see a desperate character intent on busting a prisoner
out— they were going to see a little eager schoolboy. I think that was the biggest
advantage. People do see what they expect to see.
   On the other hand, all I had was me, a not-always-effective hell on wheels. If I
didn’t do things exactly right, if I weren’t lucky, I would be in jail right beside
Jimmy, probably on the third floor.
   Just before I got to the jail, I stopped and knelt on the wet ground. I took out the
sock and I filled it with sand until it was about half full.
  I didn’t hesitate then. I went right into the jail. There were warm oil lights in only
two of the main floor offices. I looked in the first and Sgt. Robards was there.
   “Hello, Sgt. Robards,” I said, going in. “How be you tonight?”
   “Hello, Billy,” he said. “It be pretty slow tonight down here. Won’t be later,
though.”
   “Oh?”
  “Yes. They pick up the Anti-Redemptionists tonight. The boys just went out.
You won’t be able to stay long.”
   “Oh,” I said.
   “How did your paper go?”
    I had to backtrack for a moment. Then I said, “I finished it this afternoon. I’ll turn
it in tomorrow.”
   “Found out everything you want to know?”
  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I just came by to visit tonight. You know when you showed
me the target range? That been neat. I thought if you had time you might shoot for
me like you said.”
   He looked at the clock. Then he said, “Sure. I be local champion, you know.”
   “Gee,” I said. Just like some of the fatuous boys I know.
   We went downstairs, Sgt. Robards leading the way with a lamp. He was picking
out the key to the target range when I pulled out my sock. I hesitated for a moment
because it isn’t easy to deliberately set out to hurt somebody, but then he started to
turn his head to say something. So I swung as hard as I could and the sand hit him
wetly across the back of the neck. He crumpled. He was too heavy for me to catch,
but I pushed him against the door and then managed to get him to the floor without
dropping him on his face. I left the lamp on the floor where he had set it.
   The weapons room was across the hail. I took the keys from the floor by Sgt.
Robard’s hand and tried the ones on either side of the one he had picked out for the
target room door. The door opened on the second try. I left it open and went back
to Sgt. Robards, lying on the floor. I grabbed his collar and his coat and heaved
him, then heaved him again, and eventually got his dead weight across the floor and
into the weapons room. I got out my line and tied his elbows and knees. I emptied
the sand out of the sock onto the floor, and then shoved the sock into his mouth.
My heart was pounding and my breath was coming fast as I went back for the lamp.
   Then I turned to the weapons rack. I took a hurried look over them. There was
nothing modern, of course, only powder-and-lead antiques like those in the old
books. I’d never fired one, but I understood that they didn’t hold still when you shot
them— for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and all that— so I
picked out a pair of the smallest guns they had. I tested the ammunition until I found
the right kind of bullets, and then I put the guns and a number of the bullets in my
pocket.
   I swung the door shut and locked it again, leaving Sgt. Robards inside. I stood
then for a moment in the hallway with the keys in my hand. There were ten of them,
not enough to cover each individual cell, yet Sgt. Robards had clinked his keys and
said that he could unlock the cells. Maybe I would have done better to stick up the
Territorial Governor.
   My heart pounding, I blew out the light and started upstairs. I eased up to the first
floor. Nobody was there. Then I went carefully up the wooden stairs to the second
floor. It was dark there, but a little light leaked up from the first floor and down from
the third. There were voices on the third floor, and somebody laughed up there. I
held my breath and moved quietly to Jimmy’s cell.
  I whispered, “Jimmy!” and he came alert and moved lo the door of the cell.
  “Am I glad to see you,” he whispered back.
  I said, “I have the keys. Which one fits?”
  “The key marked ‘D.’ It fits the four cells here in the corner.”
  I couldn’t see well enough there and I didn’t want to light a match, so I moved
back to the light and fumbled through the keys until I found the key tagged “D.” I
opened the cell with as little noise as I could manage.
  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here in a hurry.”
  He slipped out and pushed the door shut behind him. We started for the stairs.
We were almost there when I heard somebody coming up. Jimmy grabbed my arm
and pulled me back. We flattened out as best we could.
  The policeman looked around in the dark and said, “Be you up here, Robards?”
Then he saw us and started to say, “What the hell?”
  I stepped out and pointed one of the pistols at him. I hadn’t loaded it. I had just
stuck them in my pocket.
  I said, “Easy now. I’ve got nothing to lose by shooting you. If you want to live,
put up your hands.”
  He put up his hands.
  “All right. Walk down here.”
   Jimmy opened the door for him and the policeman stepped inside the cell. While
his back was turned, I hit him with the pistol. I probably hurt him worse than I did
Sgt. Robards— a gun is a good deal more solid than a sack of sand— but I didn’t
feel quite so bad about it because I didn’t know him. He groaned and fell and I
didn’t try to break the fall at all. Instead I swung the cell door shut and locked it.
   Then I heard the sound of low voices in one of the other cells and somebody
said, “Shut up,” quite clearly to somebody else.
  I turned and said, “Do you want to get shot?”
  The voice was collected. “No. No trouble here.”
  “Do you want to be let out?”
    The voice was amused. “I don’t think so. Thank you just the same. I be due to be
let out tomorrow and I think I’ll wait.”
  Jimmy said, “Come on. Come on. Let’s go.”
  On the stairs, I said, “Where’s your signal? We’ve got to have it.”
   “It’s not here,” Jimmy said. “The soldiers took all my gear when I was arrested.
All they have here are my clothes.”
  “We’re in trouble,” I said. “My signal is broken and lost.”
  “Oh, no!” Jimmy said. “I was counting on you. Well, we can try to get mine
back.”
   There was no real comfort in that. We collected Jimmy’s coat and clothes and
headed into the night. When we were three blocks away and on a side street we
stopped for a moment and kissed and hugged, and then I handed Jimmy one of the
guns and half the ammunition. He loaded the gun immediately.
  Then he said, “Tell me something, Mia. Would you really have shot him?”
  “I couldn’t,” I said. “My gun wasn’t loaded.”
  He laughed and then he asked in another tone, “What do we do now?”
  “We steal horses,” I said. “And I know where, too.”
  Jimmy said, “Should we?”
  I said, “This man stole Ninc and everything else I have. He smashed my signal,
and he beat me up.”
  “He beat you up?” Jimmy said, immediately concerned.
  “I’m all right now,” I said. “It only hurt for awhile.”
   There was a fetid, unwashed odor hanging around the entire district and the rain
did nothing to carry the smell away. Instead the wetness seemed to hold the odor in
place in a damp foggy stink that surrounded and penetrated everything. There were
Losel pens all along the street. When we came to Fanger’s place, we slipped by the
pen and if the Losels heard us, they made no noise. I had marked the stable and we
went directly to it and slipped inside. Jimmy closed the door behind us.
   “Stand outside and keep watch,” I said. “These are mean, unpleasant people. I’ll
pick out horses.”
  Jimmy said, “Right,” and slipped outside again.
   When the door had clicked shut, I struck a match. I found a lamp and lit it. Then I
started along the rows. I found Ninc, good old Nincompoop, and my saddle and I
saddled up. Then I picked out a fairly small black-and-white horse for Jimmy and
quickly saddled it, and added saddle bags.
   After that, I took a quick look around. I didn’t find my gun, but I found the
bubble tent thrown in a corner— apparently they hadn’t figured out how it worked. I
found my bedroll, too. The rest of my things I wrote off. I decided that I would have
to get Jimmy to share his clothes with me.
 On impulse, then, I took out my pad and pencil, wrote, “I’m a girl, you
Mudeater!” and hung the note on a nail. I blew the light out.
