Refugee (9 page)

I was going to let Helse go in alone, but she gestured me to join her. I saw that there were other people nearby, who might deem it odd if two boys our age showed such deference to each other. Feeling a trifle guilty, I crowded in with her.

Now the details of Helse's problem showed starkly. There were two apertures for body excretions, one for solids, the other for liquids. It was important that the functions be separated, because the recycling processes were different. Solids would clog the liquid system, and liquid would saturate the dry-compost mechanism of the other. I had known this intellectually without considering the practical side of it.

Actually, on a ten-day hop the solid recycling would not be done within the bubble; the holding tanks would be emptied elsewhere, providing rich organic material for some agricultural dome. The water, however, would be cycled through many times while we traveled.

With the facilities already being overworked by the crowding of the bubble, any abuse could be disastrous. Helse would not urinate into the solids aperture; such wrongdoing would soon be apparent as the tank fouled up. She had to use the liquids aperture—and there was a problem. Either sex could use the solid-collector funnel, as that was set in a sort of potty chair with handholds to keep the floating body proximate. But the liquids funnel was set at waist height in the vertical wall. The wall that would be vertical when spin began, I mean. At the moment, in complete free fall—for they seemed to be using the propulsive jet intermittently, saving it for some later need, so there was not even the trace thrust of acceleration—all walls were of indeterminate orientation.

I had no trouble with the liquids funnel, of course. I merely hooked my toes in the toehold slots in the floor so that my body was fixed parallel to the wall, and directed the flow appropriately. There was a slight suction that brought the fluid in; otherwise it might have floated out into the chamber in disintegrating bubbles, an obvious liability. The presence of a young woman did not bother me unduly, for our family had never been squeamish about such things; we had had to share a single bathroom, and my sisters and I had long since passed the exploration stage. But Helse—

“You'll have to hold me against the wall,” she said. Her face was somewhat ruddy, as mine would have been in a similar circumstance. Obviously she hadn't wanted male cooperation; she had had to have it.

That was the solution, of course. I hooked my toes, leaned back, and caught her as she floated close.

She dropped her trousers, or rather drew them down about her legs in the absence of gravity, baring her bottom. Then she doubled up her legs and squatted against the funnel, while I held her by the shoulders and gently shoved her in to the wall. Otherwise she would simply have floated away from it, especially when—well, a rocket moves in space by jetting gas, and a person would move similarly by jetting liquid.

I closed my eyes, in deference to her modesty, after the first guilty glimpse that verified that she definitely was not male, but could still feel the slight motion of her body and hear the fluid striking the funnel. Then, abruptly, it became very exciting for me, though my reaction embarrassed me. I was lucky to have urinated first; had I done it last, I would have had more difficulty than she, albeit for a different reason. I chided myself; after all, she was only urinating. Why should this essentially pedestrian activity excite me so strongly, in that fashion? Yet there was no question that it did.

Then I opened my eyes and looked again, not to further titillate myself, though that was a consequence; I realized I had seen something odd. Yes, there it was—a small mark, or tattoo in the crease where her left leg connected to her body. Three letters: QYV.

She finished and drew her trousers back up. “Thank you,” she said. “That was the help I needed.”

“Sure,” I mumbled, knowing I was blushing. I hoped my erection did not show. One advantage the female of the species has is the ability to conceal sexual awareness if she wishes.

“In the female section they have bidets,” Helse said. “You'd have almost as much trouble using one of those.”

“Umph,” I agreed, preferring to change the subject, though I was curious about what a bidet was.

We returned to our cell, and two men headed for the head, passing us in the Commons. I could tell the men didn't suspect anything; we were just two teen-age boys. My blush must have faded, or maybe it just didn't show well in the partial light, against my naturally dusky complexion.

“A female roommate couldn't have helped this way,” Helse murmured as we climbed back into our cell.

She had certainly figured it well, and played it correctly. She had of course been lucky I was available, but luck is a fickle mistress that is powerless unless intelligently exploited. Helse had gambled, to the extent she had to, and won, and I respected that.

Then a complementary notion occurred. “If I ever have to use the female head—” I began.

“Yes, of course I'll help you,” she agreed quickly. “There could be an occasion.”

