32
By Phase Five there were only twenty-one left in Dekker DeWoe's class. That was no worse than was to be expected from normal attrition, but the other new fact was a lot more unpleasant. Dekker himself had dropped to number eleven in the class standings.
That he had not expected at all. It was Ven Kupferfeld's fault, he told himself grimly. If he hadn't wasted so much time playing lovesick Romeo to Yen's bloodthirsty Juliet, he would have been right up at the top, where he belonged. But, thank God, that was over, and now he could get back to what really mattered. . . .
It was annoying, though, to see that Ven herself was still proudly number one.
It was even more annoying to have to face the fact that he didn't stop thinking about her. He missed Ven Kupferfeld. He missed all of her; her talk, her touch, her pretty hair, her sweet, wet interiors, her perfume, her warmth beside him as they drowsed in her comfortable bed—yes, he even missed her startlingly rough-edged way of looking at the world, which was certainly improper and wrongheaded and even by any reasonable standard actually repulsive; but still her own. They had disagreed irreconcilably on some of the most fundamental questions of human values, of course. Yet even their disagreements had been interesting.
Dekker felt obscurely cheated by the way the woman kept creeping into his thoughts. It didn't seem fair. It seemed to him that the fact that they weren't lovers anymore should be easy enough to take under the circumstances. After all, he was the one who had made the decision to break it off. But it wasn't.
The good part was that Phase Five was only four weeks from Phase Six, and Phase Six would end with Dekker actually going off to tame comets for Mars—assuming he got his grades back up where they belonged, that was. He devoted himself to doing so.
What made doing that easier was that in Phase Five he was actually seeing the greening of Mars happening. Each workstation in the training room had its own simulations, two sets of them. If the student controller selected one of them he was looking at a display of the surface of the planet Mars. If he selected the other he saw a tank, like the one for the Co-Mars stations, but much smaller in scope; it showed nothing but the region around the trailing segment of Mars's orbit. The rest of the solar system didn't matter. Apart from the odd ship in nearby space, the orbiter controllers only cared about Mars, its moons, the three Mars orbiters . . . and the string of trailing dots that were comets—all yellow now—that had been handed over to the orbiting stations for their final creeping approach toward impact.
The instructor for Phase Five was a Martian named Merike Chophard. "Chop-hard," Dekker said the first time he talked to him, but the teacher corrected him amiably enough. "It's 'choe-fard,'" he said; but, however he pronounced his name, Dekker was pleased to have him there. Chophard was the first Martian Dekker had seen to occupy a position of authority in this enterprise devoted to Mars's regeneration. Well, of some authority—as much as a teacher ever had—at least it proved that Martians weren't always restricted to the very bottom of the totem pole in this Earthie-dominated place.
At the first session Chophard started by sending all the class to workstations—"Any ones you like. Just sit down, and familiarize yourself with the controls." There wasn't much competition for seats. With the class now attrited down to the mere twenty-one survivors, they filled hardly half the available spaces.
The most demanding part of the job was the part shown in the orbit simulation; that was where the final approach trajectory was shaped, and where the last-minute work of fracturing the huge comet body into manageable bits took place.
It wasn't the part that most fascinated Dekker DeWoe, though. When time permitted he delighted in switching the view from the incomings to the Martian surface itself. The view was marvelous. The Mars-orbit stations were in five-hour orbits, circling even closer to the planet than the nearer of its two little moons, and in the simulation Dekker could se the Martian landscape sliding slowly by beneath him. He could identify the familiar geography easily enough, regardless of whether it was day or nigh below; the station's sensors were not limited to visible light. He was even able to pick out the sites of individual demes, though the buildings themselves were too tiny to be visible in the simulation's coarse resolution; he caught his breath when he first saw the mountain on whose slope Sagdayev rested come up over the horizon toward him.
And he saw comet strikes actually happening. Well, not actually "actual." Like everything else in the training displays they were either simulated or recorded from the real events that had already taken place, but no less thrilling for that. He saw two of them close together in one session, one just inside the dawn line, the other coming down eight hundred kilometers away and half an hour later. He saw the gases boil up from each of the fifty or sixty impact points that came from the fragments of each strike.
The gases formed instant mushroom clouds, towering into the sky . . . and, Dekker realized with a thrill, the clouds were lingering. He didn't have Ven Kupferfeld anymore, but he had something that was far more important: Mars was beginning to come to life.
