Marion Bradley - Survey Ship

“Now you see why you have to,” Peake said soberly. “It doesn’t take the heart very long to adapt to zero-gravity, and the heart’s like any other muscle, it gets lazy when it isn’t working; the muscles in the human body were made to operate at one gee. You’ll need to work out twice as long today, and don’t try that again.”

She stared at him rebelliously, but the thumping of her heart had frightened her. Could they really lose fitness so swiftly outside the familiar gravity of Earth? “All right,” she said soberly, “I’ll remember, Peake.”

Peake nodded and went off to jog around the edge of the room, setting himself a hard, unrelenting pace. At one side, Ching was clinging to a ballet barre, doing smooth, fluid knee bends — Peake rummaged in a packrat memory for the word, plies. During a lifetime of physical training, all of them had had introductory ballet exercises for fitness, and some of the women still used them as a training routine. Ravi was running too, on a treadmill. Peake ran on, feeling the pounding of his bare feet against the floor, enjoying the slow acceleration of his heartbeat. He was, he assessed himself mentally, in excellent condition. He intended to stay that way, though he supposed the novelty of doing exercises in the little gym module might wear off fairly soon.

As he ran around the small arena, recurrently, he passed Teague at the rowing machine, and about the fourth time he realized that he, too, was looking at the red-haired youngster’s superb muscled physique. Not, especially, with desire; just, he became aware that he was noticing Teague, and it dismayed him, ha hadn’t looked at anyone that way in years. Not since he and Jimson — he cut off that thought in midair, knowing Fontana had been right; looking back was pointless, simply a way to torture himself.

No harm in looking, he told himself grimly as he pounded around the track. Especially when that’s all it can ever come to. Teague and Ravi are both woman-chasers. Which is just as well because neither of them is my type, or ever could be.

He had never thought about anyone that way — not, anyhow, after adolescence — except Jimson.

But why not? Why was I different? He had read the theory that homosexuality or heterosexuality is firmly established by the age of two or three. When the practice is free of social stigma, as in the Academy, at least one out of every five or six men will be homosexual; and there had been four or five besides himself in their class. All but himself and Jimson had experimented with women, too; they had simply been too wrapped up in one another.

I don’t know how I feel about women. I never bothered to find out. And then Peake, running, realized that this kind of thought was the sort of thing which hard exercise was intended to exorcise; wholly preoccupied with the body, awareness and morbid introspection left the mind. He sped up his running to sprint level, and thought dropped away; he was simply enjoying the feel of his body, his feet drumming the track, his heart pounding, the feel of sweat bursting from his body.

When it happened it was not the way he had always thought it would be if such a thing happened. First he felt his feet slip slightly, as if the floor had suddenly become tacky and his bare feet lost their traction. Then, since he was moving too swiftly to check himself, he felt himself slip loose and plummet, free of gravity,

toward the far wall. Inertia, he thought, an object keeps travelling in the same direction unless something happens to stop it…he twisted as hard as he could to roll up in a ball, struck hard with one shoulder and slid along — no longer down — the wall. He looked around. Ching was floating, clinging with one hand to the ballet barre, looking suprised and panicky; the force of her kick had flung her into the air with nothing to bring her down again. Fontana, Ravi, and Moira were floating in midair, while Teague, still in the rowing machine, was staring in dismay as it wobbled under him.

Moira, with the skill of the free-fall-trained athlete, was already aware of what had happened, and making sturdy swimming motions down toward the DeMag unit.

“The gravity went off,” she announced, superfluously. “You didn’t set it properly, Teague.”

“Yes I did,” Teague objected, climbing out of the machine with some difficulty, “See, it’s still turned full ON — one full gravity.”

Fontana came and joined them. “Granted, I’m not quite the expert on DeMag technology that you are, Teague, I do know something about them, and a properly set DeMag doesn’t go off that way. There’s supposed to be a fail-safe device in them which lessens the gravity very slowly, to prevent just this kind of accident. Someone could have been hurt—”

Teague had already removed the panel over the unit and was peering into its interior. Fontana thought he looked very strange, as if he were swimming down toward it, his legs sticking straight up from inside the box. Moira shoved Fontana to one side and joined Teague there.

She said, “There’s nothing wrong with the unit. Are you sure you set it properly, Teague?”

“Positive,” he said, “and if I hadn’t, it couldn’t go off suddenly like that.” He withdrew his head slowly from the box. “It’s all tied into the central computer for Life Support, and when it lets go — and nothing is perfect — it’s backed up so that the changes in gravity are very, very gradual. It doesn’t matter so much when the gravity goes off — but suppose we’d all been in free-fall, doing acrobatics or something?” He pointed at Ching, still holding the barre. “Anyone who’d been in midair like that would have come down with an impact — one of us could have broken a leg, a kneecap, a shoulder — what’s the matter, Moira?” he asked, for the red-headed woman had gone white, her freckles standing out like blots.

Her smile wavered. She said, “I — I’m not sure. It’s like that other time—”

Teague looked grim. He said, “I think we treat Moira the way coal-miners used to treat their canaries —when the bird keels over, something’s wrong even if the miner doesn’t feel it yet. When Moira looks like this, we assume there’s a real emergency. Ching, if it’s something in the computer— ” remembering that free-fall bothered her, he pushed up, floating, took her hands and gently steadied her as she lowered herself toward the floor.

He said softly, for her ears alone, “It’s got to be in your mind, Ching. You’re a G-N; your inner-ear channels are by definition perfect.”

She said, shakily, “I think somehow the geneticists missed that one,” and unexpectedly, vomited messily into the air.

“Let her alone,” Peake said swiftly, “Get her down!”

Ching moaned, still retching, “There isn’t any down.!”

Peake came and took over, checking her pulse, wiping her face. The others, with varying expressions of disgust and exasperation, were dodging drifting globules of vomit. Fontana — she too, Peake recalled, was medically trained — came over to them, a dampened towel in one hand.

She wiped Ching’s face with it, gently. Ching was still retching emptily and crying, but as Fontana touched her she made a noticeable effort to control herself.

“I’m all right. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Here, Teague, did you need help?”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the setup,” Moira said, her hands caressing the DeMag machinery. “It’s perfect, nothing wrong with it.”

Fontana said with asperity, “Maybe we all dreamed it.”

Moira’s voice was impatient. “No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean, since there’s nothing wrong with the functioning of the DeMag, whatever it is, it’s got to be in the computer tie-in.”