We settled down for more rest, as there wasn't much else to do. But now that my roommate's femaleness had been so unequivocally brought home to me, I could not quite relax. That sexual barrier was up between us; I kept thinking of the private glimpse of her posterior vicinity I had had. Certainly I had seen it on my sisters—though not recently, on Faith—but this was not my sister. That made an enormous difference. I wondered what the rest of her looked like, when it showed. She had done an excellent job of masquerading as a boy; nothing showed. Her chest looked just like a masculine chest.

Maybe she was flat-breasted. No, that was unlikely, because her buttocks were too rounded and her—she was at the age of nubility, and the upper part of her would certainly conform.

And my own reaction to her urination—I suppose it was because her act called more specific attention to that portion of her anatomy and the functioning of it. A person may be stimulated to hunger by seeing another person eat; why not a similar stimulation in genital matters? At any rate, I had learned something about my own organic responses. The first requirement in the understanding of other people is the understanding of oneself.

“Anyway, thanks,” she said. I jumped—which didn't get me far, in free fall. I felt nervous, thinking about someone that way, when she was right there with me. I did not believe in telepathy, but my disbelief weakened at moments like that.

“Welcome,” I said, and that at least was honest.

I must have snoozed—certainly I needed more rest!—because I was jolted awake when the warning klaxon went off. We had separated far enough from the planet and were about to go into spin. That meant gravity, or a reasonable facsimile, and we didn't want to be sleeping in midair when it started. I had, of course, been doing exactly that.

But it started gently enough. I heard noises from the hull and realized someone was out there in a space suit, doing something. “They're moving the drive unit around to the equator,” I said, catching on. “If they angled it side-wise at the pole, it would start the bubble turning pole over pole, and it's not designed for that. So they have to fasten it where it belongs for proper spin.”

Then the room began to drift to the side. “Now they're starting the spin,” I said, working it out in my own mind. “But at the start it's spin acceleration, so we feel it mostly sidewise. Once it gets up to proper torque, we'll feel it outwards. But it's not much of a jet, so it's slow.”

“You're good at physics,” Helse said.

I wasn't good at physics. I'm not, if the truth must be told—and I suppose it must, here—much good at anything apart from my judgment of people. Oh, I'm smart enough in a general way; that runs in our family, except for Faith, who got beauty instead of brains. But I owed my comprehension of the present situation more to the fact that males tune in to these things more than females do, by training and inclination. I knew Helse was gratuitously complimenting me, and the words meant nothing in themselves.

But I was flattered that she wanted to flatter me. After all, she was a year older than I, a real girl, a young woman. I was sure that in normal circumstances the likes of her would not even have noticed the likes of me. Of course, she needed my cooperation for the bathroom, so she could keep her secret; it figured that she would try to keep on my good side. Still, I was unreasonably pleased. I would have been pleased if a boy had complimented me similarly, but I knew it would not have had the same force. I wanted a genuine young woman to respect me; it made me feel almost like a young man instead of an awkward adolescent.

So she was trying to manage me—and I was eager to be managed.

Slowly the spin increased until the outer wall became the new floor and the sliding door became a ceiling exit. The slight push of the jet sidewise was constant, not increasing, while the effect of centrifugal force was cumulative, so that it came to dominate. It was good to have weight and orientation again!

In due course there was a jolt. Helse looked up, startled. “Just the drive unit being disconnected,” I explained. “They have to take it back to the pole and set it up again for normal forward thrust. Now that our spin is established, it will maintain itself; the rocket is needed to continue our acceleration toward Jupiter. We'll hardly feel it pushing at right angles to our new gravity, but the bubble will get up respectable velocity in due course.”

She smiled, complimenting me again, and I felt unreasonably good again. Helse had done nothing, really, to turn me on like this, but I was thoroughly turned on. For the first time in my life, I was coming to appreciate the potency with which a woman could affect a man—just by being near him.

We had been sitting on the new floor, wary of standing while our orientation was shifting. Now we stood—and I felt abruptly dizzy and had to lean quickly against a wall for support. I saw Helse react similarly. Naturally I had to set my brain scrambling for a facile explanation, lest my newfound status as a knowledgeable person suffer erosion. “The spin!” I said. "This is a small bubble, so we feel the effect.

When we stand upright, our feet are moving faster than our heads, and maybe they weigh more too. So we get dizzy, and we tend to fall sidewise, because of the physics of the situation."