   We led the horses to the street and rode. I didn’t regret the note, but I was feeling
sorry I hadn’t picked a better name than Mudeater. On the way, I asked Jimmy how
he got caught.
  He said, “There’s an army encampment north of here. They’ve got a scout from
one of the other Ships there.”
  “I’ve seen it,” I said.
    “Well, I got caught looking the place over,” Jimmy said. “That’s where my gear
is.”
  “I’ve got a map,” I said. My copying hadn’t come out well so I had reluctantly
added a map of Mr. Kutsov’s to my package. “We’ll go that way.”
   I told Jimmy about Mr. Kutsov. “He left this afternoon. After he left, I gathered
things we’ll need. All we have to do is pick them up and get going. The sooner we
get away from this town, the better.”
  When we got to the house, we rode to the back.
  “Hold the horses,” I said. “I’ll be out in just a second.”
  We both dismounted and Jimmy took Ninc’s reins from me. I went up the steps
and inside.
  “Hello, Mia,” Mr. Kutsov said as I stepped inside.
  I shut the door. “Hello,” I said.
  “I came back,” he said. “I read your note.”
  “Why did you come back?”
   He said sadly, “It didn’t seem right to leave you here by yourself. I be sorry. I
think I underestimated you. Be that another child from the Ships outside?”
  “You’re not mad?”
  He shook his head slowly. “No. I been’t angry. I think I understand. I couldn’t
keep you. I thought I could, but I be a foolish old man.”
   For some reason, I started crying and couldn’t stop. The tears ran down my face.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
  “You see,” he said, “you even talk as you did before.”
  The front door signal, a knocker, sounded then and Mr. Kutsov got up and
moved to answer the door. A green-uniformed policeman stood there in the
doorway, his face yellowish in the light of the single candle in the front room.
  “Daniel Kutsov?” he asked.
  Instinctively, I shrank back. I swiped at my face with my sleeve.
  The policeman moved one step inside the house and said in a flat voice, “I have a
warrant for your arrest.”
    I watched them both in fear. Mr. Kutsov seemed to have forgotten that I was
there. The policeman had a hard, young face, nothing like Sgt. Robards in any way
except for the uniform. Sgt. Robards was a kind man, but there was no kindness at
all in this one.
  “To jail again? For my book?” Mr. Kutsov shook his head. “No.”
   “It be nothing to do with any book, Kutsov. This be a roundup of all dissidents,
ordered by Governor Moray. It be known that you be an Anti-Redemptionist. Come
along.” He reached out and grasped Mr. Kutsov by the arm.
  Mr. Kutsov shook loose. “No. I won’t go to jail again. It be no crime to be
against stupidity. I won’t go.”
   The policeman said, “You be coming whether you like or not. You be under
arrest.”
  I had known that Mr. Kutsov was old, for all that my father had lived several
years longer than he had, and I had suspected that his mind was no longer
completely firm, but now at last his age seemed to catch up with him. He backed
away and said in a voice that shook, “Get out of my house!”
   The policeman took another step inside. I was fascinated and frozen. Why
exactly, I cannot say, but I couldn’t speak or move. I could only watch. It is the
only time in my life that this has ever happened and since then I have felt I
understood the episode on the ladder with Zena Andrus a little better. But in my
case, it wasn’t just fear. Events got out of control and rushed past me, something
like watching a moving merry-go-round and wanting to jump on, but never quite
being able to decide to go.
   The policeman lifted his gun from its holster and said, “You be coming if I have
to shoot.”
   Mr. Kutsov hit the policeman and in retaliation the policeman clubbed Mr. Kutsov
to death while I watched. The policeman hit Mr. Kutsov once and if he had fallen
that would have been the end of it, but he didn’t and the policeman hit him again and
again until he did fall.
   I must have screamed, though I have no memory of it. Jimmy says I did and
that’s what brought him. In any case, the policeman looked up from Mr. Kutsov and
stared right at me. I remember his eyes. He raised the gun he’d hit Mr. Kutsov with
so many times and pointed it at me.
    Then there were three reports at my elbow, one on the heels of the next. The
policeman stood for a moment, balanced, and then the force of life keeping him
upright was gone, and he fell to the floor. He never fired his gun. In one instant my
life was his to take, and in the next he was dead.
  I passed him by without even looking and bent over Mr. Kutsov. As I bent down
beside him, his eyes opened and he looked at me.
   I was crying again. I held him and cried. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
   He smiled and said faintly, but clearly, “It be all right, Natasha.” After a minute, he
closed his eyes as though he were terribly tired. Then he died.
   After another minute, Jimmy touched my arm. I looked up at him. His face was
pale and he didn’t look at all well.
   “There’s nothing we can do. Let’s leave now, Mia, while we can.”
   He blew out the candle. As we mounted our horses, it continued to rain.


                             Chapter Eighteen
                                                                             «^»
We rode north through the night rain for hours. At first we stuck to the road, but
when the ground started to rise and the country to roughen we cut off the road and
followed a slow route of our own into the hills and forest. It was a tiring, unpleasant
journey. The rain came down steadily until we were wet inside our coats. When we
left the road, there were many times when we had to dismount and lead our horses
through wet, rough brush that scratched and slapped. The noise of the cold wind
was shrill as it blew through the trees and tossed branches. The only satisfaction that
we had was knowing that with the rain as it was, following us would be close to
impossible. Considering the route we took, following us would have been difficult at
the best of times.
   At last we decided to stop, feeling ourselves beyond pursuit and knowing
ourselves within another day’s ride of the military camp where Jimmy’s gear might
be. We were both tired and bruised by our experience. Jimmy had had no practice in
killing people and no stomach for it. The books I used to read made killing seem fun
and bodies just a way of keeping score, but death is not like that, not to any normal
person. It may seem neat to point a gun, and keen to pull a trigger, but the result is
irrevocable. That policeman couldn’t get back up again to play the next game, and
neither could Mr. Kutsov. They were both dead for now and always. That fact was
preying on both Jimmy and me.
   I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a spear carrier in somebody
else’s story. A spear carrier is somebody who stands in the hall when Caesar
passes, comes to attention and thumps his spear. A spear carrier is the anonymous
character cut down by the hero as he advances to save the menaced heroine. A
spear carrier is a character put in a story to be used like a piece of disposable tissue.
In a story, spear carriers never suddenly assert themselves by throwing their spears
aside and saying, “I resign. I don’t want to be used.” They are there to be used,
either for atmosphere or as minor obstacles in the path of the hero. The trouble is
that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers. We take no joy
in being used and discarded. I was finding then, that wet, chilly, unhappy night, that I
took no joy in seeing other people used and discarded. Mr. Kutsov was a spear
carrier to the policeman, a spear carrier who asserted himself at the wrong moment,
and then was eliminated. Then the policeman suddenly found himself demoted from
hero to spear carrier and his story finished. I didn’t blame Jimmy at all. If I had been
able to act, I would have done as he had, simply in order to stay alive. And Jimmy
didn’t see the policeman as a spear carrier. Jimmy was always a more humane, open,
warmer person than I, and it cost him greatly to shoot the man. I admit that the man
was still a spear carrier to me, but nonetheless both deaths bothered me.
   If I had the opportunity, I would make the proposal that no man should be killed
except by somebody who knows him well enough for the act to have impact. No
death should be like nose blowing. Death is important enough that it should affect
the person who causes it.
   We made our camp at last. We attended to the horses as best we could, sheltering
them under the lee of some trees. Then we set up the bubble tent, pitching it on a
level spot. Jimmy went after the saddle bags, bedroll and saddles while I finished
with the tent. We stowed things away in all the corners and that left just enough room
to stretch out the bedroll.
