34
Dekker's class had started out with a full complement of thirty-four chosen men and women, every one of them carefully selected for education, ability, and intelligence. It dwindled fast.
By the end of Phase Five nearly half of the original thirty-four were gone. Dekker DeWoe was still there. So were Ven Kupferfeld, and Toro Tanabe, and Shiaopin Ye, and Jay-John Belster, and a dozen or so others from the original roster, but that was all. Sixteen of those bright and able students had turned out to be not quite bright and able enough—or, Dekker could not help reminding himself, dishonest enough—to keep their grades and psychological fitness high enough to survive the ordeal, and so the class number was down to eighteen . . . for one night.
When that night came Dekker didn't know it was coming. He was getting ready for bed, staring into the mirror as he brushed his teeth, not liking what he saw. It wasn't the physical reflection that bothered him; physically Dekker was in about the best shape of his life. The polysteroid and calcium shots were down to bare maintenance levels, and the braces had lain untouched under his bed for months now. It was almost possible for Dekker to forget that he was a Martian suffering from the environment of a more dire planet than his own . . . except when, now and then, he was reminded by such bizarre happenings as the sudden, surprising first autumn fall of snow. Snow! And his progress at the school was—well—optimal. It deserved congratulation . . . provided you didn't know how it had been made possible.
After all, simply getting as far as Phase Six was a victory of sorts in itself. What spoiled it for Dekker DeWoe was the knowledge that the victory was riddled with fraud. Not just his own, either. Dekker hadn't talked much with Toro Tanabe after the conversation with Annetta Bancroft, because after that he had understood at last how the Japanese had breezed through so easily. When he looked at the rest of his classmates it was with suspicion: how many of them were fakes, too? And when he looked in the mirror what he saw was that very un-Martian creature, a cheat.
It was terrible to know that Annetta, and probably Ven, and perhaps any number of other people knew the truth about him; but the worst part of all was simply knowing it of himself.
Even the little bits of recent good news had suddenly turned into bad. It was good that his mother would be there for his graduation . . . but, when he saw her, what was he going to tell Gerti DeWoe?
When, that night, he heard a commotion in the hall outside his quarters, he peered out of the bathroom, toothbrush in his hand, to see what might be going on. Toro Tanabe was already at the hall door, talking excitedly to someone outside. When Tanabe turned and saw Dekker, he called, "Come and see, DeWoe! We have some new blood for Phase Six." And when Dekker hesitated, he added irritably, "It doesn't matter that you are getting ready for bed, come anyway. Hurry."
Dekker did hurry, after his fashion. That is to say that when he washed his face and pulled on a robe he did it rapidly, but by the time he got to the door the last of the new people was already disappearing into a doorway down the hall. Dekker looked after him in puzzlement. "Did you say they're coming into Phase Six with us?"
"Yes, exactly, DeWoe. But that is not all. They are not ordinary students. These people are all veterans—eight of them—and from the Oort cloud itself, actually! They have been on Earth on R-and-R between tours of duty, only instead of going back to the Oort they have been ordered to join us for a refresher course and then to go to Co-Mars Two."
Dekker looked at his roommate in perplexity. "I never heard of such a thing," he said.
"There has never been such a thing! It is quite irregular. Do you see, DeWoe, it must mean that Co-Mars Two needs people very badly!"
"My name," the Phase Six instructor said the next morning, "is Marty Gillespie, and I used to be head of services at the Nairobi Skyhook plenum until I retired." He looked retired; he was an elderly man with no hair at the top of his head but a scraggly white pigtail tied over the back of his neck. He was short and plump, and there were lines in his face, but he looked amiable enough as he studied his new class. "What you're going to learn here is what you need to know about housekeeping on a space station, but before we get into that I want you all to stand up and tell me your names."
Dekker, up close to the instructor, turned around to see which were the new ones. They weren't hard to pick out. There were eight people who had been in the Oort, six men and two women, and they were conspicuous among the familiar faces. They carried themselves with an air of assurance that most of the others lacked, and they had clumped themselves together in a tight group. Dekker noted that one of the women, though apparently a little older than himself, was quite tall and not at all unpleasant to look at. He filed her name away in his mind: Rima Consalvo.
