Falling Free

Chapter 10

The freight shuttle docking bay was chilly, and Claire rubbed all her hands together to warm them. Only her hands seemed cold, her heart beat hot with anticipation and dread. She looked sideways at Leo, floating as seeming-stolid as ever by the airseal doors with her.

“Thanks, for pulling me off my work shift for this,” Claire said. “Are you sure you won’t get into trouble, when Mr. Van Atta finds out?”

“Who’s to tell him?” said Leo. “Besides, I think Bruce is losing interest in tormenting you. Everything’s so obviously futile. All the better for us. Anyway, I want to talk to Tony too, and I figure I’ll have a better chance of getting his undivided attention after you’ve got the reunion-bit over with.” He smiled reassuringly.

“I wonder what condition he’ll be in?”

“You may be sure he’s much better, or Dr. Minchenko wouldn’t be subjecting him to the stresses of travel, even to keep him close under his eye.”

A thump, and the whir and grind of machinery, told Claire that the shuttle had arrived in its clamps. Her hands reached out, drew in self-consciously. The quaddie manning the control booth waved to two others in the bay, and they locked the flex tubes into position and sealed them. The personnel tube opened first, and the shuttle’s engineer stuck his head through to double check everything, then whipped back out of sight. Claire’s heart lurched in her chest, and her throat constricted dryly.

Dr. Minchenko emerged at last and hovered a moment, one hand anchored to a grip by the hatch. A leathery-faced, vigorous man, his hair was as white as the GalacTech medical service coveralls he wore. He had been a big man, now shrunken to his frame like a withered apricot, but, like a withered apricot, still sound. Claire had the impression he only needed to be re-hydrated and he’d pop back to like-new condition.

Dr. Minchenko shoved off from the hatchway and crossed the bay toward them, landing accurately by the grips around the airseal doors. “Why, hullo, Claire,” he said in a surprised voice. “And, ah—Graf,” he added less cordially. “You’re the one. Let me tell you, I don’t appreciate being leaned on to authorize violation of sound medical protocol. You are to spend double time in the gym for the duration of your extension, you hear?”

“Yes, Dr. Minchenko, thank you,” said Leo promptly, who was not, as far as Claire knew, spending any time in the gym at all these days. “Where’s Tony? Can we help you get him to the infirmary?”

“Ah,” he looked more closely at Claire. “I see. Tony’s not with me, dear, he’s still in hospital downside.”

Claire stifled a gasp. “Oh, no—is he worse?”

“Not at all. I had fully intended to bring him with me. In my opinion, he needs free fall to complete his recovery. The problem is, um, administrative, not medical. And I’m on my way right now to resolve it.”

“Did Brace order him kept downside?” asked Leo.

“That’s right.” He frowned at Leo. “And I’m not pleased to have my medical responsibilities interfered with, either. He’d better have a mighty convincing explanation. Daryl Cay wouldn’t have permitted a screw-up like this.”

“You, um… haven’t heard the new orders yet, then?” said Leo carefully, with a warning glance at Claire—hush…

“What new orders? I’m on my way to see the little schmuck—that is, the man right now. Get to the bottom of this…” He turned to Claire, switching firmly to a kinder tone. “It’s all right, we’ll get it straightened out. All Tony’s internal bleeding is stopped, and there’s no further sign of infection. You quaddies are tough. You hold your health much better in gravity than we downsiders do in free fall. Well, we explicitly designed you not to undergo de-conditioning. I could only wish the confirming experiment hadn’t happened under such distressing conditions. Of course,” he sighed, “youth has something to do with it.… Speaking of youth, how’s little Andy? Sleeping better for you now?”

Claire almost burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she squeaked, and swallowed hard.

“What?”

“They won’t let me see him.”

“What?”

Leo, studying his fingernails distantly, put in, “Andy was removed from Claire’s care. On charges of child-endangering, or some such thing. Didn’t Bruce tell you that either?”

Dr. Minchenko’s face was darkening to a brick-red hue. “Removed? From a breast-feeding mother—obscene!” His eyes swept back over Claire.

“They gave me some medicine to dry me up,” explained Claire.

“Well, that’s something…” his mollification was slight. “Who did?”

“Dr. Curry.”

