Higher Education

Chapter Five

Weeks of mind-numbing tests, mental and physical, and the discomforts that went with them; they were all converging now, collapsing to a single and final minute.

Rick had been strapped into his seat for more than an hour. Next to him sat Deedee Mao, another of Vanguard Mining’s recent recruits. Like him she had been expelled from her school at sixteen, but as he had discovered in the last hour of conversation they had little else in common. She and a dozen other trainees had been flown to the White Sands launch site from an East Coast medical test facility, two thousand miles away, to join Rick and the rest of his group. She was big, loud, and self-confident, just the sort of aggressive female that he hated. She and Rick had found themselves arguing almost from the first sentence. As the single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle came closer to departure, however, they had both gradually quietened. For the past quarter of an hour neither of them had said a word.

That silence suited Rick. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could not take his eyes from the changing digits of the display. Sixty-two—sixty-one. A siren began to wail inside the ship. Only one more minute to lift-off.

He knew, intellectually, that riding the single stage vessel to orbit was not much more dangerous than taking a PV across the city. So why was he gripping the arms of his seat so hard?

There was an odd whirring sound and a vibration of the metal surface beneath Rick’s feet. The hatch was moving to its final sealed setting. That meant that the lasers were powered up, waiting for their first discharge. The cover beneath the SSTO would have opened, to reveal the ablative layers.

Rick tried to concentrate on factual matters. The first minute would be the most uncomfortable. That’s when he and Deedee and the eighteen other trainees aboard would feel the highest acceleration. After that the ground lasers would be switched off and the onboard nuclear rocket would cut in. The acceleration force on them would drop to two gees.

Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty. . .

There were voices in the background: the ground crew for the ship, just three people. Their duties had been explained to Rick as part of the “informed consent” briefing.

The moving display in front of him seemed to have slowed, minutes passing between each second. Before he got here, Rick had imagined that travel to and in space would be conducted wearing spacesuits. The first White Sands briefing had taught him that was an idiotic idea, as out-of-date as the notion that aircraft passengers all wore parachutes. Rick was dressed in the same informal uniform of blue shirt and slacks that had become familiar to him since the day he arrived in New Mexico for the medical tests.

Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . .

Almost as safe as a trip on the PV, the briefings said. But every day the media carried news of PV accidents. The vehicle he was sitting in felt far more vulnerable. Laser power could fail; the nuclear rocket could refuse to cut in; or it could refuse to turn off at the right time and hurtle the passengers away to oblivion. You could sometimes walk away from a PV accident. Had anyone ever walked away from an SSTO failure? There had been failures, he knew that for a fact.

Rick tried to steel himself for anything. He failed. It was with total astonishment that he suddenly felt a hand on his thigh.

You were supposed to keep your arms and hands flat on the padded seat support during launch. Rick turned. Deedee Mao was staring straight ahead of her. Her high-cheekboned, yellow face was oddly pale and rigid, but her fingers were squeezing and rubbing his leg.

“Wanna get it on when we’re at the transfer station?”

She could only be speaking to him, but he could hardly hear her or see her lips moving. “Y’know, in freefall. I hear it’s somethin’ special.”

It was the worst possible time for a sexual proposition. Even if he had known Deedee well, even if had liked her, Rick was far too nervous to feel horny.

But he wasn’t going to admit to her or anyone else just how he did feel.

“Sure.” His voice sounded like an old man’s. He cleared his throat. “Sure.” Then he couldn’t say any more.

Twelve, eleven, ten. . .

“I’ll be in c-cabin t-t—.” Deedee’s fingers on his thigh were trembling. “Cabin t-t-twenty-eight.”

Five, four, three—

“Oh, sweet Lord—”

Her hand was trembling worse. With fear, not passion. Rick felt an unexpected sympathy. Deedee was seeking distraction, anything to help her through the first seconds of launch.

“She’s tracking,” a crewman’s voice said.

“Mirror’s free.”

Two, one. . .

Anything to help. And he needed distraction as much as she did.

Zero.

“Up ship.”

As the final digit flickered into sight, Rick broke the rules, too. He lifted his arm from the padded support, placed his hand on top of Deedee’s, and patted it.

Within half a second he knew that he had made the mistake of the century. Lift had begun. Deedee’s hand and his own were suddenly welded together, pressed down by more than five gees of acceleration. His leg was tilted slightly upward and their joined hands inched up his thigh toward his groin.