Gillespie had also noted the grouping and shook his head. "You're going to have to pair off to share terminals, and I don't want you new people all sticking together; so if you're one of the ones that're in from the cloud, I want you working with a buddy that isn't. You can tell him what things are like out in the field, and he can tell you what he's just learned here and you've probably forgotten. So, let's see, you and you, you go with her, you two together—"
Dekker recognized a chance when he saw it. All it took then was a little inconspicuous sidling through the crowd, and when Gillespie came to Rima Consalvo, Dekker was right beside her. She gave him a quizzical look, then, when Gillespie obligingly paired them, a grin.
"Nice to meet you," Dekker whispered, and she nodded.
"Remember who you're with," the instructor ordered. "Now, you probably want to know what I mean by housekeeping. I don't just mean tidying up your quarters, though you'll have to do that, too. Mostly I mean staying alive, you yourself and everybody in the station with you. That means knowing how to deal with power loss, or accident, or fire. Second, I mean making sure the station does its job: that's instrument and communications maintenance. Last there's keeping the crew fed and healthy and reasonably happy in their work, which means food preparation, laundry, cleanup, and general repair—anything from fixing a squeaking door to tackling a stopped toilet. Any questions about any of that?"
He was looking around at the expressions on the faces of the class. None of them were looking pleased, but it was Toro Tanabe who put his hand up first. "I did not enter this course to fix toilets!" he said.
"Nobody ever does," Gillespie said pleasantly, "but sometimes the toilets have to be fixed. You crap in them, you fix them if you have to. Any other questions?" He looked around briefly, then said, "You probably don't know what to ask yet, do you? Well, let's get into it. You teams take your places—pick any screens you want, they're all the same—and let's start with a look at how we go about maintaining pressure integrity."
When they had their seats, Rima looked at Dekker inquiringly, Dekker nodded, and so she was the one who started the display.
It was, like all the school's training programs, clear and complete—though not, to Dekker, very interesting. Maintaining pressure integrity was not a challenging subject for someone who had grown up in an airtight Martian deme. It wasn't for someone who had spent four years in the Oort cloud, either. All the same, side by side they watched the 3D schematics of a station's air system, along with the automatic programs for sealing every door and bulkhead in the event of pressure drop; Dekker noticed approvingly that Rima Consalvo paid attention, in spite of the fact that she, too, must have known all this long before. He considered that her attitude was very nearly Martian. They had an interactive screen, of course, but for this first tutorial there was nothing for them to do but watch, and they both kept their hands off the keypad. Dekker had plenty of chances to notice that Rima Consalvo had a nice profile and that, although her perfume wasn't Ven Kupferfeld's, it was still quite pleasant.
When the program had run and the instructor asked if anyone hadn't understood anything, it was a while before one of the students raised her hand. "Maybe we just haven't come to that part of the course yet," she said tentatively, "but what happens if there's a massive collision and the power for the automatic systems goes out at the same time as the hull is breached?"
Gillespie gave her an approving look. "Good question, Clarkson. You're on your toes, but you're right, we just haven't come to that yet. In a minute we'll set up some problem simulations for you to deal with, and that'll be one of them. Any other questions? Then go to step two on your screens, and let's see what some of the problems might be."
On the way to lunch they walked together, naturally enough, and Dekker had plenty of time to tell Rima Consalvo all about himself. He did it with smiles and animated gestures, not entirely because he was aware of the fact that Ven Kupferfeld was only a few steps behind them. Consalvo responded, too. She showed definite signs of being interested in him, he thought, as well as being quite interesting herself. She had evidently had a privileged childhood—well, didn't every Earthie child?—but then she had signed up for the Oort. She described her four-year hitch out in the cloud, where she specialized in snake-handling by choice, now and then taking her turn in one of the spotter ships.
"But that really wears you down, DeWoe, out there all by yourself for weeks at a time. Snake-handling's better. You don't have to wear those damn bodysuits, and you're on the base ship with your friends so when you're off shift you have somebody to talk to. I was really afraid I'd be missing all those guys," she added, as they joined the counter line, "but it looks to me like there are some good people here, too."
