Higher Education

Chapter Fifteen

Rick, like the rest, felt crushed and humiliated by Barney French’s anguished put-down. It took Alice Klein to offer a different perspective on what was really happening.

“You know what they’ve been telling us since day one,” she said. She nudged him with her elbow to get his attention. “Things are not what they seem. Expect zingers. I bet that’s what is happening now.”

She was snuggled at Rick’s side, naked in the darkness of his cabin. It was two days after their arrival at the new training facility, and until now the whole time had been non-stop effort—mostly mental work, which Rick found far more demanding than physical labor. He had spent all day struggling with the unfamiliar notion of moments of inertia. According to the learning machines, moments of inertia were related to advanced methods of ore melting and metal extraction. It was hard to see how, and the problems he had been assigned did not help.

A strong mid solid hoop is spinning around a massive central point to which it is connected by thin strings. All those strings are cut at once. What will happen to the hoop, and why? Comment: When you understand the answer to this question, you will know how the great Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, proved that the rings of Saturn cannot be solid but must be made up of small independent particles.

Rick had about as much interest in dead Scotsmen as Maxwell had in him; but he did have ambition. He wanted to be a success in Vanguard Mining, and visions of a solid hoop spinning around and attracted by a central mass had plagued him all day. After the excitement and horror of the CM-31 disaster, going back to the old routine seemed boring; but he could not get his mind off this particular problem.

Spin the hoop, cut the strings. And then what? What would it do—still spin around the central mass, or something else?

He had been drowsing, his mind filled with rotating rings, when Alice spoke again. “Did you hear me?”

“Uh-huh.” He grunted his reply.

She nudged him. “Wake up. I checked the qualities that successful apprentices are supposed to display. Do you know what the most important quality is, according to the manuals?”

“Intelligence?” A strong, solid hoop. That meant it was able to stand either compression or tension. As he had learned long ago, the assigned problems did not tell you things that you didn’t need to know. And gravity had to be important, too, because the central point was stated to be massive. The hoop and the central mass would attract each other.

“Wrong.” Alice wriggled closer. “You only say it’s intelligence because you think you’re smart. The most important quality isn’t knowledge, either. It’s initiative. But it seems to me that initiative is the exact opposite of doing what you’re told and following somebody else’s instructions.”

“What are you suggesting? That we ignore our assignments? Then we flunk everything and get kicked out.”

“No. I think they want us to try things for ourselves. They want us to push the envelope, keep going as far as we can until we’re stopped. Unless we’re told not to go somewhere, we should make a point of checking it out. Unless something is forbidden, we go ahead and do it.”

“Mmm.”

“Agreed?”

“Uh-huh.”

So far as Rick was concerned that was the end of the conversation. He didn’t remember any discussion after that. On the other hand he didn’t even remember Alice leaving his cabin. Her words went forgotten until three days later, when the whole group of apprentices were told to put on their suits and assemble inside the Smelting Module.

That was the official name, usually shortened to “the SM,” for the cylinder that Lafe Eklund had dismissed as a “toy” the first time that they had seen it. Close up, the SM seemed anything but a toy. Access to the interior was gained through an elaborate triple hatch, more complex than any that Rick had ever seen before. It was located near the edge of the SM’s flat circular end, and its three octagonal doors had to be passed through in series, one after another. Each chamber had a little side room with its own door, and every door had a central viewing port of thick transparent glass. From any part of the lock, and even from outside it, you could see all the way along the axis of the cylinder to the other end. That other end was partly open, showing beyond it a disk of star-filled open space.

The size of the Smelting Module was even more apparent once you were inside. Rick, passing through the lock, found himself in a gigantic empty room that towered twenty times his own height. The inner surface of the curved wall was bare, blackened and crusted with hardened ore residue and dross. The flat end of the cylinder through which Rick had entered was covered with instruments, equally dark with dirt and battered as though with long use.

Since they were in free fall it was easy to soar from the “bottom” where they had entered up to the “top,” and peer outside. Most of them did that. They saw half a dozen small asteroids, just a couple of kilometers away, co-orbiting with the SM and with the main body of Company Mine 26. They could also see that this end of the SM was made up of flat interlocking sectors, so that the whole end could either close completely or iris wide open. Like CM-31 but on a far smaller scale, the SM could stretch its maw wide enough to engulf any one of the waiting asteroids.

“All right, that’s enough boggling at nothing.” Barney French, down at the bottom of the SM, clapped her suited hands together from habit. It produced no sound at all in hard vacuum, but they heard her call through their suit radios: “Let’s get down to business.”

For the past few days she had been in her toughest and most sarcastic mood, as though she wanted to deny that she had ever displayed any sign of sentiment or human feeling. That had made the returning deputation’s job doubly difficult when they went back to the dining-area after their meeting with her. None of the other apprentices believed that Barney was capable of softness, and they had suspected Rick, Deedee, Polly, and especially Chick of being afraid to make their case. Even Alice seemed skeptical when Rick repeated to her what Barney had said during the meeting.

