Rite of Passage

1

To be honest, I haven’t been able to remember clearly everything that happened to me before and during Trial, so where necessary I’ve filled in with possibilities — lies, if you want.

There is no doubt that I never said things half as smoothly as I set them down here, and probably no one else did either. Some of the incidents are wholly made up. It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on. Without them, I wouldn’t be studying to be an ordinologist, I wouldn’t be married to the same man, and I wouldn’t even be alive. The changes are given exactly — no lies.

I remember that it was a long time before I started to grow. That was important to me. When I was twelve, I was a little black-haired, black-eyed girl, short, small, and without even the promise of a figure. My friends had started to change while I continued to be the same as I had always been, and I had begun to lose hope. For one thing, according to Daddy I was frozen the way I was. He hit upon that when I was ten, one day when he was in a teasing mood.

“Mia,” he said. “I like you the way you are right now. It would be a real shame if you were to grow up and change.”

I said, “But I want to grow up.”

“No,” Daddy said thoughtfully. “I think I’ll just freeze you the way you are right now.” He waved a hand. “Consider yourself frozen.”

I was so obviously annoyed that Daddy continued to play the game. By the time that I was twelve I was doing my best to ignore it, but it was hard sometimes just because I hadn’t done any real growing since I was ten. I was just as short, just as small, and just as fiat. When he started teasing, the only thing I could say was that it simply wasn’t true. After awhile, I stopped saying anything.

Just before we left Alfing Quad, I walked in with a black eye. Daddy looked at me and the only thing he said was, “Well, did you win or did you lose?”

“I won,” I said.

“In that case,” Daddy said, “I suppose I won’t have to unfreeze you. Not as long as you can hold your own.”

That was when I was twelve. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have anything to say. And besides, I was mad at Daddy anyway.

Not growing was part of my obvious problem. The other part was that I was standing on a tightrope. I didn’t want to go forward — I didn’t like what I saw there. But I couldn’t go back, either, because I tried that and it didn’t work. And you can’t spend your life on a tightrope. I didn’t know what to do.

There are three major holidays here in the Ship, as well as several minor ones. On August 14, we celebrate the launching of the Ship — last August it was one hundred and sixty-four years ago. Then, between December 30 and January 1, we celebrate Year End. Five days of no school, no tutoring, no work. Dinners, decorations hung everywhere, friends visiting, presents, parties. Every fourth year we tack on one more day. These are the two fun holidays.

March 9^th is something different. That’s the day that Earth was destroyed and it isn’t the sort of thing you celebrate. It’s just something you remember.

From what I learned in school, population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war. In 2041, there were eight billion people on Earth alone, and nobody even had free room to sneeze. There were not enough houses, not enough schools or teachers, inadequate roads and impossible traffic, natural resources were going or gone, and everybody was a little bit hungry all the time, although nobody was actually starving. Nobody dared to raise his voice because if he did he might disturb a hundred other people, and they had laws and ordinances to bring the point home — it must have been like being in a library with a stuffy librarian twenty-four hours a day. And the population continued to rise. There was a limit to how long all this could go on, and that end was reached one hundred and sixty-four years ago.

I’m lucky, I know, even to be alive at all. My great-great-grandparents were among those who saw it coming and that’s the only reason I’m here.

It wasn’t a case of moving elsewhere in the Solar System. Not only was Earth the only good real estate in the vicinity, but when Earth was destroyed so was every colony in the system. The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight that were in service as well as two more that were uncompleted went up with everything else in 2041. Between those two years we Ships planted 112 colonies on planets in as many star systems. (There were 112 at the beginning, but a fair number simply failed and at least seven acted badly and had to be morally disciplined, so around ninety still exist.)

We in the Ships learned our lesson, and though our Ship has only a small, closed population, we won’t degenerate. We won’t become overpopulated, either. We have a safety valve. Within three months of the day you turn fourteen, they take you from the ship and drop you on one of the colony planets to survive as best you can for thirty days. There are no exceptions and a reasonably high percentage of deaths. If you are stupid, foolish, immature, or simply unlucky, you won’t live through the month. If you do come home, you are an adult. My problem was that at twelve I wasn’t afraid to die, but I was afraid to leave the Ship. I couldn’t even face leaving the quad we lived in.

We call that month of survival “Trial,” and I don’t think there was a day from the time I was eleven that it wasn’t in my thoughts at least once. When I was eleven, a man named Chatterji had a son due to go on Trial, and he had serious doubts that the boy would make it. So he went to a great deal of trouble to try to ease the boy through. He found out where his son was to be dropped and then he coached him on every danger that he knew the planet had to offer. Then, before the boy left, he slipped him a whole range of weapons that are not allowed to be carried on Trial, and he advised him to find a protected spot as soon as he landed and to hole up there for a month, not stirring at all, thinking the boy might have more of a chance that way.

The boy still didn’t make it. He wasn’t very bright. I don’t know how he died — he may not have been able to cope with one of the dangers he knew was there; he may have run into something unexpected; he may accidentally have blown his head off with one of those weapons he wasn’t supposed to have; or he may simply have tripped over his own feet and broken his neck — but he didn’t live to come home.

And Mr. Chatterji was expelled from the Ship. He may have died, too.

This may sound harsh — I can’t judge. It doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s harsh, because it was necessary and I knew that it was necessary long before I was even eleven. At the time, however, this made a great impression on me, and if I had been able to force myself to face things outside the confines of the quad in which I lived I would have rested much easier.

There may have been other reasons, but I suspect that all this is why when Daddy became Chairman of the Ship’s Council he decided that we had to move.

Boys and girls, all of us in the Ship grew up playing soccer. I’m sure I knew how to play by the time I was four or five, and I was certainly kicking the ball around earlier than that. We used to play every chance we got, so it wasn’t surprising that I was playing soccer in the quad yard — Alfing Quad, Fourth Level — when I got word to come home. The yard stretches three floors high and two hundred yards in each direction. There’s a regulation-sized soccer field, green and beautifully kept, in the yard, but some older kids newly come back from their month of Trial and feeling twice as tall because of it had exercised their privileges and taken the field for themselves. We had moved down to the smaller field set up in the far end and were playing there.

In soccer you have a five-man front line, three halfbacks who serve as the first line of defense and who bring the ball up so the forward line can take it and score, two fullbacks who play defense only, and a goalie who guards the nets. It’s a game of constant motion that stops only when a penalty is called or when a ball goes out of bounds or when a score is made, and then stops only for a moment.

I was playing the inside left position on the forward line because I have a strong left-footed kick. It’s my natural kicking foot.

From midfield, trying to catch my breath after running hard, I watched our goalie dive on a hard boot at the nets. He was up almost instantly, bounced the ball once, then held it and kicked it high and long. The goalies are the only players on the field who are allowed to touch the ball with their hands. The rest of us have to use our heads, elbows, knees and feet. That’s what makes the game interesting.

Our right halfback knocked the ball down and trapped it with his foot. The instant he had control, he passed the ball over to Mary Carpentier at center halfback and we all started ahead on a rush for the goal.

The ball criss-crossed between our halfbacks running behind us up the field almost as though it had a life of its own, a round brown shape that darted and dodged and leaped in the air, but always was caught and controlled, never quite getting away.

Once the other team intercepted the ball and it went back past midfield, but Jay Widner picked off a bad pass and we began to rush again. Finally Mary Carpentier headed a pass to me when I was in the clear for a moment. I had a step on Venie Morlock, who was playing fullback against me. She was big, but slow. Even having to concentrate on keeping the ball moving in front of me, I was faster than she was. I had a good opening for a shot at the goal when Venie saw she couldn’t get the ball. She swerved into me, gave me a neat hip, and sent me skidding onto my face. I was running full tilt and couldn’t help myself. I went flying and hit hard. My kick went bouncing out-of-bounds wide of the white posts and the net of the goal.

I looked up, sputtering mad. “Soccer is not a contact sport!” I said.

It was like Venie to pull something like that if she saw no other way to keep from losing, and especially to me. We were confirmed old enemies, though I think it was more of a deliberate policy on her part than on mine. Just as I scrambled up from the floor the wallspeakers whistled twice for attention.

There were always announcements coming over the speakers. This time they were calling for me. They said, “Mia Havero is wanted at home. Mia Havero is wanted at home.”

Ordinarily Daddy didn’t have me paged and let me come home when I was good and ready. There was a woman named Mrs. Farmer who used to tell Daddy that I was undisciplined, but that wasn’t true. When Daddy did call for me, he only had to call once.

“Time for you to go home,” Venie said. “Run along.”

The immediate flash of anger I had felt when I was skidding along had passed, but I was still smoldering.

“I’m not ready to go yet,” I said. “I have a fresh kick coming.”

“What for?” Venie demanded. “It’s not my fault that you ran into me.”

If it was my own fault that I’d wound up on the ground, I had no reason for complaint. If it was Venie’s fault, then I had a shot at the goal coming on a major penalty. That’s soccer. I guess Venie thought if she denied doing anything long enough and loudly enough somebody would take her seriously.

Mary Carpentier, my best friend, spoke up then. “Oh, come off it, Venie,” she said. “We all saw what happened. Let Mia take her shot so she can go home.”

After some fruitless argument on Venie’s part, everybody agreed I had a free kick coming. I set the ball on the X-mark on the ground in front of the goal.

The goalie was Mrs. Farmer’s son, Peter, who was younger than I and slow enough to be put in the goal. He poised himself with his hands on his knees and waited. The goal is eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, and the ball is set down thirty-six feet away. The goalie has a big area to cover but in two quick steps he can reach any ball aimed at the goal. It takes a good shot to get by him.

Both teams stood behind and watched as I backed off a step or two from the ball. After a moment I ran, faked a kick with my good left foot, and put a weak right-footed kick dribbling just past the goalie’s outstretched fingers into the corner of the nets. Then I left.

I dodged into the outside corridor and made straight for my shortcut. I unclipped a wall grate that provided an entrance to the air ducts, lifted it off and skinnied through the hole into the dark, and then from the inside pulled the grate back into position. That was always the hardest part, clipping the grate in place from inside. I had to stick a finger through, then turn my elbow out and up so my finger could reach the clip, then wiggle the clip until it caught. My fingers just weren’t long enough, so it was always a frustrating moment or two until I succeeded. When I had the grate in place, I turned and walked through the dark with a light steady breeze tickling my cheek. I concentrated on counting the inlets as I passed them.

Changing the Ship from a colony transport into a city was as big a job as turning my mother into an artist — her project ever since I could remember. And they had this much in common: neither was completely successful, so far as I’m concerned. In both cases there were a lot of loose ends dangling that should have been tied into neat square knots.

As an example, the point where our quad left off and the ones on either side began was completely a matter of administration, not walls. The quad itself, and they’re all this way, was a maze of blank walls, blind alleys, endless corridors, and staircases leading in odd directions. This was done on purpose — it keeps people from getting either bored or lazy, and that’s important on a Ship like ours.

In any case, there are very few straight lines, so in order to save yourself distances, you have to know which way to go. In a strange quad it’s quite possible to get lost if you don’t have a guide, and every so often they broadcast a general appeal to be on the lookout for some straying three-year-old.

I was in a hurry to make up lost time when I left the quad yard, so I had gone straight to my shortcut. If the Ship were a person, the air ducts would be the circulatory system. Your blood travels from your heart to your lungs, where it passes off carbon dioxide and picks up oxygen; back to the heart; into the body, where the oxygen is used and carbon dioxide is picked up; and then back to the heart again. The air in the Ship goes through the ducts to the Third Level, where it picks up oxygen; then through the ducts and into the Ship, where the air is breathed; then back into the ducts and down to Engineers, where water and dirt, carbon dioxide, and germs are removed, and a touch of clean water is added. They kick it around a little more, and then they blow it back up to the Third Level.

The ducts moved in straight lines, and walking within them you could move through walls and arrive almost anywhere faster than you could through the halls. Anybody bigger than I was was too big to squeeze through the grate openings — there were larger openings for repairmen, but they were kept locked — and all the other kids I knew were too frightened to follow me, so the shortcut remained my own private route. They all thought I was foolish to go where I did, and for the sake of prestige I liked to pretend that they were right, though they weren’t. As long as you avoided the giant fans you were all right. It was simply that it was people, not things, that frightened me.

When I got to our corridor, I slipped the grate out and pulled myself up and out on the floor. I reset the grate and gave a swipe to my hair to teach it to behave and lie down flat again. I inherit my hair and eyes, my straight nose and my complexion from my Spanish and Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”

The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in look, but this was far worse than usual.

Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.

He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”

“I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”

I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both were streaks of dust and grime.

The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the quad yards isn’t real dirt-and-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a milled fiber and plastic base — when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a new one, just like in your living room floor. The only place there is dirt in any quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship. Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on the First Level, where it is used to feed the Convertors to produce heat, light and power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity to get filthy.

I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only source — the Third Level — instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.

He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle the Colonies — I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.

Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters — Colons, rather — were packed in at very close quarters. They weren’t clean people — try to convince a peasant to wash — and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink anyway. For that reason, mainly, the Ship was built with a very efficient cleaning and air-distribution system. The Ship is used now for a completely different purpose, so we no longer need that system.

Daddy said my suggestion wasn’t completely out of line.

“Why doesn’t the Council do something about it, then? I asked.

“Figure it out yourself, Mia,” Daddy said. He was always after me to try to figure things out myself before I looked them up or asked him for the answers.

I did figure it out. Simply, it would be just too much trouble for too little result to scrap a complicated existing system that worked well at no present cost in favor of another system whose only virtue was its simplicity.

I brushed at my shirt and most of the dirt went its own way.

“I took a shortcut home,” I said.

Daddy just nodded absently and didn’t say anything. He’s impossible to figure. I was once taken aside and pumped to find out how Daddy was going to vote on a Council Question. They weren’t very nice people, so instead of telling them politely that I didn’t have the least idea, I lied. I can’t guess what Daddy is thinking — he has to tell me what’s on his mind.

He set down the book he had been looking at and said, “Mia, I have some good news for you. We’re going to move into a new place.”

I gave a whoop and threw my arms around his dear neck.

This was news I had wanted to hear. In spite of all the empty space in the Ship, we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow after I left the dorm and moved in with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space — they feel they have to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for myself. Daddy had promised I could.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”

The population of the Ship is about 30,000 now, but once we had transported thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have moved next door.

Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.

I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up everything I had gained since then.

Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do, seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.

I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccupping and I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter?” Daddy kept asking me, but I couldn’t answer.

He took out a handkerchief and wiped my face and he finally got me calmed down enough to find out what I was trying to tell him. It took awhile, but finally I was finished and had stopped crying, and was only hiccupping occasionally.

“I’m truly sorry, Mia,” he said gravely. “I hadn’t really understood how things were. I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be better off in a dormitory with other children than living here alone with me.”

“No,” I said. “I want to live with you, Daddy.”

He looked thoughtful for a long moment, and then he gave a little nod and said, “All right. I’ll call up the dorm and let them know so they won’t think you’re lost.”

Alfing Quad then became one of the two certain things in my life. You can’t count on a dorm or a dorm mother, but a quad and a father are sure. But now Daddy wanted us to leave one of my two sureties. And Geo Quad wasn’t even on the Fourth Level — it was on the Fifth.