   We were soaking wet. The rain made a steady pitter on the bubble and we could
hear the rising and falling shrill of the wind outside. We left the light on until we had
taken off all our clothes. Undressing was difficult because of the lack of room and a
cold saddle is an unpleasant place to put your bare bottom. Jimmy was more hairy
than I had ever suspected. Finally we spread our clothes out to dry, turned out the
light and got into bed.
   The bed was cold and so was I, and I put my arms around Jimmy. His skin was
cold too, at first, but he was comfortingly solid. I needed comfort. I think he did,
too.
  I touched his cheek with my hand. “I’m not mad any more, you know.”
  “I know,” he said. “I didn’t think you were. I’m sorry, anyway. I’ve got to take
you as you are, even when you say stupid things. You can’t help what you think.”
   He kissed me gently. I cooperated with the kiss.
  “I’m glad you came for me,” Jimmy said. He moved his hand up the length of my
back and across my shoulders. It gave me shivers. “Are you cold?” he asked.
   “No,” I said. “Did you think I’d come?”
   “I hoped, I guess. I’m glad you came. I’m glad it was you, Mia.”
   He shifted and then put his hand on my breast. I put my hand over it.
   “You’re beautiful,” he said.
   “Why didn’t you ever say that before?” We’d kissed and done some other
things, and I’d assumed he liked me, our differences aside, but he’d never said he
liked the way I looked. I pressed the hand on my breast and I kissed his cheek and
his mouth. I felt safer and warmer and more secure than I had in days. Oh, he was
good to hold onto.
   I let his hand go free and he let it wander. “I never dared,” he said. “You’d have
used it against me. Hey, you know, that’s funny. When I touch this one, I can feel
your heart beat and when I touch this one, I can’t.”
   “I can feel yours, too,” I said. “Thump, thump, thump, thumps thump.”
   I kissed my hand and let it touch his face. Kissed his face.
   “You do like the way I look?”
  “Of course. You are beautiful. I like the way you look. I like your voice— it
doesn’t squeak. I like the way you feel.” He moved his hand. “I like the way you
smell.” His face moved in my hair.
  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” I said. “I don’t think I’d like this if I didn’t like the way you
smell, and I never thought about it before. What do you mean I’d have used it
against you?”
  He said slowly, “You’d have said something snippy. I just couldn’t take the
chance.”
  I never realized before that he was that vulnerable, that something I might say
could hurt him. “I say things sometimes,” I said, “but never if you told me that.”
   He kissed my breast, moved his tongue experimentally over the nipple, and it
swelled without my willing it. I thought my heart would become too large and break
with the surge it made. We moved tightly into each other’s arms and kissed deeply. I
held Jimmy to me and my knees moved apart for him.
   Sex in the Ship is for adults. If you are an adult, then it doesn’t matter particularly
whom you do sleep with. Nobody checks. But just as anywhere, people tend to be
fairly consistent, fairly discriminating about what they do, at least the people I’m
likely to be friends with. I don’t think I’d want to know well the sort of person who
makes notches on the end of her bed, the sort of person who takes sex wherever he
can, the sort of person who takes sex lightly. I can’t do any of those things. I’m
much too vulnerable. I enjoy making love, but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have
confidence and trust, liking and respect, beyond the basic fact of physical attraction.
I had known Jimmy for nearly two years and been attracted to him for nearly that
long, but making love with him was something that I could not have done much
sooner than I did.
   In a sense, Jimmy and I were intended for each other. Whether we had met or not,
whether we had liked each other or not, we still would have had at least one child,
and probably more. But that is a mechanical process that has nothing to do with
living together and loving. It was nice that knowing each other we could love. The
passion of age fourteen is not an ultimate, but age fourteen does not last forever and
passions do grow.
   Sex in the Ship is for adults. We were not officially adults, but we needed each
other then, and I was no longer quite the stickler for rules that I once had been. We
needed each other then and it was the proper time. If we didn’t make it back to the
Ship, who would ever care? And if we made it back to the Ship, we would be
officially adults and the question would be irrelevant.
   So we made love there in the dark with the rain falling outside, safe in each other’s
arms. Neither of us knew what we were doing, except theoretically, and we were as
clumsy as kittens. It was something of a botch, too, in an extremely pleasant way. At
the climax there was simply a hint of something we couldn’t reach.
  We lay quietly and after a few minutes Jimmy said, “How was that?”
  I said, somewhat sleepily, “I think it takes practice.
  Just before I fell asleep, I said, “It was comforting, though.”
   The next night, we left our horses tied in the trees. We were miles from our camp
of the previous night. We had arrived on the hillside in the late afternoon, then
crawled through the woods to look over the army complex. Below us, in the gold
light, was a town cupped in a bowl between the hills. On our side of the town was an
enfenced army base, patrolled like all army bases by regular guards, and on what
must have been their parade ground was sitting the scoutship.
   “I got curious,” Jimmy said. “It seemed strange to me that they should have a
scoutship. I snuck out there to take a look and I got careless and got caught.”
   Buildings framed the parade ground on three sides. The enclosed short side was
nearest to our vantage point high above. The open short side was at the far end of
the parade ground nearest to the town. There were some few trees mixed among the
buildings. The fence was linked iron spikes, and it completely circled the camp. It
was perhaps a hundred feet from the fence to the nearest building.
  Jimmy pointed through the leaves. “See the two-story building just below there?
That’s their headquarters. That’s where they took me until the police came from the
town. That’s where we ought to look for my gear.”
  The building was red brick with a gray slate roof and it dominated the end of the
parade ground. Most of the other buildings in the camp were only single story—
barracks and stables and the like— and the other two-story buildings were not as
large.
   We timed the guard on his rounds. It took him twenty minutes to walk from one
end of his post to the other in the slow, casual way of guards killing watch hours.
Sometimes he reached the end of his post at the same time as the guard from the
adjacent post and they stopped and talked.
  I said, “We couldn’t count on more than twenty minutes if we hit the guard.”
  “No,” Jimmy said. “We’ll do best if we can sneak over without being seen.”
   After we had checked everything, we crawled back out of sight on our knees, and
then we went back to our horses, where we ate a cold meal. Jimmy’s mistake before
had been that he had entered the camp too early, when people were still about and
the guards were alert. We were both tired from riding all day and we went to sleep
until well after dark. I woke when Jimmy shook me.
  “Come on,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
   We took our time picking our way down the dark slope, making as little noise as
possible. I was glad to be with Jimmy. We did make a team, and with Jimmy along I
felt something more of an effective hell on wheels than I did by myself. It was twenty
feet from the edge of the brush to the fence, the space cleared. We crouched there in
the brush, able to see the fence and barely able to make out the outline of the
two-story headquarters building beyond.
  “Shh,” Jimmy whispered, holding my arm. “There’s the guard.”
   We waited until he had passed and then we ran low to the iron fence. Jimmy gave
me a boost and I grasped the spikes, the points sharp under my thumbs. He pushed
me up and I got a knee on the top bar between the spikes. I paused there for a brief
moment and then I jumped clear on the far side, ripping my pants on one of the
spikes. I looked both ways to see if the noise of my landing had alerted anyone, and
then I turned back to the fence. I put both hands through the bars and cupped them
for Jimmy’s foot. He stepped into my hands and I pushed up. He got his other foot
on the top bar and then sprang over. He landed on his feet with a thud that was
noisier than mine and then without pausing we ran for the nearest tree, where we
stopped for a moment before we ran to the shadow of the headquarters building.
