Rite of Passage

7

We took off shortly after Daddy came aboard. He and I and Mr. Tubman were sitting in the center of the downstairs lounge in easy chairs. The three crewmen were playing cards, and George Fuhonin was upstairs piloting.

I felt quietly pleased with myself. Viewed from one angle, my time on Grainau had been nothing but one long mistake. I wasn’t bothering to view it that way, even though I did realize dimly that I had made a few errors in tact and simple good sense. It wasn’t important to me, and even now I would say that it was comparatively unimportant in real terms.

I think I was deservedly elated. I was filled to the brim with the discovery that I could meet Mudeaters on their own home grounds, and if not come off best, at least draw.

Like the girl who first found out how to make fire, like the girl who invented the principle of the lever, like the girl who first had the courage to eat moldy goat cheese and found Roquefort, I had discovered something absolutely new in the world. Self-confidence, perhaps.

My errors had been made. My self-confidence was still in the process of becoming. If Daddy had pointed out the errors, they would not have been mended, and the self-confidence might have been stillborn. But Daddy just smoked and smiled.

I was curious enough about the things that Ralph Gennaro had said that I repeated his comments to Daddy and asked about them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Daddy said.

“There’s not much sense in even listening to a Mudeater,” Mr. Tubman said. “They have no perspective. They live in such limited little worlds that they can’t see what’s going on.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Henry,” Daddy said. “It’s just as thoughtless as that silly word that Mia picked up. What did that boy say?”

“‘Grabbie?’”

“Mm, yes. That one. There’s no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life and they have theirs. I wouldn’t live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I’m sure there are good people among them.”

“It’s their lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “I’ll bet Gennaro is complaining right now that you cheated him.”

“He might be,” Daddy said.

“You didn’t cheat him, did you, Daddy? He seemed happy that you were willing to make a deal.”

“When did you hear this?”

“When you rode up.”

“Lack of perspective,” Mr. Tubman said. “He doesn’t bargain well and he was afraid that your dad had been offended by your adventure. He gave in more easily than he had to. He was happy at the time, but he’s probably regretting it now.”

Daddy nodded and filled his pipe again. “I don’t see any reason to mind his interests for him. As far as I’m concerned, the less we do for the colonists, the sooner they’ll learn to watch out for themselves. And all the better for them when they do. That’s where Mr. Mbele and I disagree. He believes in exceptions to rules, in treating the colonists better than we treat ourselves. I’m not ready to accept that.”

Mr. Tubman said, “I’ll have to admit that I’ve learned things about bargaining from watching you, Miles.”

“I hope so. You will be a poor trader if you underestimate the people you deal with. And you, Mia, will be making a mistake if you underestimate a man like Mr. Mbele. His principles are excellent — sometimes, however, he only sees one route to a goal.”

After a few minutes, Mr. Tubman went over to make a fourth in the card game. I decided to go upstairs.

Daddy looked up as I left. He took the pipe from his mouth. It had gone out without his noticing. “Going to hear another story?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” And I went up and spent the rest of the trip with George.

So, I went home to Geo Quad. In my own time, I thought about things and discovered at least some of my errors, and the discovery did not hurt me, as it might have.

Sometimes there is art of a subtle sort in not touching, in simply sitting and smoking and talking of other people. When I got back to the Ship, I was still feeling good. And it lasted until I went to sleep.

I sat in a large comfortable chair — uncomfortably — and waited for Jimmy Dentremont. I wasn’t twitching; I merely had a definite feeling of unease. This was the living room of the Geo Quad dorm, and very similar to the one that I had once lived in. The similarity didn’t bother me much, but I was a stranger here and a little hesitant because of it. If it hasn’t become clear previously, perhaps I should say that I always prefer to feel in command of a situation.

The room was nicely-enough appointed, but very impersonal. Individuality in a room comes from personal touches, personal care, personal interest, and the more public a room is, the less individual it is bound to be. My own room at home was more personal and individual than our living room, our living room better than the sleeping quarters of this dorm — though I hadn’t seen them, I remembered well enough what dorm sleeping quarters were like — and the quarters better than this room I was sitting in. To be a stranger in an impersonal room in which there are other people who are not strangers to one another or to the place is to have the feeling of strangeness compounded.

The dorm had a living room, where I was sitting, a kitchen and study rooms out of sight, and living quarters upstairs. When I came in I looked around, and then stopped one of the small kids who obviously belonged here, a little girl of about eight.

“Is Jimmy Dentremont around?”

“Upstairs, I imagine,” she said.

Near the door there was a buzzer board for the use of people like me who didn’t live here. I looked Jimmy’s name up, then rang two longs and a short. Since it was not far out of his way, Jimmy usually stopped by for me on the way to Mr. Mbele’s, rather than me coming after him, but I had something to talk with him about today.

He came on the screen by the buzzer and said, “Oh, hello Mia.”

I said, “Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to you about something. Get dressed and come on down.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be down as soon as I get some clothes on.” He rang off and his image faded.

So I picked a seat and waited for him. He hadn’t been living in the dorm long, only a year or so. His birth had been a result of a suggestion by the Ship’s Eugenist — his parents had barely known one another — but his mother had wanted him and raised him. When he was eleven, however, she had decided to get married, and on Jimmy’s own suggestion he had moved into a dorm.

“I didn’t want to be underfoot,” he’d said to me. “I do go over there evenings sometimes. And I see my father, too, from time to time.”

Perhaps it was because he could move back with his mother if he wanted that he didn’t find living in the dorm painful. He seemed to view it as just a temporary situation to be lived with until he came back from Trial and could have an apartment of his own. In any case, I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

There were kids playing a board game of some sort and I sat in my chair. I watched the game and I watched the people watching the game, and I watched people passing, but nobody watched me at all. Jimmy came down in a few minutes and I got out of my chair, quite ready to be gone.

By way of greeting, I said, “What I really want to know is whether you want to go over with me on Friday.”

“Where?”

“What do you mean, ‘where’?”

“Mia, you know I’d go anywhere you asked. Simply name a place and lead the way.”

“You’re lucky I’m not bigger than you are. If I were bigger, I’d hit you. You don’t have to be smart.”

“Well, where is it that you’re going?”

“Don’t you know what I’m talking about?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I got out the note that had come for me yesterday and unfolded it. It said that I was to have a physical examination Wednesday, and on Friday I was to assemble with the others in my survival class at Gate 5, Third Level for our first meeting. I handed the note to Jimmy and he read it.

This first meeting of my survival class would be on Friday, June 3, 2198. My physical would be one year and six months to the day before we would be dropped on one colony planet or another to actually undergo Trial. There is no rule that says a child has to attend a survival class, but in actual practice everybody takes advantage of the training that is offered. Clear choices as to the best course to take in life are very rare, and this was one of those few. They don’t drop us simply to die. They train us for a year and a half, and then they drop us and find out how much good the training has done us.

New classes are started every three or four months, and the last one had been in March, so this note was not unexpected. Since Jimmy had been born in November, too, as he had been so quick to point out when we first met, he was bound to be in the same class with me. Frankly, I wanted company on Friday.

“I didn’t know about this,” Jimmy said. “I should have a note, too. When did this come?”

“Yesterday. I thought you’d call me this morning about it but you didn’t.”

“I’d better check this out. Hold on here.” He went off to find the dorm mother and came back in a few minutes with a note similar to mine. “It was here. I just never looked for it and she never thought to mention it.”

There was one thing that irritated me about Jimmy, but that in a way I admired. Or, perhaps, something I marveled at. On at least two occasions, I had called Jimmy and left a message, once to call me back, once to say I wasn’t going to be able to make our meeting with Mr. Mbele. Neither time did he get the message, because neither time did he stop to look for one. That irritates me. I also feel envious of anyone who can be so unanxious about who might have called. Jimmy simply says that he’s so busy that he never stops to worry about things like that.

Jimmy liked the idea of going to the first meeting on Friday together. To this time, at least, we were not close friends — there was an element of antagonism — but we did know each other and we had Mr. Mbele in common. It seemed to make sense to both of us to face the new situation together.

As we were on our way to Mr. Mbele’s, I said, “Do you remember when I got back from Grainau and I was talking about that boy and his sister to you and Mr. Mbele?”

“The one with the weird ideas of what we’re like?”

“Yes. One of the things they said was that we went around naked all the time. I was objecting to all the things they were saying. I wonder what I would have said if they’d been here to see you on the vid without even your socks on.”

“I suppose they would have thought they were right all along,” Jimmy said reasonably.

“Yes. But they weren’t.”

“I don’t know. I was naked, wasn’t I?”

“Sure, but that was in your own room. I go naked at home, too. They thought we never wear clothes.”

“Well,” Jimmy said brightly, “there’s no real reason we ought to, is there?” He started to pull his shirt off over his head. “We could be just what they think we are, and we wouldn’t be worse because of it, would we?”

“Don’t be perverse,” I said.

“What’s perverse about going naked?”

“I’m talking about your contrariness. Are you going to eat dirt just because they think we do? I shouldn’t have brought the subject up in the first place. It just struck me as something incongruous.”

“Incongruous,” Jimmy corrected, putting the accent on the second syllable where it belonged.

“Well, however you pronounce it,” I said. This comes of reading words and not having heard them pronounced. This also was a matter of talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. It seemed that I might do better just to leave Grainau out of my conversations completely. Just after I’d gotten back home, I’d made the mistake of saying what I really thought about the Mudeaters in front of Jimmy and Mr. Mbele.

“Do they really stink?” Mr. Mbele asked.

Jimmy and I were seated on the couch in Mr. Mbele’s apartment. I had my notebook with notes on my reading, subjects I wanted to bring up, and some book titles that Mr. Mbele had suggested. I realized that I’d just said something I couldn’t really defend, so I backtracked.

“I don’t know if they do. Everybody says they do. What I meant is that I didn’t like what I saw of them.”

“Why not?” Jimmy asked.

“Is that a serious question, or are you just prodding?”

“I’m interested, too, Mia,” Mr. Mbele said. In his case, I could tell that it was a seriously intended question, not just digging. Mr. Mbele never did any ganging up with either one of us against the other.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “We didn’t get along. Do I have to have a better reason than that?”

“Of course,” Jimmy said.

“Well, if you think so,” I said, “give me one good reason you have for being so antagonistic.”

Jimmy half shrugged, looking uncomfortable.

“You don’t have one,” I said. “I just said something you didn’t take to. Well, I didn’t take to the Mudeaters. I can doggone well say they stink if I want to.”

“I guess so,” Jimmy said.

“Hmm,” Mr. Mbele said. “What if it doesn’t happen to be true? What if what you say damages the other person, or if you are just building yourself up by tearing another person down?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Would you agree that it isn’t a good policy?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, it’s my personal opinion that saying the Colons stink is simply a self-justifying myth invented to make us feel morally superior and absolutely in the right. Your statement is likely to keep me from listening to any valid arguments that you might actually have. That certainly wouldn’t do you any good.”

Jimmy had been following the argument. He said, “How about this? It’s all right to dislike people for poor reasons, but not to call them names. You don’t have to justify your dislikes, but you have to justify your contentions.”

“That’s a little oversimplified,” Mr. Mbele said.

For the moment I was off the hook, and since I was struck by a thought, I brought it forward. “What about the people whom you ought to like — only you don’t? And the people you ought not to like that you do?”

“And what does all that mean?” Jimmy asked.

“Well, say you and I agree on everything, and I respect you, and you never do me any harm — like backbiting all the time for no good reason — and yet I can’t stand you. Or say there were somebody I ought to dislike — a total rat, somebody who’ll do anything if he sees advantage in it — and I like him. Can you separate liking from what a person does?”

Mr. Mbele smiled, as though the course of the conversation amused him. “Well, do you separate them?”

“I suppose I do,” I said.

“Jimmy?”

Jimmy didn’t say anything for a minute while he decided whether he did or whether he didn’t. I already knew the answer, having just worked it out myself. Everybody does, or there wouldn’t be charming sociallyaccepted bastards in the world.

Jimmy said, “I suppose I do, too.”

I said, “What I think I mean was should you separate them?”

“Isn’t it more to the point to ask whether it makes any difference if you do or not?”

“You mean, if you can’t help it anyway?”

“No,” Mr. Mbele said. “I meant do your emotions make a difference in your judgment of people that you like or dislike?”

Jimmy said, “Alicia MacReady? Everybody likes her, they say. Will that make any difference in what the Assembly decides?”

Alicia MacReady was the woman who was carrying an illegal baby. The question of what to do in the case had come up before the Council, but it hadn’t stayed there. She had apparently thought that she would get more lenient treatment if the Ship’s Assembly were to make the judgment, so before the Council could decide, she had opted to take the matter out of their hands. The Council had agreed, as in difficult or important cases they were likely to.

The Ship’s Assembly was a meeting of all the adults in the Ship, coming together in the amphitheater on Second Level, and voting. Since she was a popular person — I’d heard this only; until this had come up I had never heard of her or met her — the MacReady woman wanted to face the Assembly, hoping her friendships would count for more than they would in Council.

“That’s a good example,” Mr. Mbele said. “I don’t know if it will make a difference. I would suggest that since you can’t attend, you watch what goes on on your video. Then perhaps we can discuss the decision next time. This is just part of a larger problem, however: what constitutes proper conduct? That is, ethics. This is something an ordinologist” — a nod to Jimmy — “or a synthesist” — a nod toward me — “should be thoroughly familiar with. I’ll give you titles to start with. Take your time with them, and when you’re ready to talk, let me know.”

So he started us reading in ethics. He went to his book shelves and called off titles and authors for us to copy: Epicureans and Utilitarians; Stoics; Power Philosophers, both sophisticated and unsophisticated; and Humanists of several stripes. All these not to mention various religious ethical systems. If I’d known all this was to come out of my one simple, honestly prejudiced remark, I would never have opened my mouth. Maybe there is a lesson in that, but if there is, I’ve never learned it; I still have an unbecoming tendency to open my mouth and get myself in trouble.

I saw Dr. Jerome on Wednesday, June 1. I’d seen him once or twice a year ever since I could remember. He was of middle height, inclined to be portly, and like most doctors wore a beard. His was black. I’d asked him about it when I was much younger and he’d said, “It’s either to give our patients confidence or to give ourselves confidence. I’m not sure which.”

As he examined me, he talked as he always did, a constant flow of commentary directed half at me and half at himself, all given in an even, low-pitched voice. Its effect, and perhaps its intention, was to give reassurance in the same way that a horseman soothes a skittish colt with his voice. It was part of Dr. Jerome’s professional manner.

“Good enough, good enough. Sound. Good shape. Breathe in. Now, out. Good. Hmm-hum. Yes. Good enough.”

There’s always the question of how much you can believe of what a doctor says — he has one of those ethical problems in how much he can tell you — but I had no reason not to believe Dr. Jerome when he told me I was in perfectly sound shape. I was due for no treatments of any kind before starting Survival Class. I was in first-class condition.

“It’s always good to see you, Mia,” he said. “I wish everybody were in as good health. I might have a little more spare time.”

He said one other thing. When he took my height and weight, he said, “You’ve gained three inches since the last time you were here. That’s very good.”

Three inches. I wasn’t sure whether it was Daddy’s doing or nature, but I wasn’t displeased to hear it.