“He didn’t report it to me.”

“You were on leave.”

“ ‘On leave’ doesn’t mean ‘incommunicado.’ You, Graf! Spit it out. What the hell’s going on around here? Has that pocket-martinet lost his mind?”

“You really haven’t heard. Well, you’d better ask Bruce. I’m under direct orders not to discuss it.”

Minchenko gave Leo a stabbing glare. “I shall.” He pushed off and entered the corridor through the airseal doors, muttering under his breath.

Claire and Leo were left looking at each other in dismay.

“How are we going to get Tony back now?” cried Claire. “It’s less than twenty-four hours till Silver’s signal!”

“I don’t know—but don’t cave now! Remember Andy. He’s going to need you.”

“I’m not going to cave,” Claire denied. She took a steadying gulp of air. “Not ever again. What can we do?”

“Well, I’ll see what strings I can pull, to try and have Tony brought up—bullshit Bruce, tell him I have to have Tony to supervise his welding gang or something—I’m not sure. Maybe Minchenko and I together can work something, though I don’t want to risk rousing Minchenko’s suspicions. If I can’t,” Leo inhaled carefully, “we’ll have to work out something else.”

“Don’t lie to me, Leo,” said Claire dangerously. “Don’t leap to conclusions. Yes, I know—you know—the possibility exists that we won’t be able to retrieve him, all right, I said it, right out loud. But please note any, er, alternative scenarios depend on Ti to pilot a shuttle for us, and must wait until we re-connect with the hijack crew. At which point we will have captured a Jumpship, and I will begin to believe that anything is possible.” His brows quirked, stressed. “And if it’s possible, well try it. Promise.”

There was a growing coldness in her. She firmed her lips against their tremble. “You can’t risk everybody for the sake of just one. That’s not right.”

“Well… there are a thousand things that can go wrong between now and some—point of no return for Tony. It may turn out to be quite academic. I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next, that counts most. What must you do next?”

Claire swallowed, and tried to pull her wits back together. “Go back to work… pretend like nothing’s going on. Continue the secret inventory of all possible seed stocks. Uh, finish the plan of how we’re going to hook up the grow-lights to keep the plants going while the Habitat is moved away from the sun. And as soon as the Habitat is ours, start the new cuttings and bring the reserve tubes on-line, to start building up extra food stocks against emergencies. And, uh, arrange cryo-storage of samples of every genetic variety we have on board, to re-stock in case of disaster—”

“That’s enough!” Leo smiled encouragement. “The next step only! And you know you can do that.”

She nodded.

“We need you, Claire,” he added. “All of us, not just Andy. Food production is one of the fundamentals of our survival. We’ll need every pair, er, every set of expert hands. And you’ll have to start training youngsters, passing on that how-to knowledge that the library, no matter how technically complete, can’t duplicate.”

“I am not going to cave,” Claire reiterated through her teeth, answering the undercurrent, not the surface, of his speech.

“You scared me, that time in the airlock,” he apologized, embarrassed.

“I scared myself,” she admitted.

“You had a right to be angry. Just remember, your true target isn’t in here—” he touched her collarbone, above her heart, fleetingly. “It’s out there.”

So, he had recognized it was rage, rage blocked and turned inward, and not despair, that had brought her to the airlock that day. In a way, it was a relief to put the right name to her emotion. In a way it was not.

“Leo… that scares me too.”

He smiled quizzically. “Welcome to the human club.”

“The next step,” she muttered. “Right. The next reach.” She gave Leo a wave, and swung into the corridor.

Leo turned back to the freight bay with a sigh. The next-step speech was all very well, except when people and changing conditions kept switching your route around in front of you while your foot was in the air. His gaze lingered a moment on the quaddie docking crew, who had connected the flex tube to the shuttle’s large freight hatch and were unloading the cargo into the bay with their power handlers. The cargo consisted of man-high grey cylinders, that Leo did not at first recognize.

But the cargo wasn’t supposed to be unrecognizable.

The cargo was supposed to be a massive stock of spare cargo-pusher fuel rods. “For dismantling the Habitat,” Leo had sung dulcetly to Van Atta, when jamming the requisition through. “So I won’t have to stop and reorder. So what if we have leftovers, they can go to the Transfer Station with the pushers when they’re relocated. Credit them to the salvage.”