   There was a partial cloud rack overhead and the light varied from dim to worse as
the clouds moved by. We moved to the end of the building, Jimmy preceding, and
there we stopped while Jimmy put his head around. Then we went around the corner
and I could see the silent and empty parade ground and one or two night lights in the
buildings on its edge. I could barely see the scoutship squatting in the dirt. We
checked again at the next corner and then we ghosted along the front of the building.
   “There should be one man on night duty,” Jimmy said. “The office is just to the
right inside the door.”
  He pointed up to a window over our heads. I could see light there and shadows
on the ceiling. We went up the steps, flattened in the doorway while Jimmy and I
took out our pistols and then we went through the door. The hall was dark and quiet.
The door to the room on our right was open and light was streaming out.
  Jimmy went through the door, gun in his hand, and said, “Put your hands up.”
  There was just one man behind the desk and his head had been nodding. He came
awake with a start and looked at us.
  “You again,” he said.
   It was a chubby little man, not particularly competent looking, dressed in a green
uniform with red markings and red braided epaulets on the shoulders. The room was
large and contained a number of desks, one on the side of the door and two on the
side opposite. There were several offices behind the desks. The lamp turned low on
the officer’s desk was the only light.
  “Keep your voice down,” Jimmy said. “I’ll shoot you if I have to. Now where is
my gear?”
    The officer said, “I don’t know,” but his voice was uncertain. He was startled and
still half asleep.
   Jimmy nodded to me to go around the desk. I took out my knife and the man’s
eyes watched me. He tried to move his chair, but 1 pushed at the back of it so that
he couldn’t rise.
  “Careful there, boy,” he said, his voice rising.
   I took the point of the knife and I pricked his ear. It didn’t even bring a drop of
blood.
  “Where is the gear?” I asked.
  The man choked and cleared his throat. “Not in any one place. I don’t know
where everything be.”
  “Where are my saddle bags?”
  He shrugged helplessly. “In the stables, I suppose.”
  “What about the stuff that was in them?”
  Eagerly he said, “They been fooling with that in the mess. Some of the boys.”
  “Take us to the mess.”
  “I can’t show you,” the officer said. “I can’t leave my post.”
  I tickled his epaulet with my knife. “You’ll have to.”
  “Don’t cut that!” he said in agitation.
  “Show us.” I raised the knife.
  “Very well,” he said helplessly. “It be on the second floor.”
   I took the lamp from the desk and Jimmy prodded the officer to his feet. He led
us out into the corridor and then up the stairs. We walked down another corridor on
the second floor, out footsteps echoing hollowly. At last we came to a door and the
pudgy little officer unlocked it and threw it open.
  “There,” he said.
   The lamp light showed a silent room with a great long white-cloth covered table
surrounded by ranks of chairs. There was a lounge and a great fireplace.
  “Show us,” Jimmy said.
    The officer led the way over to the lounge. There was a dart board there and
newspapers and games, and on one of the tables Jimmy’s chess board. I recognized
it. I don’t know who Jimmy had been intending to play with. Some of his other
things were scattered about.
  “Jimmy,” I said, in a voice filled with dread. “I don’t see it.”
   Jimmy took a quick look himself. “No,” he said. He turned to the officer. “We’re
looking for a little block sized object about so by so. Have you seen it?”
  “No,” said the officer. “I haven’t been playing with your stuff.”
  I poked him with the knife. “Are you sure?”
   With some asperity he said, “I be sure! I don’t remember seeing anything like
that.”
  “What are we going to do now?” I said to Jimmy.
  “I don’t know. It must be somewhere, but I don’t know where we could look.”
   I was really beginning to worry as I hadn’t before. We couldn’t run loose around
this place for very long without being caught, and if we didn’t find the signal we
would never get home at all.
   We went back downstairs and into the office. It was then that I was suddenly
struck by an idea.
   “There’s the scoutship outside,” I said. “We could take that! If these people can
fly it, we can.”
   The chubby officer said, “No you won’t! You Ship people think you have
everything, but we’ll show you. We’ve got a little ship of our own now and we be
tougher people than you. You won’t take that ship.”
  “No need,” Jimmy said. He picked a paperweight off one of the desks. It was his
missing signal. He turned with it to the officer. “I thought you hadn’t seen this… ?”
  “Oh, be that what you wanted? I never noticed it.”
   The officer’s back was turned to me. I took out my pistol and somewhat
squeamishly hit him with it under the ear.
  “Come on, Jimmy,” I said. “If you’ve got the signal, let’s go.”
  We went out into the night again. We went around the corner of the building
toward the back, but then Jimmy pulled me to a stop. He put his mouth to my ear.
  “It’s the guard. See?” He pointed.
   We crouched there in the lee of the building as the guard paced slowly down the
fence toward the other end of the building. Then, all of a sudden, the night was split
with a shout.
  “Guards! Guards!”
   It came from the front of the building. The guard on patrol here swung around at
the shout, but like a good soldier he didn’t leave his post. He simply cut off our
retreat.
  “Come on,” Jimmy said. We slipped along the buildings parallel to the fence. The
shouting continued. Jimmy stopped by a small building at the corner of the square, a
building set apart. From there we could see in two directions along the fence.
  Jimmy said, “Couldn’t you have hit the officer harder?”
  “I don’t like to hit people.”
  There was all sorts of hoorah going on. We couldn’t see it, but we could hear it.
  Then I said, “Jimmy, do you know what this building is?”
  “No.”
  “It’s a powder house. See the danger sign? Let’s create a diversion. Let’s blow
up the scoutship.”
  Jimmy smiled. He reached out and touched my hair for just a second.
   We found the door and Jimmy broke the lock with his pistol butt. Whatever noise
we made was amply covered. We piled inside and Jimmy swung the door shut
behind us. There were small windows in the front of the building and through them
we could see soldiers running about on the parade ground and lamps and torches
being lit. Guards ran by on their way to reinforce the fences. It began to seem a very
good thing to be inside. In the light of the torches we could see the scoutship with its
ramp down. Men formed in a line on the parade ground, a formation. Then they were
being talked at.
  Jimmy said, “They’ll probably be searching the buildings soon.”
   I found a small powder keg and set a fuse about five feet long in it. The principle
was simple enough. The only thing I wasn’t sure was how long the fuse would take
to burn. That was a chance.
   Jimmy and I talked about what we would do while the men on the far side of the
parade ground were being given their orders. It was almost like playing
Paper-Scissors-Rock, where you both decide what you’re going to do and then
reveal at the same time. We’d make our plans, and they would make theirs, and then
we’d see who won. I gave Jimmy my gun and he loaded it. We then slipped out the
back door again. I trailed another fuse out the door behind us.
  I said, “Start firing in forty seconds.”
  Jimmy said, “Yes,” and he slipped away along the buildings.
    I crouched in the dark with my back to the fence and took out a match. I shielded
it carefully and scratched it on the lighter board. It didn’t light and so I struck it
again. It flared into light and I touched it to the fuse end. The fuse began to sputter
and I waved out the match, lifted the small powder keg and went around the side of
the building.
  Then down the way Jimmy opened up over the heads of the men in formation.
They fell to the ground and began to fire back. I trusted Jimmy to keep his head
down.
  I didn’t hesitate. I plunged straight out onto the parade ground. The keg was
heavy and I concentrated simply on running for the scoutship ramp. I don’t know if
anybody saw me or if I was shot at. I just concentrated on running. As I got to the
ramp, the powder house blew up in a great flash of light and noise. Pieces of the
building flew into the air. The concussion knocked me to my knees, but I got up
again immediately and dashed up the ramp.
   Inside the scoutship, I didn’t hesitate but went immediately to the control room. I
set the keg on the pilot’s seat, right next to the main panel. Through the dome I
could see men and confusion everywhere. Nobody was firing now. Fire from the
powder house had spread to one of the barracks and men were running for water.