8

Jimmy and I got off the shuttle at Entry Gate 5 on the Third Level. This was supposedly where our group was to meet at two o’clock. We were about ten minutes early. The shuttle door slid open and we left the car. When we were clear, the car flicked away, responding to a call from another level, much like an elevator. On the cross-level line, a few feet away, there were several cars just sitting and waiting to be called.

The door leading out of the shuttle room was double, with both sides standing open. Above it a sign read: ENTRY GATE 5, THIRD LEVEL: PARK. Through the open door I could see light, grass, dirt and a number of kids about my age, all beyond the gate.

“There they are,” Jimmy said.

The Third Level is divided into three distinct and separate types of areas. First there are the areas under cultivation, producing food, oxygen, and fodder for the cattle we raise. Beef is our only on-the-hoof meat, our other meats coming from cultures raised in vats, also here on the Third Level. The second type of area is park. Here there are trees, a lake, flowers, grassland, picnic areas, room to walk, room to ride. This is what you might wish the planets were like. The last type of area is the wilds, which is much like the parks but more dangerous. As the maps might have it, here there are wilde beastes. The terrain is more sudden and the vegetation is left to find its own way. It’s designed for hunting, for chance-taking, and for training not-quite-adults. I’d never been in the wilds up to this time, only in the ag and park areas.

“Come on, then,” I said.

We went through the doors, then through what amounted to a short tunnel, perhaps ten feet long. The transparent gate dilated and we went through. Outside there were trees and stables, a corral among the trees, and a building that had a wall from about two feet off the ground to about seven feet, and about three feet higher an open-gabled roof. This held lockers and showers.

It was only here on the Third Level that you could appreciate the size of the Ship. Everywhere else there were walls at every hand, but here your view was all but unimpeded. It was fully miles to the nearest point where roof above and ground below met ship-side. The roof was three hundred feet up and it took a sharp eye to pick out sprinklers and such as individual features.

Behind us, the shuttle tube rose out of the station and disappeared blackly into the roof far above. The crosslevel shuttle tube went underground from the station so that was not visible.

It was still before two, so the kids who were there already were standing under the trees by the corral and watching the horses. I recognized Venie Morlock among them. I wasn’t surprised to see her there since she was only one month older than I and I had expected that we would wind up in the same Trial group.

Others were arriving behind us and coming out of the shuttle station. Jimmy and I moved over to join the others watching the horses. I suppose I might have learned to ride when I was smaller just as I had learned to swim, but for no good reason in particular I hadn’t. I wasn’t afraid of horses but I was wary of them. There was another girl who wasn’t. She was reaching through the fence and teasing one, a red roan mare.

A tall, large-built boy near us looked at her and said, “I can’t stand children and that Debbie is such a child.”

A moment later there was a metallic toot as somebody blew on a whistle. I looked at my watch and saw that it was two exactly. There were two men standing on the single step up to the locker building. One had a whistle. He was young, perhaps forty-five, and smoothskinned. He was also impatient.

“Come on,” he said, and beckoned irritatedly. “Come on over here.”

He was about medium-height and dark-haired, and he had a list in his hand. He looked like the sort of person who would spend his time with lists of one sort or another. There are people, you know, who find no satisfaction in living unless they can plan ahead and then tick off items as they come.

We gathered around and he rattled his paper. The other man stood there rather quietly. He was also medium height, but slighter, older, considerably more wrinkled, and much less formally dressed.

“Answer when your name is called,” said the younger man, and he began reading off our names. He started with Allen, Andersson, and Briney, Robert, who was the large boy who was unenthusiastic about children, and he ended with Wilson, You and Yung. There were about thirty names.

“Two missing,” he said to the other when he was done. “Send them a second notice.”

Then he turned to us and said, “My name is Fosnight. I’m in charge of coordinating all Trial and pre-Trial programs, and that includes survival classes. There are, at present, six classes in training, counting this one, meeting in various areas of the Third Level. This class is scheduled to meet regularly from now on, here at Gate 5, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons at 12:30. Third Class is here on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. If the meeting times conflict with school, tutorial sessions, or anything else, you’ll have to find a way out. Reschedule, perhaps — the other, of course, not this — or skip one or the other. That is strictly up to you to settle. It is strictly up to you whether or not you decide to attend, but I can guarantee that almost anyone will find his chances of coming back from Trial alive infinitely improved if he attends Survival Class regularly. Your group is somewhat smaller than the usual one, so you should do very well. You are also lucky to have Mr. Marechal here as your instructor — he’s one of our six best chief instructors.” He smiled at his little joke.

Mr. Fosnight’s manner was brisk and businesslike, as though he were checking his mental items off. Now he turned to Marechal and handed him the whistle. “Whistle,” he said. He handed him the list. “List.” Then he turned back to us standing in a bunch in front. “Any questions.”

He’d struck us so hard and fast that we just looked blankly up at him. Nobody said anything.

“Good,” he said. “Goodbye.” And he walked off as though the last item on his list were settled quite satisfactorily, and another tedious but necessary little task were out of the way.

Mr. Marechal looked at the whistle in his hand, and then after Fosnight as he walked to the shuttle station. He didn’t look as though he liked whistles. Then he stuck the whistle in his pocket. He folded the list and put that away, too. When he was finished he looked up and looked us over slowly, perhaps taking our measure. We looked back up at him, taking a good look at the man who was going to have us in charge for a year and a half. It wasn’t a case of taking his measure, since the child’s side of an adult-child relationship is pretty ordinarily to assume that the adult knows what he is about. If he doesn’t and the child finds out, then things go to pot, but to start with he generally has the benefit of the doubt. I will admit that Mr. Marechal was not an overwhelming figure at first sight.

He said, “Well, Mr. Fosnight forgot something he usually says, so I’ll say it for him if I can remember more or less how it goes. There’s an anthropological name for Trial. They call it a rite of passage. It’s a formal way of passing from one stage of your life to another. All societies have them. The important thing to remember is that it makes being an adult a meaningful sort of thing, because adulthood has been earned when you come back from Trial. That makes Trial worth concentrating on.”

He stopped then and looked off to his right. Everybody looked that way. Mr. Fosnight was coming back toward us. Mr. Marechal looked at him and said questioningly, “Rites of passage?”

“Yes.”

“Never mind. I just finished going over it for you.”

“Oh,” Mr. Fosnight said. “Thanks, then.” He turned around and went back toward the shuttle station.

He was so dogged about the whole thing that the moment he was out of sight, everybody started laughing. Mr. Marechal let it go on for a moment and then he said, “That’s enough. I just want to say a couple of things for myself now. Me and the people who’ll be coming in to show you things are going to be doing our best to get you through Trial. If you pay attention, you shouldn’t have any trouble. Okay? Now the first thing I’m going to do is assign you horses and show you the first thing about riding.”

Mr. Marechal was a slow-speaking sort of person, and didn’t have a complete command of grammar, but he did have the sort of personal authority that makes people listen. Without consulting the list in his pocket, he called off people’s names and names of horses. I got stuck with something called Nincompoop. That got a laugh. Jimmy’s horse was Pet — the final t is written but not pronounced since it comes from the French. Venitia Morlock got a horse named Slats. When Rachel Yung was assigned her horse, we moved over to the corral, where Mr. Marechal perched up on the top rail.

“These horses are yours from here on out,” he said. “Don’t get sentimental about them. They’re just a way to get from one place to another the same as a heli-pac, and you’ll be getting practice with both. But you’ll have to take care of both, too, and that means especially the horse you have. A horse is an animal and that means he’ll break down easier than a machine if he isn’t taken care of. You damned well better take care of them.”

One of the kids raised his hand. “Yes, Herskovitz?”

Herskovitz was a little surprised to be tagged quite that easily. “If horses are that lousy, why do we have to go to the trouble of learning how to ride them? That’s what I want to know.”

Even more slowly than usual, Mr. Marechal said, “Well, I could give you reasons, I suppose, but what it all boils down to is that you have to pass a test. The test goes by certain rules and one of those rules is that you have to be able to ride a horse. But don’t let it bother you too much, son. You may find that you like horses after a while.”

He swung over the fence and landed inside. “Now I’m going to show you the first thing about riding. The first thing about riding is getting a saddle on your animal.”

One of the boys said, “Excuse me, but I already know how to ride. Do I have to stick around for this?”

Mr. Marechal said, “No, you don’t, Farmer. You can skip anything you want to. Only one thing, though. Before you walk out on anything you’d best be mighty sure you know every blessed thing I’m going to show, ’cause if it’s something you walked out on I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again for you. If you can’t help missing I might be generous — if I’m in the right mood. If you fall behind of your own doing, you’ll have to catch up on your own, too.”

Farmer said that in that case he thought he’d stick around today just to see how things went.

Mr. Marechal caught up one of the three horses in the corral, the red roan mare, and put a bridle on her, showing us what he was doing as he did it. Then he put on the blanket and the double-cinch saddle. He took them off, and then he showed us again from the beginning. When he was done, he said, “All right. Now you people will have to try it. Go collect your tack and lead out your horses.”

There was a scramble then to find and get acquainted with your horse, locate your gear, and get both into a position where the second might be strapped onto the first. Nincompoop turned out to be brown — what they call a chestnut — and not terribly large. He was more of a pony than a horse, a pony being less than 56 inches high at the shoulder. It seems to be an arbitrary cutoff point. His size pleased me, since a larger animal would probably have intimidated me more than this one did. As it was, I hardly had time to be intimidated, just time to get in line with everybody else, our animals more or less in a row with gear on the left side. Mr. Marechal stood out in front and told us what to do.

The first time went badly. I got everything where I thought it should go, but when I stood back, the saddle didn’t stay in place. It seemed to be in place for a moment and I looked up feeling pleased, but when I looked back, it was tipped. It seemed to be on tightly, but it was tipped.

I figured I’d better try again. I undid the cinch, the strap that goes under the belly of the horse to tie the saddle on, straightened the saddle, and restrapped it.

Mr. Marechal was walking down the line inspecting and offering advice. He got to me as I was hauling the cinch tight.

“Let me show you something,” he said. He walked up to Nincompoop, lifted his knee and rammed him a hard one in the belly. The horse gave a whoof of expelled air, and he yanked the cinch tight. The horse looked at him reproachfully as he notched it.

“This one will swell up on you every time if you let him,” he said. “You’ve got to let him know you’re sharper than he is.”

We spent about an hour with saddling and unsaddling before we quit for the day. On the way home, I asked Jimmy what he thought. We were sharing our shuttle car with half-a-dozen others from our group.

“I like Marechal,” he said. “I think he’s going to be okay.”

One of the girls said, “He doesn’t seem to stand still for any nonsense. I like that. It means we won’t waste any of our time.”

The Farmer boy was in our car. He was the one who already knew how to ride. “My time was wasted,” he said. “He didn’t go over anything I didn’t know already today. That’s what I call nonsense.”

“It may be nonsense for you,” Jimmy said, “but most of the rest of us learned something. If you know everything already, don’t come. Just like he said.”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe I won’t.”

On the cross-level shuttle to Geo Quad, I said to Jimmy, “I was a little disappointed, myself.”

“With Marechal?”

“No. With the whole afternoon. I expected something more.”

“Well, what exactly?”

I shot him a look. “You always like to pin me down, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I just like to know what you mean, or if you mean anything.”

“Well, Mr. Smarty, what I meant is that it all seemed so businesslike and ordinary. There’s got to be a better word… undramatic.”

“Well, they say Sixth Class is likely to be pretty dull. In three months or so when we’ve got some of the basic stuff down, it should be more exciting.”

We rode silently for a minute while I thought it over. Then I said, “I don’t think so. I’ll bet things stay the same whether we’re Sixth Class, Fourth Class or whatever. It’ll be all the same, businesslike.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy asked.

“Nothing. I just don’t believe in adventure anymore.”

“When did you decide that?”

“Just now.”

“Because today wasn’t exciting. No — ‘dramatic.’ Wasn’t going down to Grainau an adventure? How about that?”

“You think being pushed into a big pool of foul tasting water is an adventure?” I asked scornfully. “Have you ever had an adventure?”

“I guess not. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. You must be in a bad mood. You were talking about bets — I bet if I try I can work up a legitimate, real adventure.”

“How?” I challenged.

He shook his red head doggedly. “All right. I don’t know now. All I’m betting is that I can find one.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a bet.”

There is a certain amount of organization to a Ship’s Assembly, as with most mass gatherings — it takes somebody to be there to see that everything is in order, that there are chairs, tables, microphones and all that. Mostly this can be just anybody who gets saddled with the job, but the final decisions devolve on the man who chairs the Assembly, meaning Daddy. I think, too, that he was interested that things go smoothly in this first Assembly after he became Ship’s Chairman.

The night the Assembly was to meet to consider the case of Alicia MacReady, Daddy finished dinner early and left for the Second Level. Zena Andrus came over to eat with me that night. I had found that in the right circumstances I could like her. She had a tendency to whine at times, but that’s not the worst fault in the world. And she did have courage.

As we were finishing dinner, but before dessert, there was a signal at the door. It was Mr. Tubman.

“You said to be here at six-thirty,” he said apologetically, seeing that we were not finished as yet.

“That’s quite all right, Henry,” Daddy said. “I think I’m about finished. You know where the dessert is, Mia. Clean things up and dispose of the dishes when you’re finished.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “It just isn’t so long since I did have to and I still have the habit.”

Dessert was a parfait. While we were eating it after Daddy had left, Zena said, “What is this Assembly thing about, anyway? Mum and Daddy are going but they didn’t talk about it.”

I said, “Everybody’s been talking about it. I would have thought you’d know.”

“Well, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t pay much attention to things like Assemblies and I bet you never did either before your dad became Ship’s Chairman.”

Well, I hadn’t, but I hadn’t been completely unaware of them, either. So I explained what I knew of things to her.

“It doesn’t seem like very much,” Zena said. “They could always get rid of the baby. She couldn’t have gotten away with having it, anyway. It seems like a whole big fuss over not very much at all.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.

Zena shrugged, and went back to her parfait. It was her second. Things always seemed to be much simpler for her than they were for me.

“Must you make that noise?” asked Zena, after we had adjourned from the table. She was sitting on the floor of my bedroom systematically taking one of my dolls apart. As it happened, this one was meant to be taken apart, carefully of course since it was old and worn. The doll was originally Russian and had been in the family since before we’d left Earth. It was wooden and came apart. Inside was a smaller doll which came apart. Altogether there were a total of twelve dolls nested one inside the next. It’s the sort of thing you can spend a lot of time with.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed and playing on the pennywhistle I had discovered a couple of months before. I was playing a very simple little tune, mainly because I couldn’t finger fast enough for anything more complicated. Still, it didn’t sound half bad to me.

I said, “ ‘The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for…’ ” I shut my eyes trying to remember. “ ‘… for treasons, stratagems and something-or-other.’ ”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a quotation. From Shakespeare.”

“If you’re talking about me,” Zena said, “I like music well enough.”

I held up the pennywhistle. “Well, this is music.”

“You ought to practice it in private until you can play it better.”

I bounced up, put the pennywhistle away, then hopped over Zena on the floor to get to the vid. “It’s time for the Assembly anyway.” I turned on the general channel of the vid.

Zena gave a sour look. “Do we have to watch that old thing?”

“Jimmy and I are supposed to,” I said.

“Is that Jimmy Dentremont?”

“Yes.”

“You spend a lot of time with him, don’t you?”

“We’ve got the same tutor and we’re in the same Survival Class,” I said.