Rick gasped with pain. If that monster weight kept moving up his body, it would turn him into a eunuch. He tried to lift his hand and arm and found them sheathed in lead. He could not raise his hand, let alone Deedee’s. All he could do, with one desperate jerk, was push their hands a couple of inches away along his leg and hold them there.

The pain and pressure was excruciating. Deedee’s whole forearm lay across his thigh. He could feel bruises forming there in real-time. He sat silent and sweating, pushing and pushing forever, until without warning all weight vanished completely. His stomach at once came free of its moorings and started to float up into his throat, but before he had time to gag he was again pressed back into his seat. This time the force was endurable. It had to be the two gees of the nuclear drive, but compared with the laser-boosted liftoff it felt like nothing.

Rick lifted his hand away from Deedee’s, closed his eyes, and relaxed. After a few moments he felt her hand leave his thigh.

“Luban. That your name?”

“Yeah?” He opened his eyes and glanced across at her. Deedee Mao’s smooth face was still pale but now it bore its old belligerent expression.

“Don’t get no funny ideas, Luban.”

“Like what?”

“I mean, about what I might have said back there at liftoff.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean, I was just making conversation.”

Rick couldn’t let that pass. “Like hell! You were scared white. You should change your name from Deedee to pee-pee. You were ready to pee in your pants.”

“Making love to you appeals less than screwing a swamp toad.”

“I guess you’ve tried that. Tough on the toad.”

She reached over and grabbed his arm. “Listen, if you want to have this out when we get to the station that’s fine by me. I’ve eaten smart-ass jerks like you—”

She paused. The steady roar beneath them had ended. Suddenly they were in freefall, gliding upward in dead silence. Rick once more felt his stomach start to move up his throat.

“—eaten them for breakf—” Deedee couldn’t complete the word. Her brown eyes bulged and her mouth clamped shut. She turned away from Rick, reaching forward and trying to hold off long enough to get her suction mask into position.

Rick clenched his own teeth and closed his eyes again. He wished he could close his ears, too. Any smart-ass jerks that Deedee had eaten for breakfast were coming up again, along with everything else; and from the sound of it Deedee was just getting into her stride. Rick didn’t want to watch.

Sex in freefall—or, fighting, or anything else with the possible exception of dying—didn’t seem to be in Rick and Deedee Mao’s immediate future.

Rick had been told quite a few things about Vanguard Mining’s operations, but he lacked the glue to put the pieces together. For instance, he knew from the short briefings at the medical facility and at White Sands that franchises for commercial mining of the Belt had bogged down in endless debate within the Council of Nations. That deadlock had continued until the Council’s own international (and multilingual) mining effort had ended in disaster, with the loss of all equipment and personnel.

At that point, business interests were suddenly permitted to mine the asteroid belt—and welcome to it. The Council had decided that there was no profit to be made there, although they were more than ready to accept franchise fees. They were astonished when Vanguard Mining’s prototype mine and refinery turned out to be profitable. In the subsequent sixteen years the company had established commercial mining and refining operations on thirty-eight different asteroids out in the Belt.

Rick knew all that. He had also been told, at the time of his first tests by Vanguard, that the woman speaking to him was located on some place called CM-2, in translunar orbit. But in school, astronomy had been of no interest. He didn’t know the difference between LEO and GEO, or cislunar and translunar. He was more interested in chastity belts than asteroid belts.

It never occurred to Rick to connect the things he had been told until the translunar transfer vehicle carrying him and thirty-one other trainees up from the holding station in low earth orbit was close enough for Rick to actually see CM-2.

He had been expecting some sleek, clean-lined structure. Instead he found their vehicle was closing on a vast irregular lump of dark rock.

“That thing?” Rick spoke to Deedee, who was standing between him and Jigger Tait, a Vanguard miner who was hitching a ride back from Earth with the trainees. “That can’t be the training center.”

In the two days since first lift-off, Rick and Deedee had been observing a sort of armed truce. Their ship, station, and dining-area seat assignments had forced them to be together most of the time, but neither one was sure enough of either knowledge or stomach stability to risk an assertion of superiority. So it was Jigger, big-boned, iron-stomached, unaffected by freefall, and apparently totally self-confident in every way, who raised his pale eyebrows, sniffed disdainfully, and said, “Don’t you guys know anything? That’s CM-2 out there—commercial mine number two.”