Disturbed, Leo drifted over to the cargo workers. “What’s this, kids?”

“Oh, Mr. Graf, hello. Well, I’m not quite sure,” said the quaddie boy in the canary-yellow T-shirt and shorts of Airsystems Maintenance, of which Docks & Locks was a subdivision. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. It’s massive, anyway.” He paused to unhook a report panel from his power-handler and gave it to Leo. “There’s the freight manifest.”

“It was supposed to be cargo-pusher fuel rods.…” The cylinders were about the right size. They surely couldn’t have redesigned them. Leo tapped the manifest keypad—item, a string of code numbers, quantity, astronomical.

“They gurgle,” the yellow-shirted quaddie added helpfully.

“Gurgle?” Leo looked at the code number on the report panel more closely, glanced at the grey cylinders—they matched. Yet he recognized the code for the pusher rods—or did he? He entered ‘Fuel Rods, Orbital Cargo Pusher Type II, cross ref, inventory code.’ The report panel blinked and a number popped up. Yes, it was the same—no, by God! G77618PD, versus the G77681PD emblazoned on the cylinders. Quickly he tapped in ‘G77681PD.’ There was a long pause, not for the report panel but for Leo’s brain to register.

“Gasoline?” Leo croaked in disbelief. “Gasoline?

Those idiots actually shipped a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station…?”

“What is it?” asked the quaddie.

“Gasoline. It’s a hydrocarbon fuel used downside, to power their land rovers. A freebie by-product from the petrochemical cracking. Atmospheric oxygen provides the oxidant. It’s a bulky, toxic, volatile, flammable—explosive!—liquid at room temperature. For God’s sake don’t let any of those barrels get open.”

“Yes, sir,” promised the quaddie, clearly impressed with Leo’s list of hazards.

The legged supervisor of the orbital pusher crews arrived at that moment in the bay, trailed by a gang of quaddies from his department.

“Oh, hello, Graf. Look, I think it was a mistake letting you talk me into ordering this load—we’re going to have a storage problem—” “Did you order this?” Leo demanded. “What?” the supervisor blinked, then took in the scene before him. “What the—where are my fuel rods? They told me they were here.”

“I mean did you, personally, place the order. With your own little fingers.”

“Yes. You asked me to, remember?”

“Well,” Leo took a breath, and handed him the report panel, “you made a typo.”

The super glanced at the report panel, and paled. “Oh, God.”

“And they did it,” Leo gibbered, running his hands through what was left of his hair, “they filled it—I can’t believe they filled it. Loaded all this stuff onto the shuttle without once questioning it, sent a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station without once noticing that it was utterly absurd.…”

“I can believe it,” sighed the super. “Oh, God. Oh, well. Well just have to send it back, and reorder. It’ll probably take about a week. It’s not like our fuel rod stocks are really low, in spite of the rate you’ve been using them up for that ‘special project’ you’re so hushy-hush about.”

I don’t have a week, thought Leo frantically. / have twenty-four hours, maybe.

“I don’t have a week,” Leo found himself raging. “I want them now. Put it on a rush order.” He lowered his voice, realizing he was becoming conspicuous.

The super was offended enough to overcome his guilt. “There’s no need to throw a fit, Graf. It was my mistake and I’ll probably have to pay for it, but it’s plain stupid to charge my department for a rush shuttle trip on top of this one when we can perfectly well wait. This is going to be bad enough as it is.” He waved at the gasoline. “Hey, kids,” he added, “stop unloading! This load’s a mistake, it’s all gotta go back downside.”

The shuttle pilot was just exiting the personnel hatch in time to hear this. “What?” He floated over to them, and Leo gave him a brief explanation in very short words of the error.

“Well, you can’t send it back this trip,” said the shuttle pilot firmly. “I’m not fueled up to take a full load. It’ll have to wait.” He shoved off, to take his mandatory safety break in the cafeteria.

The quaddie cargo handlers looked quite reproachful, as the direction of their work was reversed for the second time. But they limited their implied criticism to a plaintive, “Are you sure now, sir?”