The Ship is divided into five separate levels. First Level is mainly Technical — Engineers, Salvage, Drive, Conversion, and so on. Second is mainly Administration. Third has dirt and hills, real trees and grass, sand, animals and weeds — it’s where they instruct us kids before they drop us on a planet to live or die. Fourth and Fifth are Residential, where we all live. Of these five, the Fifth is the last. All of us kids knew that if you lived way out on the Fifth Level you weren’t much better than a Mudeater. If you lived on the Fifth Level you were giving up one of your claims to being human.

I sat in my chair thinking for a long time, trying to recover myself. “You can’t be serious about moving to the Fifth Level?” I asked, hoping Daddy might be joking — not really hoping; more just trying to keep from facing the situation for a moment longer.

“Certainly I am,” he said, as though it were nothing. “I had to hunt for a long time before I found this apartment. I’ve already started getting us ready to move. You’ll like it there, I think. I understand there’s a boy your age in the school there who’s somewhat ahead of you. It will give you a chance to scratch for awhile instead of coasting along with no competition the way you do here.”

I was afraid, and so I started to argue desperately, naming all the places we could move into inside Alfing. I even cried — and I didn’t do that often anymore — but Daddy was unshakable. Finally I dragged my sleeve across my face to dry my eyes and folded my arms and said, “I’m not going to go.”

That wasn’t the right tack to take with Daddy. It just convinced him that I was being stubborn, but it wasn’t stubbornness now. I was truly frightened. I was sure that if we moved things would never be the same for me again. They couldn’t be.

But I couldn’t say that to Daddy. I couldn’t admit to him that I was afraid.

He came to the chair where I was sitting defiantly with my arms crossed and fresh tears lurking in the corners of my eyes, and he put both of his hands on my shoulders.

“Mia,” he said. “I realize that it isn’t easy for you, but in less than two years you will be your own master and then you can live where you please and do as you like. If you can’t take an unpleasant decision now, what kind of an adult will you make then? Right now — no arguments — I am moving. You have a choice. Move with me, or move into the dormitory here in Alfing Quad.”

I’d lived in a dormitory and I had no desire ever to go back. I did want to stay with Daddy, but it was still a hard decision for me to make. It was a question of which of my two certainties I wanted to give up. In the end, I made my decision.

After I wiped my eyes once again with the lower edge of my shirt, I walked slowly back down to the quad yard. When I got there, both soccer games had broken up and the whole yard was a turning kaleidoscope of colored shirts and shorts. I didn’t see Venie Morlock anywhere in the mass of playing kids, so I asked a boy I knew if he had seen her.

He pointed, “She’s right over there.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I got her down. I rubbed her nose in the ground. Then I made her beg to be let up. I got a black eye for my trouble, but it was worth it to make her remember who was who, even if I did live on the Fifth Level now.

After that, Daddy and I moved.

2

The people who run our schools are very conservative — that probably holds true just about everywhere, not just on our Ship. In any case, usually once you get assigned to a tutor you don’t change to another for years. In fact, I knew a boy in Alfing Quad who hated his tutor and got along so badly with him that they could both show scars, and it took him three years to change to another.

Compared to that, anything less has to seem frivolous.

Monday morning, two days after we moved, I reported to my new school supervisor in Geo Quad. He was thin, officious, prim and exact, and his name was Mr. Quince. He looked at me standing in front of his desk, raised his eyebrows as he took in my black eye, finished examining me, and said, “Sit down.”

The supervisor is in charge of all the school’s administrative work — he assigns tutors, handles class movements, programs the teaching machines, breaks up fights, if there are any, and so on. It’s a job with only a minimum of appeal for most people so they don’t make anybody stay with it for longer than three years.

After looking through all my papers with pursed lips, and making a painstaking entry in a file, Mr. Quince said, “Mr. Wickersham.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, puzzled.

“Mr. Wickersham will be your tutor. He lives at Geo C/15/37. You’re to meet him at his home at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and thereafter three times a week at your mutual convenience. And please, let’s not be late on Wednesday. Now come along and I’ll show you your room for first hour.”

School is for kids between the age of four and fifteen. After fourteen, if you survive, they let you give up all the nonsensical parts. You simply work with a tutor or a craft master and follow your interests toward some goal.

I was due to make a decision on that in about two years. The trouble is that except for math and reading old novels I had a completely different set of interests than I had had a year before, and since I didn’t really have a solid talent for math and reading old novels isn’t much use for anything, I had to find something definite. I didn’t really want to specialize. I wanted to be a synthesist, knowing a little about everything and seeing enough to put the pieces together. It’s a job that had appeal for me, but I never talked about wanting it because I suspected I wasn’t smart enough to handle it and I wanted room to back down in if I had to.

At my moments of depression I thought I might well wind up as a dorm mother or something equally daring.

At some point between fourteen and twenty everybody finishes his normal training. You pick something you like and start doing it. Later, after twenty, if you’re not already in research, you may apply for educational leave and work on a project of some sort. That’s what my mother keeps herself busy with.

I followed Mr. Quince to the room I was scheduled to be in first hour. I wasn’t anxious to be there at all, and I was half-scared and half-belligerent with no way of knowing which part would dominate at any given moment. When we arrived, there was a lot of sudden moving around. When the people unsorted themselves, I saw there were four kids in the room, two boys and two girls.

Mr. Quince said, “What’s going on here?”

Nobody said anything — nobody ever does to a supervisor if they can avoid it.

He said, “You, Dentremont. What are you up to?”

The boy was red-headed and even smaller than I, with very prominent ears. He looked very young, though he couldn’t have been since he was in the same class as I.

He said, “Nothing, sir.”

After a moment of sharp gazing around, Mr. Quince accepted that and unbent sufficiently to introduce me. He didn’t introduce anybody else, apparently assuming I could catch on to the names soon enough on my own. The buzzer for the first hour sounded then and he said, “All right. Let’s set to work.”

When he left, the red-headed boy went behind one of the teaching machines and busied himself in tightening down the back plate.

The girl nearest me said, “One of these days Mr. Quince is going to catch you, Jimmy, and then there really will be trouble.”

“I’m just curious,” Jimmy said.

Everybody more or less ignored me, probably no more knowing how to take me than I knew how to take them. They did watch me and I have no doubt they took their first opportunity to tell everyone their idea of what that new girl from the Fourth Level was like. It was soon clear to me that they eyed us as suspiciously as we on the Fourth Level regarded them, with the added note that in our case it was justified while in theirs it was not. I took no pleasure in having girls look at me and then put their heads together and whisper and giggle and if I had been a little more sure of myself I would have challenged them. As it was, I just dug into my work and pretended I didn’t notice.

After first hour, three of the kids left. Jimmy Dentremont stayed where he was, and since my schedule card called for me to stay here second hour, I didn’t move, either. He looked closer at me than I could like. I didn’t know quite what to say. But then people had been staring and prying and even prodding from the moment we arrived in Geo Quad.

Our furniture had been moved over on Saturday morning — the pieces we wanted to keep — and Daddy and I came up on Saturday afternoon bringing everything else that we owned. I had four cartons full of boxes, clothes, and my personal things. I also had a pennywhistle that I’d salvaged. It was about eight inches long and had brass ends and finger holes. It turned up when we were going through our things, in some old box of Daddy’s, and he had put it on his “to throw” pile, from which I immediately rescued it. Sometimes I don’t understand my father at all.

The cartons went in my new room, which was larger than my old one. Larger, plus having more book shelves, which pleased me because I like my books out where I can use them, not piled away for lack of space.

I stood looking at the cartons, and not having the courage to attack them immediately, I began experimenting to see what sounds I could get out of the pennywhistle. Three minutes — that was the time we had in peace before the door rang.

First it was our neighbors. They crowded in and said, Oh, Mr. Havero, it’s such a thrill to have you here on our corridor, we hope you love it here as much as we do, and some of us men get together once in awhile, you know, for a little evening, keep it in mind, and oh, so that’s your daughter, she’s sweet, she’s adorable, Mr. Havero, I mean that, I really do, and you know Havero, there are some things I’ve been meaning to talk over with our rep on the Council, but now that you’re here, well, I might as well say it right to you, go right to the top, so to speak…

After that came the sightseers and the favor askers. A lot of favor askers. I could tell them from the neighbors because they tried to butter me up, as well as Daddy. The neighbors just buttered up Daddy.

I don’t know why it is, but in a case like this, the very people you’d enjoy meeting are the ones who have the good taste to stay home and not bother you. I think it may be an unsolvable problem.

Within minutes, Daddy retreated to his office and the people took over our living room while they waited to talk to him. The new apartment had two wings with the living room in between like the meat in a sandwich. One wing had three bedrooms, a bath and a kitchen/dining room. The other had a study for Daddy and an office Adjoining the office on the far side was another smaller, empty apartment. Eventually, this was supposed to be a waiting room, but it wasn’t ready yet and so the people were camping themselves inside our house.

I watched the people for awhile, and then I pushed my way through the crowd and went into the bedroom wing. I called up Mary Carpentier from there.

“Hello, Mia,” she said. “Seeing you on the vid like this, you might still be home.”

“I am still home,” I said. “I haven’t moved yet.”

“Oh,” she said, and her face fell. She must have had her heart set on a call from a distance.

“I was just fooling,” I said. “I have moved.”

That brightened her up again and we talked for awhile. I told her about all the people who were squatting in our living room, and we got giggling like madmen about all the imaginary errands we made up for them to have come about. We also swore again that we would be true-blue friends forever and ever.

When I was done, I went out in the hall just in time to see a heavy-set man coming out of my bedroom. I knew I’d never seen him before.

“What are you doing in there?” I asked.

Before he answered, he stuck his head into the next room for a moment to take a good look around in there. Then he said, “I’m just poking around, same as you.”

“I’m not poking around,” I said quietly. “I live here.”

He realized then that he’d made a mistake. He didn’t say anything. He just turned red and pushed by me hastily. And that’s the way things had been ever since.

Now, Jimmy Dentremont, looking closely at my face, asked, “What happened to your eye?”

I don’t believe in answering leading questions if I can avoid them, but even beyond that I had no intention of telling anybody what had happened to my eye.

“How old are you?” I asked in an even voice.

“Why?”

“If you’re as young as I think you are, you have no business asking me anything. Children should be seen and not heard.”

“Well, I’m older than you are,” he said. “I was born November 8, 2185.”

If he was telling the truth, then he was right by three weeks to the day.

“How do you know how old I am?” I asked.

“I asked about it when I found you were moving here,” he said quite openly.

See what I mean? Staring and prying.

The buzzer in the schoolroom sounded to signal the start of the second hour.

“Is this First Room?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy Dentremont said. “They don’t tell you that.”

Well, I knew they didn’t. They don’t want anybody feeling bad about what level he’s studying at — or feeling too good, either — but since it’s simply a matter of comparing notes, everybody knows just exactly what level his room is.

Jimmy Dentremont was simply being contrary. So far we had been feeling each other out, and I had no idea of how to take him or even whether or not we could get along. I thought not.

Mr. Quince called me in again after lunch, raised his eyebrows once more at my black eye — I had the feeling that he didn’t approve of it — and informed me that he had a change to make in my schedule.

“Mr. Mbele,” he said, handing me an address.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Mr. Mbele is your tutor now. Not Mr. Wickersham as I told you this morning. I assume everything else I told you this morning will apply. Show up at two o’clock on Wednesday and please remember what I said about being late. I don’t want the students in my charge being late. A bad reputation always gets back and I’m the one who has to think up explanations.”

“Can you tell me why I’m being switched?” I asked.

Mr. Quince raised his eyebrows. With acerbity, he said, “That doesn’t seem to be any of my business. I was informed of the change, and I am informing you. You may believe that it wasn’t my idea. I’m going to have to alter two assignments now, and I do not deliberately make work for myself. So don’t expect any answers from me. I don’t have any.”

It seemed like an odd business to me — switching me from one tutor to another before we’d even had a chance to inflict scars on one another. Almost frivolous.

In spite of myself, I was glad to meet Jimmy Dentremont on Wednesday afternoon. I was having trouble finding Mr. Mbele’s apartment and he helped me find my way.

“That’s where I’m going, as a matter of fact,” he said. Standing there in the hall with a slip with the address in his hand, he seemed almost friendly, perhaps because there weren’t any other kids around.

So far, I hadn’t won any friends in Geo Quad, and by being quick-tongued had made one or two enemies, so I didn’t object to somebody being pleasant.

“Is Mr. Mbele your tutor, too?”

“Well, only since yesterday. I called Mr. Wickersham to find out why I was being switched around, and he’d only just been told about it by Mr. Quince, himself.”

“You didn’t ask to be switched?”

“No.”

“That does seem funny,” I said.

Mr. Mbele opened his door to our ring. “Hello,” he said, and smiled. “I thought you two would be showing up about now.”

He was white-haired and old — certainly well over a hundred — but tall and straight for his age. His face was dark and lined, with a broad nose and white eyebrows like dashes.

Jimmy said, “How do you do, sir.”

I didn’t say anything because I recognized him.

No name on the Ship is completely uncommon and I knew as many Mbeles as I knew Haveros. I just didn’t expect my tutor to be Joseph L. H. Mbele.

When he sat on the Ship’s Council, he and my father were generally in disagreement. Daddy led the opposition to his pet plan for miniaturized libraries to be distributed to all the colonies. The third time it was defeated, Mr. Mbele resigned.

When I was in the dorm, I once got into a namecalling, hair-yanking fight with another girl. She said that if Mr. Mbele wanted something to be passed, all he had to do was introduce a resolution against it, and then sit back. My father would immediately come out in favor of the proposal and ram it through for him.

I don’t think this girl knew what the joke meant, and I know I didn’t, but she intended it to be slighting, and I knew she did, so I started fighting. I didn’t know Daddy very well in those days, but I was full to the brim with family loyalty.

Assigning me Mr. Mbele as a tutor seemed like another poor joke, and I wondered who had thought of it. Not Mr. Quince, certainly — it had cost him extra work and his time was precious.

“Come inside,” Mr. Mbele said. Jimmy prodded me and we moved forward. Mr. Mbele tapped the door button and the door slid shut behind us.

He motioned us toward the living room and said, “I thought today we’d simply get acquainted, arrange times that are convenient for all of us to meet, and then have something to eat. We can save our work for next time.”

We sat down in the living room, and though there wasn’t much doubt as to who was who amongst the three of us, at least in my mind, we all introduced ourselves.

“Yes, I think I’ve met both of your parents, Jimmy,” Mr. Mbele said, “and, of course, I knew your grandfather. As a matter of interest to me, what do you think you might like to specialize in eventually?”

Jimmy looked away. “I’m not positive yet.”

“Well, what are the possibilities?”

For a long moment, Jimmy didn’t speak, and then in a row and unconfident voice, he said, “I think I’d like to be an ordinologist.”