   I lit another match and touched this fuse off. Then I went down the stairs as fast
as I could. Outside, I looked back at the scoutship. Great shadows and flickerings
were reflected on the dull metal.
   Somebody ran into me then and said, “Watch out there,” and ran on. The parade
ground was a crisscrossing of men and nobody even noticed me.
    I was beginning to despair, to think I’d have to go back and relight the fuse, when
I felt a dull whump. These people were not going to use the scoutship again.
  I slipped between the buildings, out of the parade ground, and out of the light and
noise. The fences were deserted. It took me several difficult minutes to climb over.
Then I climbed through the tree and brush-covered hillside slowly.
   At the top, very near the place from which Jimmy and I had made our
observations in the afternoon, I looked back at the army compound. The fire had
spread to a second building and men like ants rushed around. I watched for a few
minutes and then I went on.
  Jimmy was waiting by the horses when I got there.
  “Are you all right?” I asked.
  “Yes. I’m all right. But I dropped the signal.”
  I gasped.
  “I’m just kidding,” he said.
  I sat down on a rock and spread my torn pant leg. Somewhat gingerly, I touched
my leg.
  “What’s the matter?”
  “Oh, I cut myself going over the fence the first time.”
  “That’s too bad,” Jimmy said. He took a look himself. “Its not too bad. Do you
want me to kiss it and make it well?”
  “Would you?”
  Jimmy stood up then and looked toward the light-streaked sky. He waved at it.
“You know, that’s an awful lot of trouble to make simply because you can’t bring
yourself to hit somebody.”


                            Chapter Nineteen
                                                                           «^»
The final morning on Tintera was beautiful. We and the horses were in a
rock-enclosed aerie high on a mountainside near the coast. In the aerie were grass
and a small rock spring, and this day, the final day, was bright with only a few piled
clouds riding high in the sky and warm enough that we could put our coats aside.
We had eaten breakfast and packed one final time, and now we were just sitting
quietly in the sun.
   Looking from the top of the rocks, you could see over miles of expanse. On one
side, the mountain dropped and beyond it you could see miles of ocean, gray
flecked with white, see part of the coast and shore, brown cliff and dark wet rocks
and a narrow beach, see occasional birds gliding on the wind and imagine their calls.
Turning your gaze inland, you could see upland meadows in the foreground and
mountains much like this one beyond, making a line along the coast. Farther inland
were lower hills and curving valleys, blending together, all covered with another
rolling sea of trees, a sea at close range made of varying shades of gray and green,
but at a distance an even olive.
   Down there, under that sea, were all sorts of things— wild Losels and men
hunting us. We had seen the Losels and they had seen us; they had gone their way
and we had gone ours. The men hunting us we hadn’t had a glimpse of for four
days, and that last time they hadn’t even seen us. Also under that sea might be some
of the other kids from the Ship, but we hadn’t seen them at all.
   Early in the morning we triggered the signal. It was six hours before the ship
came. We passed the time quietly, keeping one eye on guard, talking. There was a
tiny little animal chittering and nipping around the rocks and I tossed it some food.
   We went aboard when the scout came, and put our horses away. Mr. Pizarro was
there, checking us back aboard. We were the sixth and seventh.
  I said to Jimmy, “I’m going upstairs and talk to George.”
  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell Mr. Pizarro what happened to us.”
   We thought they ought to know. Certainly things had been more adventurous for
us than anything we thought might have been counted on during Trial. So I went
upstairs to see George.
  “Congratulations, Adult,” he said when he saw me. “I knew you’d make it.”
   “Hello, George,” I said. “Tell me, have you had any trouble in picking up people
so far?”
   “No trouble,” he said, “but I have been worrying. Look.” He waved his hand at
the grid he was using as a guide for his pickups. There were nowhere near
twenty-nine lights. I counted them and there were twelve.
   “The last light came on two hours ago,” George said. “I’m afraid a lot of people
aren’t going to get picked up.”
  I told him a little of what had happened to us. I stayed upstairs while we dropped
down and picked up Venie Morlock, and then another double pickup. Then I went
down and sat with Jimmy.
  I said, “There are only six more pickups to make. Look how few of us there are.”
  “Is it that bad?” Jimmy said. “I wonder what the Council will say.”
  There were only ten of us aboard now. Jimmy and I and Venie were safe, but Att
and Helen and Riggy were not yet aboard.
   All of a sudden, George called for attention over the speaker. “All right, kids—
shut up and listen. One of our people is down there. I didn’t get close enough to see
who, but whoever it is is being shot at. We’re going to have to bust him out. I’ll give
you two minutes to get your weapons and then I’m going to buzz down and try to
get him out. I want all of you outside and laying down a covering fire.”
   Some of the kids had their weapons with them. Jimmy and I hopped for the gear
racks and got out our pistols. I loaded mine for the first time. There were eleven of
us, including Mr. Pizarro, and four ramps to the outside. Jimmy and I and Jack
Femandez-Fragoso stood by one ramp. Then George swooped down, touched light
as a feather, and dropped all four ramps.
   We dived down the ramp. Jack went left, Jimmy center, and I to the right. We
were at the top of a wooded slope and my momentum and the slant put me right
where I wanted to be— flat on my face. I rolled behind a tree and looked over to see
Jimmy almost hidden by a bush.
   Here, hundreds of miles from where we had been picked up, it was misting under
a familiar rolled gray sky. From the other side of the ship and from below there was
the sound of gunfire. Our boy was pinned down fifty yards below us among some
rocks that wouldn’t have sheltered properly anything larger than the tiny animal I had
been feeding earlier in the day. The boy in the rocks was Riggy Allen and he was
fighting back. I saw the sighting beam of his sonic pistol slapping out. About thirty
feet toward us up the slope was the body of Riggy’s horse. Riggy turned his head
and looked at us.
   Riggy’s attackers, the ones that weren’t separated now on the far side of our
ship, were dug in behind trees and rocks, at least partly hidden from Riggy, as he
was partly hidden from them. From where we were, though, they could be seen
more clearly.
    I took all this in in seconds, and then I raised my pistol and fired, aiming at a man
firing a rifle. The distance was greater than I had counted on and the shot plowed
earth ten feet short, but the man jerked back.
   This was the first time I had fired the pistol. It bucked in my hand and it made a
considerable noise. In a sense, there was a certain satisfaction in it, though. A sonic
pistol is silent and if you missed the most you could expect was a sere and yellow
leaf. This gun made enough noise and impact in your hand that you knew that you
were doing something and a miss might raise dirt, or make a whine, or rip a tree—
enough to make the steadiest man keep his head down.
    I aimed higher and started to loft my shots in. Jimmy was doing the same thing,
and the net effect was enough that the firing at Riggy stopped. Riggy got the idea,
stood up and began racing up the hill. Then my gun clicked empty and Jimmy’s
firing stopped, too. Jack continued to fire, but except for one burnt arm, the result
was less obvious to those being shot at and as our firing stopped, those heads came
back up again and took in the situation. They began firing again immediately. Riggy
gave a twitch and a hop and went flat behind the body of his horse.
  I reloaded as fast as I could, and then I was firing again. Jimmy started firing, too,
and Riggy was up and running again. Then I started thinking clearly and held my fire
until Jimmy stopped. The instant he stopped, I started again, a regular squeeze,
squeeze, squeeze, not caring whether I hit a thing as long as those heads stayed
down.
   As I finished, Jimmy opened again and then Riggy was past us and up the ramp.