“Oh,” Zena said. She began stacking the dolls together. “Do you like him? He always seemed too full of himself to me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He is bright. I guess I can take him or leave him alone.”

I flopped on the floor and leaned my back against the bed. The vid showed the Assembly about ready to be called to order.

“If the Assembly doesn’t turn out to be interesting we can always turn it off,” I said.

We watched the Assembly for the next two hours. It seemed that just about everybody had a firm grasp of the basic questions beforehand. It remained for spokesmen for both sides to state their cases, for questions to be put from the floor, for witnesses to be called, more questions to be put, and a final vote. Daddy, as Chairman, didn’t involve himself in the argument.

Mr. Tubman put the case for the Ship. Another member of the Council, Mr. Persson, made the plea for the other side. Witnesses included the Ship’s Eugenist, a lawyer giving the point of law at stake, Alicia MacReady speaking in her own behalf, and a number of character witnesses who spoke for her.

The Council and witnesses sat at a table at the base of the amphitheatre. Every adult presently aboard Ship had an assigned seat in the circle above and could speak if he so desired. Potentially the Assembly could have dragged on for hours, but it didn’t. This was Daddy’s job. He conducted the Assembly, putting witnesses through their paces briskly, cutting the garrulous off, giving both sides an equal share of time. As Ship’s Chairman, it was his job to be fair and impartial, and as nearly as I could see he was, though I did know in this case what his real opinions were. Mr. Tubman was speaking for him.

In truth, the MacReady side had no case. All they could do was make a plea for leniency. Alicia MacReady cried when it was her turn to speak, until Daddy made her stop.

Mr. Persson said, “Once we all agree that it was a stupid thing to do, what more is there to say? Alicia MacReady is a citizen of this Ship. She survived Trial. She has as much right to live here as anyone else. Granted that she did a foolish thing, it’s a very simple thing to abort the child. You all watched her crawl for you. There isn’t any question of this sort of thing happening again. It was a mistake made in a wild moment and heartily repented of. Can’t we say that this public humiliation is punishment enough and drop the whole matter?”

When Mr. Tubman had his chance to speak, he said, more crisply than I was used to hearing him speak, “If nothing else, there are a few corrections I would like to make. If what Mr. Persson chooses to call ‘this public humiliation’ is a punishment, it is a self-inflicted one — discount it. Miss MacReady’s case could have been settled before the Council. Bringing it before an Assembly was her own choice. Secondly, her so-called repentance. Repentance when you are found out is much too easy — discount it. ‘A mistake made in a wild moment’? Hardly. It took more than a month of deliberate dodging of her APPs for Miss MacReady to become pregnant. That is hardly a single wild moment — discount it. Corrections aside, there is something else. There is a matter of basic principle. We are a tiny precarious island floating in a hostile sea. We have worked out ways of living that observed exactly allow us to survive and go on living. If they are not observed exactly, we cannot survive. Alicia MacReady made a choice. She chose to have a fifth child that the Ship’s Eugenist had not given her permission to have. It was a choice between the Ship and the baby. The choice made, there are certain inevitable consequences of which Alicia MacReady was aware when she made her choice. Would we be fair either to her or ourselves if we didn’t face and help her to face the consequences? We are not barbarians. We don’t propose to kill either Miss MacReady or her unborn child. What we do propose is to give her what she has elected, her baby and not the Ship. I say we should drop her on the nearest Colony planet. And good luck to her.”

Which was a nice way of pronouncing a probable death sentence. But then Mr. Tubman wasn’t wrong — she had asked for it.

Soon after they held the vote. 7,923 people voted to let her stay. 18,401 voted to expel her.

Alicia MacReady fainted, the reaction of an hysteric. Mr. Persson and some of her friends gathered around. The other people began to file out of the great room, the business of the evening behind them.

I got up and switched off the vid. “How would you have voted?” I asked.

“I don’t know that much about things like this,” Zena said looking up. She’d only been half paying attention. “They don’t give her anything, a horse or weapons or a heli-pac or anything, when they put her off on a Colony planet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, isn’t that pretty harsh?”

“It’s like Mr. Tubman said, we’ve got rules that have to be followed. If people don’t follow the rules they can’t stay here. They were doing her a favor by even letting the Assembly vote on the question.”

Zena looked sour and said, “What will your father do if he comes home and finds that you haven’t thrown out the dinner things?”

“Oh, heavens,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

I’m likely to put off little bits of drudgery, even when they wouldn’t take long to settle. I had managed to put the dinner remains completely out of mind.

As I was collecting the dishes and throwing them in the incinerator, Zena, standing by, said, “Why are you so strong on rules?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re so set on the rules that you won’t allow any mistakes at all. And that MacReady woman is going to die now.”

I stopped stacking dishes. I looked at her. “I didn’t even vote. I had nothing to do with what was decided.”

“That isn’t the point,” she said, but she didn’t say what the point was.

Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he had expected them to, and he said yes.

“I cleared up the dishes,” I said.

Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”

At our next meeting I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the way it had.

“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”

9

It may sound like an anachronism to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did: that is, July, August and September were “summer,” as an example. This never struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors responsible for planetary weather, and one day I really thought about the meaning of the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year — well, for that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we do it anyway.

At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. (Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name — he has enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”

He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the original Ship Lists from the library.”

I said, “But don’t you think this is interesting?”

He said, “No.”

Perhaps stupid is not the word I intended. Perhaps contentious.

In any case, the summer when I was twelve passed. I think of it as a busy block with a whole number of items, and I’m not sure in what exact order any of them happened. I could invent an order, but since none of them is central, I won’t. For instance, during that summer, I had my first menstrual period — that’s important insofar as I took it as a sign that I was growing up, but that’s about all you can say for it. Then there were dancing lessons. You might well wonder what we were doing with dancing lessons, but they were actually a part of our Survival Class training.

Mr. Marechal said, “This isn’t meant to be fun and it isn’t meant to be funny. It is deadly serious. You stumble over your own feet. You don’t know what to do with your hands. When you are in a position where you have to do the exact right thing in an instant, deft movement is the most important element. You want your body to work for you, not against you. Not only, by God, am I going to give you dancing lessons, but I’m going to start you on needlepoint.”

We not only got needlepoint, dancing lessons, hand-to-hand combat training, and weapon instruction, but Mr. Marechal was our tutor in all of them. He showed us films of people drawing hand-guns and dropping them, of people falling off horses (I did that a couple of times myself), of people in a blue funk. The films were taken on an obstacle course where, for instance, if you didn’t watch out, the ground might suddenly fall out from underneath your feet. There might be a rope to grab, or you might simply have to land without breaking your ankle. At the end of the summer, when we moved up from Sixth Class to Fifth, we started going through obstacle courses ourselves. The primary aim was not to teach us any individual skill, but how to react smoothly and intelligently in difficult situations. We were shown how to do individual things, but that wasn’t the primary aim of the instruction.

All of this adds up to the fact that I had been wrong in thinking it would be simply businesslike first to last. Survival Class was earnest, it was businesslike, but it was intelligent and interesting, too. What it was not was an adventure, but since I had my desire for an adventure settled very shortly it no longer bothered me that Survival Class was not an adventure.

Survival Class gave me a whole new set of friends, and they began taking up enough of my time that I saw less of people like Zena Andrus. I did see Mary Carpentier once more, but we found that we didn’t have a great deal to say to one another and we never seemed to call each other again.

Most important, though, out of the thirty-one of us in the Survival Class, there drew together a nuclear group of six. This was hardly pure friendship since some of my best friends were not in it and Venie Morlock was. It was just… the group. We drew together originally through a non-adventure. At Jimmy’s urging, I took a group of kids up to the Sixth Level and we spent the day exploring. The six of us who went were me and Venie and Jimmy, Helen Pak, Riggy Allen and Attila Szabody. Attila and Helen, and, I guess, Jimmy were my particular friends. Riggy was a good friend of Attila’s, and Helen and Riggy both saw something in Venie. That was the way the group hung together, and the trip to the Sixth Level — I guess it was something of an adventure for some of the others and it was fun for me — provided another bond. We usually saw each other for an hour or two after each Survival Class and sometimes on weekends. There were a few others who joined us from time to time, but they were just comers-and-goers.

After Survival Class one day, five of us were sitting in the snackery of the Common Room of Lev Quad on the Fifth Level. By shuttle this wasn’t really far from Entry Gate 5, and it was the most convenient central point for all of us. A few changes on the shuttle and we were all home. We didn’t know anybody in Lev Quad and we couldn’t have found our way around it very well, but still we had our place here, our regular corner, and after a little while we no longer felt so much like intruders.

The missing number was Jimmy. He’d been hurrying off one place and another during the past week after class, mumbling and chuckling around as though he had his little business and would be damned if he’d tell it, and in the meantime was enjoying it thoroughly.

I was doodling on a piece of paper, working out an idea I had in mind. We were sitting at the table with food and drink, but not a lot of it. We were mostly taking up table space and talking. Our regular table was this one, a red-topped affair set in a corner on the left in the under-fourteen area.

We were talking of a prospective soccer game to be played on Saturday morning in Attila’s home quad, Roth Quad on the Fourth Level, if we could raise the necessary players. I was thinking that I’d certainly come a long way from the time — not that long ago — when all that it took to page me was a simple call on my homequad speaker system. I was no longer quite the stick-at-home I’d been then.

“Will Jimmy play?” Attila asked. He was the biggest amongst us, but a quiet boy for all that. He generally didn’t say a lot, but would just sit back and then from time to time come out with some comment that was completely surprising, and all the more surprising because he wasn’t the person you’d pick as likely to say anything bright or clever or knowledgeable.

“Mia can ask him,” Helen said.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll have him call you. Unless he’s too busy with this whatever-it-is of his, I think he’ll want to play. He’s a good halfback.” I turned my attention back to my scribble.

“What is that you’re doing there?” Riggy asked, and snatched it away. Riggy is somebody I have to describe as a meatball — he was hardly my favorite person in the world. He’s one of those people who have no governor, who’ll do the first thing that pops into their heads whether or not it makes a lick of sense — and then, if necessary, be heartily sorry afterwards. He wasn’t stupid, or clumsy, or incompetent — he simply had no sense of proportion at all.

“And what’s that supposed to be?” he asked, pointing at the paper. Venie and Helen on his side of the table both looked at it, too.

After several tries, I had drawn what was reasonably recognizable as a fist seen palm on, holding a long, clean arrow. I’m no artist and I’d had to keep sneaking looks at my own hand to get even a moderately accurate picture. The arrow I’d managed to draw without benefit of a model.

I made a grab for it, but Riggy held it out of reach. “Uh-uh,” he said, passing it on to Venie farther down the table. She looked at it with a frown, making sure at the same time that I wasn’t able to grab it back.

I shrugged and said, “It’s a picture with a meaning, if you must know. It’s sort of a pictorial pun.”

“A rebus?” Attila suggested.

“I guess it is.”

“Let me see it,” he said, and took it from Venie.

“I don’t get it,” Venie said. “An arrow held in a hand.”

“A fist,” Riggy said. “The hand’s closed.”

Tiredly I said, “It’s my name. ‘Have arrow’ — Havero.”

“Oh, no,” Venie said. “That’s pretty poor.”

Helen said, “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think it’s a pretty clever idea.”

“‘An ill-favoured thing, but mine own,’” I quoted tartly.

Venie gave me a disgusted look. “You are a show-off, aren’t you? What was that supposed to be?”

“Mia’s reading Shakespeare for her tutor,” Helen said. “That’s all. She’s been memorizing lines.”

Riggy took the doodle back and gave it another look. “You know, this is a good idea. I wonder if I could work my name out somehow.”

We spent some time trying, working on all our names. It didn’t come out terribly well. By stretching we got “pack,” a little knapsack for Helen — but that wasn’t truly homonymous. “Szabody” and “Allen” were pretty well unworkable.

“I’ve got one,” Riggy said, after some moments of concentration during which he wouldn’t show anybody what he was doing. Triumphantly he held up a sheet with a series of locks drawn on it. “ ‘More-lock,’ ” he said. “Get it?”

We got it, but we didn’t like it. He had covered the whole sheet with his drawings, which is hardly what you’d call concise.

I’d been working on the same name myself. I came up with a fair-to-middling troglodyte.

“What’s that?” Attila asked.

“It’s Morlock again.”

Venie didn’t look pleased, and Riggy immediately challenged, “How do you get Morlock out of that thing?”

“It’s from an old novel called The Time Machine. There’s a group of underground monsters in it called Morlocks.”

“You’re making that up,” Venie said.

“I’m not either,” I said. “You can look the book up for yourself. I read it when I was in Alfing, so all you have to do is call for the facsimile.”

Venie looked at the drawing again. Then she said, “All right, I’ll look it up. I may even use it.”

I almost liked her for saying that, since I hadn’t been very kind in bringing the subject up. If my name had been Morlock, I might have used the troglodyte idea myself, but I hadn’t really expected Venie to stomach the idea. It took more… not quite objectivity — but detachment from herself — than I thought she had.

Just then Attila said, “Here comes Jim.”

Jimmy Dentremont came between the tables, snaked up a free chair from the next table over and plunked it down beside me.

“Hi,” he said.

“Where have you been?” Helen asked for all of us. Helen is a very striking girl. She has blonde hair and oriental eyes — eyes with an epicanthic fold — and it’s a wild combination.

Jimmy just shrugged and pointed at our various little doodles. “What’s all this?”

We explained it to him.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s easy. I can get one for me with no trouble.” He picked up a pencil and sketched two mountains, and then put a little stick figure man between them.

I looked blankly at him and so did the others.

“My name means ‘between mountains,’ ” he explained.

“It does?” Riggy asked.

“In French.”

“I didn’t know you knew French,” I said.

“I don’t. I just looked my name up because I knew it was originally French.”

“How about that?” Attila said. “I wonder if my name means something in Hungarian.”

Jimmy cleared his throat, looked around at us, and then said to me, “Mia, do you remember our bet about my finding an adventure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve found one. That’s what I’ve been working on the past few days.”

Helen immediately asked for an explanation of what we were talking about, and I had to wait to ask Jimmy just what it was that I was in for until he had finished explaining.

“If this was a bet, what were the stakes involved?” Riggy asked.

Jimmy looked at me questioningly. Then he said, “I don’t think we settled that. I assumed it was that if I found an adventure, Mia would have to go along.”

Everybody looked at me, and I said, “All right. I guess so.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “This is it: we’re going to go outside the Ship. On the outside of the Ship.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Helen asked.

“It’s an adventure,” Jimmy said. “Adventures are supposed to have an element of danger, be fraught with peril and all that.”

“Is it dangerous outside the Ship?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t know what it’s like out there. I couldn’t find out. I did try. Finding out should be part of the fun. Besides, even if that’s easy, there are some hard parts. We’ve got to have suits to go outside, and we’ve got to get ourselves outside. Neither of those will be easy.”

“I want to go, too,” Riggy said.

Jimmy shook his head. “This is just Mia and me. We are going to need help, though, and if you want to help us you’re welcome.”

The kids looked at each other around the table, and then they all nodded. We were a group, after all, and this was just too good to miss.

The six of us walked in a body through a corridor on the First Level. Jimmy walked a step or two ahead of us, leading the way. There is something to being a part of a group busy on purposes of its own, something exciting. Even if it is melodramatic, even if it is 90 % hokum, it is fun. I was enjoying myself, and so were the others. I could hardly restrain myself from practicing surreptitious glances behind us, simply because they seemed in keeping with the part we were playing.