He stared across at her now, floating over at the other side of the group of apprentices. Within her suit visor, Alice’s icy grey glance passed over Rick, roamed over Vido Valdez standing next to him, and continued on to stare calmly at nothing.

No one would ever guess what she could be like in private. But Rick didn’t have to guess. He had absolute personal proof. He tried again to catch Alice’s eye, and was rewarded by what might have been the faintest of frowns. She would probably give him hell for that later, but he didn’t care. It was her fault for avoiding him for the past few days.

“Now use your brains if you have any.” Barney’s voice in Rick’s headphone brought his attention away from Alice. “You may wonder,” she went on, “why we came in through that odd triple hatch. What is its purpose? Did any of you happen to have your eyes open when you came in, or is that too much to hope for?”

She sounded in savage mood. It was Goggles Landau—always sensitive to any suggestion that he might not see as well as anyone—who risked ridicule.

“It’s not just a hatch,” he said. “It’s an airlock, too.”

“Indeed it is. But anybody inside the SM when smelting begins wouldn’t last two minutes. Would you like to take the next step, and tell me why a smelting facility needs an airlock?”

Rick was just a couple of people along from Goggles and could see his face through the visor. There was a mortified look there that said, Trapped! Why didn’t I keep my big mouth shut?

Rick didn’t feel much sympathy. Hadn’t Goggles learned the basic rule back in kindergarten? Never volunteer. The nail that sticks up gets the hammer.

And sometimes the nail that doesn’t stick up gets it, too. Because Barney was saying, “You do not know, Landau? Then how about you, Luban? That smarmy grin on your face suggests you are feeling highly pleased with yourself. So you tell me why SM needs an airlock.”

Another rule, one that Rick had learned more recently: On a test, any answer at all was more likely to be right than no answer at all. He tried the obvious. “It has an airlock so that if the top end of the SM were closed, the inside could be filled with air.”

“True, but hardly an earth-shaking conclusion. You are evading the real question. Why fill the SM with air? Air would be nothing but a nuisance during smelting.”

Rick cast his eye around the interior for inspiration, and saw the grimy and blackened instruments on the flat end of the cylinder. “You fill it with air so that crews can work in here. For—for maintenance.”

“Close enough. Of course, maintenance crews could work very well in suits. But I’ll accept your answer, because I doubt that any of you could get much closer.” Barney looked away from Rick, to his huge relief, and addressed the whole group. “The right answer is, the airlock was put here for you. The airtight interior of SM exists for your benefit, and for the benefit of past and future apprentices. I hope you are suitably appreciative.

“This is a real live smelter, although a small one, but it’s also intended as a training facility. To this point, you’ve worked alone or in pairs. Now it’s time for a practical effort where you will all work together. That’s easiest done when you don’t have to wear suits. In the next two weeks we—or rather, you—are going to do three things. First, you are going to clean all the muck out of the SM. Be prepared to eat your meals dirty and go to bed dirty. Second, once this place is clean you are going to learn how each instrument works. You are going to take them apart and put them back together until you can do the whole thing blindfold. And third—the big scary treat—you’ll get into your suits, go outside, and work together to bring one of those waiting asteroids in here. You’ll melt and centrifuge and tap, and when the molten metal flows I guess you’ll feel like genuine miners. And then, assuming that goes well, you’ll advance to Level Four—and be ready for something difficult. Any questions?”

This time everyone had enough sense to keep quiet. Barney nodded.

“Very well. You are free to make your way back to your quarters and continue with regular assignments. I will post a schedule for SM cleaning and maintenance later today, and work will begin here tomorrow.”

She turned and led the way back through the triple-locking hatch. Rick was all set to follow with the others when Alice turned to look directly at him and jerked her head inside her suit. He hung hack and waited, until just the two of them were floating in the cavernous interior of the smelter. She gestured to him to turn off his suit radio and moved so that their helmets were touching.

“What?” He knew she would hear him through their direct contact, although no one else would even if they were only a foot away.

“Remember what we agreed? If it’s not forbidden, we assume it’s permitted. Barney said we were free to go back, but she didn’t say we had to. Let’s stay and have a look around this place.”

Rick had seen as much of the SM as he wanted to. The chance of finding a cozy place where he and Alice could snuggle up and have some fun was as low here as you could get. He wanted her back at the main station, and into his bunk. But he couldn’t tell her that, because she had already broken the contact between their helmets and was soaring up toward the other end. He trailed along behind, staring with no relish at all at the SM’s crusted sides. In another day or so he would be scraping that crud away—and for what? So that they could melt down an asteroid, and make the whole smelter dirty again.