“But I thought the mines were all out in the Belt.”

“They are. But this one has been worked out commercially. When the iron and siderophiles—that’s nickel and platinum and iridium—were all gone they attached low-thrust engines and moved it to translunar, so now it’s the headquarters for the Vanguard training school.”

“I don’t remember that from any briefings.” Rick looked questioningly at Deedee, who shook her head.

“Me neither.”

“Then you didn’t use the browse feature on your reader.”

“We weren’t told we had to.”

Jigger sniffed again. “I’m sure you weren’t. But I’ll give you some free advice that I had to learn the hard way when I was a trainee: If you only do what you’re told to do, you’ll soon be in trouble at Vanguard Mining.” Jigger lifted from his seat, moving effortlessly in the zero-gee environment. “Okay kids. Better get your act together and strap in. We’ll be docking in a few more minutes. But before you sit down, take a quick look at that.”

He pointed outside, away from CM-2. At first Rick saw nothing but bright unwinking stars. He stared hard, and finally noticed something like a tiny feather of sparkling blue-white where Jigger Tait had pointed.

“What is it?” asked Deedee. “A comet?”

“No such luck. That, friends, is the competition. Take a good look, and hope you won’t be seeing a lot like it.”

“That’s a ship,” Rick exclaimed. “Isn’t it?”

“It is. But it’s not one of ours, you can tell that from the drive. They use pulsed fusion, we use continuous fusion. So their ships don’t show a continuous exhaust. If you want to travel rough, ride one of those babies—an acceleration that varies between zero and two gees and back, every ten seconds.”

“What do you mean, not one of ours?” asked Deedee.

“What I said. That’s part of the fleet of Avant Mining and Refining.”

“Who?”

“God! Don’t they tell you guys anything?” Jigger glared at them. “Avant Mining and Refining. Founded seven years after Vanguard. They’re aggressive, expanding fast. That one’s on its way back from the Belt. Did you think we had a damned monopoly out here?”

“Nobody ever mentioned Avant Mining,” said Deedee defensively, and looked at Rick for confirmation. He nodded.

“Well, they will,” Tait said. “Maybe you shouldn’t hear this from me, but you’re going to find it out sooner or later. Avant make our management real nervous. They’ve had a couple of big successes in the Belt, places where they got to a rich asteroid and staked their claim on it before we did—even though we thought our prospectors had found it first, and we had the inside track. Believe me, Avant is tough. Pacific Rim financing, and they play real hardball. You’ll see.”

He floated away toward the rear of the ship. Rick and Deedee lingered at the screen for a few seconds longer, staring at the insignificant mote of Vanguard’s competition. But then their attention turned again to their destination. CM-2 seemed much more important to their immediate future than Avant Mining.

Now that they were closer they could see the true size of the training asteroid. Each of the wart-like bubbles that covered the surface of the planetoid was actually the exit point for a mine shaft, three to ten meters across. The whole object must be riddled with tunnels. CM-2 seemed more like a whole world than a training facility.

The now-familiar warning siren began to wail. Thrust was coming in sixty seconds. Rick led the way back to their seats, striving to mimic the easy free-space motion of Jigger Tait. He couldn’t do it. After a few seconds of aimless drifting he was forced to pull himself along using seat backs as handholds. Convinced that Deedee was watching him and laughing, he turned his head. She had just bounced off a wall and was turning end-over-end with a bewildered expression on her face. He went back and helped her to reach her seat.

One thing about freefall, Rick thought as they reached CM-2 and went through docking, pressurization, and disembarkation: it made you a lot less likely to laugh at somebody else—because you never knew how soon your turn would come to look like an idiot.

As he left the pressurized dock he turned and caught a glimpse of Earth through the transparent overhead dome. It hung above him, about twice as big as a full moon.

He halted and stared up at it for a long time. Somewhere on that globe was his school, with Screw and Hoss and Juanita and Jackie, with Mr. Hamel and Mr. Preebane and Principal Rigden. Somewhere were his mother and Mick, living it up on what they had been paid by Vanguard Mining—unless it was already all spent. Somewhere were Doctor Bretherton and Tess Shawm, taking in the next batch of recruits and testing them to the point of collapse.

They were all on that far-off blue-grey ball, all invisible, close to each other in space but seven hundred thousand kilometers away from him.

It felt more like seven hundred million.