Jimmy turned half around and pointed ahead and to the left. “It’s around here.”

There was a little foyer there a couple of feet deep, and then a blank black door, completely featureless. In our world that is unusual — people ordinarily lavish considerable care in making their surroundings lively and personal. Consequently the Ship is quite a colorful place to live in. A black door like this with neither design nor decoration was obviously meant to say “Stay Out” to anybody who came by.

“The air lock to the outside is in the room behind the door there,” Jimmy said.

The door had no obvious button, knob, slide, latch or handle, only a single hole for an electronic key — this sort of key when inserted would emit an irregular signal of an established frequency and the door would open.

Attila and Jimmy were the two of us that knew something about electronics and they looked the door over carefully together.

After a moment Attila said, “It’s just a token lock.”

“What’s that?” I asked. We were standing in a halfcircle around the two boys and the door.

He said, “This lock is just to keep the door closed and to let people know the door is supposed to be closed, and that’s about all. I’ll have to work on it a couple of times and I can get through.”

Jimmy said, “Can you be through by next Saturday — a week from tomorrow?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Let’s plan to go then. Helen? You work with Attila. You be his lookout and make sure he doesn’t get caught fooling around here and ruin everything.”

Then he turned to the other three of us. “All right, let’s go see about getting the suits.”

Helen said, “But can’t I go? I don’t want to miss out.”

It was interesting — of the six of us, Jimmy was the next-to-smallest and yet he dominated the group when he wanted to. There is something to the idea of natural leadership ability.

Jimmy said, “We have to have somebody be lookout. Besides, you’ll be here when we go outside. The only thing you’re going to miss is swiping the suits.”

To get to Salvage, our next stop, we cut through Engineers. That saved us a long trip around. The four of us must have made considerable noise because as we were passing down the main hall of offices, an elderly woman popped out of one of them behind us.

“Hold on there!” she said.

We turned around. She was elderly — short, squarelybuilt, white-haired and obviously well over a hundred, perhaps even as old as Mr. Mbele. She also looked thoroughly sour.

“Well, what is it you’re doing here, making all this noise? Perhaps you don’t realize it, but there is important work being done here.”

Uneasily Jimmy said that we were just passing through on our way to Salvage and that we meant no harm.

“This is not a public highway,” she said. “If you have no business in Engineers, you shouldn’t be here. You children have no sense of fitness. Why are you going to Salvage?”

Jimmy and I were standing just behind Venie and Riggy, and her question was addressed to Jimmy.

“It’s a school assignment,” Jimmy said.

“That’s right,” I chimed in.

Her glance shifted to the other two of us. “What about you?”

Instead of saying the obvious thing, Riggy said, “We’re with them.”

“All right,” the old lady snapped. “You first two go on, but don’t come through here again. The other two of you go on home.”

Venie and Riggy looked helplessly at us, but then they turned and went reluctantly the other way. The old lady really had no right to chase them out, but she was so fierce and unarguable-with that we just couldn’t say a thing. Jimmy and I scooted on our way before she could add anything more, and she watched until both sets of us had definitely done as she said. Some people get a feeling of power from being unpleasant.

Most of all, Salvage smelled interesting. Salvage and Repair are really little enclaves almost surrounded by the much larger Engineers. There are offices and large machines and large projects a-building in Engineers. Salvage and Repair are just the tail end of the dog, without the personnel, resources or neatness of Engineers. Salvage was a crowded room, full of aisles and racks and benches and tables all in a pleasing state of disarray. It looked like the sort of place that you could poke around in for weeks or even months and always turn up something new and interesting. And hanging over it all was the most intriguing and unidentifiable odor I’d come upon. The smell alone was enough to make you want to spend your spare time here.

We peeked cautiously in. There were a couple of technicians working and moving around.

“Come on,” Jimmy said. “I know they have suits here somewhere, probably locked away. We’ll have to poke around.”

We looked around as inconspicuously as possible, Jimmy taking one aisle and me taking the next. I was lost in a pile of broken toys when Jimmy grabbed at my elbow. I jumped.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve found them. They’re two rows over and they’re not locked away or anything. They’re just in a rack.”

“How do you know they’re safe to use?” I said. I nudged a broken doll with my toe. “If they’re like that, we might as well forget it.”

“These aren’t in for repair,” Jimmy said. “These are the ones they’d use themselves if they had to go outside. They’ve got seals on from after the last time they were used. The important thing is how we’re going to sneak them out. Oh-oh, watch out.”

I turned to look. Just down the aisle a pleasant looking technician was coming toward us. He was a short youngish man with mouse-colored hair.

“Well, what can I do for you kids?” he asked.

“I’m Mia Havero,” I said. “This is Jimmy Dentremont.”

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Mitchell.” And waited with eyebrows raised.

I reached into my pocket and took out a couple of folded sheets of paper. Uncertainly I said, “I don’t know if you can help us. Maybe this isn’t the right place.”

Jimmy stayed silent, watching my lead.

Mr. Mitchell said, “Well, we’ll see. What is it that you’ve got?”

I showed him the sketches, Jimmy’s and mine, that I’d taken from the table in Lev Quad, and explained how our names were involved.

“These are just rough,” I said. “What we wanted to do was draw them a little better and then work up pins to wear with these as designs.”

“Hmm,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Yes. I don’t see why not. It may not fall strictly in our province, but it seems a worthwhile idea. I think I can help you. How does ceramic jewelry sound?”

“Great,” Jimmy said. “Could we come down on a Saturday morning?”

Mr. Mitchell said, “There’s usually only one technician on duty on Saturdays, but I suppose…

I said, “Could we make it a week from tomorrow? We have this big soccer game in the quad tomorrow and we really ought to be there.”

“Oh, sure,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’ll even arrange to nave the duty a week from tomorrow and help you myself.”

After we had thanked him and walked away, Jimmy said, “You certainly can lie. How did you think that one up?

“Which?”

“About the soccer game.”

“I didn’t make that up,” I said. “I was supposed to tell you. The kids want to play soccer tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said. “Maybe you aren’t such a good liar, then.”

10

The score in the soccer game in Roth Quad was 5 to 3. Attila and Venie and I were on the losing side.

During the next week we set our plans. With some practice, Attila had that door so well trained that it would practically pop open when he told it to, at least according to Helen. Att looked pleased and didn’t deny it. We had borrowing the suits set up pretty well, too. Jimmy sketched the location of the suits for Venie and Riggy.

“There’ll be just one technician working on Saturday,” Jimmy said, “and he’ll be busy helping Mia and me. All you two have to do is sneak easy. As soon as we can, we’ll join you in the air lock room.”

I had some spare time and Jimmy didn’t, so I took Venie and Riggy down to Salvage for a quick scout around. Mr. Mitchell was in the back, but I made sure we didn’t attract his attention. We were in, I pointed to the suits, and we were out again in no more than twenty seconds. On our way back, though, the same old woman stopped us in Engineers and lectured us again. She had her desk placed so that she could see everybody who passed in the hall — and, I guess, come out to exterminate anyone who she thought had no business being there. Her name, displayed on her desk, was Keithley. She more than awed me. She scared me. As soon as she turned away, we three scooted.

“You’d better not come this way when you have the suits,” I said. “Think what would happen if she caught you.”

Riggy paled and shook his head.

“She shouldn’t have stopped us,” Venie said. “We weren’t making any noise this time.” She agreed to make a detour when they had the suits, however.

Things aren’t always fair, I guess.

Actually, the old lady wasn’t the only thing I was afraid of. I didn’t really like the idea of going outside the Ship, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it. The Ship goes faster than the speed of light (the old Einstein barrier) by becoming discontinuous (the Kaufmann-Chambers Discontinuity Equations). 1 know the thought of standing on the outside of the Ship and looking at the inside of nothing excited Jimmy, but it did not excite me. It seems to be my nature to have second thoughts, and they came to me all through the week. Since it was far too late to back out without looking foolish, I didn’t tell any of the others, but I began to regret ever having mentioned the word adventure.

Perhaps the answer is that if you’re going to do something impulsive, you should do it the way Riggy does. Act while the impulse is clear and fresh and don’t allow any time for second thought.

“Who won that soccer game of yours?” Mr. Mitchell said as he led the way through the maze of unrepaired, half-repaired, and repaired whatnot in Salvage.

“Jimmy’s side did,” I said. “Mine lost. We really appreciate your helping us like this.”

“Oh, it’s nothing at all,” he said. “Here we are. This is the kiln where we bake the finished pieces. Copper — that’s for the base. Then an enamel and a surface painting on that. We can try it a couple of times until it comes out right.”

He pointed at each item and, in fact, seemed more than pleased to help us. I think part of it was the chance to help out eager kiddies, partly he liked me because I was a cute little girl, and part was the sheer joy of operating the bake oven and making the jewelry. The pins were just an excuse for me, though I did find the idea of making them intriguing and the process interesting. I am not a tinkerer, however. Jimmy and Mr. Mitchell both were. They belonged to the let’s-putter-around-and-see-what-happens school and they got on very well together.

We started by picking the copper backing, refining our sketches, and planning the colors we wanted to use. Gradually, I became relegated to the position of observer while Jimmy took over the planning and execution of the jewelry with Mr. Mitchell serving as over-hisshoulder adviser. That was after the first try, particularly mine, turned out badly.

The first I ever saw Jimmy Dentremont he was tinkering, or if he wasn’t at least that’s the way I remember it. He was good at it, too, and that combined with enthusiasm, mild mental myopia, and desire to dominate sometimes carried him away. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten elbowed to the side by him. I didn’t care for it particularly, either. It was one of the things that made me wonder, our necessary association aside, if I really liked Jimmy.

It wasn’t really an important enough thing to get more than slightly irritated about today, since we had larger goals in mind, but I did resent mildly being put in a position where I had to work just to see enough over Jimmy’s other shoulder to know what was going on. But, at least, having been put in the role of an observer, I did make an effort to observe and I saw more than either Jimmy or Mr. Mitchell.

When our second tries were in the oven, I poked Jimmy and said, “Mr. Mitchell, it’s about lunch time.”

“Hmm?” Jimmy said, turning his attention from the oven to me. It was actually something on the early side for lunch, as Jimmy was perceptive enough to be aware. In his concentration on the job of the moment, our larger purposes had escaped him. I gave him another prod to restore his memory.

I said, “We can go and eat and then come back to see how the pins turned out.”

Jimmy had the good sense to nod.

Mr. Mitchell seemed a little bewildered, mostly I think because he and Jimmy had been in rapport, working together to do the job, and now, all of a sudden, Jimmy was just dropping things and dashing off. But he said, “Oh. All right. Sure.”

When we were in the hall on beyond, Jimmy said, “What I said last week about lies — I was wrong. Boy, did that sound weak: ‘Have to go to lunch.’ ”

“Well, I didn’t notice you thinking up anything better,” I said, quite tartly. I was walking determinedly enough that before Jimmy saw how fast I was going, I was a good bit ahead and he had to push to catch up. It’s my I-mean-business-and-I’m-more-than-just-an-ounce-irked pace.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jimmy asked. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Well, what is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. Then, “They got the suits about half an hour ago. Venie waved at me. You two had your heads down over the table.”

“I hope they got the smallest there were,” Jimmy said.

Suddenly, I put my hand on his elbow and stopped. “Hold on there. We’d better go back and go around.” I gestured at the hail ahead. “I don’t want to get bawled out by that old witch again.”

Jimmy looked at me with an impish expression. It’s the sort of expression his face, topped by red hair and set between prominent ears, is really fitted for.

“Let’s take a chance,” he said. “Let’s just run for it, and if she comes out we won’t stop at all.”

Maybe it was my moment to be impulsive. The hall stretched before us like a gauntlet. The door to old Mrs. Keithley’s office was open and we were far enough out of her line of sight to allow us a running start. We had to go about thirty yards beyond it, turn a corner left, and then we’d be out of sight and out of practical reach.

“All right,” I said. Feeling like little blonde-haired Susy Dangerfield running between the lines of hostile Iroquois braves, I took off. Jimmy was right with me, on my left, and we pounded along. As we passed the old lady’s office, I shot a glance right, but didn’t see her.

Jimmy out-accelerated me, and as we made for the corner, he was a step or two ahead.

“Hey, slow down,” I said. “She isn’t even there.”

He turned his head to look back as he reached the corner, and still moving at considerable speed crashed blindly into someone. Jimmy bounced off and into the wall, but didn’t fall down. I skidded to a stop at the corner and looked down. It was Mrs. Keithley, white hair and all, sitting flat on her bottom with an expression of affronted dignity on her face. She looked up at me.

“Hello,” I said. “Nice day, isn’t it?” I stepped over her and walked at a very sedate pace down the hail.

Jimmy was stunned momentarily, but then he made the best of things. “It was nice to see you again,” he said politely to the dear old lady, and then walked after me. I shot a glance back at her and then Jimmy caught up with me and we both broke into a run and left her looking speechlessly after us.

When we were out of breath and out of sight, we stopped running and flung ourselves down panting on a flight of stairs. Then we started laughing, partly because it seemed terribly funny and partly from sheer relief.

When I’d caught my breath and stopped laughing, I looked soberly at Jimmy and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take the long way around from now on.”

“That’s a pretty obvious thing to say,” Jimmy said.

“Well, I’m not a very brave person.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you. I’m going to be careful, too.”

When we got to the lock room, Helen was waiting in the hallway. All of us looked in both directions, and then Helen stepped up to the black door and gave a knock that was recognizably a signal and not a casual rapping by some passerby with an unaccountable desire to tap on black doors. The door swung open immediately and we all piled inside. Att, standing behind the door, gave us just time enough to get completely in and then shut the door behind us.

The room was green-colored, small and bare. The lock door was directly opposite the door we’d come in. The suits had been hung on racks that apparently were designed to hold them.

Jimmy looked around in satisfaction. “Ah,” he said. “Very, very good. Let’s get the suits on, Mia.”

I looked around at Venie and Helen and Att and said, “Where’s Riggy?”

Att said, “I couldn’t talk him out of it. He brought along an extra suit. You know how he wanted to go outside, too. Well, he went.”

Looking very unhappy, Jimmy said, “Well, couldn’t you stop him, Venie? You could have kept him from taking an extra suit.”

Venie said defensively, “If you only wanted one suit between the two of you, I could have made him leave one behind. He said he had as much right to go out as you two did.”

Att said, “You know how mad he can get. We told him it wasn’t a good idea but he wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Oh, well,” I said.

Helen said, “He’s going to ‘surprise’ you.”

“I guess so,” Jimmy said, somewhat sourly. “Well, let’s go ahead with what’s left of this adventure.”

He was obviously quite disgruntled, but trying not to let it show. Or, perhaps, trying to let it show just enough so that he could be a good sport about it all. I’ve not been above that one myself.