“So it's not something I ate,” Helse said. “I don't have to get sick.”

I wish she hadn't said that word! We struggled with our equilibrium and our psychologies and managed to get ourselves less queasy and more balanced. But we could hear the sound of someone retching in a neighboring cell.

“Let me try something,” I said, struck by a notion. I took my comb from my pocket, held it aloft near the ceiling just above head level, and dropped it.

The comb took about one second to reach the floor—but it didn't fall straight down. It drifted four feet to the side and banged into the wall.

Helse gasped. “How—?”

“It's the spin, again,” I said, pleased. “The hull is evidently providing us about half Earth-gravity, which I think is standard for a bubble this size. It has a diameter of about sixteen meters, which means a circumference of just over fifty meters, and so if it spins in ten seconds—”

“Wait, wait!” Helse interrupted. “I want to understand, really I do, because I think comprehension makes me less queasy. But I've had most of my education in Jupiter measurements, you know, inches and feet, and—”

Oh. I wondered how she had picked up that education, since it was normally affected on Callisto only by the rich landholders and politicians who had dealings with the Colossus Planet. But I did have some conversance with that clumsy system, so I rose to the challenge. “The bubble's radius in feet would be perhaps twenty-five,” I said. “And its circumference, here just inside the hull, maybe one hundred sixty feet, roughly. So if it completes a full turn every ten seconds, which seems reasonable, a point on the hull will travel sixteen feet every second. That gives us a velocity of sixteen feet per second—no, I guess it doesn't because the deviation is tangential, not straight—”

“That's all right,” she said quickly. “Now I understand the principle. But why did your comb fall sidewise?”

“Well, the floor of the Commons, our ceiling, is a little over six feet farther in, so while the hull moves sixteen feet, the ceiling moved only, let me see, twelve feet. So that's the velocity of my comb at that level. When I drop it, it can't match the velocity of the hull, so it falls four feet behind.”

“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, of course!” And yet again she was flattering me.

“So when we go up into the Commons,” I concluded, “We had better lean a little to compensate for the effects, and watch out how we jump, because we may not land where we expect. And our weight will be less on the Commons—about three-quarters what it is here. If this is half-gee here—and I really can't tell, now, so maybe it's quarter-gee, like Callisto—the Commons will be three-eighths gee, or three-sixteenths, or whatever. Anyway, less.”

“I feel better already,” Helse said. “Maybe some time I'll have the chance to explain something as useful to you.”

She was giving me too much credit, but I could live with it. It was time for us to go abroad and meet our neighbors.

I reached up, opened the panel, and hauled myself into the Commons. Spirit had done the same thing, and other passengers were popping out of their holes, some of them looking greenish. Yes, I understood their nausea! Soon a number of us were standing on the new concave floor of the doughnut, meeting each other. Camaraderie was easy, for we all shared some significant experiences: fleeing Callisto and adapting to spin-gravity.

I introduced Helse formally to my family. “He's traveling alone,” I explained. “His family couldn't support him any longer.” I made sure I made the “he” plain, so that Helse would know I was honoring her secret.

I suppose technically this was lying, but I had given my word, and it would have been a greater wrong to betray her. Still, I felt a twinge and resolved to cogitate upon the ethics next time I had cogitation time on my hands. Is a lie ever justified by circumstances? That's one you cannot answer in an offhand way.

Our neighbors, as it turned out, were basically similar to ourselves. They had been ground into intolerable poverty by the system, or had incurred the wrath of some person of power, or had simply come to the conclusion that they were on a dead-end street on Callisto. They were not the very poorest, for those could not even have raised the fare; they were the descending middle class, like us, or the disillusioned specialists who could no longer tolerate the system.

There was a lot of demand for the heads at this point, as people tried to get their motion-sick stomachs in order. Helse and I had overcome our problem, so were all right in that respect. I saw that a number of people were remaining in their cells, probably too sick to emerge. Time would help cure that, I was sure.

The immense if cloud-shrouded lure of Jupiter summoned us all. There we would somehow find the reprieve life had so far denied us. It was a giant mutual dream, and if it was short on practical details, at least it was better than dwelling on the problems behind us. How much better to float toward a dream than to sink into potential nightmare!