That was a remark that pleased Dekker, since naturally he concluded that he was one of them. Unfortunately they got separated in the line, because Consalvo had had to go back for a clean tray, and their conversation was interrupted just when it was going well. Dekker was careful to save a seat for her on the assumption that they would have the whole lunch hour to get to know each other better. Maybe even to get her to answer a few questions more explicitly. Like why she had made the jump from a life of ease to the Oort. Like her age, for that matter. He guessed, as well as he could, that Consalvo was in her early thirties, Earth years, but she seemed to have that strange reluctance of Earthie women about revealing their ages—as though ten years or so one way or another could make much difference. Anyway, she certainly did seem to like him, and Dekker considered that that promised well for the future on Co-Mars Two.
But when Consalvo came off the line with her tray she passed right by him with a nod and a friendly, but not inviting, smile, to sit down two or three tables away.
That was a disappointment. It was a surprise, too, when he saw that the person she sat with was, of all people, Ven Kupferfeld. A moment later another man joined them—Dekker recognized him as one of the new group from the Oort, somebody named Berl Korman.
Then there was a second surprise and maybe an even more unwelcome one, as Jay-John Belster put his tray down at the same table.
Dekker concentrated his attention on his killed-animal cutlet. He wasn't really being snubbed, he explained to himself. It was only natural that Rima Consalvo would want to get to know as many of her new classmates as possible—but why those particular two new classmates? At least, he thought, her choice of companions seemed to prove that she wasn't avoiding him because of some prejudice against Martians—supposing that anyone could still think of Jay-John Belster as a real Martian.
When they got back to the training center after lunch, Consalvo seemed as friendly as ever when she took her place right beside him again. The rest of the class was still drifting in, which gave him a chance for a little conversation. Dekker debated mentioning that he had been looking forward to having her company at lunch. It was certainly true, but he guessed that it probably wasn't a good idea to say it, since it might sound to her as though he were trying to be, well, possessive, and without much excuse considering the shortness of their acquaintance.
Still, he couldn't see any reason not to say, quite casually, "I didn't know you knew Jay-John Belster."
"Belster? Oh, yes. Met him last night," she said. "Kupferfeld, too. Were your ears burning? She was saying some very nice things about you, DeWoe."
That was another surprise. It was unexpected enough to keep him from saying anything else just then, and a minute later they were deep into the afternoon's lesson and any further personal remarks had to be postponed. "The key to all the safety systems," Marty Gillespie announced, picking up where he had left off, "is communications. The sensors won't do you any good if their data doesn't get to the safety relays, and so the intrastation communications links are vital. They're all triply redundant, of course, but that doesn't mean they can't all go out at once. That's what we call 'common vulnerability,' meaning that sometimes what makes one of them fail will do the same thing to the others as soon as they come on. So we're going to work on the communications net now; fire up and start with the next step."
So Dekker and Rima Consalvo spent the afternoon tracing communications links on a model space station. There were plenty of them that had to be learned: the emergency net that dealt with such potential disasters as fires, pressure drops, or solar flares; the relays that kept the controllers' displays continuously updated; the forwarding circuits that passed on communications from outside the station; the intrastation voice links and all the others.
The final task of the day was to check the links between the station's comet-watching instrument, and the display, on the controllers' boards. As Dekker already knew, of course, Co-Mars Two's sensors continually interrogated every one of the comets and received status reports, which were passed on to the displays at each station; then, after the computers had produced their analyses and solutions, the controllers' burn instructions retraced the same steps back to the receivers on the comets themselves.
"The worst problem here," Marty Gillespie told them, "is when there's a fault in the downlink on the comet body. There's an example right here. Look at that little one on the up leg there, 67-JY. It's been giving erratic responses for months now; the controllers have had a lot of trouble with it. Tomorrow we're going to see what kind of commands you can use to conduct two-way parity checks and system search scans to try to straighten one out when there's what looks like a hardware fault out on the comet and you can't send a team to fix it in person; but that's all for today. Get a good night's sleep, and I'll see you in the morning."