We put on the suits. They were about as similar to the old-time pressure suits described in the novels I liked to read as the Ship is to that silly sailboat I once got so sick in. (In passing, I want to say that it used to strike me as odd the way nobody in the Ship wrote novels at all; nobody had for years and years and years, so that what I read dated from before the Population Wars. Right now I’m not even sure why I liked to read them. Most of them weren’t very good by any objective standard. Escapism, maybe…) Anyway, our suits were an adaptation of the basic discontinuity principle that the Ship used, too. To be analogous (and thereby inaccurate), remember that old saw about reaching inside a cat, grabbing it by the tail, and turning it inside out? The discontinuity effect, as far as the Ship is concerned, grabs the universe by the tail and turns it inside out so as to get at it better. Strictly a local effect, but in the process getting from here to there becomes a relatively simple matter instead of an intensely difficult one. The discontinuity effect doesn’t work the same way in the suits — they are more of a self-contained little universe of their own. They were originally invented, my reading tells me, to fight battles in — part of a continuing effort to render individual soldiers invulnerable — and hence were light in weight, carried their own air, heat, air-conditioning, light, etc., plus being proof against just about everything from concentrated light beams to projectiles to any of the unpleasant battery of gases that had been invented. Turned out, of course, that the suits were far more useful for constructive purposes (building the Ships) than they had ever been in wartime. Militarily, of course, they were a bust — everybody on Old Earth who fought in one was long dead — but in their peaceful adaptations they were still useful and still in use, as witness.

Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the air lock with air.

As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”

Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the air lock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.

As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button-pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”

I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”

Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were on the First Level, which was “down” as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal orientation, we had to go further “down” to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder, which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.

“Go ahead,” he said.

I grabbed the ladder and began to climb down. Then I remembered — two other ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was. Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of the Ship cut out and normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took over. “Down” in the ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing from one to the other. So now I was pointed head down, but my feet were outside the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around. Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and pinpoints of a black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie, washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm real world I was used to, but effectively in another dimension.

Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck up out of the hole beside me as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.

Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon. On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign — the joke, I suspect, of somebody long dead — that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some combination.

We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”

Beyond the pylon, in the distance, were a long row of giant tubes projecting above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Shin’s surface the distance to the horizon was not great.

“Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout bay.”

“Yes, I guess,” Jimmy said.

The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.

“I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well yourself.”

“It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”

Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.

“Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”

“What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”

There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy was hiding it would be no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.

Then our questions were answered for us.

Jimmy said, “What was that?”

“What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time — a horrible retching sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.

“Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.

“I don’t see him,” I said.

Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance, perhaps forty feet or more and then down. He landed lightly. But then he said, “I couldn’t see him at all. I couldn’t see a thing. Mia, go out about one hundred or a hundred and fifty feet toward the middle one of those big tubes and look for Riggy. I’ll go in the other direction. We’ll both make a half-circle clockwise.”

I stumbled away over the rocks toward the scout bay tubes, bouncing unevenly, slipping a couple of times, and not helped at all by the sound of Riggy and his vomiturition. I wanted to turn him off, but I didn’t because then I couldn’t hear Jimmy. When I was about the right distance from the pylon, I started making my half-circle.

Then Jimmy said, “Are you ready, Mia?”

“I’ve already started,” I said.

“Riggy,” Jimmy said. “If you don’t want to be left out here, you’d better get to your feet and do your best to be found.”

What I wanted most was to shut my eyes against the silver, just sit down and try to ease my spinning head (my eyes were beginning to ache and my ears to ring) and concentrate on quelling the nausea I felt. It reminded me of my sailing experience, but this was much worse. It was all I could do to keep walking and my feet were not going where I wanted them to. I didn’t go exactly in a half-circle, either. I tried to check on my position, to look for Riggy, and just to keep going, and I wasn’t doing very well at any of them. I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a puddled heap and puke. It would probably destroy the concept of heroics for all time.

As light as the gravity was here, I had some trouble with my traction. In jumping from one rock to another, my foot slipped, my feet tangled, and then there wasn’t a rock where I thought there was, and I took a header. Under normal gravity and without the protection of a suit, I would probably have been pretty badly hurt. As it was, I just fell. Unless you did some quiet practice first, without the distraction of this unsettling dizziness, I doubted the tremendous bounds that would be possible out here would be worth making. I lay there, fetched up against a rock that resembled nothing so much as a particularly hideous sculpture my mother once made — a distorted bust of old Lemuel Carpentier himself. The only thing that was in proper proportion was his nose, and that was his worst feature. He hadn’t been pleased. Lying still, my head didn’t clear, so I forced myself to stand up again.

Then I saw Riggy. He was on his knees, if not on his feet. He was hidden completely from the pylon by a tent-like conglomeration of rocks which had pitched together to form a sheltered area. He was still retching.

I said to Jimmy, “I’ve found him.” Then, because it didn’t matter anymore and I wanted to save my stomach if I could, I shut off my receive line.

I hardly looked at Riggy. I didn’t want to. I got him on his feet and then found that if I was careful about where I put my own feet as I walked, I could carry him. I kept my mind on reaching the pylon and then Jimmy was beside us and helping me.

We set Riggy down by the lock and Jimmy pushed the lock controls on the pylon so that we could make our way inside.

I said, “Go on through. I’ll push him inside to you.”

Jimmy went ahead. He went head first down the hole and then was gone. I waited a minute and then I fed Riggy down the hole, too. I held him by the ankles. For a moment there was a feeling exactly like that feeling of invisible force when you push the similar poles of two magnets together and Riggy was neither here nor there, but then Jimmy had him and pulled him through. I went through after.

When we were in the lock, Jimmy fed the air in. When the air was all in, the door to the lock room opened. By that time I had the headpiece of my suit off. Just in time, too. When the door opened, I took two steps forward and then threw up. It was, in a way, a considerable relief.

Jimmy and I had been outside for twenty minutes, Riggy for forty. We recovered our equilibrium in a bare few minutes, but Riggy could do nothing but sit and look miserable and hold his head.

When I threw up, Venie looked down at it and then up at me. “You’re going to have to clean that up,” she said. “I’m not.” Apparently she felt she’d had enough of the dirty work on this little adventure. I didn’t really blame her. I didn’t have the strength. All I did was just sit down and close my eyes and give blessings that I was back in the real world again, even including Venie.

Jimmy and Riggy and I just sat around and the other three threw questions at us. Jimmy told them how it was.

Riggy said weakly, “If anybody wants to go, I’ll give them this suit.”

“It’s hardly in shape for anybody to wear,” Helen said, and that was true. For all that he had stopped being racked by heaves, Riggy and the inside of his suit were in impossible shape.

Jimmy said, “We’d best get these things cleaned up and returned.”

We got Riggy out of his suit and Venie was delegated to see that he got home. Helen and Att took Riggy’s suit off to clean it up, and Jimmy and I cleaned up the lock room. I don’t know how Jimmy was able to keep his stomach from first to last, but he did. His iron constitution, I guess.

When everything was cleaned up, we left Att and Helen to close the lock room and go home. I had never realized before that adventures took so much doing, so much preparation and so much cleaning up afterward. That’s something you don’t see in stories. Who buys the food and cooks it, washes the dishes, minds the baby, rubs down the horses, swabs out the guns, buries the bodies, mends the clothes, ties that rope in place so the hero can conveniently find it there to swing from, blows fanfares, polishes medals, and dies beautifully, all so that the hero can be a hero? Who finances him? I’m not saying I don’t believe in heroes — I’m just saying that they are either parasites or they spend the bulk of their time in making their little adventures possible, not in enjoying them.

Cleaning up after ourselves coupled with the lefthanded direction everything had gone took the sparkle out of us. Jimmy and I just tossed the suits over our arms and said goodbye to Helen and Att and went off toward Salvage. Things had gone so unswimmingly that I suppose I should have expected that they would continue that way. On our way, we ran into George Fuhonin. It was again a case of coming around a corner and not being able to avoid someone, though in this case we didn’t stumble over him. We simply turned the corner and found him close enough that we couldn’t ditch the suits or manage to go unseen.

“Hi, Mia,” he said from down the hall.

“Hello,” I said. “What are you doing down here?”

Jimmy looked up at the giant so uncertainly that I said, “It’s George Fuhonin. He pilots a scoutship — for my dad sometimes,” in an undertone.

“Oh,” Jimmy said.

“I was looking for you, I think,” George said as he came up. “I’m on constable call today and I had a complaint from a Mrs. Keithley in Engineers about two young cubs, a red-headed boy with ears that stick out — and I take it that’s you” — pointing at Jimmy — “and a black-haired little girl with bad manners. I’m not even making a guess as to who that is,” he said, looking meaningfully at me. “So perhaps we’d better go where we can talk, and while you’re about it, you might explain what you’re doing with those suits.”

“We were returning them,” I said.

George looked at us quizzically.

The aftermath I don’t care to go into detail about. Mr. Mitchell was quite genuinely hurt to think he had been used. I could tell that he was hurt when he handed each of us our pins, both of which turned out very nicely indeed.

That was at a meeting in Daddy’s office with Daddy, Mr. Mitchell, Miss Brancusik who was Jimmy’s dorm mother, and Mr. Mbele. They sat on one side of the room and Jimmy and I sat on the other. Mrs. Keithley wasn’t there, thank Heaven. The meeting was uncomfortable enough without her, too.

She entered the meeting — we were told to avoid her strictly from now on. I could see that Mr. Mitchell had been hurt, but I didn’t really understand why. It was spelled out for us. I had been looking at it from my point of view, that he was in our way and might have stopped us if we had just tried to ask for the suits. I hadn’t seen things from his angle at all. That we had used him the way you use a handkerchief. I’ve always thought more in terms of things than of people, and I’m sometimes slow to put myself in somebody else’s shoes. When I did, I wasn’t happy about what I’d done — which I think was Daddy’s intention.

They didn’t question us about who used the third suit, but they did point out how stupid and dangerous it had been for us to go outside.

“I suppose I ought to be pleased by your initiative,” Daddy said, “but what I think about is the permanent damage to your sense of balance that might well have resulted if you two hadn’t come back inside in time. You might never have been able to move again without suffering vertigo.”

The thought alone was enough to make me queasy.

Daddy finished by settling a punishment of not being able to go anywhere for a month. For a month, after class with Mr. Mbele or Survival Class, I had to come straight home and stay there. Miss Brancusik then and there meted out the same restriction to Jimmy.

In some ways, that was the hardest month I ever spent, cooped up in the apartment and not able to go anywhere. Sitting at home when other people were free to come and go, free to play soccer, to go folk dancing at night, or to sit around the Common Room while Jimmy and I had to go check in. In other ways, it wasn’t entirely a loss. For one thing, it gave me time to think about my character deficiencies. I didn’t think of them in exactly those terms, but I did determine not to be any more stupid than was absolutely necessary, which is much the same thing. Also, since we were both stuck in our own homes, Jimmy and I did quite a lot of talking and I got to know him better.

The first thing we did when our month was over was to go to Salvage, detouring around Mrs. Keithley, and apologize to Mr. Mitchell. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I never wore my pin until I was back on good terms with him. Then it was all right.

11

We received our automatic promotions from Sixth Class to Fifth in the fall when First Class went off on Trial and another group of younger kids began training. Through the fall, as we approached the end of our first six months of training, we one-by-one turned thirteen. Not only was I the smallest one in the class — not that I minded, since being cute little black-haired Mia Havero never hurt anything — but my birthday was last. It came, as always, on Saturday, November 29. One of the advantages of a permanent calendar is that it gives you something to count on.

On my birthday, Mother made a special trip to see us — well, she spent the day with Daddy. She presented me with one of her sculptures and I thanked her politely. She didn’t like being thanked, for some reason — and I assure you that I was nice — and left the room.

Daddy, who isn’t always as single-minded or as busy as you might think, had done something that I would never have thought of. He’d called the library and they made a search of all their recordings and sent him a fair copy of no less than five pennywhistle records. I once, believe it or not, went through a stage of thinking the Andrew Johnson books were all mine and nobody else knew about them, and it was something of a shock to learn that they did. The pennywhistle records that Daddy gave me didn’t produce quite the same feeling of losing something private, but I would never have dreamed that anyone would ever have recorded pennywhistle music. I thanked Daddy and kissed his cheek. I had never been able to be demonstrative when I was younger, but since we had moved to Geo Quad somehow it came easier, like a lot of things.

The biggest surprise of my birthday was Jimmy D. He asked me to go to the theatre with him. I think he was a little frightened when he did and that surprised me. I’d always thought that he saw me as, at best, a brother-in-arms, and not as a girl at all.

The play was put on in the amphitheatre where they hold Ship’s Assembly and we actually went to it instead of watching it on the vid. It was Richard B. Sheridan’s School for Scandal and except that I got a little sweaty in the palms of my hands, something that had never happened at home and that I can only attribute to my being excited, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

I was excited all evening, too. When we got home, Jimmy took my hand and touched the palm with his finger.

“Your hand is sweaty,” he said.

I looked up at him and I nodded.

He said, “So is mine,” and he showed me, and it was.

Jimmy kissed me then. In spite of what they say, I was a little surprised. I had no idea that he wanted to, though I’d been hoping he would. It shows you what secret passions you can arouse. It was the first time anybody had ever kissed me like that and it made my heart pound and my hands sweat even more. Whatever I’ve forgotten, I’ve remembered that birthday.

It was almost as though Jimmy and I had invested something of ourselves because after that we had an unspoken understanding. Instead of carping at each other all the time, we only fought when we were mad. You can’t squabble in public with somebody you sometimes kiss privately, or at least I found I couldn’t. Of course I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t want them to think I was changing.

Since I was now thirteen, Trial was less than a year away, but somehow I wasn’t quite as awed by the thought as I once had been. It no longer seemed as deadly a thing as it once had — though I did know that far from everyone returned. Survival Class gave me an amazing amount of confidence. For one thing, it made what we had to face more of a known quantity, and the unknown, unnameable, might-be-anything is always more frightening than the known. Trial was beginning to look more and more like thirty days amongst the Mudeaters — soonest begun, soonest done — and not much more, though there were some moments when I was surer of this than others. The moments when I wasn’t quite so sure that Trial would be a waltz usually came after one of the afternoons we spent watching various white-fanged this-and-thats come charging efficiently across the projection screen to slice down some galumping creature three times their size, wham! But Survival Class also taught us to deal with completely strange things. Many didn’t seem to have very much to do with Trial, either. Dancing, needlepoint, parachuting. The thing is that once you’ve discovered that you can do a lot of strange and demanding things, and sometimes even do them well, then coping with the unknown doesn’t seem quite as hard. When they ask you to raise a log cabin, you don’t object that you never expect the opportunity to come up during Trial. You do it. You learn that you can do it. And you even learn one or two things that might come in handy.

In December, forty-two kids who were exactly a year older than we were, were scattered across the Western Hemisphere of New Dalmatia. They were dropped one at a time with horses and packs and no clear idea of where they were or what planet they were on, then got waved goodbye to. Also in December, about one week later, thirty-one of us kids went on a three-day field trip with Mr. Marechal and an assistant named Pizarro, also to New Dalmatia. The differences, of course, were that we knew where we were going, what we would find there, how long we were going to stay, and a few other nonessentials like that.

Four horses were taken, large draft animals. All of us kids came down to the scout bay with good shoes on our feet, heavy clothing, and back packs. We’d been issued these when we started Survival Class. I’d outgrown my shoes, however, and been issued new pairs, and I was almost ready to ask for a larger set of clothes. As we went on board, I saw Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal counting us off. They weren’t too obvious about it because there was that set idea of the voluntary nature of Survival Class and they make a point of not checking up. Still, they wanted to know how many they were taking — somebody would be bound to say something if they came back a half-dozen short.