“Yes,” sighed Leo. “But find some place to store this stuff in a detached module, you can’t leave it in here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Leo turned again to the pusher crew supervisor. “I’ve still got to have those fuel rods.”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait. I won’t do it. Van Atta’s going to have enough of my blood for this already.”

“You can charge it to my special project. I’ll sign for it.”

The super raised his eyebrows, slightly consoled. “Well… I’ll try, all right, I’ll try. But what about your blood?”

Already sold, thought Leo. “That’s my look-out, isn’t it?”

The super shrugged. “I guess.” He exited, muttering. One of the pusher crew quaddies, trailing him, gave Leo a significant look; Leo returned a severe shake of his head, emphasized by a throat-cutting gesture with his index finger, indicating, Silence I

He turned and nearly rammed Pramod, waiting patiently at his shoulder. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” he yelped, then got better control of his fraying nerves. “Sorry, you startled me. What is it?”

“We’ve run into a problem, Leo.”

“But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news? Never mind. What is it?”

“Clamps.”

“Clamps?”

‘There’s a lot of clamped connections Outside. We were going over the flow chart for the Habitat disassembly, for, um, tomorrow, you know—”

“I know, don’t say it.”

“We thought a little practice might speed things up—”

“Yes, good…”

“Hardly any of the clamps will unclamp. Even with power tools.”

“Uh…” Leo paused, taken aback, then realized what the problem was. “Metal clamps?”

“Mostly.”

“Worse on the sun side?”

“Much worse. We couldn’t get any of those to come at all. Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.”

“Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.”

“Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—”

“Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.”

“Oh. But what do we do about them?”

“They’ll have to be cut.”

Pramod’s lips pursed in worry. “That will slow things down.”

“Yeah. And we’ll have to have a way set up to re-clamp each connection in the new configuration, too… gonna need more clamps, or something that can be made to work as clamps.… Go round up all your off-shift work gang. We’re going to have to have a little emergency scrounging session.”

Leo stopped wondering if he was going to survive the Great Takeover, and started wondering if he was going to survive until the Great Takeover. He prayed devoutly that Silver was having an easier time of it than himself.

Silver hoped earnestly that Leo was having an easier time of it than herself.

She hitched herself around in the acceleration couch, increasingly uncomfortable after their first eight hours of flight, and rested her chin on the padding to regard her crew, crammed in the pusher’s cabin. The other quaddies were drooped and draped as she was; only Ti seemed comfortable, feet propped up and leaning back in his seat in the steady gee-forces.

“I saw this great holovid,” Siggy waved some hands enthusiastically, “that had a boarding battle. The marines used magnetic mines to blow holes like bubble cheese in the side of the mothership and just poured through.” He added a weird ululating cry for sound effects. “The aliens were running every which way, stuff flying everywhere as the air blew out—”

“I saw that one,” said Ti. “Nest of Doom, right?”

“You got it for us,” reminded Silver. “Did you know it had a sequel?” said Ti aside to Siggy. “The Nest’s Revenge.”

“No, really? Do you suppose—”

“First of all,” said Silver, “nobody has found any intelligent aliens yet, hostile or not, secondly, we don’t have any magnetic mines,” thanks be, “and thirdly, I don’t think Ti wants a lot of unsightly holes blown in the side of his ship.”

“Well, no,” conceded Ti.

“We will go in through the airlock,” said Silver firmly, “which was designed for just that purpose. I think the jumpship crew will be surprised enough when we put them in their escape pod and launch it, without, um, frightening them into doing who-knows-what with a lot of premature whooping. Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comm links, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.” She frowned Siggy into submission.

“We’ll just do it Leo’s way,” Silver went on, “and point the laser-solderers at them. They don’t know us, they wouldn’t know whether we’d fire or not.” How, after all, could strangers know what she didn’t know herself? “Speaking of which, how do we know which Superjumper to,” she groped for terminology, “cut out of the herd? It ought to be easier to get permission to come aboard if the crew’s someone Ti knows well. On the other hand, it might be harder to…” she trailed off, disliking the thought. “Especially if they tried to fight back.”

“Jon could wrestle them into submission,” offered Ti. “That’s what he’s here for, after all.”

Husky Jon gave him a woeful look. “I thought I was here as the pusher back-up pilot. You wrestle them if you want, they’re your friends. I’ll hold a solderer.”