Rima Consalvo stood up, stretched, and yawned, while she watched Dekker turning off their screen. He smiled at her. "Is it all beginning to come back to you?"
She gave him a puzzled look, then understood. "Oh, you mean comet handling. Yes, I guess so, but I'm glad we're getting this refresher. I think I need it. DeWoe? If I get stuck on anything, would you put in a little study time with me one of these days?"
"Well, sure," he said, feeling a glow. "How about tonight?"
She shook her head. "Not tonight," she said regretfully, "because I've made plans—matter of fact, I see my date's waiting for me. But thanks, DeWoe, and I'll see you in the morning."
"Good night," he said, watching her go—watching, especially, to see which of his lucky male classmates was going to be the one waiting for her.
But it wasn't any of them, and that was another big surprise from this surprising woman; because the person standing in the doorway, greeting Rima Consalvo, wasn't a student at all. It was Annetta Bancroft. And what very bad luck it was, Dekker thought, that the people Consalvo seemed most interested in spending time with included so many of the people he was most anxious to avoid.
One of the other people he had been avoiding was his roommate, but when Dekker got to his quarters he found Toro Tanabe gazing despondently at their study screen.
All those childhood repetitions of the Pledge of Assistance had left their indelible imprint on Dekker DeWoe. He could not help a feeling of sympathy for his roommate; Tanabe might be a cheat, but he was also a friend, more or less. Anyway, what right did Dekker have to criticize another cheat? He said, cordially enough, "Cheer up, Tanabe. It's been a tough time, but we're on the homestretch."
The Japanese gave him a sulky look. "I suppose so," he said, "but what of it? When we graduate, what have we to look forward to?"
"You're really worried about having to fix toilets," Dekker guessed, but Tanabe shook his head. Dekker tried again. "Then you missed out on another lottery?"
"Actually," Tanabe said with dignity, "I had five numbers on one card last time; if it had only been six I would at least have had eight or nine hundred cues for a consolation prize." He hesitated, then confided, "It isn't the course. It's the market again, DeWoe. It has dropped nearly five hundred points over the last two months, you know."
"I haven't been following it," Dekker admitted.
"No, of course not. Martians don't care for such things, do they? Still, it is a worry. It is going to get serious for my father if it goes down much more. He has a good many futures buying contracts coming due."
"Well," Dekker said cheerfully, not at all tempted to try to have a futures buying contract explained to him again, "at least you'll have a regular job on Co-Mars Two, so you can support him in his old age if he goes broke. Personally, I'm off to dinner."
"I'll come with you," Tanabe said, getting up. On the way to the dining hall Dekker puzzled over something about Tanabe's behavior, and realized just as they were coming off the line what it was. Tanabe's money worries must be real; it had been weeks since he had allowed himself a weekend in Denver, and he was actually eating almost all his meals with everyone else in the school cafeteria.
Out of charity Dekker made a point of being upbeat all through the meal, and by the time they were back at their study screens Tanabe seemed to have recovered. "I think," he said judiciously, taking a break to make them some of that nearly flavorless Japanese tea that Dekker hated, but drank out of politeness, "I think you are right, DeWoe, or almost. My father is not after all likely to go entirely 'broke'—a bit less rich, perhaps, but by no means a pauper—and even if I did have to repair toilets I suppose I could do it. For a while. But it is more likely that I would draw something like power-plant maintenance. That is a decent job, and if you remember I did well in that part of the course—and anyway," he added, actually smiling, "it is a known fact that nothing ever goes wrong with the Augensteins. It can't; if they break down seriously, everyone dies."
"What a cheerful creature you are," Dekker said. "All right, let's take another look at the debugging programs."
By the third week of Phase Six, Dekker calculated, his mother was only days away from docking at one of Earth's Skyhook orbital terminals, which was a pleasing thought. He was doing well in the course, too, though no more than breaking even with Rima Consalvo. They did study together a time or two, but she was friendly but impersonal, and most of the time invisible after school hours. Her behavior, in fact, was not unlike what he had observed in Ven Kupferfeld for the first weeks of their acquaintance.