If you think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses, then an ordinologist is somebody who comes in every so often to clean up. He picks up the books around the room and puts them where they belong. He straightens everything up. He throws away the junk that the recluses have kept and cherished, but for which they have no use. And then he leaves the room in condition for outsiders to visit while he’s busy cleaning up next door. He bears about the same resemblance to the middle-aged woman who checks out books in the quad library as one of our agriculturists does to a primitive Mudeater farmer, but if you stretched a point, you might call him a librarian.

A synthesist, which is what I wanted to be, is a person who comes in and admires the neatened room, and recognizes how nice a copy of a certain piece of furniture would look in the next room over and how useful it would be there, and points the fact out. Without the ordinologists, a synthesist wouldn’t be able to begin work. Of course, without the synthesists, there wouldn’t be much reason for the ordinologists to set to work in the first place, because nobody would have any use for what they do.

At no time are there very many people who are successful at either one job or the other. Ordering information and assembling odd scraps of information takes brains, memory, instinct, and luck. Not many people have all that.

“How much do you know about ordinology?” Mr. Mbele asked.

“Well, not very much at first hand,” Jimmy said. And then, with a touch of pride, “My grandfather was an ordinologist.”

“He was, indeed. And one of the best. You shouldn’t feel apologetic about trying to follow him unless you’re a complete failure, and you won’t be that,” Mr. Mbele said. “I’m not in favor of following ordinary practice simply because it’s done. If you don’t tell anybody, we’ll see if we can’t arrange to give you a detailed look at ordinology, and some basis for you to decide whether you want it or not. All right?”

It was plain that Mr. Mbele was going to be an unorthodox tutor. What he was proposing was something you don’t ordinarily have the chance to do until you’re past fourteen and back from Trial.

Jimmy grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

Then Mr. Mbele turned to me. “Well, how do you like living in Geo Quad?”

“I don’t think I’m going to like it,” I said.

Jimmy Dentremont shot a look at me. I don’t think he’d expected me to say that.

“What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Mbele.

I said, “There hasn’t been one moment since we arrived here in this quad that we haven’t had strangers all over the house. They don’t leave us any privacy at all. It was never like this back in Alfing Quad, believe me.”

Mr. Mbele smiled openly. “It isn’t Geo Quad that’s to blame,” he said. “This always happens when somebody becomes Chairman. The novelty will wear off in a few weeks and things will be back to normal again. Wait and see.

After a few more minutes of talk, Mrs. Mbele brought us something to eat. She was somewhat younger than her husband, though she wasn’t young. She was a large woman with a round face and light brown hair. She seemed pleasant enough.

While we ate, we decided that we would meet on Monday and Thursday afternoons and on Friday night, with the possibility of changes from week to week if something came up to interfere with that schedule.

Mr. Mbele wound up our meeting by saying, “I want to make it clear before we begin that I think your purpose is to learn and mine is to help you learn, or to make you learn, though I doubt either of you has to be made. I have very little interest in writing out progress reports on you, or sticking to form charts, or anything else that interferes with our basic purposes. If there is anything you want to learn and have the necessary background to handle, I’ll be ready to help you, whether or not it is something that formally falls among the things I’m supposed to teach you. If you don’t have the background, I’ll help you get it. In return, I want you to do something for me. It’s been many years since I was last a tutor, so I expect you to point out to me when I fail to observe some ritual that Mr. Quince holds essential. Fair enough?”

In spite of my basic loyalties, and contrary to them, I found myself liking Mr. Mbele and being very pleased that I had been lucky enough to be assigned to him, even though I couldn’t admit it publicly.

When we were in the halls again and on our way back home, Jimmy said suddenly, “Hold on.”

We stopped and he faced me.

“I want you to promise me one thing,” he said. “Promise not to tell anybody about my grandfather or about me wanting to be an ordinologist.”

“That’s two things,” I said.

“Don’t joke!” he said pleadingly. “The other kids would make it hard for me if they knew I wanted to be an odd thing like that.”

“I want to be a synthesist,” I said. “I won’t say anything about you if you don’t say anything about me.”

We took it as a solemn agreement, and after that anything that was ever said in Mr. Mbele’s apartment was kept between us and never brought out in public. It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.

Jimmy said, “You know, I’m glad now that I was switched. I think I’m going to enjoy studying under Mr. Mbele.”

Cautiously, I said, “Well, I have to admit he’s different.”

And that was about all that we ever said to anybody who ever asked us about our tutor.

I saw Daddy after he closed his office for the day. That is, he closed our living room to new people at five o’clock, and by almost eleven he’d seen the last person who was waiting.

Excitedly, I said, “Daddy, you know my new tutor is Mr. Joseph Mbele!”

“Mmm, yes, I know,” Daddy said, matter-of-factly, stacking papers on his desk and straightening up.

“You do?” I asked in surprise. I sat down in a chair next to him.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, he agreed to take you on as a personal favor to me. I asked him to do it.”

“But I thought you two were against each other,” I said. As I have said before, I don’t fully understand my father. I am not a charitable person — when I decide I’m against somebody, I’m against him. When Daddy’s against somebody, he asks him to serve as my tutor.

“Well, we do disagree on some points,” Daddy said. “I happen to think his attitude toward the colonies is very wrong. But just because a man disagrees with me doesn’t make him a villain or a fool, and I sincerely doubt that any of his attitudes will damage you in any way. They didn’t hurt me when I studied Social Philosophy under him sixty years ago.”

“Social Philosophy?” I asked.

“Yes,” Daddy said. “That’s Mr. Mbele’s major interest.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t have you study under a man who didn’t have something to teach you. I think you could stand a very healthy dose of Social Philosophy.

“Oh,” I said.

Well, there was one thing I could say for Mr. Mbele. He hadn’t done any eyebrow raising over my black eye. Neither had his wife, for that matter. I did appreciate that.

Still, I wished that Daddy had warned me beforehand. Even though I had liked Mr. Mbele, it would have saved me a few uncharitable thoughts right at the beginning.

3

Two weeks after we moved, I came into Daddy’s study to tell him that I had dinner ready. He was talking on the vid to Mr. Persson, another Council member.

Mr. Persson’s image sighed and said, “I know, I know. But I don’t like making an example of anybody. If she wanted another child so badly, why couldn’t she have become a dorm mother?”

“It’s a little late to convince her of that with the baby on the way,” Daddy said dryly.

“I suppose so. Still, we might abort the baby and give her a warning. Well, we can hash it all out tomorrow,” Mr. Persson said, and he signed off.

“Dinner’s ready,” I said. “What was all that about?”

Daddy said, “Oh, it’s a woman named MacReady. She’s had four children and none of them have made it through Trial. She wanted one more try and the Ship’s Eugenist said no. She went ahead anyway.”

It put a bad taste in my mouth.

“She must be crazy,” I said. “Only a crazy woman would do a thing like that. Why don’t you examine her? What are you going to do with her, anyway?”

“I’m not sure how the Council will vote,” Daddy said, “but I imagine she will be allowed to pick out a colony planet and be dropped there.”

There are two points — one is population and the. other is Trial — on which we cannot compromise at all. The Ship couldn’t survive if we did. Imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have children every time the notion occurred to them. There is a limit to the amount of food that we have space to grow. There is a limit to the amount of room that we have in which people could live. It may seem that we are not very close to these limits now, but they couldn’t last even fifty years of unlimited growth. This woman had four children, not one of which turned out well enough to survive. Four chances is enough.

What Daddy was suggesting for the woman sounded over-generous to me, and I said so.

“It’s not generosity,” Daddy said. “It’s simply that we have to have rules in the Ship in order to live at all. You play by the rules or you go elsewhere.”

“I still think you’re being too easy,” I said. It wasn’t a light matter to me at all.

Somewhat abruptly, Daddy changed the subject. He said, “Hold still there. How’s your eye today? It’s looking much better, I think. Yes, definitely better.”

When Daddy doesn’t agree with me and he doesn’t want to argue, he slips out by teasing.

I turned my head away. “My eye’s all right,” I said. It was, too, since the bruise had faded away almost completely.

At dinner, Daddy asked, “Well, after two weeks, how do you like Geo Quad? Has it turned out as badly as you thought it would?”

I shrugged, and turned my attention to my food. “It’s all right, I guess,” I mumbled.

That’s all I could say. It just wasn’t possible for me to admit that I was both unhappy and unpopular, both of which were true. There are two reasons I started off wrong in Geo Quad, one big one and one small one.

The small one was school. As I’ve said, the only kids who are supposed to know how you stand are the others at the same level in each subject, people just like you. In practice, though, everybody has a pretty good idea of just where everybody else is and those at the top and bottom are expected to blush accordingly. I’ve never been able to blush on command, and, as a newcomer, it was all the harder for me because of it. It’s not good to start by being singled out.

The big reason, on the other hand, was completely my fault. When we moved, I knew I wasn’t going to like Geo Quad, and it mattered not at all what anybody there thought of me. By the time it sank through to me that I was really and truly stuck in Geo Quad and that I’d better step a little more lightly, my heel marks were already plain to see on more than one face.

As it turned out, my position and my conduct interacted to bring me trouble. This is how things go wrong — and this is just a sample:

At the beginning of the week, the whole school went down to the Third Level on an educational jaunt. The afternoon was really more in the nature of a holiday because we older ones had seen the rows of broad-leaf plants they raise for carbon dioxide/oxygen exchange more than once before. At the end of the day we were coming back home to Geo Quad by shuttle and to pass the time some of us girls were playing a hand game. I was included because I was there and they needed everybody present to make a good game of it.

The game goes like this: Everybody has three numbers to remember. At a signal, everybody claps their hands on their knees, claps their hands, then the person starting the game calls a number. Knees, hands, then the person whose number was called calls someone else’s number. Knees, hands, number. Knees, hands, number. It goes on, the speed of the beat picking up, until somebody claps wrong or misses when one of her numbers is called. When that happens, everybody gets licks with stiffened fingers on her wrist.

The game is simple enough. It’s just that when the pace picks up, it’s easy to make a mistake. We girls stood in a group in the aisle, one or two lucky ones sitting down, near the front of the shuttle car.

We started out — clap, clap, “Twelve,” said the girl starting.

Clap on knees, clap together, “Seven.”

Clap, clap, “Seventeen.”

Clap, clap, “Six.” Six was one of my numbers.

I clapped hands on knees, hands together, and “Twenty,” I said.

Clap, clap. “Two.”

Clap, clap, “-.”

Somebody missed.

It was a plump eleven-year-old named Zena Andrus. She kept missing and kept suffering for it. There were seven of us girls playing and she had missed five or six times. When you’ve had licks taken on your wrist thirty or thirty-five times, you’re likely to have a pretty sore wrist. Zena had both a sore wrist and the idea that she was being persecuted.

“You call me too often,” she said as we lined up to rap. “It’s not fair!”

She was so whiney about it that we stopped calling her number almost entirely — just often enough that she didn’t get the idea that she was being excluded. I went along with this, though I didn’t agree. I may be wrong, but I don’t see any point in playing a game with anybody who isn’t just as ready to face losing as to face winning. It’s not a game if there’s no risk.

A moment later when somebody else lost I noticed that Zena was right up there in line and happy to have the chance to do a little damage of her own.

We seven weren’t the whole class, of course. Some were talking, some were reading, Jimmy Dentremont and another boy were playing chess, some were just sitting, and three or four boys were chasing each other up and down the aisles. Mr. Marberry, who was in charge of us for the afternoon said, “Sit down until we get to Geo Quad,” to them in a resigned voice every time they started to get too loud or to make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Mr. Marberry is one of those people who talk and talk and talk, and never follow through, so they weren’t paying too much attention to him.

As we reached the last station before Geo Quad, somebody noticed and we decided to play just one last round. Since we were so close to home, the boys were out of their seats and starting up the aisle past us to be first out of the shuttle. They were bouncing around, swatting one another, and when they got up by us and saw what we were playing they began to try to distract us so that we would make mistakes and suffer for it. We did our best to ignore them.

One of the boys, Thorin Luomela, was paying close attention to our numbers so he could distract the right person when that number was called again. By chance, the first number he heard repeated was one of mine.

“Fourteen.”

Thorin waited until the right moment and smacked me across the behind. He put plenty of sting into it, too.

I said, “Fifteen,” and clouted him back. I brought my hand back hard and set him back on his heels. In those days, I was small and hard and I could hit. For a moment I thought he might do something about it, but then his resolve wilted.

“What did you do that for?” he asked. “I was only fooling.”

I turned back to the game. “Fifteen” happened to be Zena Andrus and she had missed as usual, so we started to take licks.

When I stepped up for my turn, Zena glared at me as though I had deliberately caused her to miss and was personally to blame for her sore wrist. I hadn’t intended to hit her hard at all because she was so completely hapless, but that look of hers just made me mad, it was so chock full of malice. I took a tight grip on her arm, stiffened the first two fingers of my left hand, and whacked her across the reddened area of her wrist as hard as I could. It hurt my fingers.

The shuttle was just coming to a stop then, and I turned away from Zena and said, “Well, here we are,” ignoring her whimper of self-pity as she nursed her wrist.

We were free to go our own way after the shuttle dropped us at Geo Quad, so I started for home, but Zena caught up with me before I’d gone very far.

She said, “Your father’s being Chairman of the Ship’s Council doesn’t make any difference to me. In spite of what you think, you’re no better than anybody else.”

I looked at her and said, “I don’t claim that I’m better than everybody else, but I don’t walk around telling everybody that I’m not, the way you do.”

I saw immediately that I’d made a mistake. Every so often I meet somebody with whom I just can’t communicate. Sometimes it is an adult. More often it is somebody my own age. Sometimes it is somebody who thinks in a different way than I do so that the words we use don’t mean the same things to both of us. More often it is somebody like Zena who just doesn’t listen.

What I’d said seemed obvious to me, but Zena missed the point completely. There were lots of times when I didn’t think well of myself at all, but even when I had cause to whisper mea culpas to myself under my breath, I would not concede that I was inferior to other people. I knew that I was smarter than most people, smaller than most people, clumsier than most, untalented in art (I inherited that), less pretty than most, and that I could play the pennywhistle a little. bit — at least, I owned one, and most people didn’t. I was what I was. Why should I crawl, or cry, or be humble about it? I really didn’t understand.

Zena either didn’t hear what I said the way I said it or she simply wasn’t able to understand anything that complicated.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “You do think you’re better than everybody else! I didn’t think you’d admit it. I’ve been saying that’s the way you are. You’re stuckup.”

I started to protest, but she’d already turned away, as pleased as though she’d been handed a cookie. I knew it was my fault, too. Not for what I’d said, but for losing my temper and being unpleasant in the first place. You can’t stamp on people and not get hurt in return.

It didn’t end there, though. Zena spread what she thought I’d said, plus some interpolations, plus some liberal commentary that demonstrated just how thoroughly noble she was, and how objective, all over the quad and there were kids willing to listen and to believe. Why not? They didn’t know me. And I didn’t care. Geo Quad meant nothing to me.

By the time that I realized that it did matter, I’d backed myself neatly into a corner. I had a few enemies — perhaps even more than a few — and a fair number of neutral acquaintances. I had no friends.

The major reason that I found it hard to think of leaving the Ship is that the Mudeaters, the Colons, are so different from us. They are peasants, farmers mostly, because that sort of person was best equipped to stay alive on a colony planet, some of which are pretty rough places. On the other hand, we people on the Ship mostly have technical training.