Ti cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’d like to get D771, if it’s there. We aren’t going to have much choice, though. There’s only likely to be a couple of Superjumpers working this side of the wormhole at any one time anyway. Basically, we go for whatever ship that’s just jumped over from Orient IV and dumped its empty pod bundles, and hasn’t started to load on new ones yet. That’ll give us the quickest getaway. There’s not that much to plan, we just go do it.”

“The real trouble will start,” said Silver, “when they’ve figured out what we’re really up to and start trying to take the ship back.”

A glum silence fell. For the moment, even Siggy had no suggestions.

Leo found Van Atta in the downsiders’ gym, tramping determinedly on the treadmill. The treadmill was a medical torture device like a rack in reverse. Spring-loaded straps pulled the walker toward the tread surface, against which his or her feet pushed, for an hour or more a day by prescription, an exercise designed to slow, if not stop, the lower body deconditioning and long bone demineralization of free fell dwellers.

By the expression on Van Atta’s face he was stamping out the measured treads today with considerable personal animosity. Cultivated irritation was indeed one way to muster the energy to tackle the boring but necessary task. After a moment’s thoughtful study Leo decided upon a casual and oblique approach. He slipped out of his coveralls and velcroed them to the wall-strip, retaining his red T-shirt and shorts, and floated over and hooked himself into the belt and straps of the unoccupied machine next to Van Atta’s. “Have they been lubricating these things with glue?” he puffed, grasping the hand holds and straining to start the treads moving against his feet.

Van Atta turned his head and grinned sardonically. “What’s the matter, Leo? Did Minchenko the medical mini-dictator order a little physiological revenge on you?”

“Yeah, something like that…”he got it started at last, his legs flexing in an even rhythm. He had skipped too many sessions lately. “Have you talked to him since he came up?”

“Yeah.” Van Atta’s legs drove against his machine, and angry whirring spurted from its gears.

“Have you told him what’s going to be happening to the Project yet?”

“Unfortunately, I had to. I’d hoped to put him off to the last, with the rest. Minchenko is probably the most arrogant of Cay’s Old Guard—he’s never made it a secret that he thought he should have succeeded Cay as Head of Project, instead of bringing in an outsider, namely me. If he hadn’t been slated for retirement in a year, I’d damn well have taken steps to get rid of him before this.”

“Did he, ah—voice objections?”

“You mean, did he yowl like a stuck pig? You bet he did. Carried on like I was personally responsible for inventing the damned artificial gravity. I don’t need this shit.” Van Atta’s treadmill moaned in counterpoint to his words.

“If he’s been with the Project from the beginning, I guess the quaddies are practically his life’s work,” allowed Leo reasonably.

“Mm.” Van Atta marched. “It doesn’t give him the right to go on strike in a snit, though. Even you had more sense, in the end. If he doesn’t show signs of a more cooperative attitude when he’s had a chance to calm down and think through how useless it is, it may be easier to extend Curry’s rotation and just send Minchenko back downside.”

“Ah.” Leo cleared his throat. This didn’t exactly smell like the good opening he’d been hoping for. But there was so little time. “Did he talk to you about Tony?”

“Tony!” Van Atta’s treadmill buzzed like a hornet for a moment. “If I never see that little geek again in my life it will be too soon. He’s been nothing but trouble, trouble and expense.”

“I was rather hoping to get some more use out of him, myself,” said Leo carefully. “Even if he’s not medically ready to go back on regular Outside work shifts, I’ve got a lot of computer console work and supervisory tasks I could delegate to him, if he was here. If we could bring him up.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Van Atta. “You could much more easily tap one of your other quaddie work gang leaders—Pramod, say—or pull any quaddie in the place. I don’t care who, that’s what I gave you the authorization for. We’re going to start moving the little freaks down in just two weeks. It makes no sense to bring up one Minchenko wouldn’t let out of the infirmary till then. And so I told him.” He glared at Leo. “I don’t want to hear one more word about Tony.”

“Ah,” said Leo. Damn. Clearly, he should have taken Minchenko aside before he’d muddied the waters with Van Atta, Too late now. It wasn’t just the exercise that was making Van Atta red in the face. Leo wondered what all Minchenko had really said—doubtless pretty choice, it would have been a pleasure to hear. Too expensive a pleasure for the quaddies, though. Leo schooled his features to what he hoped would be read through his puffing and blowing as sympathy for Van Atta.