It was quite possible, Dekker told himself, that this was simply the normal conduct of unattached Earthie women with an interested male. He could not be sure of that. It certainly wasn't Martian. Still, he reminded himself, if that were the case it might bode well, for in the long run things had developed very rapidly with Ven Kupferfeld. So perhaps all he needed was patience.
Meanwhile he was learning more than he had thought possible about the things that could go wrong with a complex mechanism like Co-Mars Two. Doris Clarkson's question had been long answered: if a large-scale collision caused a pressure drop and a failure of the main power supply at once, the station would simply switch over to standby power. All the doors would seal themselves; air to the parts of the station that still had pressure would continue to come from the reserve tanks; the crew would survive locked in wherever they had happened to be caught—not comfortably, but not dead, either—until they either managed to make repairs or a service ship from Earth or Mars could get there to rescue them.
Anyway, that sort of collision was unlikely. A service ship or one of the fixbots that performed out-of-station repairs and surveys might crash on docking, but surely never at high speed. A wandering natural comet or errant asteroid might do a great deal more harm, of course, if it hit the station. But it wouldn't. The chances of such a thing were tiny to begin with. And if, miraculously, one such did turn out to be on a collision course with the station, the sensors would pick it up in plenty of time and the station would simply use its position-keeping thrusters to move out of the way.
A more real threat was a solar flare. They weren't improbable. They happened all the time, and the particle rain from the Sun was deadly. But the station's Sun-spotters would detect the optical flare long before the particles arrived, and everyone would simply retreat to the shielded core chamber—which every man-made object in space had as a basic necessity of design—and wait it out.
No, the real dangers were all internal. An explosion of the Augensteins would be instantly fatal—though, as Toro Tanabe had pointed out, very unlikely. The greatest concern of all was fire.
That surprised Dekker at first, for what was there on a space station to burn? But the answer was that there was plenty. Not the structure itself; the station was designed to contain almost nothing flammable in its parts. The people who manned the station were another story. Inevitably crews would bring their choicest possessions along and, given the right chance, many of those would burn. The fires that might occur would not be huge—no one would be likely to roast from a bonfire of sports shoes and shirts—but they didn't have to be. Where there was fire there was smoke, and in the enclosed space of the station the smoke was where the real danger lay. The smoke could kill.
There was a cure for that, a simple but drastic one: the emergency evacuation systems. Those could drain the air almost instantly from any part of the station—even from the whole station, except for sealed compartments, if that should be necessary. Every compartment and passage door would lock. Then the fire would starve for lack of air. When it was out the station could be sealed again by closing the blowout vents, and the air would be replaced from stores.
Shiaopin Ye raised her hand after they had gone through a simulated air drain. "That seems dangerous to me. What if someone decided to blow off all the air when there wasn't a fire?"
Gillespie said, "Let me answer you this way, Ye. Do you cook?"
"Sometimes, of course."
"And do you have sharp knives to fix the food with?"
"Naturally."
"Do you ever cut your throat with one of them? No, don't answer. I know you don't. Dangerous accidents do not occur if no one makes them happen. There are dangerous things around all of us, all the time. The next hydrocar driver you see could turn the wheel and run you down, but he doesn't do that. We just have to learn how to live with things that could kill us."
That night, as a group of them were waiting to begin their hostility-release session, Ye brought the subject up again. She said to Dekker, "I'm not satisfied, DeWoe. I still think it's dangerous."
"Gillespie says it doesn't happen," Dekker offered, noticing that Rima Consalvo was listening.
"Gillespie could be wrong. What if someone wanted to commit suicide and take the whole station with him? He could blow out the air, or override the safety controls on the Augensteins, or crash one of those fixbot ships into the hull. What would stop him?"
Dekker didn't have an answer for that, only a generalized feeling that the instructor had been right. Rima Consalvo answered instead. "That's a nonexistent problem, Ye. He would stop himself. What do you think all those psych tests are for? Suicidal people don't get onto a station. They're weeded out in advance."
"Every time?" Ye asked doubtfully.