Mr. Pizarro was our pilot. When everybody was aboard — everybody meaning all thirty-one of us, nobody missing; I happen to know that Robert Briney got out of bed with a cracked rib (his horse kicked him) to come along — they raised the ramp and took off. There was some nervous talking and joke telling. Mr. Marechal was even tolerant enough not to tell everybody to be quiet.

I picked a chair against the partition that separated the walk-around from the bull-pen where we were sitting. I’ve never been at my best in groups like that — where there are only a few people that I know well I talk, but where there are crowds I fade into the background. Besides, I had something to do. Att and Jimmy did come over, though.

“What are you writing?” Att asked.

I put down my notebook. “Ethics notes,” I said. “I’m organizing my ideas for a paper Jimmy and I have to do for Mr. Mbele.”

Jimmy asked, “How are you doing it?”

I took his hand and ran a finger across the back of it. “I’m not asking you that. You’ll see when I’m done.”

Big Att sat down then and said, “What sort of thing does it have to be?”

Jimmy mussed my hair lightly and said, “No one particular thing. It has to be on the subject of ethics.”

I ducked my head away from Jimmy’s hand and said, “You seem nervous, Att.”

“A little, I guess,” he said. “I’ve never been down on a planet. I don’t see how you can be so calm and just sit here and write.”

“Scribble,” Jimmy said.

“It’s not so new for me,” I said. “I’ve been down before.”

“Her dad takes her when he goes,” Jimmy said.

After a few more minutes, Jimmy and Att broke out a pocket chess set and began to play and I turned back to my notes. I finished off utilitarianism before we landed.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with conduct, questions of good and evil, right and wrong. Almost every ethical system — and there are a great many of them, because even people who supposedly belong to the same school don’t agree a good share of the time and have to be considered separately — can be looked at as a description and as a prescription. Is this what people actually do? Is this what people ought to do?

Skipping the history and development of utilitarianism, the most popular expression of the doctrine is “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which makes it sound like its relative, the economic philosophy communism which, in a sense, is what we live with in the Ship. The common expression of utilitarian good is “the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.”

Speaking descriptively, utilitarianism doesn’t hold true, though the utilitarian claims that it does. People do act self-destructively at times — they know the pleasureful and choose the painful instead. The only way that what people do and what utilitarianism says they do can be matched is by distorting the ordinary meanings of the words “pleasure” and “pain.” Besides, notions of what is pleasurable are subject to training and manipulation. The standard is too shifting to be a good one.

I don’t like utilitarianism as a prescription, either. Treating pleasure and pain as quantities by which good can be measured seems very mechanical, and people become just another factor to adjust in the equation. Pragmatically, it seems to make sense to say One hundred lives saved at the cost of one? — go ahead! The utilitarian would say it every time — he would have to say it. But who gave him the right to say it? What if the one doesn’t have any choice in the matter, but is blindly sacrificed for, say, one hundred Mudeaters whose very existence he is unaware of? Say the choice was between Daddy or Jimmy and a hundred Mudeaters. I wouldn’t make a utilitarian choice and I don’t think I could be easily convinced that the answer should be made by use of the number of pounds of human flesh involved. People are not objects.

We set down in a great nest of trees in bright morning sunshine. The air was clear and brisk. The season was early summer and things were in bloom. The gravity was enough less than normal that it was noticeable, but not enough less to cause discomfort. We landed in a valley by a quiet river. Our side of the river was gentle with great trees rising from a springy floor, but the other side of the river was a sixty-foot bluff, rough-edged, marked by protrusions of rock, ledges and occasional bits of greenery.

I grabbed up my pack by the straps, slung it over my shoulder and went trooping outside with everybody else, down the ramp and into the sun and the cool air. In my pack were a change of clothes, a change of shoes, manual toothbrush, hairbrush, bedroll, and some odds and ends. We had bubble tents, but we had been told not to bring them. I had a heavy shirt and a light shirt underneath, and since the pocket in the outer shirt was small and the shirt was beginning to be tight through the shoulders and across the breast, I dropped my notebook down my shirt front. It would stay as long as I stayed buttoned and tucked. I squinted as I came into the sun.

The trees stretched serenely upwards as though nothing could ever ruffle their composure, the river moved silently past and then curved away, and the light made patches of light and dark as it cut through the trees, alleys in which dust motes could be seen swimming. The chatter of a bird was the only counterpoint to the noise we made. Most of the kids had never been on a planet before and this was a gentle, pleasant introduction. The wind blew lightly, toying with my hair and sleeve, and died again. The horses were led out after us along with harnesses, ropes and chains.

Mr. Marechal called for us to gather around.

“The first fifteen of you will be with Mr. Pizarro,” he said. “That’s through Mathur. From Morlock on you’ll be with me. We’re going to build cabins today, and tomorrow, too. If it takes that long. Mr. Pizarro thinks that his group can build a cabin faster than my group can. We’re going to see about that.”

That was an obvious sort of appeal, but it sounded like fun, so I didn’t even giggle. Jimmy, Riggy, Robert Briney, that Farmer boy and the Herskovitz boy were all in my group. Venie and Helen and Att were in Mr. Marechal’s group. Jimmy yanked at my sleeve and we followed Mr. Pizarro away from Mr. Marechal to a place of our own. He sat down on a rock and motioned us to take places on the springy ground around him. Mr. Pizarro was a young man with a narrow face and a brushy red moustache.

“All right,” he paid. “What we are going to build is a log cabin, fifteen by twenty feet. We’re going to need about sixty logs. I want all of you kids to get some experience in felling trees, but the boys will do most of it. This is what the cabin will look like.”

He sketched in the dirt with a stick. “This is going to be as good a cabin as we can make in this short a time. We’re going to have floors, and doors and windows. But this isn’t going to be as good a cabin as it might be — any guesses why?”

Somebody raised his hand and Mr. Pizarro called on him. “Well, if we cut them down, the logs are going to be green. They won’t dry evenly and the walls will let air in.

“Right,” Mr. Pizarro said. “We’ll chink the walls as best we can now.”

After we had discussed the cabin for a few more minutes, Mr. Pizarro led the way down the hill to a level place near the river. Here the cabin outlines had already been marked, and two saw pits had been dug in the ground. Mr. Marechal’s group was already down here.

Mr. Pizarro said, “Mr. Marechal and I came down here last Saturday to mark our spots, blaze our trees, and make the saw pits. This is just to make the work faster. When you cut a tree, try to decide why we picked it rather than some of the others around.”

Then he assigned us to jobs: tree-felling, horse-handling and log-hauling, log-peeling, and so on. Jack Fernandez-Fragoso and I were put on sill-laying and lunch. Mr. Pizarro gave us a quick sketch of what we were to do and then took the rest of the people off to get them started on their jobs. Mr. Marechal left two people like us behind on the other cabin, and we took a look at them already at work, and started on our own job.

The side base logs, the long base of the cabin, are the most important because the cabin rests on them. They have to be solidly fitted. The best way to do this is to half-sink them into the ground.

Jack and I got shovels and started digging shallow trenches down the long sides of the cabin outlines. We had pegs and string to keep our trenches straight, level and the same depth. The physical part wasn’t too bad, since we had been using hand tools for several months in practice and our hands were not as blister-prone as they once had been. It was somewhat painstaking, involving a good bit of measuring to keep things even. When we were done, we leveled the interior floor of the cabin. As we worked, we could hear axes ringing in the woods, voices, and sometimes the fall of a tree.

Before we had finished the floor, Mr. Pizarro, the two horses and the two base logs were all present. The logs were dragged in along the river bank. We came out almost in a tie with the peeling of the logs. Then Jack and I watched as the top quarters of the ends of the logs were cut off. Across these ends would be laid the similarly-cut tenons of the base logs of the cabin’s short walls, these logs lying on the ground. After that, logs would be laid in alternate rows — long sides of the cabin then short sides, the tenons allowing the logs to rest on those just below them.

Jack and I went off to gather wood, then, and start lunch. By the time lunch was ready, all four base logs were in place, the long ones sitting half in the ground, the short ones standing higher, and a number of other logs had been brought up by the saw pit. Mr. Marechal’s people had done about the same amount here, but I had no idea how much had been done out in the woods.

Jack and I ate before everybody else and then served. I went over and sat with Jimmy and Riggy while they ate. Jimmy had been felling trees, Riggy cutting poles, and they and I were both pleased to have the free hour after lunch that Mr. Pizarro allowed us. There is nothing like doing physical labor to give you reason to think, if only to pass the time, so I had more thoughts for my ethics paper on the subject of stoicism. I got out my notebook and wrote them down. Jimmy and Riggy just rested.

The trouble with stoicism, it seems to me, is that it is a soporific. It affirms the status quo and thereby puts an end to all ambition, all change. It says, as Christianity did a thousand years ago, that kings should be kings and slaves should be slaves, and it seems to me that that is a philosophy infinitely more attractive to the king than the slave.

It is much the same as the question of determination and free will. Whether or not your actions are determined, you have to act on the assumption that you have free will. If you are determined, your attempt at free will loses you nothing. However, if you are not determined and you act on the assumption that you are, you will never attempt anything. You will simply be a passive blob that things happen to.

I am not a passive blob. I have changed and I think at least some of it is my own doing. As long as I have any hope, I could not possibly be a stoic.

In the afternoon, I walked with Jimmy behind Mr. Pizarro to chop down my tree. We followed the skid marks of previous logs along the edge of the river bank. The sun was bright and the air a little warmer now. I couldn’t help thinking that this was very pleasant although it was nothing like home. After a few hundred yards we cut away from the river and up a ridge line. The underbrush was very thin and there was a rust brown carpet of shed tree leaves over the ground.

The boys who had been chopping trees before went back to work. There were several trees down and cut into logs waiting to be dragged away. Mr. Pizarro pointed at a gray tree trunk with a white mark on it.

“That’s your tree,” he said, as the cling of axes and the whirr-whirr of saws started around us.

I walked around the tree and looked up at it. Finally, just as we had been told and shown, I picked the direction I wanted it to fall. I didn’t want it to fall on anybody, and I wanted it to fall where it could be cut and hauled away.

Then I braced my feet, lifted my axe and started my undercut. This is a small cut in, the tree on the side you wish it to fall. The axe struck the tree and made a gash. Once again and a big chip flew. When I had my undercut, I stopped to rest.

“Very good,” Mr. Pizarro said. “When you are done, send Sonja up here. You know what you are doing this afternoon, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded and walked away then. He was overseeing all the different jobs that we were doing, plus doing a good bit of the heaviest work himself. You could expect him to be at your elbow one minute and then gone the next — he had come and tasted a spoonful of the soup while I was making it that morning. As he walked away, somebody yelled, “Stand clear,” and we all looked up.

One of the trees was ready to fall. There was a ravine between us and both of our trees were aimed to fall there, this one about thirty feet closer to the river than mine. Mr. Pizarro moved up the hill away from it. The boy, seeing everyone clear, pushed the tree and stepped back. It wasn’t cut completely through, but the undercut projected beneath the major cut and the push was enough to break through the bit of wood between and the tree wavered and then with majestic slowness toppled forward. In the silence left by the quieted axes, there was the sound of wood breaking, of branches crashing and then a great splintering rack as it smashed against the ground, raising dirt. Then the axes started again.

I moved around to the uphill side of my tree and started my major cut. I stopped from time to time to catch my breath and kick damp aromatic chips. At last it was beginning to waver and I knew it was ready to fall.

I yelled, “Everybody stand clear,” and checked to see that everybody was.

Then I pushed the tree and stepped back. My foot skidded on a chip and I sat down hard, looking up at the tree. At first I thought I was wrong and it wasn’t going to fall at all, but then it slowly tottered away from me. It fell and when it hit the ground, the butt, snapped clean from the stump, leapt high and then smacked back against the ground only a few feet away. The tree top that had been high over my head was now fifty feet below me in the gully. The tree, landing on the slope, slid forward a few feet and then came to a stop.

I looked down at it with a great deal of satisfaction. Then I got to my feet, dusted off the seat of my pants, picked up my axe and started back to where the cabin was going up. I waved at Jimmy as I passed.

Of the fifteen of us, seven were girls. Five had cut down their trees in the morning, the only ones who hadn’t being me and Sonja. So I found her making a door for the cabin with Riggy. The saw pit was now turning out slabs from medium-sized logs — the slabs being really half-logs, flat on one side, round on the other. The slabs were to be used for shutters, doors, roof and cabin floor. In the case of the door, the poles cut in the morning were being nailed to the flat sides of slabs about six feet long. I gave Sonja my axe and sent her along to find Mr. Pizarro, looked at the saw pit in operation for a minute, and then turned to my afternoon job. In the pit, one person gets down in it, one person stands on the ground above, and the log is sawed between them. The only disadvantage is that the person on the bottom gets sawdust in his hair, but if you switch off this evens out.

My afternoon job was taking the mud and moss brought by the mud-and-moss detail (Juanita) and chinking the cracks between the logs. By the time I got back, the two boys on the walls were working on their third tier of logs. They had skids in place and were now looping ropes around the logs and pulling them up the skids and into place. I happily went along, pushing my mud and moss in place, thinking of ethics, and whiling the afternoon away as the walls rose.

After Riggy finished the door and shutters, Mr. Pizarro showed up and they stopped putting up walls for awhile. By that time the walls were high enough that I felt surrounded, tall enough that I had to stand on a cut block to do my chinking. Where I had yet to chink the light slanted through to cut across the shadowed floor.

Mr. Pizarro climbed over the logs then, needing a little boost, and borrowed my block to stand on. Then he and Riggy cut through the solid logs to make the windows. They made two cuts for each window and removed the sections of log. It was then easier to get in and out, which was good because the logs were becoming harder to raise into place. Riggy came inside, and instead of two boys raising logs, there were now three boys and Mr. Pizarro, plus me when Juanita didn’t have enough mud and moss for me and they needed a hand.

When there were two more rows of logs in place, they cut the door in the same way as the window and suddenly the cabin wasn’t a tight little box anymore. Everybody was coming in from the woods then, and I went out of the cabin through the hole that was a doorway. Juanita and I made one last trip for mud together while they were raising the last log into place over the door. When we came back with the mud, everybody pitched in and we finished the outside chinking. It was great fun and at the end we just took mud and threw it at each other. I caught Jimmy a great gob across the back and he returned the favor. All fifteen of us were running around throwing mud while Mr. Pizarro stayed out of range and watched us.

When we were all out of mud, he said, “What are you going to do? You only have one spare change of clothes.”

Jimmy looked at the river, gave an onward ho point of the finger, and said, “There we are.”

He sat down, pulled off his shoes, and then made a dash, fully-clothed, for the river, plopped through the shallows and made a plunge into the water. I had my shoes kicked off in an instant, and my notebook out of my shirt, and followed right after. The water was clear and cold, not too swift, and just fine for swimming. It was much better than my one previous planetary swimming experience. We all splashed and made grampus noises in the late afternoon sun, flipped water at each other, and had a real old-fashioned time. Very quickly we were joined by Mr. Marechal’s group, who were not mud-covered but most of whom had gotten reasonably dirty or sawdust covered in the course of the day and knew a good thing when they saw it. We stayed in until we were called out, and then we came out soggy.

Our leaders were willing to make one concession to the good usages of civilization, and we took our clothes to the scoutship to be quickly dried. The rest of our weekend — sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, handprepared food — was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life. We did get this one concession, though.