We could have joined them, I suppose, when Earth was destroyed — as, in fact, it was planned that we would — but if we had it would have meant dropping the better part of 5000 years of advance. You see, you have to have time for science, and working every minute through the day just to stay alive in order to be able to do the same thing tomorrow leaves no free time at all. So we never left the Ship, and none of the other Ships were abandoned, either.

Now when we need something from one of the colonies, we trade some of the knowledge we have preserved all these years, or some of the products our science has worked out, and in exchange we get raw materials — what we have for what they have. It’s a fair trade.

The truth is, I guess, I just find it easier to cope with things than with people. When I came to Alfing Quad, I got to know everybody. I thought I was settled for good and I set down roots. Or, you might say, I dug in my fingernails and held on for dear life. But then we came to Geo Quad and I had to face all these new people. I might not have done it very well, but I could do it because they were Ship people. People-type people. But they aren’t like us on the planets.

I really think I could have faced Earth. I think I could understand anybody who could take an asteroid roughly thirty miles by twenty by ten and turn it into a Ship. They split it into two halves, carved out forty or fifty percent of the rock in the two parts, leaving matching projections, and then put them back together again and restuffed the interior with all the fittings needed to make a Ship. All in one year.

To me, these people were fantastic and wonderful and it still hurts me to think that they had to cap it all by blowing themselves to pieces. But that was Earth. Not the Mudeaters.

On the second Sunday after we finished moving to Geo Quad, I was reading a book in my room when Daddy knocked on my door. I put the book aside when he came in.

“Did you have any plans for next weekend, Mia?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“I had an idea I thought you might like.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve just finished talking with the Supply Steward. We’re going to have to make a barter stop, so we’re laying by Grainau this weekend. The Council has given me the job of dealing with them. I thought you might enjoy coming along with us.”

He ought to have known better than that. I shook my head and said, “I don’t think I want to see the Mudeaters.”

“Don’t use that word,” Daddy said. “They may be primitive, but they’re still people. You might be surprised at what you could learn from them. The world doesn’t end with a quad. It doesn’t end with a Ship, either.”

My heart pounding, I said, “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m interested,” and picked up my book again.

“You might think about this,” Daddy said. “In twenty months you’re going to be alone on a planet with people like these, doing your best to live with them and stay alive. If you can’t stand to be near them now, what are you going to do then? I think you ought to be interested.”

I shook my head, but then I suddenly couldn’t pretend to be indifferent any longer. With tears in my eyes, I said, “I am interested. But I’m scared.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’ ”

Daddy said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I can see how the thought might frighten you. Most of the colony planets are pretty unpleasant places by any civilized standard. What I meant was, is that your only reason for not wanting to come along?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not the planets that scare me. It’s the people.”

“Oh,” Daddy said. He sighed. “You know, I was afraid of something like this. One of the reasons I had for moving was that I thought you were too dependent on Alfing Quad. You were living in too small a world. The trouble is that you don’t know that there is anything real beyond the things you are familiar with at first hand. If I could take you down on Grainau and show you something new, and show you that it isn’t all that bad, I think you’d get over this fear of yours.”

My stomach lurched with fear. “You’re not going to make me go, are you?” I asked desperately.

“No. I won’t make you go. I won’t ever force you to do anything, Mia. I’ll tell you what, though,” he said, his manner changing abruptly. “If you come along, if you go down to Grainau with me this weekend, I promise I’ll unfreeze you. How about that?”

I had to smile, but I shook my head.

“Think about it,” Daddy said. “You may change your mind.”

When he went out, I had the feeling he was disappointed, and suddenly I felt depressed and even more unhappy. It was as though having my fingers dug in and holding on as best I could to my security, suddenly I wasn’t to be allowed it anymore, and Daddy was prying my fingers loose one-by-one. That wouldn’t have been so bad if he weren’t disappointed that I wouldn’t let go.

So, not quite knowing why, I went back to Alfing Quad. Perhaps it was because it was the one place where I knew that they were satisfied with me as I was. I took the shuttle to the Fourth Level and then the cross-level shuttle to Alfing Quad.

First I went to our old apartment and let myself in with the key I should have turned in and hadn’t. There wasn’t a bit of furniture there. No books, no book shelves. I wandered through the rooms and they all seemed identical. It didn’t seem like home anymore, because all the things that had made it home were gone. It was just another empty corner of my life and I left very shortly.

Mrs. Farmer was standing in the hall when I went out, looking at me and noting, no doubt, that I had a key that I shouldn’t have had. She and I had never cared too much for each other. She always had made it a point of honor to tell Daddy when I did something that she would never have let her Peter do, in some cases things that Daddy had told me specifically that I could do. Daddy always listened politely to her, then closed the door behind her and forgot about the whole thing. She just looked at me; she didn’t say anything.

I went to the quad yard next, and nobody was there, so I went to the Common Room. It was odd, but I felt like a stranger here in these familiar halls, as though I ought to tiptoe and duck around corners to avoid meeting somebody who might recognize me. I felt like an intruder. That isn’t the feeling that you ought to have when you go home, but somehow in the process of our moving Alfing Quad had become an uneasy place for me.

I could hear the kids making noise in the Common Room before I even got there, and I hesitated to wind up my courage before I went in. The Common Room was not just one room, actually. It was a complex of rooms: a lounge, a library, two game rooms, study rooms, a music practice room, a music listening room, a small theater, and a snackery. The snackery was where I expected to see my friends.

It seemed to be my day for meeting Farmers, because Peter Farmer came out as I was hesitating. He isn’t one of my favorite people and his mother keeps him on a very short leash, but I saw no reason not to be friendly.

I said, “Hello.”

Peter stared frankly at me, and then he said, “What are you doing back here? My mother said that she was glad you were gone because you’re such a bad example.”

So I looked straight at him and lied. “How can you say such a thing, Peter Farmer? I just saw your mother and she was perfectly sweet. She said if I ran into you I was to tell you it was time to run along home.”

“Oh, you never met my mother.”

“Of course I did,” I said, and went into the Common Room.

There is a firm social line drawn between kids over fourteen and kids under. As adults and citizens, they have rights that the younger ones don’t have and they are not slow to let the younger ones know it. In a place like the Common Room where both come, the older ones have their area, and the younger ones their area. Though there isn’t any real difference between them, somehow the adult area has a mystique and attraction that the younger area lacks. I went over to the corner where my friends gathered.

Mary Carpentier was sitting at a table with Venie Morlock and two or three of the other kids, and I headed over to them.

When she saw me, Mary said, “Well, hi, Mia. Come on and sit down. What are you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d visit and see how you were doing,” I said, sitting down at the table. I wasn’t going to say how unhappy I was in Geo Quad — not with Venie sitting there listening to every word and ready to shout hallelujah.

I said, “Hi,” and everybody at the table said, “Hi, Mia,” back.

Mary said, “Gee, Mia. I didn’t expect you to turn up back here. Why didn’t you call and tell me you were coming?”

“It was a sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” I said.

“Well, it’s good to see you. Hey, how do you like it where you are now?”

“It’s all right, I guess,” I said. “I’m still getting used to things. I haven’t met everybody or been everywhere yet.”

“Hey, do you still do that crazy business of walking around in the collecting chutes over there?” one of the others asked.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t gotten around to it, but I expect I will.”

“Which quad did you move to, now?”

“Geo Quad,” Mary answered for me.

“That’s on the Fifth Level, isn’t it?” another of the kids asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Venie broke in. “I remember. I’ve heard of Geo Quad. That’s where all the oddballs live.”

“Oh, you know that isn’t so, Venie,” I said sweetly. “You haven’t moved there yet. By the way, why don’t you? We’ve got a place on our third-string soccer team waiting for you.”

“I may not be very good,” Venie said, stung, “but I can outplay you any day of the week with both eyes closed.”

“Mary,” I said, “how has your family been?”

“All right, I guess,” she said unhappily.

“At least my parents didn’t dump me in a dormitory to get rid of me while they were still married,” Venie said.

Without turning to look at her, I said, “Venie, if you want another punch in the nose, keep saying those things. Mary, why don’t we go over to your place? Then we won’t have any interruptions.”

“Oh, don’t leave on my account,” Venie said. “I’m going myself. The air is getting a little close in here. You kids coming with me?”

She pushed back her chair and the other three girls got up and started after her as she eased her way out between the red, yellow, green, and blue topped tables.

I said, “Shall we go over to your place, Mary?”

Unhappily, she said, “Gee, Mia, I can’t. We were just about to go over and play soccer.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said and stood up. “Let’s go play.”

Mary said, “I don’t think Venie would like that.”

I asked, “What’s the matter with you? Since when did it ever matter what Venie thinks?”

Mary stood there looking at me, and finally she said, “Mia, I love you dearly, but you just don’t live here anymore. I do. Can you understand that? I’ve got to go now. Will you call me up sometime?”

“Yes,” I said, and watched her hurry out after Venie Morlock. “I will,” I said softly, but I knew I wouldn’t. I knew, too, that one more finger had just been pried loose.

4

Lacking anything else to do, I left the Common Room and went back to Geo Quad. I may have seemed outwardly calm — I think I did — but inside I was frantic. Once, when I was about ten, I had been on an outing on the Third Level and gotten into a patch of nettles. I didn’t discover what they were until I was well into them, and I had no choice but to continue pushing my way through. By the time I came out on the other side my legs and arms were itching furiously and I was dancing up and down, driven almost into a frenzy by the fiery prickling, wishing for anything that would make it stop. What I was feeling mentally now was something very similar. I had an itch I couldn’t stop and couldn’t locate, I was jumpy and unhappy, and very depressed.

I wanted to get away. I wanted someplace dark to hide. I wanted something to do to occupy my mind. When I got back to our apartment — a place that held the furniture but not the feel of home — I hunted up a piece of chalk and one of those small lights that dorm mothers use to count heads with, after lights-out. Then I went out again. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon then, and though I hadn’t eaten for hours I was far too agitated to think of food.

I didn’t just pick the nearest grate to our apartment and pop into it. I wandered a little until I found a quiet bywater of a hall not too far away. I was in no mood at all to try to explain myself to some uncomprehending adult, so I did some looking around before I decided on a particular grate to use as my entrance into the Fifth Level collecting chutes.

I knelt down by the grate and began to take it off. It was hung by clips on both sides and they hadn’t been worked for such a long time that they were stiff and unmoving. Once I started to use them regularly they wouldn’t be any problem, but right now they refused to yield to my prying fingers. I worked at it in a very slow-paced way, not feeling up to much more, and it was fully five minutes before my judicious wiggling of the left-hand clip unfroze it. I was about to start on the other when a voice asked, “What are you doing?”

I had my face in my hand at the moment, and I jumped guiltily at the sudden sound. I composed myself as best I could before I looked around. It was Zena Andrus standing there.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She said, “I live back there,” pointing to a door not so far down the way. “What are you doing?”

I pointed through the grate at the collecting chute. “I’m going down in there.”

“You mean down in the ducts?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why not? Does the idea scare you?”

She bristled. “I’m not scared. I can do anything you can.”

With deliberate malice, I said, “In that case, come on along with me.”

She swallowed a little bit hard, then knelt down beside me and looked through the grate, feeling the indraft and becoming conscious of the distant sound of fans. “It’s awfully dark down there.”

“I have a light,” I said. “We won’t need it much, though. It’s more fun running along in the dark.”

“Running?”

“Well, walking.”

Uncertainly, she looked back at the grate again. They say that misery loves company, and I was bound to make someone else miserable.

“Oh, well,” I said. “If you’re afraid to come along…”

Zena stood up. “I am not.”

“All right,” I said. “If you’re coming, stand aside and let me get the grate off.”

In a minute I had the other clip pulled to the side. I set the grate on the floor and pointed to the black hole. “After you.”

“You’re not going to shut me up in there?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’ll be right behind you. Go through feet first.”

Since she was a butterball, it was a tight fit for her, but after she did some earnest wriggling, she popped through. I handed the chalk and the light down to her and then I slid through myself. When I was standing on the floor of the duct, I took the chalk and light back.

“Put the grate on,” I said, and while she was doing that I made an X-mark and put a neat circle around it, the chalk squeaking lightly on the metal.

“That’s the mark for home,” I said. The ducts corresponding to arteries have pushing fans, the ducts corresponding to veins have sucking fans. Between the chalk marks I make and the direction and feel of the wind, I always have a good enough idea where I am, even in a strange place like this one, to at least find my way home again. There was certainly more similarity here to the ducts at home than there was in the layouts of Alfing and Geo Quads proper. I didn’t think it would take me long to get my bearings.

When Zena had the grate in place, we set off.

I walked first down the metal corridor. Zena followed uncertainly behind me, tripping once and skidding, though there was nothing there to trip on except her feet. The duct itself, fully six feet wide and six feet high, was made of smooth metal. The darkness was complete except for the occasional grille of light cast into the dust at a grate opening, and the beam cast by my little light. As we passed them, I numbered the grates and the cross-corridors to give me a ready idea of how far from home I was.

As we passed the grates, occasionally noises penetrated from the outside world, but it was clearly another world than the one that we were in. The sounds of our world were the metallic echoes of our whispers, the sound of our sandals padding dully, and the constant sound of the fans.

I had read more than one novel set in the American West two hundred years before Earth was destroyed, where conditions were almost as primitive as on one of the colony planets. I remembered reading of the scouts who even in strange territory had the feel of the country, and I felt much the same way myself. The feel of the air, the sounds, all meant something to me. To Zena they meant nothing and she was scared. She didn’t like the dark at all.

At those points where the corridors joined there were sometimes fans to be ducked. The corridors also sloped at the junctions so that there were no straight corners, and this was disconcerting when the corridor you were meeting ran up-and-down, even when it was the equivalent of a capillary and could be gotten over with one good jump.

Zena balked at the first of these that we encountered and had to be prodded before she would cross it.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I can’t jump that far.”

“All right,” I said. “But if you don’t come along, you’ll just be left here all alone in the dark.”

That made her mind up for her and she found that she could jump it, and with very little effort, either.

But I’ll have to admit that old-collecting-chute-hand or not, I wasn’t prepared for what we found next. In the darkness, there was no floor in front of us. Above us, no ceiling. My light showed our own corridor resuming on the far side of the gap, fully six feet away. The floor sloped sharply down and the air rushed strongly along. I had never encountered an up-and-down duct of this size before.

“Well, what is it?” Zena asked.

There were handholds at the side on which to cross the gap, and holding onto one of these, I leaned over and dropped a piece of broken chalk in a futile attempt to gauge the depth of the cross-duct. I listened, but I never heard a sound.

“It must connect one level with the next,” I said. “A main line. I bet it goes straight down to the First Level.”

“Well, don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’ve never been here before.”

I wasn’t about to jump that distance, so I examined the hand- and footholds carefully. If you slipped and fell, and it was as far down as I suspected, all that would be left of you would be jam. I shone my light up and down, and the beam only managed to nibble at the blackness. The holds went up-and-down, too, as well as across, a ladder that went much farther than I could see.