"Every time so far, anyway," Consalvo assured her. "You'd better work out hard tonight, Ye, so you can get rid of some of those negative feelings." Then, dismissing Shiaopin Ye's fears, she turned smiling to Dekker. "DeWoe, I feel as though I could use a really good workout, too. Do you want to try partnering me tonight?"
Of course he did. When they were stripped down to exercise clothes he discovered what he had expected all along: however aged Rima Consalvo might be, she still had a first-class figure. They did push-away, and squeeze, and then they did flopover wrestling.
In his heart of hearts Dekker still regarded this shove-and-grunt thing as a foolish Earthie waste of time. No Martian would ever need that kind of therapeutic struggle, since every Martian learned from childhood the necessity of tolerating one another rather than simply masking intolerance. But when you were doing these very physical things with an attractive woman whom you would like to know a lot better than you did, it wasn't a bad way to spend an evening at all.
He had always been wary of working out with an Earthie, even a female Earthie. To his surprise he had little difficulty with Rima Consalvo. She did not succeed in pushing him off the square, and when she tried to resist his turning her over onto her back as they struggled on the floor, she suddenly yelped in pain and stopped resisting. "Hey, DeWoe! You're pulling my arm right out of its socket. Take it a little easier, please," she gasped.
Startled, he released her. He hunkered down next to her supine form to make sure she was all right. She was gazing up at him ruefully, rubbing her collarbone. "I know you're a Martian, but, remember, I just came back from being out in the Oort for four years. I had to take shots for Earthside leave, too, just like you—so, please, not so much muscle in the clinches."
"I'm sorry," he offered.
"Nothing to be sorry about." She got up slowly, still breathing hard. "You got me all sweaty, too," she complained. "I must stink like a pig."
"You smell pretty good to me," Dekker offered, and she gave him an ambiguous look, then grinned.
"Anyway, thank God the session's over. Oh, look, the cavalry's coming over the hill."
Dekker looked around to see that everybody was getting ready to leave and Consalvo's former colleague from the Oort, Berl Korman, was hustling toward them. He was scowling at Dekker. "Are you all right?" he asked Consalvo, though his eyes remained on Dekker.
"Of course I'm all right. He's just a mass of muscle, this fellow, but there's no permanent damage. Do you two know each other, by the way? Berl was our ace spotter out in the cloud, Dekker. I always liked fitting out his comets, because they were all solid and easy to handle."
Dekker shook the man's hand. "Were you the one who tagged that runty little 67-JY?" he asked, meaning to put the conversation on a civilized basis by poking some good-natured fun.
Korman didn't take it that way. His scowl returned. "Why do you want to know?"
"Easy, Berl. DeWoe's just being friendly," Consalvo said quickly.
"He is? Why'd he mention that particular comet?"
Dekker answered for himself. "No special reason. Just that it's little and they seem to be having trouble getting it vectored properly." He might have said more, but Consalvo interrupted.
"Forget it, Berl," she ordered. '"You go on ahead and I'll catch you later." And when the man had rather sulkily left she said to Dekker, "You see, that embarrassed him. Actually he really was the one who tagged 67-JY. He's a little sensitive about it."
"Oh," Dekker said, no longer very interested. What had caught his attention was that she was going to see the other man later—the other man, and not, for instance, himself.
"Actually, if you want to blame someone, I was the one who threaded it, for that matter, so we're both kind of sensitive. Still," she added, smiling, "they're better too small than too big, aren't they? You wouldn't want us to be sending down any plutons?"
The remark startled Dekker. "Christ, no!" Everyone knew what plutons were—immense comet bodies, the size of the Pluto that gave them their name. One of those could pretty near fill Mars's airspace by itself, but only at the cost of destroying Mars. Then he realized she, too, was probably joking.
He changed the subject back to the one that interested him. "You like Korman, don't you?"
"Well, of course I do. He's a good man." Then, studying him, she added, "I like you, too, Dekker. I hope you know that by now."
"You do?"