Now at last it was time to eat. Those of us who were not sick were famished, after the ardors of our departure from our lifetime homes. A bubble crewman dispensed packages of food and drink from the storage space in the center of the vessel, dropping them down through a hole in the net. People watched, amazed, as those items angled to the side, traveling twice as far horizontally as vertically. I spread my explanation around, but found that quite a number of people had already figured it out for themselves.

Spirit, always one to get into the spirit of these things, practiced jumping up to the net, which she could do with much less distortion by adjusting the angle and velocity of her take-off, then spreading her arms and flapping them as if flying, on the descent. Soon she had all the children doing it, and I suppose it was good experience. A person should always be properly conversant with his environment.

The food was staple stuff: all-purpose vitamin/mineral/protein cakes and globed water. No gourmet fare, but quite good enough to sustain us. This was, after all, not a pleasure excursion.

“We have to see to the orientation of the lenses,” the pilot announced, as we squatted in groups on the Commons floor near our cells. “We need a volunteer to supervise the air lock while we're outside.”

“I'll do it,” an older man said. “I've floated a bubble before.”

“Fair enough. I'll appoint you temporary captain for the interim. Your name is—”

“Diego,” the man said. “Bernardo Diego.”

“Take over, Captain Diego,” the pilot said, making a mock salute. Then he entered the air lock with his two crewmen.

Diego settled down by the lock, and the rest of us returned to our repast. Helse ate with us, seeming almost to become part of our family, and I guess that was just as well. No one seemed to suspect her true nature, not even Spirit, who could be unconscionably perceptive when that was least convenient. But she was more interested in her flying and in the other people around us, learning their names; she was as good at that sort of thing as I was poor. My talent is judging, not remembering people. That's why I am not naming people freely here; I did know their names, but I have already forgotten them, and there is nothing to be gained by cudgeling my memory to recreate every last one.

We finished our meal, and Helse and I took our turn at the head again, lining up by the cell numbers as before. We, as a group in the bubble, were fortunate that the male-female ratio of the total was just about even, for there were four heads of each type, and an imbalance would have been awkward. I helped Helse again; no one found it remarkable that two teen-age boys entered the room together, for that was the nature of boys. My mother and sisters went to their head together, though three was crowding it, and my father shared his turn with another family man. It was really working out quite well, considering the crowding. One person could use the liquid collector while another used the solid collector, and then they switched; in this way no more time was taken than it would have for one person at a time. We seemed to have a good group here, for all that it had been randomly assembled. Maybe there just happened to be a large percentage of intelligent, motivated people who couldn't abide the repressive Halfcal system.

Time passed. “How long does lens adjustment take?” I asked. “They can't stay out there forever.”

“Lens adjustment?” a neighbor asked. “Was that what they said? I was in the head when they went out, and didn't hear.”

“Orientation of the lenses,” I informed him. “They appointed a temporary captain from our number while they were out.”

“But a gravity lens is not oriented from outside,” the man protested. I remember his name now: it was García. “The lenses are not physical objects; they are fields, generated by a unit in the center of the bubble. It has to be that way; otherwise the spin would interfere with the gravity shielding, and we'd be jerking all over the cosmos. I used to be a technician. I'm not expert, but that much I do know.”

“That's right!” I agreed, chastened for not realizing it myself. I excuse myself in retrospect by pointing out that we were then in a new situation, adjusting to the spin in various ways, eating our first bubble meal, and meeting our neighbors, so that the affairs of the crewmen were not uppermost in our minds. Probably that was the way the crewmen had intended it. “They had no reason to go out for that—and one of them would have had to stay inside to change the settings if they were wrong.”

“We had better investigate,” my father said.

He and I and García made our way to Diego to present our concern. Diego looked stricken. “You know, you're right! They don't need the lifeboat to check the lenses!”

“Lifeboat?” I asked, experiencing a sinking sensation that my trace weight could not account for—

“This lock opens to the lifeboat,” Diego explained. “That's why they didn't need space suits this time. The boat's sealed, with its own supplies. I believe they stored the gold in there, for safekeeping—” Now his face was as aghast as mine had been.

It took us some time to verify and believe it, for our resources and information were limited and we didn't want to believe it. We had to get out the space suits and go outside the air lock to search for the lifeboat that wasn't there. But it was true: The three bubble crewmen had decamped with the gold. We were abruptly on our own, without even a lifeboat, in space.