“Maybe it connects with the Fourth Level down there,” Zena said, “but where does it go to up there?” She pointed straight up the duct.

I didn’t know. The Fifth Level was the very last, the outside, but this duct went beyond the Fifth. Air chutes don’t lead into blind corners and air doesn’t come from nowhere.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But as long as we’re here, why don’t we see where it goes?”

I reached over and put my toe in the inset in the wall. Then I grabbed the first handhold I could reach and swung out. They were good firm holds and while the distance straight down bothered me a little, as long as I couldn’t see how far down it was I wasn’t really scared. I once had the experience of walking along a board three inches wide while it was set on the ground — I went the whole length and probably could have walked on for a mile and never fallen off. Then the board was raised into the air and I was challenged to try again. When it was set on posts ten feet high, I wouldn’t even try it because I knew I couldn’t make it. This was something of a similar situation, and as long as I couldn’t see I knew I wouldn’t worry.

I grabbed the next hold and started up. Before I could get anywhere, Zena leaned over and held me by the foot. “Hey, wait up,” she said, and gave my foot a tug.

“Watch it!” I said sharply. “You’ll make me fall.” I tried to jerk my foot loose, but she wouldn’t let go.

“Come on back down,” Zena pleaded.

Reluctantly I came down. I said, “What is it?”

“You can’t go and just leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Just follow me and you can’t be left behind.”

“But I’m scared,” she said.

That was really the time for her to finally admit it. We had both known that from the beginning, but she had refused to admit it until things were getting interesting.

“It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. “All we have to do is climb until we find out what’s up there.” I could see she was wavering, caught between the fear of climbing the ladder and the fear of being left behind. “Come on,” I said. “You first.” I wanted her to go first. That way she couldn’t grab me again.

After a moment, I edged her down the beginning of the slope to the first handhold. I got her onto the ladder and actually moving again. I followed her. I had the light clipped at my waist, pointing upward and giving both of us some idea of what and where to grab as we continued to climb.

I could hear Zena whimpering as she climbed, making scared noises in her throat. To get her mind off her troubles, I said, “Can you see anything up there?”

She was clinging tightly to the ladder as we went up, and now she stopped, flipped her head up for just the shortest instant and then brought it down again.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

I should have known better, I told myself as we continued to climb. You don’t bring somebody who has a habit of choking up into a situation like this.

Suddenly, without any warning, Zena stopped moving. Before I could help myself, my head rammed so hard into her foot that a shock of pain ran through my neck. If I’d had my head up, I would have seen that she’d stopped, but you can’t climb indefinitely with your head thrown back without getting a crick in your neck. I stopped immediately and went down one step.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I just can’t go any farther. I can’t.”

I lifted my head and peered upward. I couldn’t see anything beyond Zena that would hold her up. She was just clinging to the ladder, her face pressed close to the metal. I could hear her breath rasp in her throat.

“Did you run into something?”

“No. I just can’t go any farther,” she said tearfully. “I’m scared.”

I reached up and put my hand on her leg. It was rock-hard and trembling. I said, “Move ahead, Zena,” in a firm but gentle tone — I didn’t want to frighten her — and pushed at the calf of her leg, but she didn’t move.

I could see that it had been a mistake to be in the lower position on the ladder. If Zena let go and fell, I would be swept along no matter how hard I tried to hold on. That would save me trying to explain what had happened — and it might be difficult to explain if I came back by myself without Zena: “Oh, she fell down one of the air chutes” — but that wasn’t anything to be happy about. I was genuinely frightened. My heart was beginning to speed up and I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back.

“Don’t let go, Zena,” I said carefully.

“I won’t,” she said. “I won’t move.”

I unclipped the light at my belt and then I leaned back as far as I could until I could see beyond her. It would take twenty minutes to go down the ladder — in her state, probably longer — and even if I could start her moving, I doubted she could hold on that long. I held the light up at arm’s length over my head. About forty or fifty feet above us I could see something black at the side of the duct. A cross-corridor, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was hope that it was.

“I want to go down,” Zena said.

We couldn’t go down. We certainly couldn’t stay where we were. I didn’t know what was ahead of us, but it was the only direction in which we could go.

“You’re going to have to climb a little more,” I said.

“But I’m scared,” Zena said. “I’m going to fall.”

I could feel sweat on my forehead now. A runnelet ran down and caught in my eyebrow. I wiped my brow.

“No, you’re not going to fall,” I said confidently. “I just looked up above, Zena, and there’s a cross-corridor just thirty feet or so over your head. That’s all you have to climb. You can do that.”

Zena just screwed her face in against the metal even harder. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. I’ll help you. Keep your eyes closed. That’s right. Now, move your foot up one step. Just one step.” I pushed at her leg. “That’s right. One step. All right, now reach your hand up — no, keep your eyes closed. Now move your other foot.”

One foot, one hand at a time, I got her moving again. For the first time since I could remember, the darkness seemed oppressive, a place where anything could happen. It was the way it must have seemed to Zena all along.

In a minute, I said, “It’s not more than twenty feet or so now,” but Zena was blocking my view and I couldn’t do anything but hope I was right. “You’re doing fine. It’s only a little bit farther.”

I continued to urge her on, and she went up slowly, a rung at a time. It was more than twenty feet, but not too much more than that, when Zena gave a little cry and was suddenly no longer above me. I looked up, and in the beam of the light clipped at my waist I could see the cross-corridor just over my head.

All I could do, sitting on its floor, was try to catch my breath and calm my heart. My heart was thumping away, sweat was continuing to drip from my forehead, and now that I was safe my mind was thinking of all that could have happened in full detail. Beside me, Zena was sobbing soundlessly.

After a minute, in a voice filled with wonder, Zena said, “I did make it.”

I breathed through my open mouth, trying not to pant. Then I said, “I told you that you would, didn’t I? Now all we have to do is get you back down again.”

Zena said, in a determined tone that surprised me, “I can make it back down again.”

I said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we may as well have a look around.”

In a minute or two, we walked down the corridor until we came to the first grate opening. The opening was there, but not the grate, and there was no light shining into the duct from outside as there would have been in Geo Quad or Alfing. I snaked through the hole and then gave a hand up to Zena. And we were standing in a hall on the Sixth Level, the level that shouldn’t have been there.

I shone my light around and all was silent, and dark, and deserted. The corridor was bare. All the fixtures were gone. Anything that could be removed was gone, only the holes remaining after. There was a doorway showing in the beam of my light.

“Let’s go look at that,” I said.

There was no door — that was gone, too. Nothing had been yanked ruthlessly or broken off. Everything had simply been removed.

The room into which the doorway led was bare, too. It was a very long room, longer than anything else I had seen in any quad, short of a quad yard. Its closest resemblance was to a dormitory, but it was as though somebody had taken all the rooms in a dormitory and torn out all the walls in order to make one long room. There were holes bored in the walls at regular intervals, columns of holes. But the room was bare.

“What is it?” Zena asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

We went back into the hall. It was long and straight, without any of the dead ends, stairs, or sudden turns that you ordinarily expect to see in any normal hallway. It was straight as a string. That was strange and different, too.

I noticed the numbers 44-2 painted neatly on the wall by the door of the room. There was a red line that started at the doorway, moved to the center of the hall and made a sharp right turn to run beside green, yellow, blue, orange and purple lines that continued past, running down the center of the hall.

“Let’s see where the lines go,” I said, and set off down the corridor.

It was late, past dinner time, when we got back to Geo Quad. We came out of the ducts from our original opening just down the hall from Zena’s home. My stomach was starting to notice how long it had been since I had eaten and I had a healthy appetite.

Zena hesitated for a minute outside her door, and then she said, “You’re much nicer than I thought you were at first.” And then, rapidly, as though to cover that statement up, she said, “Good night,” and went quickly into her apartment.

When I walked in, Daddy was just getting ready to go out for the evening. He and some of his friends used to get together regularly and build scale models and talk. Models of machines, animals (bones and all), almost anything imaginable. This group had met on Sunday nights for as long as I had lived with Daddy, and he had a whole collection of the models he had made, though they hadn’t yet been unpacked since we had moved here from Alfing.

Actually, I had no fault to pick with his models. Daddy used to say that everybody needs to have at least one mindless hobby to occupy himself with, and I had several.

Daddy asked, “Where have you been?”

“Up on the Sixth Level,” I said. “What do we have on hand to eat?”

“There’s some Ham-IV in the kitchen, if you want that,” Daddy said.

“That sounds good,” I said.

I liked Ham-IV very much. It comes from one of the two or three best meat vats in the Ship, though some people find it too strong for their taste. Gamey, I think they say. Still they have to put up with it, because it’s one of the best producing meat cultures on the Ship. It doesn’t hurt to like the inevitable.

I started for the kitchen and Daddy followed.

“Isn’t the Sixth Level completely shut up?” he asked. “I didn’t know you could still get up there.”

“It’s not that hard,” I said, and started getting food out. “Just why did they tear everything out the way they did?”

“Nobody has ever told you why they closed it down?”

I said, “Before today, I didn’t even know that there was a Sixth Level.”

“Oh,” Daddy said. “Well, it’s simple enough. At the time they converted the Ship it was pretty Spartan living here. We had more space than we needed with all the colonists gone, but not enough of everything else. They stripped the Third and Sixth Levels and used the materials to fix up the rest of the Ship more comfortably. They changed the Third to as near an approximation of Earth as they could, and closed the Sixth down as unnecessary.”

“Oh,” I said. That seemed to make sense out of the tomb that we had seen.

Daddy said, “I guess I’d forgotten how barren the Sixth Level is. If you want to find out more about it, I can tell you where to look it up. Right now, though, I have to be on my way or I’ll be late.”

Before he got out of the kitchen, I said, “Daddy?”

He turned around.

I said, “I changed my mind today. I think I’d like to go with you next weekend after all.”

Daddy smiled. “I was hoping you’d change your mind if I gave you a little time. You make your share of mistakes, but most of the time you show good sense. I think you did this time.”

Daddy is nice, so he wouldn’t say, “I told you so,” but I was certain that he thought that it was seeing the Sixth Level and not getting stricken dead for it that had changed my mind. It wasn’t, though. I think I changed my mind on the ladder — there are times when you have to go forward whether you like it or not, and if Zena Andrus could do it, as scared as she was, so could I. That’s all.

I smiled and said, “Do I get unfrozen?” I was at least half-serious. For some reason, getting Daddy to say so was important to me.

Daddy nodded. “I guess you do. I guess you do.”

I was still smiling as I sat down to eat. It was just about time I started to do a little growing. It was then that the thought struck me that if I did start to grow, in not very long at all I wouldn’t be able to squeeze my way into the ducts.

Well, you can’t have everything.

5

While I think of it, I want to excuse myself in advance. From time to time, I’m going to say terribly ignorant things. For instance, when I come to speak of boats shortly, anybody who has ever sailed will probably find reason to laugh and shake his head at my description. Please forgive me. I’m not writing technical descriptions, I’m simply trying to tell what I saw and did. When I felt the need to grab onto something, I didn’t grab onto a “gunwale,” I grabbed onto the plain old side of the boat. That’s what it was to me.

In any case, through the week before we went to Grainau, my spirits slid down again. Having decided to go on Sunday, if I had left on Monday I wouldn’t have felt bad at all, but unfortunately I had a whole week to mull things over, worry and imagine. Friday night, the night before we were to leave, I lay awake for hours, unable to sleep. I tried to sleep on my stomach, but bleak possibilities came into my head, one after another. Then onto my side, and imaginary conversations. Onto my back, and thoughts of all the things I might be doing tomorrow instead, if only I could. Finally I did go to sleep, but I didn’t sleep well.

At breakfast, Daddy advised me to eat up, but I couldn’t. My stomach was nervous. After breakfast, we got on the shuttle and traveled down to the First Level, and then over to the bay in which the scoutships sit waiting to take damned fools places they’d rather not go.

We arrived in the scout bay fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave for Grainau. Daddy said, “Wait here, Mia. I’ll be right back.” He went over to a cluster of men standing by the nearest scoutship.

I stood there in a great entranceway carved in the rock, feeling just a little abandoned. Daddy had brought me here, and now he was just going off and leaving me. I was nervous and scared. If I could legitimately have gone back home and crawled in bed, I would have — and not gotten up again for two days, either. If I could have done it without losing face. Unfortunately, it was now harder to back out than to go on, so I was going on, carried by the momentum of my Sunday night decision.

It was the first time I’d ever been in the scout bay. Hesitantly, I looked around. The rock roof arched over the long single line of ships, all squatting over their tubes, waiting for the catch bars that ringed their rims to be released so they could drop out of sight. Scoutships are used for any errands planetside where the Ship can’t go itself because of its size. These include delivering and picking up traded items, tooting off on joyrides, carrying diplomatic missions like ours, and dropping kids on Trial. The scoutships are pigeons that nest in a cote that hoves between the stars, and some are out and away at almost any time. To keep my mind off my unhappy stomach, which was growling sourly, I counted the ships that were home, and there were a dozen. The ships are disc-shaped, with bulges top and bottom in the center. Each of them had at least one of its four ramps lowered.

In a moment, Daddy came back with one of the men he’d been speaking with — a young giant. He was at least a foot taller than Daddy. He was very ugly, unpleasantlooking and formidable. I don’t think I’d have cared to meet him at any time.

“This is George Fuhonin,” Daddy said. “He’s going to be our pilot.”

I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. Daddy prodded me. “Hello,” I said in a small, distant voice.

“Hello,” he said, in a voice I’d have to call a bass growl. It was deep and it rumbled. “Your father tells me that this is going to be your first trip outside the Ship.”

I looked at Daddy out of the corner of my eye, and then I looked up at the big, ugly man. I nodded warily, the least little dip. He scared me.

“Would you like to take a look around the scout before we take off?” he asked. “As your pilot and your father’s regular chauffeur, I guarantee I’ll leave out nothing.”

I wanted to say a definite no, and was just about to when Daddy pushed me forward and said, “Go ahead and enjoy yourself, Mia.” He motioned toward the other men. “I’ve got some things to settle before we leave.”

So this man, this monster, George Whatever-His-Name-Was, and I walked up the scoutship ramp, me feeling totally betrayed. I sometimes think that parents enjoy putting their children in uncomfortable situations, maybe as a way of getting back without admitting it. I don’t say that is what Daddy was doing, but I certainly thought so at the time.

The top of my head came to about the bottom of this George’s ribcage, and he was so big that one of his steps was worth two and a half of mine, so that even when he was walking slowly that half-step kept me either ahead or behind him. If I’d been feeling better, it would have seemed like playing tag around a dinosaur. As it was, I’d just have enjoyed a hole to hide in. Black, deep, and secret.

The main part of the scoutship was at the level we entered. In the center, surrounded by a circular separating partition about four feet high, were lounge beds with sides that stuck up a foot or more like a baby’s bed, comfortable chairs, magnetized straight chairs that could be moved, and two tables. In the exact center was a spiral stairway that led both up and down. Around the edge of the ship were storerooms, racks, a kitchen, a toilet, and a number of horse stalls with straw-covered floors. Two horses were being led into place as we came up the ramp and into the ship.