She laughed at the skeptical tone. "Come on, Dekker. I know I've been sort of, well, hard to get to know. It isn't that I don't like you. It's mostly that I do." While he was puzzling that out, she added earnestly, "Look, you don't know what it's like on a station, even Co-Mars Two. Once you're there you spend a lot of time with the same people. That means you don't want to get too close with anybody too fast, because maybe you'll regret it. Then you have some kind of break, and that usually means some kind of hard feelings go along with breaking up—and that s trouble. You don't want that kind of trouble coming up when you're stuck with a small group of people."
"The Law of the Raft," Dekker said, nodding.
"Well, I don't know what the Law of the Raft is, but that's the idea. Unless they change their minds again upstairs, we'll both be going to Co-Mars Two. That means we're going to be together for a long time, Dekker. I want to be sure of what I want before I get in too deep. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Dekker beamed at her. "Of course I do," he said, and, casting caution to the winds, took her by the shoulders and gave her a quick, impulsive kiss, and then turned away and headed for the showers, more sunnily than he had felt in some time.
The thing people didn't realize about the Oort project stations was that, of the two hundred or more people on a station like Co-Mars Two, only about twenty worked regularly as controllers. The rest worked as cooks, cleaners, systems maintenance, and all the other support tasks that kept the controllers in business.
That was what Marty Gillespie pointed out to them in their last week. He added, "You'll be getting your extra-duty assignments soon. That's what they call them, as though you were just going to do them when you had a few minutes off from jockeying comets around. Don't take that word 'extra' too seriously. The fact is that they'll be your main work. You'll be spending more time on them than on controlling, at least until the next batch of new blood comes up and relieves some of you of the scut work."
Toro Tanabe's hand shot up. "I have not taken all this dreary technical training simply to become a houseboy," he complained.
"Haven't you? What a pity, because it'll be a while before you get to use that glamorous technical training. Oh, they'll put you on shift now and then, to keep your skills up—or, really, to learn them, because you'll always be teamed with a real pro, and he'll be watching every move you make. Then if you're good enough sooner or later you'll get to be a certified operator. Meanwhile, you'll do what you're ordered to do, Tanabe. Including repairing toilets, if that's still worrying you."
He smiled politely at the Japanese, who looked rebellious but was quiet. "Okay then," Gillespie went on to the class at large. "You're not actually going to learn how to fix sanitary facilities here, though. What you're going to learn now is how to use the tutorials in the station data base; they'll do the teaching, not me. Starting now." He paused to move his fingers over his keypad, then looked up at the class. "I've just simulated a broken toilet. Now you people go ahead and start your diagnostics, and let's see which team can get it fixed first."
The class bent to it. The first team finished wasn't Dekker's, although both he and Rima Consalvo knew the technique—people who had lived on Mars or in the Oort had practice in those matters. What slowed them down was Dekker, because testosterone was enlivening his senses every time they brushed arms or their hands touched on the keypad—and, wonderfully, Consalvo seemed as conscious of his presence as he was of hers.
That was about all the touching they did. There wasn't any more kissing, either, though once or twice Rima Consalvo gave him an affectionate clasp of the arm or touch on the cheek before she went off to whatever other social matter engaged her evenings. On the rare occasions when Dekker happened to see her talking with anyone else, the group usually included Ven Kupferfeld or Annetta, sometimes Jay-John Belster or the other Oort cloud alumnus, Berl Korman. When Dekker overcame the restrictions of manners and common sense enough to ask her just what they did together, Consalvo simply shrugged.
Dekker didn't press the question. He didn't want to find out that perhaps Consalvo was interviewing other candidates for a more meaningful relationship once they got out in the field, and that maybe one of the others was, for instance, Jay-John Belster.
On the night before graduation some of the more eager members of the class proposed a celebration. They had reason to celebrate. Amazingly, no one had failed Phase Six and the rumor had become fact: they were all going in a body to Co-Mars Two.
It sounded to Dekker as though it were going to be one of those Earthie drinking matches, probably with singing and a lot of loud talk—not really the kind of thing he liked. Still, no doubt Rima Consalvo would be there. He decided to go, but took his time about it. He stopped by way of his quarters to see if his formal orders, as well as his extra-duty assignment posting, had arrived.