“How’s the salvage planning going?” asked Van Atta after a while.

“Almost complete.”

“Oh, really?” Van Atta brightened. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

“You’ll be amazed at how totally the Habitat can be recycled,” Leo promised with perfect truth. “So will the company brass.”

“And fast?”

“Just as soon as we get the go-ahead. I’ve got it laid out like a war game.” He closed his teeth on further double entendres. “You still planning the Grand Announcement to the rest of the staff at 1300 tomorrow?” Leo inquired casually. “In the main lecture module? I really want to be in on that, I have a few visual aids to present when you’re done.”

“Naw,” said Van Atta.

“What?” Leo gulped. He missed a step, and the springs slammed him painfully down on one knee on the treadmill, padded against just such clumsiness. He struggled back to his feet.

“Did you hurt yourself?” said Van Atta. “You look funny.…”

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” He stood, leg muscles straining against the elastic pull, regaining his breath and equilibrium in the face of pain and panic. “I thought—that was how you were going to drop the shoe. Get everybody together, just go over the facts once.”

“After Minchenko, I’m tired of arguing about it,” said Van Atta. “I’ve told Yei to do it. She can call them into her office in small groups, and hand out the individual and department evacuation schedules at the same time. Much more efficient.”

And so Leo and Silver’s beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned…

The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in place. The emergency breath masks to supply the nearly three hundred bodies with oxygen for the few hours necessary to push the module around the planet to the Transfer Station were carefully hidden within. The two pusher crews were drilled, their pushers fueled and ready.

Fool he had been, to lay plans that depended on Van Atta following through on anything… Leo felt suddenly sick.

It was going to have to be the second-choice plan, then, the emergency one they’d discussed and discarded as too risky, too potentially uncontrolled in its results. Numbly, he detached his springs and harness and hooked them back in their slots on the treadmill frame.

“That wasn’t an hour,” said Van Atta.

“I think I did something to my knee,” lied Leo.

“I’m not surprised. Think I didn’t know you’ve been skipping exercise sessions? Just don’t try to sue GalacTech, ‘cause we can prove personal neglect.” Van Atta grinned and marched on virtuously.

Leo paused. “By the way, did you know that Rodeo Warehousing just misshipped the Habitat a hundred tons of gasoline? And they’re charging it to us.”

“What?”

As Leo turned away he had the small vindictive satisfaction of hearing Van Atta’s treadmill stop and the snap of a too-hastily-detached harness rebounding to slap its wearer. “Ow!” Van Atta cried.

Leo did not look back.

Dr. Curry met Claire as she arrived for her appointment at the infirmary. “Oh, good, you’re just on time.”

Claire glanced up and down the corridor, and her eyes searched the treatment room into which Dr. Curry shoo’d her. “Where’s Dr. Minchenko? I thought he’d be here.”

Dr. Curry flushed faintly. “Dr. Minchenko is in his quarters. He won’t be coming on duty.”

“But I wanted to talk to him.…”

Dr. Curry cleared his throat. “Did they tell you what your appointment was for?”

“No… I supposed it was for more medication for my breasts.”

“Ah, I see.”

Claire waited a moment, but he did not expand further. He busied himself, laying out a tray of instruments by their velcro collars and placing them in the sterilizer, not meeting Claire’s eyes. “Well, it’s quite painless.”

Once, she might have asked no questions, docilely submitting—she had undergone thousands of obscure medical tests starting even before she had been freed as an infant from the uterine replicator, the artificial womb that had gestated her in a now-closed section of this very infirmary. Once, she had been another person, before the downside disaster with Tony. For a little time thereafter she had hovered close to being no one at all. Now she felt strangely thrilled, as if she trembled on the edge of a new birth. Her first had been mechanical and painless, perhaps that was why it had failed to take root…

“What—” she began to squeak. Too tiny a voice. She raised it, loud in her own ears. “What is this appointment for?”