When he got back to his quarters that night there were two messages waiting for him. He played the picmail message first. Surprisingly, it was from his old Nairobi classmate, Walter Ngemba.
It was odd, Dekker thought, that Ngemba had sent him a recorded visual message instead of just calling him up. Because of the time difference? Surely not simply to save the extra cost of a two-way. When the Kenyan's image flashed on the screen Walter didn't look any different—same smart, well-pressed shirt and shorts, same carefully coiffed hair, same friendly smile—but the smile faded as he began to speak: "Dekker, my friend, I am sorry to say that I won't be coming to join you in Denver after all. On my birthday I told my father of my plan to apply for Oort training. He asked me to wait until he could make some inquiries, and I did. When his replies came he invited me into his study and let me read the screen.
"Dekker, I'm afraid that there would be no point in my applying for the course. I am not permitted to say what intelligence agency my father consulted, but I am convinced their report is quite reliable. It stated that there is definitely a decreasing need for the terraforming of Mars, because the farm products that would justify it can be produced more quickly and cheaply in other ways—I suppose, because of the new farm habitats that the Japanese are building—and it said that the entire project was going to be under review within the next few months. I'm afraid that means cancellation. Under the circumstances, my father said, it made no sense for me to apply. I was forced to agree. So, sadly, I will not see you there. But, Dekker, please remember that if the training center closes you are always welcome at our farm."
When the message was over Dekker stared at the blank screen. At least, he thought, that explained Walter's using picmail; he hadn't wanted Dekker to be asking questions about these "intelligence" sources. But how reliable were they?
Dekker glanced up as he caught a flicker of motion at the door to Toro Tanabe's room. The Japanese was standing there, looking guilty. He coughed apologetically when he saw Dekker's accusing look. "Please excuse me, DeWoe. I didn't intend to eavesdrop."
"But you did."
"I heard, yes." He hesitated, then added quickly, "I think it is unfair of this African person to blame the Japanese; we are not alone in this, you know."
"But your own father put up the money for the habitats, didn't he?"
"He invested heavily in them, yes," Tanabe admitted. "Please remember that my father is a businessman. In business it is necessary to be practical. The habitats can be producing crops in large quantity in less than ten years—and how long would it be for Mars? Another thirty or forty years at best. So I fear there may be some truth to these reports, though I would not say it is definite that the project will necessarily be canceled. . . . But, Dekker," he added pleadingly, "we Japanese are not all unwilling to help your planet. I don't want it canceled, either. After all, I'm here."
He didn't wait for an answer, but retreated into his room and closed the door. A moment later he came out again, his coat over his arm, and left the apartment without speaking again to Dekker.
Dekker sighed. Well, he thought, he had heard plenty of rumors already about the project being in danger. Assuming they were true, what could he do about it? No more than he was doing already: Keep on plugging away, and hope the rumors turned out to be wrong. . . . Then he remembered the other message. This one was voicemail and—he saw with a quick uplift—from his mother.
He wished he could see her face, for Gerti DeWoe sounded tired as she spoke. "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that maybe I'll see you soon, Dek, because I have to go to Earth for a meeting about the Bonds. The bad news is that I have to. The Commons appointed me. The Earthies are being bitchy about the next issue. They want to renegotiate the terms, and they're getting really tough about it. As long as I'm coming, though, I'm going to try to steal a little time for myself and make it to your graduation—so there's a silver lining, anyway."
That was all.
After a moment Dekker turned off the screen, stood up, washed his face, and left for the mess hall. He went alone. The fact that Toro Tanabe had left without waiting for him was all right with Dekker. He didn't much want to talk to Tanabe just then. He wanted to sort out his thoughts on his own.
The thoughts were not joyous. It was certainly a real pleasure to think that Gerti DeWoe might be there soon—maybe even to watch him graduate?—but the rest of the thoughts that crowded through his mind were a lot less pleasing. Renegotiate the terms! But there was simply nothing more to give; the Earthies had the next six generations of Martians mortgaged already! He wished his mother were there already so he could talk them over with her. Or with his father. Or even—running through the list of people he would have liked to talk to—with Ven Kupferfeld. She probably would know no more fact than he did, but at least she might have been able to help him understand what was behind all this, even if only to tell him what the Earthies really wanted. They already had everything. Couldn't they spare a little assistance for their fellow humans on Mars?
Just asking the question gave Dekker the answer. He knew exactly what Ven would have said, and that she would have been laughing at him as she said it. What the Earthies wanted was undoubtedly what Earthies always seemed to want. They wanted more.