The monster said, “Those are for your father and his assistant after we land.”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked stonily around.

When the colonies were settled, they took horses to work and ride, because tractors and heli-pacs have such a low reproductive rate. There weren’t any opportunities to set up industries on the colonies, simply time enough to drop people and enough supplies to give them a fair chance to survive. Then the Ships would head back to Earth for another load and another destination. Those supplies included very little in the way of machines because machines wear out in a few years. They did include horses. Nowadays when we land on a planet where they haven’t made any progress in the last 170 years, we ride horseback, too.

At that time, of course, I hadn’t learned to ride yet and I was a little shy of horses. When one was led past me and wrinkled its lips and snorted, I jumped back.

I noticed the toilet then. We were only a few feet away from it. I looked up at the giant and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Before he could say anything, I was inside with the door locked. Escaped, for the moment. I didn’t have to go to the bathroom at all. I just wanted to be left alone.

I looked around at the bare-walled room. I ran the water and washed my hands. Altogether, I managed to stay inside for a full five minutes before being alone in the little empty room with my nervousness got to be too much for me. I kept imagining that Daddy was on board by now, and I even thought I could almost hear his voice. Finally I was driven outside to see.

When I opened the door, the giant was standing exactly where I had left him, obviously waiting for me. There were people moving things on board, the horses were locked in their stalls and moving around, and Daddy was still outside somewhere.

Exactly as though I’d never been gone, the giant said, “Come on upstairs,” in his deep voice. “I’ll show you my buttons. I keep a collection of them there.”

Resignedly, I preceded him up the flight of metal stairs that led upstairs, winding around a vertical handpole like threads winding around a screw. It was obvious that he was determined to keep me in his charge, and I wasn’t feeling up to arguing, even if I’d dared to. At the top we came out in a bubble-dome in which were two seats hung on swivel pivots, a slanting panel directly in front of them with inset vision screens, dials and meters — the slant of the panel low enough so as not to obscure vision out the dome — and beside these, perhaps enough room to turn around twice.

The giant waved a paw at the console at the base of the panel. “My button collection,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll bet you didn’t think I had any.”

They were there. Enough buttons to keep a two-year-old or a pilot occupied for hours. It was obvious that in his way this George was trying to be friendly, but I wasn’t in the mood to be friendly with any large, ugly stranger. After one brief glance at the panel and console I turned away to look outside.

Through the dome I could see the rock roof glowing gently all above us. The ring of the scoutship’s body cut off the view directly beneath us and I couldn’t see Daddy or the men with him at all. It’s no fun to be deserted. It’s a miserable feeling.

This George said, “Your father will be a little while yet.” Feeling caught, I stopped looking for him and turned back around.

“Sit down,” the giant said, and somewhat warily I did. The chair bobbed on its pivot as I sat down. I kept my eyes on George.

He leaned carelessly against his panel and after a moment he said, “Since you don’t seem to want to talk and we have to be here together for awhile yet, let me tell you a story. It was told to me by my mother the night before I went on Trial.”

And with that, he launched full into it, ignoring the fact that I was too old for such things:

Once upon a time (he said) there was a king who had two sons, and they twins, the first ever born in the country. One was named Enegan and the other Britoval, and though one was older than the other, I don’t remember which it was, and I doubt anyone else does, either. The two boys were so alike that not even-their dear mother’s heart could tell one from the other, and before their first month was out they were so thoroughly mixed that no one could be sure which to call Britoval and which Enegan. Finally, they gave the whole thing up as a bad lot, used their heads and hung tags on the boys and called them Ned and Sam.

They grew up tall and strong and as like each other as two warts on the same toad. If one was an inch taller or a pound heavier at the beginning of the month, by the end of it they were all even again. It was all even between them in wrestling, running, swimming, riding, and spitting. By the time they were grown-up young men, there was only one way to mark them apart. It was universally agreed that Sam was bright and Ned was charming, and the people of the country even called them Bright Sam and Charming Ned.

“Hark,” they would say as a horse went by on the road. “There goes Prince Charming Ned.” Or, alternatively, “Hey, mark old Bright Sam thinking under yon spreading oak.”

The boys did earn their names, and honestly. Ask Sam to do a sum, parse a sentence, or figure a puzzle and he could do it in a trice, whereas Ned just wasn’t handy at that sort of thing. On the other hand, if you like charm and heart, courtesy and good humor, Ned was a really swell fellow, a delight to his dear mother, and a merry ray of sunshine to his subjects, while Sam at his best was a trifle sour.

Then one day the Old King, their father, died and the question arose as to which son should inherit, for the kingdom was small and the treasury was empty, and there simply was not enough for both.

The Great Council of the Kingdom met to consider the problem. They met and considered, considered and voted, voted and tied. At first they said it was obvious that the elder son should inherit, but they found that no one at all could say which was the elder. Then an exasperated soul proposed that the younger should inherit, and all agreed that was a fine way out until they discovered that it was equally problematic which was the younger. It was at this point that they decided to vote to settle the question — but the vote turned out a tie, for half said, “A king should be bright so as to be able to rule intelligently and deal wisely with the friends and the enemies of the kingdom. Nobody really has to like him,” and the other half said, “A king should be beloved by his subjects and well thought of by his neighbors and peers. The Council can always provide the brains needed to run things if brains are ever required.”

At last, finally, and in the end, it was decided by all that there was only one way to settle the matter. Charming Ned and Bright Sam must undertake a Quest and whichever of them was successful would become King of the Realm, and take his fine old father’s place. If neither was successful, they could always bring in a poor second cousin who was waiting in the wings, hat in hand. Kingdoms always have second cousins around to fill in when they’re needed.

The Quest decided upon was this: it seems that many miles away — or so the story had come to them in the kingdom — there was a small cavern in which lived a moderate-sized ogre with a fine large treasure, big enough to handle the kingdom’s budget problem for some years to come. It was agreed that whichever of the two boys could bring the treasure home where it belonged would have proved to the satisfaction of everybody his overwhelming right to be king.

At this point the story was interrupted. One of the three crewmen stuck his head up through the stairwell and said, “We’re all tight, George. Miles says we can leave any time now.”

George said to me, “Strap yourself in there,” and pushed the button that locked himself into his own seat. Humming slightly to himself, he rapped a switch with the back of his hand and rumbled, “Ten seconds to drop. Mind your stomachs.”

In ten seconds, the rim bars pulled back and we dropped slowly into our tube and then out of the Ship. I was leaving home for the first time. Geo Quad, even at its worst, was still “Us” rather than “Them.” As we dropped into the tube, the dome went opaque around us and lights came on. There was none of the stomach upsetting moment of transition as we shifted from the artificial gravity of the Ship to the artificial gravity of the scoutship of which George had just warned us, though there might have been. Which meant that whatever else he might be, this George creature was a relatively effective pilot.

I still didn’t know how to take him. I have that problem when I first meet people — I have to get used to them slowly. For the moment, too young for me or not, I was content to have him go on with his story, because it gave me something to think about instead of Grainau and whatever I would find there.

He punched buttons for a minute, and then said, “Well, that ought to hold us for awhile. Now where was I?”

“The ogre and the treasure.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and continued with his story:

Well, the two young men set off the very next morning, when the sun was up and the air was warm. Sam, intelligent as always, had loaded food and supplies into a knapsack and put it on his back, and buckled a great sword about his waist. Ned took nothing — too heavy, you know — but simply put his red cap on his head and walked on down the road, whistling. Everybody in the kingdom came down to the road to wave and see them off. They waved until the boys were around the first bend in the road, and then, like sensible folk, they all went home to breakfast.

Sam was loaded so heavily that he couldn’t walk as fast as his dear brother, and Ned was soon out of sight ahead of him, without even the sound of his whistle to mark him. This didn’t seriously bother Bright Sam, because he was sure that preparation and foresight would in the end more than make up for Ned’s initial brisk pace. When he got hungry, not having any food would slow him down.

But Sam walked a long time, day and night, and never saw his brother. Then he came on the skinniest man he’d ever seen, sitting by a great pile of animal bones.

“Hello,” Sam said. “I’m looking for an ogre who lives in a cave and owns a treasure. Do you know where I can find him?”

At the question, the man began to cry. Sam asked him what the trouble was, since sour or not, he hated to see people cry. The man said, “A young fellow stopped a day or two ago and asked me the same question exactly. And he brought nothing but trouble on me. I had a flock of sheep, and fine ones, too, and I was roasting one for my dinner when he stopped, and he was such a nice, pleasant fellow that I asked him to eat with me. He was still hungry after the first sheep, so I killed another, and then another, and then another. He was so friendly and charming, and so grateful, that I never noticed until he had gone that he had eaten every last one of my animals. Now I have nothing at all. And I’m starting to get hungry myself.”

Sam said, “If you will tell me where the ogre lives I will give you some of the food that I have with me.”

The man said, “Give me some of your food and I will tell you just what I told that other young fellow.”

So Sam gave him food and when the hungry man was done eating, he said, “The answer is that I don’t know. I don’t have any truck with ogres. I just mind my own business.”

Sam went on down the road with his pack a little lighter than before. He walked a long time, day and night, and never saw his brother. Then he came on a little castle in which lived a princess well, perhaps not a princess as most people reckon it, but since she lived there alone there wasn’t a single person to say she wasn’t. That is how royal families are founded.

This little castle was being besieged by a very rude and unpleasant giant. As a passing courtesy, Sam drew his sword and slew the giant, lopping off his great hairy head. The princess, and pretty indeed she was, came out of her castle and thanked him.

“It was very nice of you,” said she, “but I’m afraid that the giant here,” and she nudged his head with the toe of her dainty slipper, “has seven brothers and the whole lot take turns besieging my castle. This will no doubt make them a bit angry. I used to have a charm that kept my land protected from all such creatures, but alas no longer. A young man with a red cap came whistling down the road last week looking for an ogre and he was so sweet and charming that I gave him the charm to protect himself with and keep him from harm, and ever since these horrid giants have been attacking my castle.”

“Well, why don’t you move?” said Sam. “There aren’t any giants where I live, though we do have a dragon or two, and we have some very nice castles looking to be bought.”

The princess said that sounded like a very nice idea, and she just might take his advice.

“By the way,” said Sam, “do you know, by chance, where I can find the ogre you were speaking of just a minute ago?”

“Oh, certainly,” she said. “It’s not far at all. Just follow your nose for three days and nights and you’ll be there.”

Sam thanked her, slew a second giant come to look for his brother, and went on his way. He followed his nose, and after three days and nights it told him that he had found the ogre’s cave. He knocked politely and the ogre came out. The cave was a bit small for him. He was covered with hair, and he had three red eyes and two great yellow fangs. Other than his appearance, he seemed friendly enough.

Sam drew his sword and said, “Excuse me, but I’ve come for your treasure.”

“Well, if you can tell me a riddle I can’t guess,” said the ogre, “I’ll give all I have to you. But if I do answer it, I want your money and all that you have.”

Sam agreed. It is common knowledge that ogres are not bright as a rule, and Sam knew some very hard riddles indeed.

He thought, he did, and finally he said, “What is it that is not, and never will be?”

The ogre turned the question over in his mind. Then he sat down to really think about it. For three whole days and three whole nights they sat there, and nobody thought it odd of them because nobody lived nearby. The ogre tried a dozen answers one by one, but each time Sam said, “I’m sorry, but that’s not it.”

Finally, the ogre said, “I can’t think of any more answers. You win. But don’t tell me the answer. Write it on a piece of paper. I can think about it after you’re gone.”

So Sam wrote his answer down on a piece of paper and gave it to the ogre. Then he said, “And now, could I trouble you for your treasure?”

The ogre said, “You won all that I have fair and square. Just a minute.” He went inside the cave and in just a moment he was back with a single brass farthing. “I’m sorry, but that’s all there is. There used to be more, but I gave it all to a nice young man who was here just a week ago. I had to start all over again after he left, and now that you’ve beaten me, I’ll have to start even another time.”

Because he knew his brother well, Sam asked disbelievingly, “This young fellow didn’t ask you any riddles you couldn’t answer, did he?”

The ogre drew himself up and said in a wounded tone, “Of course not. But he was such a nice young fellow that I couldn’t bear to let him go away emptyhanded.”

Well, that left Sam with something of a problem. He’d beaten the ogre and won his treasure, but nobody was likely to take a single brass farthing as proof of that. So he thought for a minute, and then he said, “And how do you find your cave for size, my friend?”

“Cramped,” said the ogre. “But good caves are hard to find.”

“And do you have much company here?”

“No,” said the ogre. “I think on my riddles to pass the time.”

“Well,” said Sam, “how would you like to come along home with me? When I’m king at home I can provide you with a fine large cave and pleasant neighbors, and send people with riddles to you from time to time. How about that?”

The ogre could hardly turn an offer like that down, so he agreed readily and they set out together. When they got near home, it was apparent to Sam that a celebration was going on in the kingdom.

He said to his ogre friend, “How would you like to go to a party?”

“Oh, fine,” said the ogre. “I’m sure I’d like a party, though I’ve never been to one.”

“Well, I’ll go in first, and then I’ll come out for you in a minute,” said Sam.

He went inside to find that there was a double celebration in progress. His brother Ned was about to be crowned king and to marry the sweet princess that Sam had sent home. Sam thought that was most unkind.

“Stop the wedding,” said Sam. They stopped the wedding and looked around at him. He said, “I succeeded at the Quest, and I claim the right to be king.”

Everybody laughed at him. They said, “Charming Ned brought home the ogre’s treasure. What did you bring?”

Sam showed them his single brass farthing. “I brought this,” he said and they all laughed the more. “And I brought one more thing,” he said, and threw open the doors. In walked the ogre, looking for the party he’d been promised.

Sam explained to the ogre that the party would begin straight away the moment he became king. Since the ogre was standing in the only doorway, Sam was made king in no time at all.

Well, after that, Sam set the ogre up in a cave of his very own, and after the neighbors found he wasn’t a bad sort he got on quite well. The ogre became a regular tourist attraction, one of the finest in the kingdom, and brought in a nice regular bit of revenue. Sam opened a charm school with his brother Ned in charge, and that brought in even more money. Sam married the princess himself and everybody lived quite happily from then on. If they haven’t moved away, and I don’t know why they would, they’ll be living there still.

Oh, yes. It took the ogre a full ten years to decide he couldn’t answer Sam’s riddle. Every week he would bundle the answers he’d thought of together and send them to Sam and Sam would send them back. Finally the ogre decided he would never find the right answer to the question, “What is it that is not and never will be?” He opened the paper Sam had given him so long before and took a look. The answer was, “A mouse’s nest in a cat’s ear.” (And that, my little friend, is the only real, true answer there is.)

“Oh, hell,” said the ogre. “I was just about to guess that.”

“There’s a moral, too,” George said. “My mother told it to me and I’ll tell it to you: If you’re bright and use your head, you’ll never go too far wrong. Just keep it in mind, and you’ll get along.”

Right after that, we reached the atmosphere of Grainau. George was busy with his buttons. I was thinking that he meant well enough and I was feeling a bit more friendly toward him.