After dinner, freshly dressed, full of food and a warm glow, and thoroughly tired, I wandered over to look at the other cabin along with Jimmy. It was about as far toward completion as ours — that is, the walls were in place and chinked, and the door and window holes were cut — but it looked odd. One of the long walls was higher than the other, and higher than any of our walls. It gave the cabin an odd unfinished look, a hunchbacked look.

We had been issued bubble tents, which can be folded to pocket size and are proof against almost anything, but we had been told not to bring them. Instead we unrolled our beds near the fire and took our chances in the open. I was one of those who drew guard duty, but I was lucky enough to get second hour. I stayed awake, relieved Stu Herskovitz, who hadn’t seen anything, and walked for an hour around the camp. I didn’t see anything except people ready to go to sleep. I yawned my way through the hour, then got Vishwa Mathur up and went to sleep myself.

There were clouds over the sky in the morning and it was gray through breakfast and cold, but then the clouds began to break into white pieces and move apart and then the sky was clear again and it was bright.

We raised the gable ends of the roof into place and fit the doors and shutters. Then all of us working, we raised the three roof logs into place, the ridgepole on top, the other two below on either side, forming a slope. As we were finishing, somebody looked over at the Marechal cabin and saw what they were doing. They were slanting a roof from the tall wall across the short one. “That’s not fair,” I yelled. “You’re building a shed, not a cabin.”

“Ho, ho — too bad,” Venie called back. We booed.

We laid the poles that Riggy and Sonja had collected the day before over fitted slabs to make the roof. I was inside the cabin helping to lay the floor. The slabs of wood were laid rounded side down, side by side, to make a reasonably flat floor, what is called a puncheon floor. If we had had the time, we would have smoothed the flat sides, but as it was, we couldn’t. The result was a floor that I wouldn’t recommend walking on in bare feet unless you have a genuine affection for splinters, but it was a good solid floor. Jimmy was on the roof laying slabs, stuffing moss, and placing poles. A little of the moss filtered through as they worked, but the roof closed in quickly over our heads and when they were done it looked as solid as our floor.

We were clearly beaten by Mr. Marechal’s group, which finished almost an hour before we did and then came over and made comments, but we were done before noon, too. I looked over the other building when we were done along with some curious friends and I’ll have to honestly say that I preferred our cabin to their shed — better workmanship.

In the afternoon we relaxed with an easy hike and then a swim, this one in suits, not in our clothes. After that, I got out my notebook again and made some more ethics notes — these about an easy one, the philosophy of power.

In effect, the philosophy of power says that you should do anything you can get away with. If you don’t get away with it, you were wrong.

You really can’t argue with this, you know. It is a self-contained system, logically self-consistent. It makes no appeal to outside authority and it doesn’t stumble over its own definitions.

But I don’t like it. For one thing, it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between “ethically good” and “ethically better.” More important, however, stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power simply say that the results of actions have no importance — the philosophy of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

We slept that night in the cabin with the door latched, and there was a certain comfort and solidity in sleeping in what we had built. I can also say that the puncheon floor was much harder than the ground had been. Or perhaps I wasn’t as tired.

The next day was our last of the excursion and we celebrated it by jumping off the bluff across the river. Then we cleaned up the camp and came home.

It was foggy in the morning, and though the fog lifted, the clouds stayed low and gray over our heads. We set out in one big group this morning with Mr. Marechal leading and Mr. Pizarro bringing up the rear and carrying ropes. Looking at the river, our cabin was on the left and the shed on the right. We had gone upriver for our logs, and Mr. Marechal’s group the other way. We went downriver along the river bank, past the point where their skid tracks went uphill away from the river, and then around the long slow bend where the river curved out of sight of the camp. It was a gloomy day but we were in good spirits, chattering as we walked. Our group of six, reunited, walked together.

We picked our way along for more than a mile, sometimes having to leave the river edge and move inland, but making a pretty good pace of it. At last we came out on a sand shoal and looked across at an easy bank on the other side of the river and a broken and easily climbed bluff.

“We’re going to have to swim,” Mr. Marechal said. He waded out into the water until he was standing in water to his waist about one-quarter of the way across.

Then we were started across with both of our leaders standing guard. The water was cold and it wasn’t half as much fun to get soaked as it had been the first time. Our clothes are dirt and water resistant and dry quickly, but believe me, it is far nicer to have them dry off you than to have them dry while you are wearing them. On the far bank I dripped and shivered.

We all gathered on the grassy bank and then Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal splashed and swam across to join us. We climbed through the underbrush and tumbled rock and by the time we reached the top of the bluff, if I wasn’t fully dry at least I wasn’t shivering.

The bluff was covered with forest, too, but standing on the edge we could see the easy, forest-covered slope on the other side from above, a dark green rising carpet. Then we turned into the woods and didn’t come out again until we were standing on the bluff edge opposite our camp.

I didn’t like standing on the edge, so I came to the lip on my knees and looked down at the river. It looked a long way down — a drop big enough to kill you, and after that distances are academic. At the base, there looked to be just room to stand and no more. As it had been explained to us, the two ropes would be tied in place here at the top of the bluff and then each of us would whip the ropes around our waists and step off the cliff backwards. Looking down, I didn’t exactly relish the idea. I moved back from the edge and then got to my feet.

“Well,” Mr. Marechal said, “who’s going to be the first to try it?”

Jimmy said, “Mia and I will.”

Mr. Marechal looked at me and I said, “Yes.” I didn’t like the thought of doing it, but if it was something expected of everybody and I was going to have to do it eventually, I didn’t mind doing it first and getting it over with.

The ropes were tied to trees and then passed around our waists, around the main ropes, and then back around the waists again. Mr. Pizzarro and Mr. Marechal demonstrated for everybody how this worked. The ends were finally dropped back between our legs and over the edge of the cliff to dangle just above the river. In effect, what we were doing was putting ourselves in a running loop that slid freely on the rope and then moving down the rope to the river.

At the signal, we stood with our backs to the river, the rope taut between us and our trees. I looked down at the river and sighed, then stepped backward off the edge. I let line pay out for a moment and then stopped it and swung in to come to a halt with my feet against the cliff-face, my body hanging in the loop from the tree on the cliff above. I was almost surprised that it worked. Then I pushed off again and went down another six or seven feet. This was not hard at all, and rather fun. I looked over at Jimmy and laughed. Then, almost before I knew it, I was at the bottom. The bank here was wider than it looked from above, four or five feet wide, and Jimmy and I landed at almost the same moment.

We pulled the ropes free and waved up at the people on top.

“It’s easy,” Jimmy called.

“It’s fun,” I said.

The ropes were snaked up again to the top of the bluff as we watched.

Jimmy said, “There’s no sense in staying down here. Let’s go across the river.”

We swam across again and then watched while the next pair rappelled down the cliff. We sat on the last completed part of the cabin, a slab doorstep.

As we watched, I said, “Thank you for volunteering me, by the way.”

“I know,” Jimmy said. “You’re a reluctant daredevil. Aren’t you the person who used to crawl around in the air ducts?”

“That was different,” I said. “That was my idea.”

12

At the end of December, just in time for Year’s End, the kids on Trial on New Dalmatia were brought home. Of the forty-two kids who were dropped, seven didn’t signal for Pickup and didn’t come home. One of the seven was Jack Brophy, whom I’d known slightly in Alfing Quad. I thought about that, and I couldn’t help wondering whether I would come back to the Ship in a year. I didn’t dwell on the thought, though. Year’s End is the sort of holiday that takes your mind off the unpleasant, and besides I discovered something else that occupied my thoughts and gave me something of a new perspective on my mother.

Year’s End is a five or six day bash — five days in 2198, which wasn’t a Leap Year. In one of the old novels I read, I discovered that before the calendar was reformed, the extra day of Leap Year was tacked onto February. (This was as part of a mnemonic that was supposed to help you remember how many days there were in each month. My adaptation of it for our calendar would go: “Thirty days hath January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.” I have a pack rat memory — I even know what a “pack rat” was.) Under our system, the extra day gets tacked onto Year’s End.

I was in charge of fixing up our apartment for Year’s End. Jimmy and I made a trip down to the Ship’s Store on Second Level and picked out a piñata in the shape of a giant chicken and painted it in red, green and yellow. Jimmy’s dorm had a piñata, of course, but the impersonality of the dorm took a lot of fun out of Year’s End and I had arranged with Daddy for Jimmy to share ours. Between the two of us, Jimmy and I fixed the apartment very nicely and planned the parties we were having on Day Two (for our group of six and some of our other friends) and the big party on New Year’s Eve, more or less an open house for anybody who cared to walk in. Since that ticked off an obligation for Daddy, who has no patience for things like party arranging, he was just as glad to have us do it.

In Alfing Quad I had had my friends, but I had almost never brought them home. These days, having people around the place, particularly Jimmy, who lived in Geo Quad, was a regular thing. Daddy has his own patterns of living — in some ways he lives in a private world — and you would have thought that he would object to having strange kids permanently underfoot. I’m sure his life was disturbed but he never objected. In fact he even went out of his way to make it clear that he approved of Jimmy.

“He’s a good boy,” Daddy said. “I’m glad you’re seeing a lot of him.”

Of course, this wasn’t too surprising since I had a distinct impression that Jimmy was one of the reasons that we were living in Geo Quad. It certainly wasn’t an accident that we had been assigned Mr. Mbele as a tutor at the same time. I even had an impression (partly confirmed) that a talk with the Ship’s Eugenist would have shown that Jimmy’s and my meeting was even less of an accident, but this didn’t bother me particularly because there were moments when I distinctly liked Jimmy and moments when just looking at him made me feel all funny inside.

The partial confirmation as well as another discovery came when I was prowling through the Ship’s Records. Every Common Room has a library and there is a certain satisfaction in using them because there is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow looks right. But simple space limitations make a physical collection of all the books that the Ship holds out of the question. So standard practice is to look over titles and contents by vid and then to order a facsimile, a physical copy, if you really want or need one. There are, of course, certain things that most people don’t ordinarily look at without some special reason, like Ship’s Records, and while I had no special reason beyond curiosity, I was quite willing to look and quite willing to presume upon Daddy’s position in the Ship to make it possible for me to look.

“Are you sure?” the librarian said. “They’re not very interesting, you know, and I’m not sure that you really ought to be allowed…”

I swear that I didn’t exactly say that Daddy, Miles Havero, Ship’s Chairman, had told me that I could and was willing to discuss the point at length with the librarian if he insisted, but I think if you talked to him, the librarian might have had an impression that I had said it. In any case, I got to look at the Records.

As I’ve said, I found some twenty-year-old eugenics recommendations that gave me pause, but it wasn’t until I looked up me, or more properly, Mother and Daddy, that I discovered something that really rocked me. I had a brother!

That was a shock. I switched off the vid and it faded away, and then I turned to my bed and just lay huddled there for a long while, thinking. I didn’t know why I hadn’t been told. I remembered that somebody had once asked me or talked to me or tickled me into wondering about brothers and sisters, but I couldn’t place the memory and I never had done anything about it.

Finally I went back to the vid and I found out about my brother. His name had been Joe — José. He had been nearly forty years older than I and dead for more than fifteen years.

I dug around and found out more. Apparently he had been as conscious as I of the lack of creative writing within the Ship. He had written a novel, something I would never do, particularly after I read his. It was not just bad, it was terrible, and it gave me some reason to think that perhaps the Ship just isn’t a viable topic for fiction.

In other respects, Joe was much more competent. He’d been regarded as quite a corner in his branch of physics. His death had been the result of a grotesque and totally unnecessary accident not of his own making. He had not been discovered immediately, and when he was it was too late to revive him. His death had apparently bothered my mother greatly.

Now that I knew, I didn’t know what to do about it. Finally, in a quiet moment, I approached Daddy and as impersonally as I could I asked him about it.

He looked puzzled. “You knew all about Joe,” he said. “You haven’t asked about him in a long time, but I’ve told you twenty times.”

I said, “I didn’t even know he existed until a week ago.”

“Mia,” he said seriously, “when you were three you used to beg for stories about Joe.”

“Well, I don’t remember now,” I said. “Will you tell me?”

So Daddy told me about my brother. He even said that we were a lot alike in looks and personality.

I didn’t talk to Mother because I didn’t know what I could say about it. I cannot really talk to her. The only person besides Daddy that I talked to was Jimmy and he made a comment that was perceptive, whether or not it was accurate. He said that maybe I hadn’t remembered because I hadn’t wanted to, at least until now, and that “finding” the record of my brother wasn’t as much of an accident as I thought. To tell you the truth, that got me mad at first, and it was my getting mad that later made me think that there might have been some truth to it. The cost was that Jimmy and I didn’t speak for two days.

Thinking in psychological terms got me to thinking about my mother, about her keeping me at arm’s length and about her becoming unhappy when I was nice to her. I finally came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t me, Mia, the individual, that bothered her, but just me, the physical fact, and I proceeded on that basis. I can’t say that I liked her any better, but we did manage to deal together more pleasantly after that.

Something else changed that winter — what I thought I wanted from life. It came as a direct result of the papers on ethics that Jimmy and I did.

We met in Mr. Mbele’s apartment and talked about our conclusions over the usual refreshments provided by Mrs. Mbele. She was a very comfortable person to have around. Very nice. It was our regular Friday night meeting.

My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions. This was to say that while I found things like “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your person or in that of another, in every case as an end and not as a means merely,” quite attractive principles, I hadn’t run onto any system that exactly fitted my disposition.

In his discussion, Jimmy took another tack entirely. Instead of criticizing ethical systems, he attempted to formulate one. It was humanistic, not completely unlike some of the others that I had considered. Jimmy started by saying that true humanity was an achievement, not an automatic inheritance. There were things that you could pick at in what he had to say, but his system did have one advantage and that was that he spoke in terms of a general attitude toward living rather than in terms of exact principles. It is too easy to find exceptions to principles.

As I listened, I became increasingly bothered, not by what he was saying, which fit Jimmy’s disposition quite closely, but by the sort of paper he was giving. I was the one who was supposed to be intending to be a synthesist, assembling castles from mortar and bricks, only that wasn’t what I had done. It came to me then that I had never done it — making pins or building cabins, putting things together, none of this was really in my line, and I should have seen it long since.

I am not a builder, I thought. I am not a tinkerer. It was a moment of pure, unheralded revelation.

When Jimmy was done, Mr. Mbele said, “Let’s have a discussion. What comments occur to you? Mia?”

“All right,” I said. I turned to Jimmy. “Why do you want to be an ordinologist?”

He shrugged. “Why do you want to be a synthesist?”

I shook my head. “I’m serious. I want an answer.”

“I don’t see the point. What does this have to do with ethics or what we’ve just said?”

“Nothing to do with ethics,” I said. “It has a lot to do with your paper. You didn’t listen to yourself.”

“Do you mind explaining yourself a little more fully?” Mr. Mbele said. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

“After a while,” I said, “I wasn’t listening to Jimmy’s points. I got thinking about what sort of paper he had put together and about what sort of paper I’d put together. We had our own choice. It just struck me that if Jimmy really wanted to be an ordinologist, he would have written a paper like mine, a critical paper. And if I were really cut out to be a synthesist, I would have written a paper like Jimmy’s, a creative paper. But neither of us did.”

“I see,” Mr. Mbele said. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re right.”

Jimmy said, “But I want to be an ordinologist.”

“That’s just because of your grandfather,” I said.