He had no appetite, but he collected a tray of food at the mess hall counter. When he sat down in the corner of the room where his class usually assembled, he wondered if he should talk to any of them about his questions.
The opportunity for that wasn't there, though. The whole class was busy chattering to each other about something else, a new story that was flashing around. The word was that the class that had just graduated already had received their posting orders. Every one of them was going to Co-Mars Two, no matter what they had put in for.
"It's from psych testing," Tanabe was saying emphatically, waving a fork as Dekker approached. "DeWoe, have you heard? They must have their own Rosa McCune there; Co-Mars Two has sent down half their complement for 'instability,' and so they're running shorthanded."
"So we will go out at once," Shiaopin Ye said, looking up from her bowl of soup. "That's good."
"But that's not what I was aiming for. I wanted to go right out to the Oort itself," another grumbled. So had Dekker DeWoe. So had most of them, because the Oort cloud was where the pay was best and the glamour most appealing.
Then, thinking it over, Dekker decided to make the best of it. "I think," he said, "that I will request a Mars orbiter." The more he thought of it, the better he liked the idea. "Yes, definitely 1 will," he said. The Mars orbiters had one conspicuous advantage. If he were only some hundreds of kilometers away from Mars, rather than many light-days, he could even hope to get home now and then. Mars-orbiter personnel did get time off. It wouldn't take much; a week's pass would get him five days in Sagdayev.
He saw that, across the table, Jay-John Belster was looking at him with an amused, faintly contemptuous expression. But it was Tanabe who spoke. "You weren't listening, DeWoe. I didn't say anything about the Mars orbiters. What I said was Co-Mars. That's where they have the problem so that's where everybody's going. I guess the people in Mars orbit don't crack up as fast because they aren't under as much strain."
"But that," Ye said meditatively, "is strange, isn't it? I don't mean the crews in Mars orbit, I mean the others. Nothing like that has happened with the crews out in the cloud, has it? I have heard nothing of large numbers of them being sent down for psychological problems. And yet the miners must be even more stressed; one would think that it is there that they would crack up."
From across the table Jay-John Belster put in, "They will. Count on it, because it's tough out there in the Oort. Strong people can handle it, but weak ones turn into drunks and dopers. Remember DeWoe's father."
When Dekker left the hall, Shiaopin Ye walked with him for a bit. "Forgive me, Dekker," she offered after a moment. "You're troubled."
"It's nothing."
She shook her head. "That man," she said. "Belster is a dishonest person, Dekker. He isn't your kind."
"He's a Martian, isn't he?"
"No," she said, "I don't think so. He was a Martian once, but now he's just a greedy grabber like any other. He wants more than he's entitled to, and nothing will satisfy him."
Dekker stopped to look at the woman. Had she been reading his mind? "But that's wrong," he said, fumbling in his memory for the long-ago thing that would explain why it was wrong. Finding it. "It's the Law of the Raft," he said triumphantly.
"What is the Law of the Raft?"
"It just says that people shouldn't take unfair advantage of each other. Everybody has to be satisfied, or everybody will be miserable."
"It is a reasonable law," she said. "It's a pity that Jay-John Belster doesn't understand it. Good night."
She left him standing there, discontented, unwilling to go back to his dorm room and Toro Tanabe. He didn't particularly want to study, anyway. He had been doing enough of that since Ven Kupferfeld stopped being a distraction in his life.
It was full dark now, and chilly. He thought for a moment, looking around. He was surprised to see Jay-John Belster standing in the door of the mess hall, looking at him; but Belster made no attempt to come over to him, and Dekker certainly didn't want to talk to Belster. On impulse, he turned around and went up the hill to the training center. If he wasn't going to study, at least he could do something useful, and the training center's library study virtuals were usually left open until late at night. It could do no harm for him to get a head start on Phase Six—particularly since checking things out in the virtuals would very likely give him pleasure.