They hadn't, but there was a voicemail message waiting for him, and it was from his mother.
"Hello, Dekker. I'm in a blimp somewhere near Panama, I think, although all I can see out the window is water. That means I landed safely and I'm on my way. I'll be arriving in Denver early tomorrow morning. Don't meet me at the airport; they're providing me with a car and driver. They're putting me up at the Oortcorp VIP quarters, too, which all sounds nice except that I have the feeling they're trying to fatten me up for the kill. Anyway, I'll give you a call in the morning—and I'll get to see you graduate after all!"
So Dekker got to the celebration late, though it didn't seem to matter. It turned out to be a leaden kind of a party, and a sparsely populated one, too. Only about half the class was there, quietly seated at tables in the recreation hall and sipping an occasional beer as they talked desultorily. Of the people Dekker was most interested in there were almost none—well, none at all, if you counted properly, because the only one he was really looking forward to seeing was Rima Consalvo, and she, Shiaopin Ye informed him, had left early with Ven Kupferfeld. Toro Tanabe was gone, too, and some of the others had never showed up at all.
In a way—though not the most important way—that was a relief. Dekker had not looked forward to noise and drunkenness. For manners' sake he said a few words to some of his classmates and then sat down with Ye and drank half a glass of beer. Without Rima Consalvo to brighten up the room it seemed a waste of time; and when Ye said that she thought she'd better go back to her quarters and pack, Dekker left, too.
He expected to find Toro Tanabe in their rooms, no doubt also packing up and agonizing over what treasures to leave behind to make the mass limit. It wasn't quite the way he expected. Tanabe was there, and packing, but he was randomly flinging everything he owned into bags, swearing to himself and looking furious at the world. Dekker stopped and regarded him. "Won't you have to leave some of that out?" he asked mildly.
"I will leave it all out," Tanabe said angrily. "I will take nothing at all, not even me, for I am not going to Co-Mars Two! Do you know what they have assigned me to for 'extra duty'? It isn't even fixing toilets! They expect Toro Tanabe, the son of Waishi Tanabe, to work as a cook."
"Hell," Dekker said. He knew that, in spite of everything Marty Gillespie had said, Tanabe had still expected that the one in a million chance would work out for him and he would go directly into comet control. Once a lottery player always a lottery player, Dekker thought.
He said generously, "That's a damn shame, Tanabe, considering that your grades have been good all along—better than mine."
Tanabe shook his head. "Of course they were, and of course they should have given me some more dignified work instead of the sort of thing we give to Hainan peasants. But it isn't just grades. These people never forget," he said dolefully. "You do recall that I had some disciplinary problems—?"
"Coming in late and drunk, you mean?" Dekker said, trying to be helpful.
Tanabe glared, then shrugged. "That sort of thing, yes. They still have all those early demerits on the record, so they pay no attention to my other grades."
"Yes," Dekker said, nodding. "The grades you got from the test answers you bought from Annetta Bancroft."
Tanabe looked surprised and embarrassed at the same time. "Bancroft? Was it she who provided the answers? I didn't know; I got them from your dear friend, Kupferfeld, and she never said where they came from. That is a surprise to me. I had thought of Bancroft as a quite honorable person."
Dekker was also surprised, but it all made sense. Tanabe went on, his voice lowering. "I am sorry you know that of me, DeWoe." Dekker shrugged uncomfortably. "Still, what difference does it make who knows it now? They can't expel me anymore. I will attend the graduation, but then I will inform them I resign, and fly home to Tokyo to tell my father I have finally come to my senses."
"It's still too bad," Dekker offered.
"Thank you. But perhaps not; I think my father may need me now. In his last mail he said there were rumors of some developments that will surely affect the market, one way or another. He says that there is supposed to be a high-level Martian delegation coming. Is that by any chance—?"
"Yes," Dekker said, nodding. "It's my mother. She's part of it, anyway."
"So," Tanabe said softly, and left it at that. "Well, I must pack. And by the way, DeWoe, aren't you curious? Your own orders were on the machine, too. I took the liberty of reading them. It is not a bad assignment, I think. It is damage control specialist.