Alice headed to the very top, out of the open end of the SM and into open space. He followed her, and for the next minute or two they simply hovered, side by side. Rick stared around him, subdued by what he saw. Space felt quite different in a suit than when you looked at it through an observation port. The Sun was far off and small, a brilliant shrunken disk to his lower left. Close to it he picked up Venus and Earth, distinguishable from each other only because Venus was brighter and a little whiter. From this distance you would never know that the two worlds were so different, one bursting with life, the other a dead inferno.

Alice apparently had no interest in surveying the solar system. She was studying the way that the whole top of the smelter could either open wide, or be closed completely to provide an airtight seal. She moved close to Rick and placed her helmet next to his.

“You know, this end could operate as an emergency exit if it had to. There must be control panels, inside and out. I bet that’s the external one, under that plate.”

Rick had been scanning the starscape for other planets. Mars and Jupiter were easy, but he had not been able to find Saturn. The biggest thing in the sky was the lumpy ovoid of CM-26. From this distance, it and the smelter were the dominant features of the whole solar system.

He brought his attention reluctantly to the feature that Alice was pointing out. It was a white plate, small and almost insignificant, at the extreme outer edge of the flat circular end. Rick could see the big segmented plates that retracted as they opened, into a thick annulus. The white plate sat on the fixed outside edge of that annulus.

“Let’s take a look at it.” Before Rick could object Alice again had moved away and was zooming down. By the time that he joined her she had the plate cover open and was studying what lay beneath.

Rick put his head next to hers. “Alice! Don’t you think—”

“Nothing to it. See.” She directed the flashlight in her suit at one part of the exposed panel and placed a gloved finger on a pair of switches. “Here’s the control to open the end of the SM, and here’s the safety. This sensor tells you if there’s air pressure inside the SM—that light goes on—and if there is, the command to open is automatically cancelled. You’d have to override that manually, if you ever had reason to, and set this timer so you could get away before it opened. But how do you close it?”

Rick had been examining the rest of the panel while she was pondering the controls to open the SM.

“Like this,” he said. He pointed out another pair of switches. “This moves the plates that seal the end. No need for a safety to test for air pressure, because when the end of the SM is open there can’t be any air inside. But there is an obstruction safety, here. The end won’t close if there’s anything standing in the way. That’s so you can’t destroy the plates by asking the end to close when an asteroid or anything else is sitting between them. Agreed?”

“Looks that way to me. Let’s give it a try and see if we are right.” She reached across Rick and placed her finger on the first switch that he had pointed out.

“Wait a minute!” He put his hand on top of hers and lifted it away from the panel. “You’re not proposing to close it.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not.” She turned so that their visors met, and Rick was looking straight into those calm grey eyes. “If it’s not actually forbidden—and nobody told us we couldn’t experiment out here—then we assume that it’s permitted. Isn’t that the deal we made?”

“Within limits. I mean, you might as well say we could blow up the whole station and kill everybody, because nobody told us that we couldn’t.”

“Now who’s being ridiculous? There’s nobody inside the SM, and there’s no asteroid anywhere close by. We can’t hurt ourselves, and we can’t hurt the equipment. I’m sure it’s designed to prevent its own damage. Even if we’re wrong we’ll have done no harm, and if we’re right we’ll have learned something that I bet none of the others ever think of.” Alice placed her finger again on the switch. “And we’re showing initiative. That’s the name of the game for the rest of our training.”

She operated the switch.

Rick thought for a moment that he had been wrong about the controls, and nothing was happening; then he saw that the massive silvery segments bounding the periphery of the cylinder were moving, steadily shrinking the size of the circular aperture leading to the interior. The whole operation seemed uncannily smooth and silent, until he realized that any sound of metal moving over metal would not carry to him unless his suit was somewhere in contact with the surface of the SM.

The dark opening shrank and shrank, like a black pupil in a silver iris, until at last it was gone completely. The end of the cylinder formed a flat continuous plate, nearly forty meters across. Rick moved closer, seeking the invisible places where the sectors joined. Alice was still over by the control panel, studying it again. She touched one of the switches and the silver eye began to dilate, metal sectors rolling ponderously back until the aperture was as big as when it started.

Alice came floating across to Rick, grabbed the arm of his suit, and put their helmets together.

“We were exactly right. There’s just one thing I can’t figure out. Do you see any control that can fill the SM with air from this end?”

They wandered together back to the control panel and Alice waited while Rick made his own examination. At last he shook his head.

“It looks like the air-fill has to be done from the other end. That makes sense. It’s where you’d expect the pumps and air supply to be located. This can serve as an emergency exit, but it’s not the usual way in.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She touched Rick’s helmet. “Radios on. Talking like this is a pain.”

Rick agreed—with relief. The end to radio silence meant they must be finished with unauthorized exploration. “Ready to go back now?”

“Might as well. See, I told you that nothing bad would happen if we explored on our own.” She grinned at him as they floated together past the outside of the smelter and headed for the main body of CM-26. For someone usually so unemotional she sounded vastly pleased, even excited.

Sometimes Rick was sure that he understood Alice very well; but there were also times, like now, when he wondered if he knew her at all.