So half an hour later Dekker DeWoe was sitting with a virtual helmet on his head, in the otherwise empty library room. Since he might well be going to Co-Mars Two, the first virtual he ordered up was a kind of travelogue of the station. There was a voice-over to keep him company as he roamed through the station's parts. "The Co-Mars stations," the deep, rich voice in his ear was telling him, "provide a nearly zero-g environment, and the first thing for any new crew member to learn is the art of getting around without gravity to hold him down." Quick shots of obvious newcomers floundering wildly about in wide corridors, trying to grasp one of the holdtights in the brilliant red walls. "Since there is no 'up' or 'down,' all the passages are rectilinear and marked in different colors: red, green, yellow. This is a control station." Scene of a board and tank, very like the ones in the training room, with an operator running trajectory checks on a pulse of four comets. "The control station is where the real work of the Co-Mars stations is done, but there are only four of them, and usually only two of those are in operation at any time. All the rest of the Co-Mars stations, fifteen thousand tons' mass, are just support systems for the controllers on duty. But the support systems are vitally important, too, because without them the controllers couldn't function. Let's look at the crew quarters, where you will learn to sleep in microgravity when you are off shift—"
Dekker's "virtual" self had paused in front of a sealed door—like every entranceway in the station, capable of being instantly locked airtight m the event of catastrophic loss of pressure. Willy-nilly he entered and looked around him. A young woman was asleep in a kind of infant's car seat, her knees partly drawn up, her arms folded across her waist.
Dekker studied the room critically. It was small, certainly, but not damagingly so. It was not nearly as small as the ship's stateroom he had occupied on the way to Earth—and not, really, much smaller than the room he had shared with his mother back in Sagdayev. A Martian could be quite comfortable in a room like that, he thought—until the tour took him to another room, minutely more spacious, where there were two of the "beds" strapped side by side to a wall, and the voice explained that these were "conjugal" quarters.
How nice it would be, Dekker thought, if he had someone to be conjugal with on the station. Not Ven Kupferfeld, of course; that was out of the question. But there surely were other women there.
The rest of the tour was less entertaining—perhaps because the woman was hovering on the edge of his thoughts again. It was instructive, of course. He got his first real understanding of just what it took to keep a handful of controllers functioning several hundred million kilometers from the nearest other human being. What it took was everything a human being might need for survival: alarm systems, automatic safety features, communications networks to tie everything together, kitchens, toilets, "relaxation" rooms with virts and game boards and places just to sit and talk—and, of course, the juice to make it all grow: the power plant, which consisted of a pair of constantly working Augensteins that were devoted to producing heat, rather than thrust, and so generated magnetohydrodynamic electricity to run the station's systems.
Even that wasn't everything. There was the mushroom farm of antennae that sprouted from the outer skin of the station; there were the "fixbots," the little spotter-ship-like repair vessels that circumnavigate the external shell when one of those indispensable dishes developed a glitch; and there was the sick bay—almost a small-scale hospital, because some kinds of medical emergencies couldn't wait for the two-week trip to the nearest planet. Co-Mars One and Two weren't just space stations. They were miniature cities that simply happened to be nowhere near any kind of solid ground.
They were also too complicated to take in in a single dose, and Dekker cut the feed long before the tour was finished. He didn't take the helmet off. He thought for a moment, then took a look at the base station out in the Oort—not very like the Co-Mars stations, but not very different, either, except in the fact that half the crews were going out on comet-tagging missions into the cloud itself. He sampled a Mars orbiter—almost identical to the Co-Mars stations, he thought—and then, out of nostalgia and longing, peered at a revolving virtual globe of Mars itself.
It would be a long time before he got there again, he thought.
He took a quick look at the repeat from the Co-Mars training tank, just to make sure nothing had changed. Nothing had, of course. Even that pesky little 67-JY was plainly in sight, now well out from its perihelion and climbing back up toward Mars. Or at least he hoped it was Mars. Could it be possible that it was going to be hijacked to the farm satellites?
He turned the set off and removed the helmet, not much more at ease than when he had started . . . and was astonished to find that he had a visitor.
Annetta Bancroft was watching him from her perch on the low divider that separated this workstation from the next.
"I wondered who was in here," she said. "I had an idea it might be you, but I didn't know if you were ever going to come out of that."
He didn't have a response for that. "Sorry if I worried you, Bancroft."
"Oh, come on, Dekker. I'm not your instructor anymore. We've known each other a long time, haven't we? Besides, we may well be working together in another month. Try again. What's my name?"
"Annetta. Well, Annetta, it's nice to see you," he said politely, as a prologue to saying good night.
She stopped him as he was about to rise. "What've you got to rush off to? You know, you don't look as though you're having much fun these days, Dekker. Is it because Ven Kupferfeld has her hooks into you?"
"Of course not!"