Mr. Mbele agreed with me almost immediately, but Jimmy had had his aims too long set on ordinology to change his mind easily. It took some time before the sense of it got through to him, but then he doesn’t have a critical mind, and that, of course, was the point. I just made it clear that I now intended to be an ordinologist, and Mr. Mbele accepted that. It was easier for me to change, because when I had thought of the future, I had thought of synthesis, but with parentheses and a question mark after. This change of direction was right for me, and now when I thought of ordinology there was no question of any kind in my mind, particularly when Mr. Mbele told me that I had the equipment to make a success at it.

And after Jimmy got used to the idea, he finally changed his direction, too. Because, after all, he was creative.

I said, “You’re the one who is always thinking up crazy things for us to do. I’m the one who should be thinking why they won’t work.”

“All right,” Jimmy said. “You be the ordinologist and I’ll be the synthesist.”

I kissed his cheek. “Good. Then we can still be partners.”

My change in direction may have been part of growing up. Nearly everything was, or so it seemed these days. I certainly didn’t lack for signs of change. One came while Helen Pak and I were down in the Ship’s Store looking for clothes.

There is a constant problem of stimulation in living in the Ship — if life were too easy, we would all become vegetables. The response has been to make some things more difficult than they might be. This means that shopping is something you do in person and not by vid.

Helen and I were in the Ship’s Store not because our clothes had worn out, but because we’d outgrown them. I’d been growing steadily for the last year, but I hadn’t caught up with anybody because they had all been growing, too. I was now having to wear a bra, which was something new and uncomfortable, and my taste in clothes had developed beyond light shirts, shorts, and sandals. That was partly Helen’s doing. She had a good eye for clothes and she insisted I make more of myself than I had been.

“You’re pretty enough,” she said, “but who’s going to know it the way you dress?”

For myself, I didn’t care — I would just as soon have lived naturally — and I had no great desire to overwhelm the world. However, there were a few people I wanted to be attractive to, so I put myself in Helen’s hands, and by God I did come out looking better. Among other things, she got me to wearing pink, which went well with my black hair, and which I wouldn’t have chosen myself. It all came as a pleasant surprise.

Helen said, “It’s a matter of emphasizing your best points.” She was quite modest about it, but she had reason to be proud. Even Daddy noticed, and Jimmy did, too. No compliments, of course, from Jimmy, though I did get them from Daddy.

We were down in the Ship’s Store picking things out, trying them on, piling things up, giggling, rejecting, posing, approving and disapproving. I even found something for Helen that she looked good in — that blonde hair and those oriental eyes. She generally knows what looks good on her — it was pleasant to find something for her that she liked.

We were thumbing through racks when I saw somebody I knew and I said, “Just a second.” I waved.

It was Zena Andrus, who wasn’t quite as plump as she once had been. She was looking quite excited and apparently trying to find someone. She saw me wave and she came over.

“Hi, Mia,” she said. “Have you seen my mother?”

“No,” I said. “Is something the matter?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s nothing bad. I just got my notice. I start Survival Class next week.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” I said.

After she’d gone off after her mother again, Helen and I looked at each other. Time does pass. It was only yesterday.

13

The culmination of Survival Class came when we were Class One and went on a tiger hunt on the Third Level. It, like so much else, was designed to give us confidence in ourselves. There is nothing like hunting a tiger almost bare-handed to give you a feeling of real confidence in yourself. If you manage to survive the experience.

Come to think about it, though, we did manage to survive, so maybe there was point to it.

By that time, going down to the Third Level with packs was a commonplace. Jimmy and I went down from Geo Quad in the shuttle. I was not in the best of spirits, because I never am before something like that, and I was playing somewhat morosely on the pennywhistle.

Jimmy said, “You’re not going to bring that along, are you?”

“Why not?”

“I have to admit that you play fairly well now, but if you play like that you’re just going to depress everybody.”

I said, “I’ve got Campfire Entertainment tonight.” That was something we had instituted after our second expedition in order to liven camping evenings.

“You’re not going to play the pennywhistle, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I was going to tell a story. You almost make me change my mind, though.”

“Are you afraid?” He wasn’t talking about the Camp fire Entertainment.

“I can’t say I relish the thought of throwing rocks at a tiger,” I said, “but I guess I’ll get used to it. How about you?”

“I’m always scared beforehand,” Jimmy said. “That’s why I like to talk or play chess.”

We got off at familiar Gate 5 and joined everybody else in getting our heli-pacs. Mr. Marechal was there with a couple of dogs, and he was being assisted again by Mr. Pizarro, who had grown a red beard to go along with his brushy moustache. They were loading the dogs and food into a carrier. Before we left, Mr. Marechal lined us up and looked us over.

“You understand,” he said, “that nobody has to come along.”

We all nodded, but nobody made a move to leave.

“Do you have your knives?”

“Yes,” we said. That was it, the only weapons we had.

“I want you to understand that at least one of you’s going to get hurt, maybe killed. You’re going to chase down a tiger, which is about as mean and rough an animal as you’re liable to meet anywhere you get dropped on Trial. On Trial, I hope you’ll have the sense to avoid anything like that. This time, though, we’re going to pick one out, track it down and kill it by hand. You can do it because you’re rougher and meaner than it is — at least as a group. I can guarantee you that some one of you is going to get hurt, but when you’re done, that tiger’s going to be dead. You’ll be surprised to find how satisfying you’re going to find that. All right?”

The wild areas of the Third Level are about as unpleasant as any you’ll find on a planet. The terrain is perhaps not as rugged as you’ll find in places on planets, but the wildlife is fully as unpleasant, and that’s the major factor. On this final jaunt we were going without the bubble tents and sonic pistols that we would be allowed to carry on Trial and we were deliberately seeking out the most dangerous animal that we have on board the Ship. Something like this is not only a preview of Trial, it brings home to you what is real and what is not, and quite designedly shows you that death is real. You may call it backhanded, but as I say, the point is to lend confidence.

We lifted like a flock of great birds away from the Training Center toward the roof above, and then swept away. We moved across the parkland, looking down on the trees and bridle paths, and then finally across the thorn hedge wall that marked the edge of wild country. At first it did not look greatly different, but then we passed over a herd of broom-tails, our noise and shadows frightening them and sending them careening over the grassland.

Mr. Marechal led the way and Mr. Pizarro brought up the rear with the carrier. We buzzed along in about the same relation to the roof, the ground rising and falling beneath us. With the ground in small hills covered by scrub and occasional trees, and the grassland behind us, we set down at a signal from Mr. Marechal.

When the dogs were released from the carrier, they yapped and strained at their leads, but Mr. Pizarro simply tied them up. We put guards around immediately and then started to make camp. We had just about time to gather wood and set up fires before the great lights in the roof began to fade, the air currents to die, and the temperature to fall. The temperature didn’t fall far, but the fire was not for that — it was for cooking and for security.

After dinner, everybody gathered around the fire, including Mr. Pizarro and Mr. Marechal, and I was privileged to give my Campfire Entertainment. For Jimmy’s sake, I forbore the pennywhistle and instead told the story that I had prepared and had intended to tell. It’s an old, old story called “The Lady of Carlisle.”

I waited until everybody was quiet. I stood in front of the sitting people in the wavering light of the fire and began:

“Oh, come on, Mia,” somebody said. “Who’d want to buy stale bread crumbs?”

“I’ll tell you exactly, Stu,” I said. “It was to children to make trails behind them when they went into the woods so they could find their way out again.”

“Well, what happened to her?”

“That’s the way the original story goes,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it meant that she was a hysteric.”

“Now, hush,” somebody said, “and let her get on with it.”

When he had a chance to speak to me privately, Jimmy said, “Isn’t it lucky we’re out here for a good reason?”

In the morning, with the fires out, the lights high and the heli-pacs protected by a bubble tent, we set out casting for tracks behind the leashed dogs. We followed behind in anticipation.

As we walked, I picked up hand-sized rocks and practiced throwing. Att and Jimmy offered criticism.

“Not like that,” Jimmy said. “Like this.” He threw. It looked smooth and more effective, but I didn’t see what was different about it.

“I don’t know quite what you’re doing wrong,” Att said, “but you twitch your whole body when you throw.”

“I think I see,” Jimmy said. “You keep your forearm stiff and throw with your shoulder. You ought to be using your wrist and your forearm more. Snap them forward.”

Venie edged over toward us and said, “Being all sweet and helpless again, Mia?”

I picked up another rock and threw it.

“That’s better,” Jimmy said.

I turned to Venie and was about to make a sharp comment when the dogs began to yelp. It wasn’t their ordinary yapping. It was a more musical note as though they felt they had something to sing about.

“Come on over here,” Mr. Pizarro said, and we gathered around.

Mr. Marechal was kneeling by a pug-mark that was a full four inches across and more than that long. He pointed to it.

“There we are,” he said. “Look at the grains of sand in the track. It’s not more than two hours old. Probably less,” he added as he tested the breeze.

Mr. Pizarro brought the dogs forward and unsnapped their leashes. They sniffed and quivered over the tracks. It was an exciting moment as they poised and then sprang forward, bugling as they went. Now that they were at their business, the noise they made was more businesslike. We set out, trotting after them, up and down the sand hills. I was glad that I was wearing sandals that emptied of sand as fast as they filled.

It is amazing what differences in terrain and vegetation can be produced by slight variances in breeze, temperature and above all moisture. We ran through gullies between sand shoulders, through scrub and around it when we could, going farther from the grassland all the time. The tiger, in all probability, came down to the grassland to hunt, and then returned to the scrub where it had its lair.

There were times when we lost sight of the dogs and kept on their track only by following their sound. Once the dogs lost their scent and had to cast back to find it. Running became an effort. Finally, the dogs’ voices lifted and it was clear that they had caught sight of the tiger. We came over the hillside behind them to see the purple hindquarters of the tiger sliding behind a rock projection and the dogs winding around the base of the rocks to find their way up.

If making the Third Level as it is had been a matter of filling an empty volume with rock and dirt, the job would hardly have been worth attempting. Just take a slide rule and figure the number of scoutship loads it would take. The amount of effort is ridiculous. But in point of fact, the Ship is nothing more than a great rock, partly honeycombed, and making the Third Level as it is required nothing more than blasting and chipping rock loose and then pulverizing it to a desired consistency. The great rock jumble into which the tiger was disappearing was nothing more than a giant rain of rock left where it had fallen. It sat there, a red tumble, and the dogs followed the tiger into it.

We pelted down the slope, yelling, and followed the noise of the dogs. There was a trail into the rocks, and then it split, one branch going up and apparently away from the noise ahead, one going directly toward the noise.

Mr. Marechal waved breathlessly at the high trail and said, “Take some of them that way.”

I followed him straight ahead. In a moment we came to an opening in the rocks and there, at bay, snarling and striking at the dogs, was the tiger. It was purple, with high-set black shoulders and a wicked wedge shaped head. Its teeth seemed too large for its narrow face. It was as essentially useless as a soccer professional, and as ornamental, elegant and entertaining. We spread around in a circle. The dogs were yapping at its flanks and then darting out of reach as it spun to strike at them. It had been trying to break for the far side of the rock opening, but the dogs never let it get a chance. As we encircled it, one of the dogs was too slow in anticipating the tiger and was knocked into a broken, bloody heap where it kicked slowly.

Then on the rocks above the tiger appeared Mr. Pizarro and four of the kids. They looked down at the noise, blood and dust.

One of them was David Farmer, who was almost as much of a goof as Riggy Allen. He posed picturesquely at the top of the red rock face and, I have no doubt, was about to yell to be looked at, and then he lost his footing. One of his legs doubled beneath him and he went skidding down the face of the rock and landed heavily on the flanks of the startled tiger. It sprang forward and went charging right over the one cringing dog.

The tiger snarled and charged at the circle of people. Unfortunately, he picked me to charge at. Without thinking, I heaved the rock in my hand and whether I threw it properly or not, it rapped him in the muzzle. That was the signal that set off the barrage of rocks, and the poor bewildered tiger spun away again back toward the rock face. Those above threw rocks down at him.

The circle started closing on him, nobody quite daring to dash in and face him alone, but gathering courage from those who moved in beside them. Then working almost like the dogs, Jimmy waved his knife in the tiger’s face and it snarled and slapped at it. And then, with the tiger’s attention held, Att, whom I’d never have expected to do it, jumped on the tiger’s back and slid his knife between its ribs.

The tiger hunched its shoulders and threw Att off, making a wounded cry. Then it was swarmed under by all of us knife-wielding, screaming kids. In just a few seconds it was dead. When we drew away, it lay there in a hot, limp pile, its purple streaked with streams of blood.

David Farmer came out with a badly broken leg. Bill Nieman had a clawed and broken shoulder, the tiger having struck him almost as it died. I had one tiny scratch and a moderately-serious knife gash, not from my own knife.

They were right, too. It gives you a feeling of power to know that you can kill something as alive, as beautiful and as dangerous as a tiger. But the feeling of power can come from pushing a button at the range of five hundred yards. We killed the tiger on his own terms. We chased him on foot, we caught him, and we killed him. That makes you feel able.

You also learn about yourself. You learn about the sight of a claw a foot from your face. You learn about blood. And you learn that a tiger hunt can give you a sore throat.

For whatever positive effects on our minds that the tiger hunt held, nonetheless it cannot be denied that the month of November was a time of growing uneasiness and tension. I was not at my most cheerful. Though my mind told me, as it had for months, that Trial would be the simplest sort of waltz, my viscera refused to be convinced. I tried to act decently to people, but by the end of the month I could hardly bring myself to talk to anybody at all, let alone nicely, and I was sleeping badly. I woke myself screaming one night, something I hadn’t done in years.

The worst thing about it was waiting. If I had had a choice, by the middle of November I would have elected to go then, rather than later, simply to have it begun. Instead, I just got more and more edgy.

I even managed to get on bad terms with Jimmy, and that wasn’t easy, partly because Jimmy is very good natured, partly because we were close. Though you are dropped separately, one at a time, after landing you can join forces. I had been intending to go partners with Jimmy, and I’m sure he had the same thought in mind, but our quarrel ended that.

It started with an intransigent remark by me about the Mudeaters. I said what I thought, but I may have overstated my ideas for the sake of emphasis. In any case, Mr. Mbele was moved to comment.

“I thought you’d gotten over that, Mia,” he said. “This is a point that’s important to me. I don’t like this over simple categorizing. Some of my ancestors were persecuted during one period and held to be inferior simply because their skins were dark.”

That was plain silly, because my skin happens to be darker than Mr. Mbele’s and I don’t feel inferior to anybody.

“But that’s not an essential difference,” I said. “This is. They just aren’t as good as we are.”

On the way home, Jimmy tried to argue with me. “Do you remember those ethics papers we did last winter?”

“Yes.”

“It seemed to me that you approved of Kant’s proposition that we should treat all humans as both ends and means.”

“I didn’t attack it.”

“Well, then, how can you talk this way about the Colons?”

I said, “Well, really, what makes you think that the Mudeaters are people?”

“Oh, you sound just like your father,” Jimmy said.

That’s where the fight started. Jimmy never physically fights anybody, at least he hasn’t since I’ve known him, and I hadn’t been in a swinging fight with anybody in more than a year, but we came very close to it then. We ended by going separate ways and not speaking to each other. And I gave Jimmy back his “between mountains” pin. That was Friday night, the night before my birthday.

Jimmy didn’t show up on my birthday. That day, when I turned fourteen, was completely flat. So was Sunday. On Monday, we left for Trial.