I had gathered that entering a planet’s atmosphere was a tricky business, but George didn’t seem particularly concerned. The main problem was the same as when leaving the Ship: to strike a balance between one gravity field and the other, so that the people aboard were not plastered against,the floor or left suddenly without any feeling of weight at all. Besides that, he had to take us to the point on the planet to which we were going, and how he did that, I couldn’t tell. Apparently he got bearings from his instruments. The dials and meters said incomprehensible things to me, but by some strange gift of tongues, he understood them. He switched on the vision screens and they showed nothing but a billowy gray blankness beneath us. Without any coaxing from George, the dome above our heads became first translucent and then gradually transparent, our interior lights fading in correspondence to the increasing light from outside.

As we descended, I looked all around through the dome. I was still feeling apprehensive, but my curiosity was getting the better of me. I freed myself from my chair and strained to see all I could, but it wasn’t heartening. In every direction the view was the same, a slightly rolling gray-whiteness that looked soft and bouncy, lit uniformly by the red-orange sun that was low in the sky ahead of us as we traveled, and gradually rose higher. It was the first sun I had seen at close range and I didn’t like the glare it gave off. The automatic polarizer in the dome reduced the brightness until it was bearable to look at the bright disk, but I could see its light was unpleasant. The vision screens showed the same bouncy amorphous whiteness directly beneath us as we moved.

I said, “That isn’t what a planet looks like, is it?”

George laughed and said, “Those are clouds. The planet’s down underneath. It’s like frosting with cake under it.”

He reached to rap at the same switch he’d turned on before and saw it was on. He frowned and then made an announcement to the people below: “We’ll be setting down in about ten minutes.” He hit the switch and it popped up.

“I’m going downstairs,” I said.

“All right,” George said. “I’ll see you later.”

He turned his attention back to his job and we suddenly sliced down into the gray-white clouds and were surrounded by the sick, smothering mass. The lights came up a little in the dome to restore the life that was missing in the grayness outside. It was the most frightening stuff to be lost in that I could imagine and I didn’t want to look at it. I went down the spiral stairs and in the warm haven of the room below I looked for Daddy. He was sitting in an easy chair by himself in the center section. Mr. Tubman, Daddy’s assistant, was watching while the horses were saddled. Men were bustling around doing those last-minute things that people always discover five minutes before it will be too late to do them. Daddy had a book and was reading quite calmly, as I might have expected. Daddy ignores confusion.

I sat down in a heavy brown chair beside him and waited until he looked up. He said, “Hello, Mia. We’re just about there. How are you doing?”

“All right, I guess.” Meaning I was nervous.

“Good. And how are you getting on with George?”

I shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

“I’ve asked him to keep an eye on you today while I’m in conference. He’ll show you around the town. He’s been here before.”

“Are you going to be busy all day long?” I asked.

“I think so. If I wind things up before dark, I’ll find the two of you.”

I had to be satisfied with that. A few moments later we touched down smoothly for a landing. Grainau had heavier gravity than home — that was the first thing I was certain of after all our motion had ceased. I could feel the extra weight as a strain on my calves and arches when I stood up. Something that would take getting used to.

George came downstairs and walked over to us. Daddy stood up and said, “Well, all ready to take over, George?” Meaning me.

George towered over both of us. He nodded.

Daddy smiled and said, “That was a pretty good story, George. You have talents I never suspected you of having.”

“Which story?” I asked.

“The story George was just telling you,” Daddy said. “The speaker was on from the time we left the Ship.”

George grinned. “I didn’t notice that until just a minute ago.”

“It was a fine story,” Daddy said.

I flushed, thoroughly embarrassed. “Oh, no,” I said. To listen to a story like that was one thing, but to have everybody else know it was something else and thoroughly disconcerting.

I shot George an accusing look and then ran for cover, heading for the toilet again. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody.

Daddy was after me and caught me before I got to the separating partition. He grasped my arm and brought me to a stop.

“Hold on, Mia,” he said.

I struggled to get loose. “Let me go.”

“Don’t make a scene, Mia,” he said.

“Let go of me. I don’t want to stay here.”

“Quiet!” he said sharply. “I’m sorry I made the mistake of telling you, but George didn’t do it intentionally. Besides, I enjoyed his story and I’m more than six times your age.”

“That’s different,” I said.

“You may be right, but whether you’re right or not doesn’t make any difference right now. It’s time to go outside. I want you to put yourself together and walk outside with me. When we face these Colons, I want you to be somebody I can be proud of. You don’t want to show up badly in front of these people, do you?”

I shook my head.

“All right,” he said, and let go of me. “Put yourself together.”

Keeping my head averted, I did my best to get a grip on myself. I straightened my blouse and hitched my shorts, and when I was ready, I faced around.

The ramp was down on the far side of the ship, and I could hear noise from outside. People shouting.

“Come along,” Daddy said and we walked across the center area. George was still standing there and I gave him a hostile glance as we passed, but he didn’t seem to notice. He fell in behind us.

We paused for a moment at the top of the ramp, and that seemed to be taken as a signal for a band to start playing and for people to yell even louder.

6

The horses had already been led outside and were being held there by Mr. Tubman. Standing beside him was an officious-looking man in a tall hat in which was placed a great wilted white feather. At another time he might have been funny. There were two children with him, a boy and a girl, both somewhere near my age. We had set down in what must have been the main square of the town, and there were ranks of people yelling and staring up at us from either hand. It made me feel on display. The sky was low and gray above us, the yellow bricks of the square were wet and shining, and there was a warm, damp breeze. The band was directly in front of us, all of the band members dressed in dark green uniforms. They played enthusiastically — loudly, that is — but badly.

I was looking all around at this, but Daddy took my arm and said, “Come on. You can gawk later.”

We started down the ramp and all the people in the square increased the volume of their noise. I didn’t like it and started to feel very nervous. I wouldn’t like being yelled at by large numbers of people in any case, but this was all the more discomfiting because I couldn’t tell from the noise whether they were friendly or not. Whatever tune the band was playing became indistinguishable and simply added a small contribution to the general hubbub.

Daddy and the officious-looking man shook hands. Daddy said, “Mr. Gennaro. It’s good to see you again.”

The man said, “You timed things well, Mr. Havero. The rain stopped here less than an hour ago, though I won’t guarantee that it will stay stopped.”

Daddy nudged me forward. “This is my daughter, Mia. I believe you’ve already met Mr. Tubman and George Fuhonin, my pilot.” As I shook hands, I took a good look at him. He had an eager-to-please manner that I didn’t know how to take, and I couldn’t get any clue from Daddy’s face or tone.

Gennaro indicated the boy and the girl with him. “These are my children, Ralph and Helga. When you said you were bringing your daughter, I thought she might like to meet some children of her own age.” He turned on a smile and then turned it off again.

The boy had dirty-blond hair. He was just a shade taller than I, but much more squarely built. The girl was also squarely built, and about my size. They both said hello, but not in an overwhelmingly friendly way.

I said hello just as cautiously myself.

“That was very thoughtful,” Daddy said to Mr. Gennaro.

The man said, “Glad to do it. Glad to do it. Anything to keep up good will. Ha, ha.”

The people and the band continued to make noise. “Shall we be going?” Daddy said.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Germaro said. “Children, mind your manners.”

Daddy didn’t say anything to me, but simply gave me a sharp look. Mr. Gennaro mounted his horse, and Daddy and Mr. Tubman swung up on theirs. The band, still playing, backed off enough for them to pass through, and they clattered off and out of the square. The band followed after, still playing loud and tinnily, and a good portion of the crowd trailed them.

I said, “Why is everybody following after Daddy?”

“Your father is a celebrity,” George Fuhonin said in an ironic rumble, standing just behind me.

I hadn’t been speaking to him, just voicing my thoughts, but I was reminded that I had determined not to speak to him, ever again. So I moved away a little.

A section of the remaining crowd pressed forward toward the scoutship, bent on getting a good close look at us. George looked out at them with no particular sign of pleasure, as though he’d like to shoo them away.

“Stay here,” he said to me. “I’ll be right back.”

He walked up the ramp to the place where the three crewmembers were standing. They were lounging in the mouth of the ship and getting a big kick out of the crowd. When George came up, they said something that sounded like a joke, and laughed. George didn’t laugh. He shook his head irritatedly and motioned them to go inside.

“What do we do now?” the boy, Ralph, said to his sister, and I turned back to look at them.

On the Ship we have such long lives and low population that you never see brothers and sisters closer than twenty years apart, never as close together as these two. All the kids I know are singletons. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but except for build, this brother and sister didn’t look much alike at all. I had thought they would — in books they always do; either that or exactly like their long-lost Uncle Max, the one with all the money. Helga had dark hair, though not as dark as mine, and it was quite long, hanging down to her shoulders and tucked in place with combs. She wore a dress with a yoke front. Her brother wore long pants like those Daddy had put on to wear today, and a plain shirt. They had both obviously done some grooming for this little ceremony, and it made them look as stiff as their manners.

I suppose I looked just as odd to them as they did to me. I was a short, dark little thing with close-cut black hair, and I was wearing what I usually wore, a white blouse with loose sleeves, blue shorts, and high-backed sandals. It was a costume I would have felt comfortable in at almost any sort of gathering within the Ship. I wouldn’t have worn exactly that to play soccer in — something a little less formal, actually, and harder shoes — but I was presentable. My clothes were clean and reasonably neat. However, after the glory of all those dark green uniforms, I could see that these kids might consider what I was wearing just a bit lacking in elegance.

We looked at each other for a long starchy moment. Then the boy unbent a little and said, “How old are you?”

“Twelve,” I said.

“I’m fourteen,” he said. “She’s twelve.”

Helga said, “Daddy told us to show you around.” She said it tentatively.

I took a deep breath and said, “All right.”

“What about him?” she said, pointing to the ramp. George was standing just inside the ship with his back to us. “He told you to stay here.”

“He’s supposed to watch me, but I don’t have to pay any attention to him,” I said. “Let’s leave before he comes back.”

“All right,” Ralph said. “Come on then.”

He ran under the high rim of the scoutship, in exactly the opposite direction from Daddy and his own father. Helga and I followed him. George saw me as I started off, and yelled something, but I just kept on running. I’d be damned if I’d pay any attention to him.

Ralph made a slight detour to tag the lower bulge of the ship — maybe to be brave and have something to tell about afterward, maybe just to do it — and then dashed on. We went all the way under the rim of the ship and out the other side. There were a few people there, but a much smaller crowd than on the side where the ramp was lowered, possibly because there weren’t any Ship people to stare at over here. We charged through them, and I noticed that they were all squarely built, too. We left them looking after us and dashed around the first corner we came to. I was feeling pretty daring in my own way, as though I were cutting loose on a great adventure.

We took a couple of quick turns from one street into another, and if George was following after, he was soon left behind. By that time, I had no idea of where we were. It was a street like the others we’d been in, made of rounded stones and about the width of a large hallway at home, with buildings of stone and wood, and a few of brick, on either side.

“Hold on,” I said. “I can’t run any more.”

My legs were aching and I was out of breath. It took a lot more effort to get around here than it did at home, and I had no doubt that if I fell down it would hurt more. Grainau was a planet that was what they called. “Earth-like to nine degrees,” as were all the colony planets, but that one degree of difference offered a great deal of latitude for the odd or uncomfortable, including Grainau’s slightly stronger gravity. That “slightly stronger” was enough to tire me in almost no time.

“What’s the matter?” Ralph asked.

I said, “I’m tired. Let’s just walk.”

They exchanged looks, and then Ralph said, “Oh, all right.”

The air was a little hard to catch your breath in, it seemed so thick and warm. It felt wet. Something like walking through stew, and about as pleasant as that.

“Is the air always like this?” I asked.

“Like what?” Helga asked, with the barest hint of a defensive edge in her voice.

“Well, thick.” I could have added, “and smelly, too,” since it carried an odd variety of odors I couldn’t identify, but I didn’t. They always prate about planetary fresh air, but if this was it, I didn’t like it.

“It’s just a little humid today,” Ralph said. “This breeze that’s coming up now should clear the air.”

We started that afternoon by all being a little afraid of each other, I think. But very quickly Ralph and Helga found out how silly their fear was, and pretty soon, when they didn’t think to mind their manners, the contempt that replaced the fear slipped out. It took me awhile to see what it was. All I knew was that they found a lot of what I said foolish, and made it clear that they found it foolish, and that they did a lot of exchanging of significant glances.

I found I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know what time it was. I said something about the morning, something that made it clear that I thought it was morning and they both turned on me. Turned out it was after lunch here. No matter that I had stared at my breakfast just before we left.

I pointed at a building and asked what it was.

“That’s a store, silly. Haven’t you ever seen a store?”

Well, I hadn’t. I’d read about them, and that’s all. We have such a small society on the Ship that buying and selling aren’t really practicable. If you want something, you put in a requisition for it and in a little while it comes. You can live as simply or as lavishly as you want — there’s a limit as to how much you can jam into one apartment, though some people do live up to the limit. In a society where anybody can have just about anything he wants, there’s no real prestige in having things unless you use them or get some esthetic pleasure from them, so I would say the tendency in general is toward simple living.

I can think of only one regular program of exchange on the Ship. Kids under fourteen are given weekly allowance chits to draw against in the Common Room snack bars; that way none of them get a chance to ruin their health. After fourteen, they assume you know what you’re about and leave you alone.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

Ralph shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

It was a clothing store, and most of the clothes looked very strange to me. There were even some items I couldn’t figure out.

After a minute, the man who ran the place came up to Ralph and said in a loud whisper, “What’s he dressed like that for?”

“She’s a girl,” Helga said. “And she doesn’t know any better.”

My ears went red, but I pretended I didn’t hear and just kept poking through the rack of cloaks I was looking at.

“She’s down from that Ship,” Ralph said in a whisper as good as a shout. “They don’t wear clothes up there. She probably thought that junk she has on is what we wear.”

The man sneered and quite deliberately turned away from me. I wasn’t sure why and I was puzzled, because it was obviously meant to be offensive. He only stopped short of spitting on the floor at my feet. It seemed excessive if it was only because I didn’t have the sense to dress like a proper girl in the horrible things he had to sell.

As we went out, the storekeeper muttered something about “grabbie” that I didn’t catch. Ralph and Helga didn’t seem to notice, or pretended they didn’t, and I said nothing.

We had just left the store and turned the corner, starting on a long downhill slope, when I stopped still and said, “What’s that?”

“What?”

I pointed at the dead gray mass tipped with white that stretched across the bottom of the street, blocks away downhill. “Is that water?”

They looked at each other, and then in an “any blockhead should know that much” tone of voice, Ralph said, “It’s the ocean.”

I’d always wanted to see an ocean, since they’re even rarer on the Ship than stores. “Could I take a look?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “Why not?”

First there was a stone wharf and warehouses stretching away on either hand. The harbor stretched two great arms around to enclose a large expanse of water. At the sides were wooden docks on pilings running out like fingers into the harbor. Close at hand were boats of all sizes. Nearest were the great giants with several masts, big enough to have smaller boats tied on board. There were medium and small boats tied up at all the docks.