"Meaning it's none of my business? Well, maybe it isn't. Only I wonder what it's going to be like if the two of you get sent to Co-Mars Two together." He shrugged. "Because I expect to be there, too," she added, "and if there's trouble for anybody it makes trouble for everybody."
That reminded him of his conversation with Shiaopin Ye. "Right. The Law of the Raft."
Surprisingly, she nodded. "That's a Martian thing. You said something about it at that party, when we were kids."
"I did?"
She laughed. "I didn't say you were coherent, Dekker. That little rat Evan got you pretty wasted, didn't he? Serves him right; he married that stupid bitch he was showing off with, and they can't stand each other. But I looked it up afterward; it comes from a book by Mark Twain." She slipped off the low wall and took his arm, walking him toward the door. So tell me," she said, craning her neck to look up into his face, "how do you think you'll like Co-Mars Two?"
"Is it definite I'll be going there?"
She grimaced. "As definite as anything gets until it happens, I guess. Is that what you wanted to do?"
"No. I wanted the cloud."
"Well, I don't blame you—the pay's better, for one thing. If you can stand the loneliness. So will you try to get out of the Co-Mars?"
"No," Dekker said, realizing that he had just made a decision, then impelled to supply reasons for it. "Co-Mars is the most important place. Somebody has to make sure the comets get to Mars on a trajectory that the orbiters can handle, and I'll be glad to be one of those people."
"Spoken like a true Martian. Only," she added seriously, "it could be a mistake, you know. Martians don't usually make it in the Co-Mars stations."
He stopped short and glared down at her. "What are you talking about?"
"Don't jump on me, Dekker, it's a statistical fact. Do you know that two out of three of the Martians that were on Co-Mars Two were in the batch that just got sent down? Don't ask me why. For Earthies it was only about one in ten. Maybe that's just coincidence, but that's bad odds and it's a fact. I didn't make it up. You can look the records up yourself."
"You're no Martian," he pointed out, "and you got sent down."
"That was a whole other thing! I was in an accident," she said harshly. "Don't get nasty with me, Dekker. I've got my own troubles."
"Yes, I know, Annetta. Rich people always think they've got troubles, even if they don't really know what trouble is."
She frowned at the tone of bitterness in his voice, then relented and almost laughed. "I'm not rich, love. You're living in the past."
"But back in Sunpoint City—"
"Back in Sunpoint City," she said patiently, "my father was CEO of a major bank and trust, but that was then. He didn't shift the investments fast enough, and the bank fired him. That was years ago." She wrapped her arms around her breasts, shivering; they were standing in the open, and the breeze coming down from the mountaintop was cold.
"Was it the Bonds?"
"You bet your ass it was the Bonds. He should've got the bank out of them before anybody else; then it was getting too late. So now you know why I've been working for Oortcorp the last four or five years. You Martians cost me my happy little rich-girl life, so it's only fair you should pay me back." She shivered again. "Dekker?" she said. "I kind of like talking to you this way, but it's goddam cold here. Can't we go somewhere else?"
He considered the question. "Where?"
"My rooms're just up the hill," she offered. "I've even got some beer."
Dekker had never been in the permanent staff headquarters before. He wasn't sure why he was there now, either. If a Martian woman had invited him to drink a glass of beer with her in her room back in Sagdayev because it was cold outside—assuming there had been a cold, windswept place to stand anywhere around Sagdayev—he would have understood that the invitation was to be taken at face value. Here, maybe not. After all, Ven Kupferfeld's very similar invitation had turned out to be for considerably more.
So he kept his mouth shut and his options open. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. The building they quartered teachers and staff in had once been another of those resort hotels that Oortcorp had taken over. It was still more ornate, in an old-fashioned kind of opulence, than anything else in Dekker's personal experience. When he walked in with Annetta Bancroft, he half expected someone to ask for his ID. Surprisingly, no one did, not even a remote voice behind a surveillance camera. There didn't even seem to be a surveillance camera. Two or three people were sitting in a corner of the lobby, drinking coffee and chatting; they didn't even look up at Dekker and Annetta as they came in.
As Annetta led him toward elevators he saw another couple of instructors wearing helmets and bodysuits in a little room off the main lobby, off no doubt on some full-body virtual-reality trip, and a woman bent over an origami model by the side of a fountain. None of them looked up, either.
Annetta spoke to no one, not even to Dekker. She led the way down a corridor on the fifth floor and pressed the palm-pad at her door. When it opened she motioned Dekker inside and closed it behind them.