“Just a small local abdominal procedure,” said Dr. Curry airily. “It won’t take long. You don’t even have to get undressed, just roll up your shirt and push down your shorts a bit. I’ll prep you. You have to be immobilized under the sterile-air-flow shield, in case a drop or two of blood gets on the loose.”

You’re not immobilizing me… “What is the procedure?”

“It won’t hurt, and will do you no harm at all. Come on over, now.” He smiled, and tapped the shield unit, which folded out from the wall.

“What?” repeated Claire, not moving.

“I can’t discuss it. It’s—classified. Sorry. You’ll have to ask—Mr. Van Atta, or Dr. Yei, or somebody. Tell you what, I’ll send you over to Dr. Yei right after, and you can talk to her, all right?” He licked his lips; his smile grew steadily more nervous.

“I wouldn’t ask…” Claire groped after a phrase she had heard a downsider use once, “I wouldn’t ask Bruce Van Atta for the time of day.”

Dr. Curry looked quite startled. “Oh.” And muttered, not quite under his breath, “I wondered why you were second on the list.”

“Who was first on the list?” asked Claire.

“Silver, but that engineering instructor has her on some kind of assignment. Friend of yours, right? You’ll be able to tell her it doesn’t hurt.”

“I don’t care—I don’t give a damn if it hurts, I want to know what it is.” Her eyes narrowed, as the connections clicked at last, then widened in outrage. “The sterilizations,” she breathed. “You’re starting the sterilizations!”

“How did you—you weren’t supposed—I mean, whatever makes you think that?” gulped Curry.

She dodged for the doorway. He was closer and quicker, and sealed it in front of her nose. She caromed off the closing panel.

“Now, Claire, calm down!” panted Curry, zigzagging after her. “You’ll only hurt yourself, totally unnecessarily. I can put you under a general anesthetic, but it’s better for you to use a local, and just lie still. You do have to lie still. I have to do this, one way or another—”

“Why do you have to do this?” cried Claire. “Did Dr. Minchenko have to do this—or is that why he isn’t here? Who’s making you, and how, that you have to?”

“If Minchenko was here, I wouldn’t have to,” snapped Curry, infuriated. “He ducked out, and left me holding the bag. Now come over here and position yourself under the steri-shield, and let me set up the scanners, or I’ll have to get—get quite firm with you.” He inhaled deeply, psyching himself up.

“Have to,” Claire taunted, “have to, have to! It’s amazing, some of the things downsiders think they have to do. But they’re almost never the same things they think quaddies have to do. Why is that, do you suppose?”

His breath woofed out, and his lips tightened angrily. He plucked a hypodermic off his tray of instruments.

He laid it out in advance, Claire thought. He’s rehearsed this, in his mind—he made his mind up before I ever got here…

He launched himself over to where she hovered, and grabbed her left upper arm, stabbing the needle towards it in a swift silver arc. She grabbed his right wrist, slowing it to a straining standstill; so they were locked for a moment, muscles trembling, tumbling slowly in the air.

Then she brought up her lower arms to join her uppers. Curry gasped in surprise, and for breath, as she parted his arms wide, overpowering even his young male torso. He kicked, his knees thumping her, but with nothing to push against he couldn’t drive them with enough force to really hurt.

She grinned in wild exhilaration, brought his arms in, out again at will. I’m stronger! I’m stronger! I’m stronger than him and I never even knew it…

Carefully, she locked her power-gripping lower hands around his wrists, and freed her uppers. Both hands working together easily peeled his clutching fingers from the hypodermic. She held it up, and crooned, “This won’t hurt a bit.”

“No, no—”

He was wriggling too much for her inexperience to try for a swift venous injection, so she went for a deltoid muscle instead, and went on holding him until he grew woozy and weak, which took several minutes. After that, it was easy to immobilize him under the steri-shield.

She looked over his tray of instruments, and touched them wonderingly. “How far should I carry this turnabout, do you think?” she asked aloud.

He whimpered in his wooziness and twitched feebly against the soft restraints, panic in his eyes. Claire’s eyes lit; she threw back her head and laughed, really laughed, for the first time in—how long? She couldn’t remember.

She put her lips near his ear, and spoke clearly. “/ don’t have to.”

She was still laughing softly when she sealed the doors to the treatment room behind her and flew down the corridor toward refuge.