Even in the harbor, the water ran in white-crested peaks and slapped noisily at the stone and wood. There were birds of white, and gray, and brown, and black, and mixtures of all these colors, all wheeling around and crying overhead, and some of them diving down at the water. The air down here smelled strongly — of fish, I think. Outside the harbor the water was running in mountains that made the peaks inside look small, and it stretched away farther than I could see clearly, to join somewhere in the distance with the gray sky overhead.

I might have made comments about all the things I saw, the odors, the men working, but I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t strike Ralph and Helga as amusing, and by that time I was starting to be a little cautious about exposing myself. I was seeing them as something less than the allies they had been when we were running from George. We walked along the waterfront and off the quay and onto the wooden docks. Ralph led us out onto a little spur and we stopped there.

He pointed down at a little craft tied alongside. It was about twelve feet long, with a mast that stood up high enough to reach above the dock. It had a boom that was lashed in place. It was painted a serviceable white with black trim, and had the odd name Guacamole painted on it.

“What do you think of her?” he asked.

“It’s a very nice ship,” I said.

“It isn’t a ship. It’s a boat, a sailing dinghy, and it’s ours, Helga’s and mine. We go sailing all the time. Want to go for a sail?”

Helga looked at him, obviously pleased. “Oh, can we?”

“If she’ll go,” Ralph said. “It’s up to her. Otherwise we’ve got to do what Daddy said and stay with her.”

“Oh, do come on,” Helga said to me.

I looked at the water and tried to make up my mind. The water looked rough and the boat looked small. I really didn’t want to go at all.

Helga said, “We’ll just stay inside the harbor.”

“It isn’t dangerous,” Ralph added, looking at me.

I didn’t want him to think I was scared, so after a minute I shrugged and started down the wooden ladder that reached from the dock down to the rear of the boat. The ladder stood about two feet above the dock at its highest point, and I grabbed it and backed down. I seemed to be seeing more of ladders lately than I really cared to. Ralph and Helga started down after me.

The boat was rising and falling on the water as the swells came in to break on the docks and the quay. I waited until the boat was rising and then stepped in. I almost slipped, but I held my feet and then moved carefully to the front, grabbing on when I had to. When I got by the mast, I sat down on the seat that ran across the front. Helga dropped into the boat as I was sitting, and Ralph was right behind her.

I blinked a little as a trace of spray wet my cheek. “Aren’t we going to get wet?” I asked.

They didn’t hear, and I repeated my question in a louder voice.

“It’s just spindrift,” Helga said. “You’ve got to expect that. We won’t get too wet.”

Ralph said, “Besides, the water will get you clear. I know you don’t see much water in your Ship.”

That was another thing that irritated me about Ralph and Helga. They had all sorts of misconceptions about the Ship which they insisted on trotting out. Ralph was worse, because he was dogmatic. I thought at first he was being malicious until I realized he actually believed what he was saying, like that bit about going naked — that wasn’t completely wrong; some people do go without clothes in the privacy of their own apartments, but I would like to see somebody trying to play soccer while completely bare. The point is that what he said wasn’t quite right, either, and he wouldn’t listen. He would just say his misconceptions flatly and expect you to agree with him.

Right at the beginning he’d said something about how it was too bad we had to live in crowded barracks — something along that line — and didn’t I like all the space here? I tried to explain that that was only the way it used to be on the Ship, right at the beginning, but then I made the mistake of bringing in the dormitories, which are a little bit that way, trying to be honest, and that only confused the issue. Ralph finally said that everybody knew what things were like, and I didn’t have to try to explain.

Helga was a little more bearable because she only asked questions.

“Is it true you don’t eat food on your Ship?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”

“No,” I said.

And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”

“Do you?”

“Well, no. But everybody says you do.”

The thing that really annoyed me about Ralph and his “water to get you clean” remark is that we on the Ship had very clear memories of how dirty the colonists had been. Ralph apparently wasn’t even able to notice the horrid odors that clung to the whole harbor, which demonstrated how defective his sense of smell was, but I still didn’t like the blithe, “of course” way he said it.

Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.

We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray were annoying, and the grayness of the day wasn’t very nice, but I thought I could see how, given better weather and time to get used to this sort of thing, sailing could he fun.

Uncharitably, though, I couldn’t help thinking that we handled weather much better on the Third Level than they did here. When we wanted rain, everybody knows it’s coming ahead of time. We throw a switch and it rains until we want it to stop, and then it stops. None of this thick air with its clamminess.

As we were sailing, Helga started a conversation, trying to be friendly I think. She said, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I never heard of any.”

“Well, wouldn’t you know? I mean half-brothers and half-sisters, too.”

“I don’t know for sure, but I was never told of any. My parents have been married so long that if I had a brother he’d be all grown or dead years ago.” This may seem strange, but it was an idea that I’d never entertained before. I just never thought in terms of brothers and sisters. It was an interesting notion, but I didn’t really take it seriously even now.

Helga looked at me with a slightly puzzled look. “Married? I thought you didn’t get married like regular people. I thought you just lived with anybody you wanted to.”

I said, “My parents have been married more than fifty years. That’s Earth years.”

“Fifty years? Oh, you know that isn’t so. I just saw your father and he isn’t even as old as my dad.”

“Well, how old is your dad?”

“Let’s see,” she said. She did some obvious figuring. “About fifty.”

I said, “Well, my dad is eighty-one. Earth years.”

She looked at me with an expression of total disbelief. “Oh, that’s a lie.”

“And my mother is seventy-four. Or seventy-five. I’m not sure which it is.”

Helga gave me a disgusted look and turned away.

Well, it was true, and if she didn’t want to believe it, too bad. I won’t say it’s usual for people to be married as long as fifty years. I get the impression that people tend to get tired of each other after twenty or thirty years, and split up, and there are some people who don’t want anything as permanent as marriage and just live together. And people who don’t even know each other who have children because the Ship’s Eugenist advises it. Whatever Helga had heard, it had been a garbled or twisted version of this.

My parents were a strange pair. They’d been married for fifty years, which wasn’t usual, and they hadn’t lived together for eight years. When I was four, my mother got an opportunity she had been looking forward to for the study of art under Lemuel Carpentier, and she’d moved out. I guess that if you’ve been married as long as fifty years, and apparently expect it to go on for maybe fifty years more, that a vacation of eight years or so is hardly noticeable.

To tell the truth, I didn’t know what my parents saw in each other. I liked and respected my father, but I didn’t like my mother at all. I’d like to say that it was simply that we didn’t understand each other, and that was partly true. I thought her “art” was plain bad. One of the few times I went to her apartment to visit, I looked at a sculpture she’d done and asked her about it.

“That’s called ‘The Bird,’ ” she said.

I could see that it was meant to be a bird. Mother was working directly from a picture and it looked just like it. But it was so stiff and formal that it had no feel of life at all. I said something about that, and she didn’t like the remark at all. We got into an argument, and she finally put me out.

So part of it was misunderstanding, but not all. For one thing, she made it quite clear to me that she’d had me as a duty and not because she particularly wanted to. I firmly believed that she was just waiting for me to go on Trial, and then she’d move back in with Daddy. As I say, I didn’t like her.

When we got to the far side of the harbor, instead of coming directly back, as I somehow had thought we would, Ralph turned us so that we were traveling out at an angle toward the mouth of the harbor. Traveling that way, we were running at an angle through the waves, too, and the chop increased tremendously. We would go up in the air, and then quite suddenly down again, and after a few minutes of this, I was starting to feel queasy. It was a different sort of upset that I’d been suffering earlier in the day. This was nausea and accompanied by a whirling in the head.

I said to Helga, “Can’t we go straight back? I’m starting to feel sick.”

“This is the quickest way back,” she said. “We can’t sail directly into the wind. We have to tack, head into the wind at an angle.”

“But we’re going so slow,” I said. It was the slow way we rammed into waves, surged high, and then pitched down on the other side that threw my stomach off stride.

Ralph yanked on the line that was attached to the boom, and swung it over from one side of the boat to the other, turning the tiller at the same time, and we headed back in toward the quay in another slow tack. By that time, I was feeling miserable.

“Don’t throw up,” Helga said cheerfully. “We’ll be back soon enough.” Then she raised her voice. “You’ve had it your fair turn, Ralph. Let me take over.”

“Oh, all right,” Ralph said, quite reluctantly.

Helga ducked back to the stern, taking the tiller and the boom line from Ralph. She nodded at me. “She’s feeling sick,” she said.

“Oh,” Ralph said. He came forward and sat down beside me.

He looked at me and said, “It takes awhile to get your sea-legs. After you sail for awhile you get used to it.”

He didn’t say anything while we completed that leg and part of the next tack. He just watched Helga a little wistfully. I began to think that this sailing thing — provided first that you were feeling well enough to enjoy it at all — was much more fun for the person actually doing the sailing than for the passengers. Helga and Ralph, at least, both seemed to be having much more fun when they were sailing than when they were sitting up front. Perhaps it was just that they felt they had to talk to me, and that was an effort for them.

Ralph said, “Uh, well, how do you think our fathers are getting along?”

I swallowed, trying to keep control of my stomach. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t even know what they were going to trade for.”

He looked at me in surprise. “You don’t even know that? We operate placer mines just to produce tungsten ore for you, we ship it all the way here, and you don’t even know it!”

“Why don’t…” I paused, and grabbed hard onto the side of the boat (gunwale) and fought hard to hold onto my composure as we dipped into a sudden trough. “Why don’t you mine this stuff, whatever it is, just for yourselves?”

Somewhat bitterly he said, “We don’t know how to reduce it. You Ship people won’t tell us how. When we trade with you, all you give us is little bits and pieces of information.”

We were heeling over into our last tack then, about to head down the last stretch to the dock.

I said, “And why not? We preserved all the knowledge through the years since Earth was destroyed. If we gave it all to you, what would we have left to trade with?”

“My dad says you’re parasites,” he said. “You live off our hard work. You’re Grabbies, and that’s no mistake.”

“We are not parasites,” I said.

“If things were the way they ought to be, we’d be the ones living like kings, not you.”

“If we live like kings, why were you saying earlier that we had to live all crowded together in barracks?”

He was nonplussed for a moment and then he said, “Because you like to live like pigs, that’s why. I can’t help it if you like to live like pigs.”

“If there are any pigs around here, it’s you Mudeaters,” I said.

“What?”

“Mudeaters!”

“Grabbie! Why don’t you take a bath?” He put his hand against my chest and gave a hard shove. In spite of our quarreling, he caught me unprepared, and I went tumbling overboard.

The feel of the water was shocking. It was colder than the air, though after the first moment not unpleasantly cold. I got a mouthful of water as I went under and it was very bad-tasting, dirty and bitter. I came up, coughing and spluttering, as the boat swung on past me. I got a glimpse of Helga with her head turned back toward me and a surprised look on her face. I treaded water while I coughed out the water that had gone down my windpipe, and some that had gone down the wrong way came up the wrong way and out my nose. It took several seconds before I was breathing properly. The shock and choking did settle my stomach, I found to my surprise, but it wasn’t the way I’d have chosen to do it if I had had a choice.

Helga had spilled the air out of the canvas and turned the tiller. The Guacamole was just rocking on the water and drifting. She stood up, looking back at me.

“Do you need help?” she called.

We weren’t really far from the dock, so I called, “No, I can swim in.”

I had light clothing on. My wet, loose sleeves were a little of a problem, but I found I could manage. I’d never swum in anything but a pool before, but I found it wasn’t really a problem to stay on top of the waves, though I had to be careful that I didn’t swallow any more of that bitter water. I wasn’t a fast swimmer, but I was built enough like a cork that all I had to do was keep at it and I had no trouble going where I wanted to.

As it was, we were close enough to the dock when I went overboard that I was able to reach a ladder by the time they had the Guacamole all tied up. I pulled myself up and then found that I was very tired, collapsed in a heap and dripped water all over the boards of the dock. I watched as thirty feet down the way, Ralph and Helga lowered the sail and lashed the boom.

As they finished, I got up and walked down the dock to the head of their ladder. The gravity had taken most of the energy out of me. Ralph caught on to the end of the ladder and started up. He had an apologetic look on his face as he saw me waiting. When he had gotten to the top and was just about to step out on the dock, I grabbed the ladder in both hands to brace myself, put a sandal lengthwise across his stomach, and pushed off as hard as I could.

He had a strong grip, but I caught him off balance. He let go of the ladder, waved his arms in an attempt to hold his balance but then saw he couldn’t. He twisted to guide his fall and turned it into a dive. He entered the water cleanly just behind his little boat. I leaned over and waited until he came up. Then I gave a look to Helga.

She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything,” she said fearfully.

Ralph caught on to the stern of the Guacamole, and clung there. He looked up at me, hopping mad.

“I had a real swell time,” I said. “Both of you will have to come up to the Ship sometime, and let me show you around.”

Then I walked away, leaving a dripping trail. I pushed my wet hair back off my forehead, squeezed a little water out of my sleeves, and shook myself as dry as I could. Then I left the quay. I didn’t look back at all. Let them solve their own problems.

I set off up the street that we’d come down. Some of the people on the street looked oddly at me as I passed. I suppose I was a strange sight, an odd little girl, dressed in funny clothes and wringing wet. I wasn’t sure where I was and where I’d find the scoutship, but I wasn’t worried about it. Somehow, during the course of the hours I’d been here, Grainau had lost its power to scare me.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know my way around. Before I’d even gotten to the top of the hill I ran into the monster, the dinosaur, George Fuhonin. He’d been out looking for me, and surprisingly, I was almost glad to see him.

He said, “What happened to you?”

I wasn’t dripping by that time, but I was still wet, looking, I’m quite sure, like a half-drowned kitten fished out of the water. Thoroughly bedraggled.

I said, “We went swimming.”

“Oh. Well, come back to the ship and we’ll get you dried out.”

I fell into step beside him, as best I could. We walked on silently for a few minutes, and then he said, “You know, I really didn’t intend to embarrass you. I wouldn’t have done that intentionally.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just make sure the switch is off next time, please.”

“All right,” he said.

When we got back to the ship, I went into the toilet and turned on the hot air blower in the refresher. In a few minutes I was dry.

Then I discovered that inspite of my various stomach upsets, I was hungry. I ate heartily and felt much better. There’s nothing like the feeling of being comfortably full.

It was near nightfall outside when Daddy came back, though it was still in the middle of the afternoon by Ship time. When it started to grow dark outside, the people who’d been coming to stare all day had gone, I suppose home to dinner. When Daddy came back, there was no band playing this time.

I heard the horses and I went outside. One of the crew went by me and down the ramp. Mr. Tubman and Daddy handed their horses over to him and then turned their attention back to Mr. Gennaro, who was standing by his own horse. They didn’t see me standing near the top of the ramp.

In a very anxious voice, Mr. Gennaro said, “Now are you sure that this unfortunate business isn’t going to make any difference to our agreement?”

“I’m quite sure,” Daddy said, smiling. “You made your apology and I’m quite sure my daughter got whatever satisfaction she needed from pushing your boy into the water. Now let’s drop the whole matter. Our ship will be down for the ore you have ready next week…”

I didn’t wait to hear him finish. I just turned and went inside with a little glow warming me. He wasn’t mad at me.

“What are you smirking about?” George asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.