He looked around. Larger than the quarters in the co-Mars stations, but smaller than the rooms he shared with Toro Tanabe. A lot less neat, too. There was a bed, and it was only sketchily made, a spread pulled lumpily up over pillows, and it was covered with skirts and jeans. "I was going to spend the evening sewing my clothes," she said.
He didn't sit. He walked over to the window and glanced out at the mountainside, falling away below them toward the distant lights of Denver. Even above the city skyglow the half-dozen nearest comets were already brightening the sky. As she waved him to a chair and opened the refrigerator he said, "Don't they give instructors better rooms than this?"
She looked at him narrowly, then laughed. "I keep forgetting that Martians say what they think," she said. "I could've had better, if I'd wanted to pay for it. But this is just until they pass me to go back to Co-Mars Two." She handed him a beer and sat down at the end of a little couch. "I hear you don't get along with Jay-John Belster," she said conversationally.
"Should I?" he asked, annoyed by the fact that everybody on this world seemed to know a great deal about what he had considered his private life and therefore sparring with her.
"Come on, Dekker, this is your old pal Annetta talking to you. To answer your question, yes. You should get along with Belster, and with Ven Kupferfeld, even if you don't want to boff her anymore, and in fact you really ought to try to get along with everybody, because that's your Law of the Raft, isn't it?"
That stung a little. "I don't think Belster cares about getting along with everybody. I don't think he cares about anything that doesn't do some good for himself."
"Do you think I do?"
He considered the question. "I don't know you well enough to have an opinion," he said.
She didn't dispute it. She picked up the blouse and held it to the light, then began to repair a seam. "I hate this," she said. "I hate being poor. Tell me what you don't like about Jay-John."
"Why?"
She shrugged, and bit off a thread. "He and I are friends. He's poor, too."
He couldn't help laughing. "So you're friends with everybody who's poor?"
"No," she said, not smiling, "just with the ones who are willing to do something about it."
"Do what? Belster's a violent man, Annetta. I can't help thinking—"
She waited, and when he didn't finish the sentence she nodded. "I think I get it. You don't like dishonest and violent people."
"That," Dekker said, "is an accurate statement."
"And you've got the idea that Jay-John is up to something criminal. Probably you think Ven is, too. Do you also think I'm part of it, Dekker?"
"How the hell do I know?"
She studied him for a moment, then sighed. "Oh, shit, Dekker," she said, "I know what's bothering you. You think Jay-John should be a Boy Scout because he's Martian. You don't want to believe that a Martian could be doing anything crooked."
"Not just crooked! I don't like the way he talks, or Ven, either, a lot of the time."
She sighed. "I guess they had more hopes for you than I did, Dekker."
He scowled at her. "What kind of hopes are you talking about?"
"Well, hopes that—never mind. Just hopes. Look, Dekker. Suppose you're right. Suppose there's some sort of criminal activity going on. What would you do about it?"
"Why—why, I don't know. It depends on what it is."
"But if it was violent, you'd feel obliged to stop it, wouldn't you?"
"Of course," he said, surprised.
She was grinning now. "I'm sorry, Dekker," she said. "It's just that you're so Martian. Anyway, you're partly right. There is something, and it's against the law, only you won't do anything about it. When you're poor, and you don't want to stay poor, you have to take some shortcuts. That's what we do. Do you want to hear what the shortcuts are?"
He considered that for a moment. Then, honestly, "I don't know if I do."
"Well, I know, so I'm going to tell you. What we do is sell information to people who want it—information, for instance, about what the tests are going to cover. Do you think that's wicked of us, Dekker? I don't. I think we're just trying to get even with the system that screwed us up."
He set his beer down in indignation. "Hell, Annetta! It's not just some prep-school course here! If you're letting people pass who don't really know what they're doing, you're endangering the whole project—not to mention actual human lives!"
She shook her head. "Wrong. I've been there," she reminded him. "Once you start work on a control station you've got the old hands standing over you for the first month, watching you like hawks. Anything you don't know when you got there, you're going to learn before they let you handle anything yourself. So there's your conspiracy, Dekker," she finished. "And now why don't you just go back to your dorm and get a good night's sleep? Because you can't blow the whistle on us, you know."
"The hell I can't!"
"But you can't," she said seriously, "because you'd be out on your ass if you did. Remember the entrance test you took? The one your father gave you the answers for before you took it? Well, hell, Dekker! Where do you think he got them?"