He went flat in the doorway there and started firing himself. I retreated up the ramp,
then Jack, then Jimmy. When Jimmy was inside, I yelled for George to lift the ramp.
He was either watching or he heard me, and the ramp lifted smoothly up and locked
in place.
   Shots were still coming from the other sides of the ship, so I yelled at Jimmy to
go left. I cut through the middle, tripping and practically breaking my neck on one of
the chairs.
   In the doorway, I skidded flat on my face again and looked for targets. Then I
started firing. The three I was covering for used their heads and slipped aboard one
at a time. As the second one came aboard, I heard Jimmy call for his ramp to be
raised. My third was Venie Morlock, and as she ran aboard, I couldn’t resist tripping
her. I yelled to George.
  Venie glared at me and demanded, “What was that for?” as the ramp swung up.
  “Just making sure you didn’t get shot,” I said, lying.
  A second later, Jack yelled for the last ramp to be raised. My last view of Tintera
was of a rainsoaked hillside and men doing their best to kill us, which all seems
appropriate somehow.
   Riggy had been completely unhurt by the barrage, but he had a great gash on his
arm that was just starting to heal. So much for a turtle policy, at least on Tintera.
Riggy said that he had been minding his own business in the woods one day when a
Losel jumped out from behind a bush and slashed him. That may sound reasonable
to you, but you don’t know Riggy. My opinion is that it was probably the other way
around— the Losel was walking along in the woods one day, minding his own
business, when Riggy jumped out from behind a bush and scared him. That is the
sort of thing that Riggy is inclined to do.
   Riggy said, “Where did you get that gun? Can I see it?”
  I handed it over to him. After a minute of inspection, Riggy said, “You wouldn’t
want to trade something for it, would you?”
  I said, “Riggy, you may have it.” I didn’t particularly want it any more. I knew I
would never use it again and it held no fascination for me.
    Only seventeen of us in all came aboard. Twelve didn’t live or trigger their signals.
I thought about that on the way back to the Ship. I counted the times I was in some
danger of being killed? and I came up with a minimum of five times. If you say the
chances of living through any single one of these encounters was nine in ten, the
chances of living through five are only six in ten. Fifty-nine in a hundred, actually. If
everybody’s experience was like mine, it wasn’t unreasonable that twelve of us
should not come back. The trouble was that Att was among the missing twelve.
   When we got to the Ship, people were there to take care of our horses. We went
through decontamination quickly and then they led us into the reception room. They
had decorations up for Year End on the walls and colored mobiles that twinkled
overhead. There was a band and Daddy in his official capacity to welcome the new
adults. Daddy shook my hand.
  There were parents waiting. There was Mother and I saw Jimmy’s mother and her
husband and his father and his father’s wife. When they saw Jimmy they all waved.
And I saw Att’s mother.
   I said to Jimmy, “I’ll see you later.”
  I went to Att’s mother and I said, “I’m sorry, but Att isn’t with us.” I didn’t
know how else to say it. I wished I could say it so that it didn’t hurt her, but it hurt
me, too, to know that he wasn’t coming back, and it hurt me to tell her. When she
hadn’t seen him with us, she must have known. She began to cry and she nodded
and touched my shoulder, and then turned away.
  I went over to Mother and she smiled and took my hand. “I’m pleased you came
home,” she said, and then she began to cry, and turned her head.
  Daddy came away from giving his congratulations and he hugged me. He put a
measuring hand over my head and said, “Mia, I believe you’ve grown some.”
   I nodded, because I thought I had, too. It felt very good to be home.
                             Epilogue:
                         RITE OF PASSAGE

                               Chapter Twenty
                                                                                  «^
I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often
used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity,
regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most
often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life
squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things
you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your
way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note
or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought
and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has
never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common
image of maturity that was presented to me.
   It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to
what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the
accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see
the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not
evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national
patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a
correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to
assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted
them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been
alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature.
   I came to this conclusion after the Ship’s Assembly that was held as a result of
our experiences on Tintera. Our experiences were shocking to the Ship, and Tintera
seemed like a glimpse of the Pit. The Tinterans were Free Birthers beyond a doubt.
(I don’t like that idea even now.) They might be slavers. They had obtained a
scoutship by some low method and had intended to use it against us. Finally, they
had killed an unprecedented number of our Trial Group. To die on Trial was one
thing— to have children assassinated by Mudeaters was another.
  Rumors started to spread almost as soon as we had arrived home. The day after
we came home, a Ship’s Council Meeting was held, and thereafter an account of
what had actually happened was broadcast through the Ship. To most people, it was
worse than the rumors.
  I sat in on the Council meeting and testified, and I could see that every man on the
Council was bothered by what we had to say. The Council concluded that a major
decision needed to be made, and made with reasonable promptness, so two days
later a Ship’s Assembly was called.
   The only adults who were not in the amphitheatre for the Assembly were the few
hundred people absolutely required to keep our world running. The seventeen of us
who had survived, Mr. Pizarro, and George Fuhonin sat with the Council on the
stage at the base of the theatre. I had seen plays performed where I was sitting.
   Daddy called the Assembly to order on the hour, and began by apologizing for
interrupting the holiday with serious business.
   “I know, however,” he said, “that most of you have caught the vid discussions of
Tintera and realize the serious nature of the problem. We dropped a Trial Group on
this planet one month ago. We’ll have them tell you as they told the Council exactly
what they saw and experienced. When they have finished, the floor will be open to
questions and debate.”
   The audience had previously heard the facts. Now they heard them directly from
us. I testified about Free Birth. I told exactly what I had seen. Jack
Fernandez-Fragoso testified about the Losels. Jimmy told about the captured
scoutship. One by one, we told what we knew, led by Daddy’s questions, and Mr.
Pizarro and George added their testimony to ours. When we were done, the
questioning started. Mr. Tubman recognized the signal of a little man sitting high in
the left banks and put him on screen. The whispering-gallery amplifiers picked up his
question.
  “Do I understand that they were using these Losel things as slaves? Is that right?”
   Mr. Persson answered that fairly. “We don’t know that. They were definitely
using them as involuntary labor. The question seems to be whether they are
intelligent enough to be called slaves. As you heard from Mr. Fernandez-Fragoso,
there are some indications that they are, and some that they aren’t. But I think we
should bear the possibility in mind.”
   The little man nodded, and Mr. Tubman passed on to another man who had
signaled for recognition.
  “Am I right? They actually intended to move against our Ship by force?”
   Mr. Persson said, “That’s not certain, either. It’s another possibility and it was
settled by the disabling of the scoutship.”
   The man said, “Barbaric,” half to himself. Then: “I think we ought to offer a vote
of thanks to these young people for solving our problem for us.” And he sat down.
   The next person to gain recognition seconded the idea, and my face got hot. I
looked at Jimmy and saw that he was embarrassed, too. I wished that they would
pass on. I didn’t want any vote of thanks like a stone hung around my neck.
  Mr. Persson said, “I think that’s a fine idea. I call for a vote on the motion.”
   One of the others on the Council raised an objecting hand. He said, “I think that’s
getting away from the purpose of this Assembly. If at some other time the idea
seems in order, we can take action on it then.”
  There was a great deal of commotion. When everything settled down, Daddy
made his ruling.
  “I think we should continue now.”
   Knowing what Daddy had in mind to do in this Assembly, I was just as glad not
to be thanked.
   The next man to speak said, “I think we’re missing the main point. These people
are Free Birthers! That’s the whole question. We all know what that sort of policy
leads to. And they’ve proven it again with this scoutship business— who did they
murder to get it?— with throwing our youngsters in jail, and all the rest. They’re a
menace, and that’s the truth.”
  Mr. Persson started to answer that one, too. “It’s their planet, Mr. Findlay. I
wouldn’t want to deny them the right to have laws of trespass. And for the…”
  My father cut him off. “I disagree. I think Mr. Findlay has raised a valid issue. It
should be considered seriously.”
   There was a lot of noise on this, but since the Council members were the only
ones on an open circuit outside the controller’s direction, Mr. Persson and Daddy
were the only ones who could be heard clearly. There were, as I well knew, firmly
drawn lines here. Under the politesse and apparent impartiality, Daddy was heading
straight for a definite purpose with the aid of Mr. Tubman, and Mr. Persson was
trying just as hard to turn the Assembly aside.
   When they could be heard, Mr. Persson said, “We’re aware. We are aware of the
danger these people present. We are aware. But the question has been settled for the
moment. They may be Free Birthers, but still there are no more than a few million of
them. They are primitive. They are backward. They have no means by which to do
us harm. At worst, they can be contained. Let’s leave the poor devils alone in
isolation to work out their own destiny.”
  Daddy said just as doggedly, “I don’t agree!”
   Somebody started yelling for debate then, and it spread, more and more people
yelling— this is the fun of Assemblies— and then, finally, they got everything
quieted down.
   The man who was recognized by the controller said, “It’s all right for you to sit
there and tell us that, Mr. Persson, but can you guarantee that they won’t get another
scoutship by whatever way they got their first one? Can you guarantee that?”
  “If the other Ships are warned,” Mr. Persson said, “there won’t be any problem.
But the real point is being missed here. The real point is not the damage that this
backward planet can do to us. The real point is, what is the reason that there is any
possibility of damage being done to us? I maintain that it is because they are
backward!”
   “That isn’t the question we are considering,” my father said. “We’re considering
a specific case, not general issues. It isn’t pertinent. That’s my ruling.”
    “It is pertinent!” Mr. Persson said. “It couldn’t be more pertinent. This question
is larger than you want to admit, Mr. Havero. You’ve been avoiding bringing this
question of policy, of basic policy for our Ship, out into the open. I say that now is
the time.”
  “You’re out of order.”
   “I am not out of order! I say we should consider the point of general Ship policy.
I call for a vote right now to decide whether or not we should consider it. I call for a
vote, Mr. Havero.”
   People in the Assembly started yelling again, some calling for a vote and some
not. Eventually those calling for a vote got the louder end of it and my father held up
a hand.
   “All right,” he said, when it was quiet enough for him to be heard. “A motion has
been made and seconded for a vote on the question of consideration of our
planetary policy and carried by acclamation. Controller, record the vote.”
  “Thank you,” Mr. Persson said, and punched his vote button.
  I knew that Daddy wanted a vote of no, but I voted yes.
   When everybody had voted, the master board showed “Yes” in green, “No” in
red. The vote was 20,283 to 6,614. So we considered the question.
    Mr. Persson said, “As you all know, our past policy has been to hand only as
little technical information out to the planets as possible, and then only in return for
material considerations. I say this is a mistake. I’ve said it before in Council meetings
and I’ve attempted to bring it up before past Assemblies. In testimony that was
made before the Council, Mia Havero stated that part of Tintera’s great hate for us is
their feeling that they have been unfairly dealt out of their inheritance to which they
have as much a right as we. I can’t say that I really blame them. We had no use for
them— they had nothing we felt we could use— and in consequence they live lives
of squalor. If there is any blame to assign for the fact that they are Free Birthers, I
think it is ours for allowing them to lose contact with the unpleasant facts of history
that we know so well. The responsibility was ours and we failed. I don’t believe that
we should punish them for our failure.”
  There was a round of applause from the Assembly as he finished. Then my father
began to speak.
   “I’m sure you all know that I disagree in every respect with Mr. Persson. First,
the responsibility for what these people are— Free Birthers, possibly slavers,
certainly attempted murderers— belongs to them, and not to us. They are products
of the same history that we are, and if they have forgotten that history, it is not our
business to teach it to them. We cannot judge them by what they might have been or
by what they should have been. We have to take them for what they are and what
they themselves intend to be. They are menaces to us and to every other portion of
the present human race. I firmly believe that our only course is to destroy them. If
we do not, then and only then will we have grounds to lay blame on ourselves. We in
the Ships are in a vulnerable position; we live in an uneasy balance and the least
mistake will be our ruin. Tintera is backward today, but even contained, tomorrow it
may not be. That is the main fact to remember. A cancer cannot be contained and a
planet that does not regulate birth is a cancer. A cancer must be destroyed or it will
grow and grow until it destroys its host and itself. Tintera is a cancer. It must be
destroyed.
   “As for our planetary policy, I don’t believe that it needs fresh justification. The
reasons for it are clear enough and they have not changed. We do live in a
precarious balance, but there is reason for our living so. If we were to abandon the
Ships and take up life on one or more of the colony planets, inevitably much of the
knowledge that we have preserved and expanded would be lost or mutilated. If we
were to take up life on one of the colonies, we would be swallowed and lost, a small
voice in a population many times our size. In the exigencies of making a living under
primitive conditions— and the most advanced of the colonies is still primitive— how
much time would be left for art and science and mathematics? These things require
time, and time is one thing that is not free on the colonies. Much that is around us
could never be transported to a planet and preserved if the Ship were left behind. It
could not be reproduced on any planet. It would have to be abandoned.
   “We do live in a balance. We use and we re-use, but once we use and re-use we
lose something that we cannot replace ourselves. We are dependent on the colonies
for our survival. That is a cold fact. We are dependent upon the colonies for our
survival. To gain the things we have to have in order to survive, we must give
something in return. The only thing we have that we can spare to trade is
knowledge— we cannot give it away as Mr. Persson has suggested in the past that
we might. We cannot give it away. It is our only barter for the means to continue to
exist as we want to exist. The only alternative to our present policy— the only
alternative— is to abandon the Ship. I don’t want that— do you?”
   As Daddy finished, the Assembly applauded again. I wondered if the same people
were applauding who had applauded Mr. Persson. When they quieted, Mr. Persson
spoke again.
   “I deny it. I deny it. I deny it! It is not the only alternative. I agree that we live in a
balance. I agree that we fulfill a necessary function and cannot abandon it. But I still
believe that the colonies, our fellow heirs, deserve better of us than they have
received. Whatever is decided about Tintera, it is a tragedy as it stands today. It is
an indictment of our policy. We have other alternatives to this policy. Without even
spending time on it, I can think of two, either of which is preferable to our present
course. Our dependence on the colonies is artificial. We pride ourselves on our
proven ability to survive. We pride ourselves that we have kept ourselves tough,
mentally and physically. But what does our toughness prove? We think it proves
much— but actually? Nothing! Nothing because it is all a waste. How could we
prove our fitness? We could hunt up a planet and produce for ourselves the raw
material we need. Or for another, we could actually attempt to apply some of our
avowed scientific superiority and devise a method by which we could avoid any
dependence on any planet, colony or uninhabited, for raw material. We could devise
a method to make the Ship truly self-sufficient. By either of these courses we would
lose nothing in doing what we should have been doing from the beginning— sharing
knowledge, teaching and helping to make something of the human race as a whole.
   “I accuse us. I accuse us of being lazy. We meet no challenges at all. We drift
instead on a lazy, leisurely, floating course that takes us from planet to planet,
meeting no challenges, fulfilling none of our potential, being less than we could be.
To me, that is a sin. It is an affront to God, but more than that, it is an affront to
ourselves. I can think of nothing sadder than to know that you might be more than
you are, but be unwilling to make the effort. We could be raising our fellow men
from the lives of squalor and desperation that they lead. You don’t wish this? Then I
say it would be better to leave them alone completely than to follow our present
meddlesome, paternalistic, repressive course. We have the power to explore the
stars. If we were willing to take the chance, we could travel to the end of the Galaxy.
That is within our power and it would certainly add to the knowledge we claim to be
interested in. But our present life is parasitical. Can we leave things as they now
stand?”
   The debate went on for two hours. After Mr. Persson and Daddy had spoken, it
went to the Assembly. At times, it was extremely bitter. At one point, someone said
that a sign of the sterility of our life was that we in the Ship had no art.
  Mr. Lemuel Carpentier rose to dispute this. That was the only time during the
evening that Mr. Mbele spoke. He bowed to Mr. Carpentier and then he said simply,
“Sir, you are wrong,” and took his seat again.
   In the end, the lines were drawn so plainly that everyone knew where he stood. At
the end of two hours, my father rose and called a halt to the debate.
   “It all seems clear enough,” he said. “Any further argument will simply be
recapitulation, so there seems no point in carrying things further. I propose we call
this all to a vote. The basic question seems to be, what shall be done with Tintera?
That is the purpose of this Assembly. Those who agree with Mr. Persson on a
policy of containment, and I don’t know what else— re-education perhaps?— will
also be voting for a change in our basic way of life along one or more of the lines
that Mr. Persson has suggested or some similar alternative. Those who vote with me
for the destruction of Tintera will also be voting for a continuation of the policies we
have been living by for 160 years. Is that a fair statement of the situation, Mr.
Persson?”
  Mr. Persson nodded. “I will second the motion for a vote myself.”
  “Is the motion carried?”
  There was an overwhelming response from the Assembly.
   “The motion is carried. The vote will be— shall Tintera be destroyed? All those in
favor vote ‘Yes.’ All those opposed vote ‘No.’ Controller, record the vote.”
   I pressed my button. Again the master board showed “Yes” in green and “No” in
red. The vote was 16,408 to 10,489— and Tintera was to be blown out of existence.
  It took just a few more minutes for the meeting to be closed. The amphitheatre
began to clear, but I didn’t leave immediately and neither did Jimmy. I saw Mr.
Mbele making his way down toward us. He walked up to the table and looked at
Daddy and for a long moment he didn’t say anything. Daddy was putting his papers
together.
    Mr. Mbele said, “So we’ve returned to the days of ‘moral discipline.’ I thought
all of that lay behind us.”
   Daddy said, “You could have made that point, Joseph. In this case, I happen to
think ‘moral discipline’— if you want to use that tired old phrase…”
  “Euphemism.”
  “All right, euphemism. I happen to think it was justified by the circumstances.”
  “I know you do.”
  “You could have spoken. Why didn’t you?”
   Mr. Mbele smiled and shook his head. “It wouldn’t have made any difference
today,” he said. “Change isn’t going to come about easily. I’m just going to have to
wait for another generation.” He nodded at Jimmy. “Ask him how he voted.”
  He knew Jimmy and there was no question in his mind.
  Daddy said, “I don’t have to. I already know how they both voted. Mia and I
have been talking about this for the past three days— arguing— and I know we
don’t agree. Was it a mistake to put her in your hands?
   Mr. Mbele was surprised. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He said, “I
doubt it was me. If it were, you’d have voted against your own motion. I think it’s
the times that are changing. I hope it is.”
  Then he turned and walked away.
  I said to Daddy, “Jimmy is going to help me pack.”
  “All right,” Daddy said. “I’ll see you later.”
  I was leaving the apartment. That had been decided earlier in the week. It wasn’t
merely a matter of Daddy’s and my complete inability to agree. He’d asked if it was.
  I said, “No. I just think it would be better if I left. Besides, Mother will be moving
back in.”
  “How did you know that?”
  I smiled. “I just knew she would.”
   With Mother coming back, I knew it was time for me to leave. In any case, I was
an adult now, and it was time for me to stop holding on to Daddy’s hand.
  I wasn’t entirely candid with him, however, as I suspect he knew. We no longer
saw things exactly the same way— I didn’t like what Daddy was doing— and it
would have made a difference in living in the same apartment. I had changed, but it
wasn’t just Mr. Mbele who had changed me. It was a lot of things— experiences
and people— including Daddy himself. If he hadn’t moved us to Geo Quad, there is
no doubt that I would never have voted the way I did, if I had by some miracle
passed Trial.
  As Jimmy and I were leaving the amphitheatre, Daddy turned and called to
George. “Come along. The Council will want to talk with you before you leave.”
  I said to Jimmy, “You were sitting next to George. How did he vote?”
  “He voted for.”
  “They’re going to send him to do it, you know.”
  Jimmy nodded.
   The thing that I didn’t understand was how people who are as fine and as kind as
Daddy and George could vote to destroy a whole world of people. The reason that I
didn’t understand was that it was only in the past few weeks that my world had
grown large enough to include Mudeaters and other patent inferiors and that I had
learned to feel pain at their passing. I simply did not want to see Tintera destroyed.
Daddy was wrong. I had had my moral blindness and now it was gone. I could not
understand my former self and I could not understand Daddy and George.
   Five years have passed since then and I still don’t fully understand. There is a
lesson that I learned at twelve— the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There
are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people
elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson— that neither does the
world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole
bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary
spear carrier among them.
   I envy people like Jimmy who knew that all along and didn’t have to learn. Jimmy
says he had to learn, too, and that I just never noticed, but I don’t believe him.
   Daddy and George and the other 16,000 had no right to destroy Tintera. If you
like, it is never right to kill millions of people that you don’t know personally.
Intellectually I knew long ago that the ability to do something doesn’t necessarily
give you the right to do it— that’s the old power philosophy, and I never liked it.
We might be able to discipline Tintera, but who appointed us to the job? We were
doing it anyway and there was no one to stop us, but we were wrong.
   New Year’s Eve is the final night of Year End, and the biggest night of celebration
of them all. There are parties in every corner of the Residential Levels, all designed
to wind up the clocks for another year. I was supposed to meet Jimmy at a party
being given by Helen Pak, but I didn’t show up.
   George was out there somewhere in his scoutship, eliminating Tintera, and I
didn’t feel particularly like going to a party. Happy 2200, everyone.
   I was down on the Third Level. I’d gone past Lev Quad and down to Entry Gate
5. I walked for awhile in the park and then they turned on the precipitation and I ran
for shelter, the familiar building in which I’d stowed my gear for a year and a half
before I had graduated to a more exalted state in which I could participate in
decisions to morally discipline all the bad people in the universe.
   It was dark except for the light shining at the entry gate. The temperature was cool
and pleasant and the rain dripped from the roof in a steady trickle. It was, as much
as any I’ve ever known, a fine night to be alive. That was where Jimmy found me
eventually, tunelessly humming to myself. I saw him come out of the entry gate, look
around, and then run through the rain, and it struck me how much he had grown.
  He sat down next to me. “I finally figured you might be here. Depressed?”
  “A little.”
  “Tomorrow, let’s stop in and see Mr. Mbele. He wants to see us, you know, and
we have to start planning our advanced training.”
  “All right,” I said. Then I said, “I wonder if Att was still alive.”
  Jimmy said, “Don’t… dwell on it.”
  “I’ll tell you something…” I began with vehemence.
  “I know. We’ll change things.”
  I nodded. “I hope it doesn’t take too long,” I said. “What will we be like if it
does?” I found the thought horrifying.
  Jimmy got up and said, “Come on. Let’s go home to bed.”
   We splashed through the rain, running toward the light over the entry gate.
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