Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

She meant to ignore Tie Dye when she got there. She really did. But when he took the remote from her to pass on to the chief, he brushed her chest with his big, freckled hand. It wasn’t an accident. His fingers lingered on the front of her utility suit at least a full second.

“Back off!” she spat at him. She slapped at his hand, but he pulled it out of her reach. Her fingers curled, longing to claw his fleshy cheeks.

His phlegmy laugh made her skin crawl. “Relax, Itty Bit,” he said. “Just checking to see if they’re as small as the rest of you. I would say—” he grinned wider, showing his big yellow teeth. “I would say the design is consistent!”

“I’ve told you to keep your hands off me,” she said. “I’ve filed a complaint with Command, so you better watch yourself.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. You did it twice, in fact. Waste of time, wasn’t it? You need to understand command priorities.” He stopped grinning, and shook a finger at her. “You ring techs are lucky to have work. One day they’ll invent their way out of the problem with the monitors, and leave you and the rest of them on Earth where you belong. That’ll save a lot of air and food out here.”

“If they could, they would, Tie Dye.” Isabet spun away from him, and kicked off down the corridor toward the mess.

He called after her, “Get used to it, Itty Bit! It’s the way we do things here.”

Over her shoulder she snapped, “Get used to it? This is my third voyage.”

“You should know, then,” he said. “Like I said, you’re one of the lucky ones!”

It was true enough. Isabet and Skunk and Happy and the others were fortunate to have their jobs. Skunk, whose Icelandic name none of them could pronounce, had fled his home as his village disappeared under the cold waves of the North Atlantic. He’d been living on Government rations since he was six, and it showed in his short stature and wispy hair.

Happy Feet had been a dancer Earthside; when he got too old for that, he applied to be a ring tech, and was accepted because of his small size and agility. He joked that he was only here so he could eat. He said, with his high-pitched laugh, “I’d rather soak up G-rays than eat G-rations!”

Ginger almost didn’t fit the profile of a ring tech. She hadn’t starved. She was just naturally small. She had once had a business, something to do with books, Isabet thought, but the Global Depression had wiped out her business and scattered her family. Bony and worn down by sorrow, she was grateful to be aboard the North America . Too grateful, in Isabet’s view. She took Tie Dye’s abuse without the slightest resistance.

Isabet knew she was the luckiest of all. She was also the youngest and the smallest. Abandoned as an infant—a doorstep baby—she had been kicked out of the orphanage at the age of sixteen to find her own way. The orphanage called it graduation, but all it meant to her was being turned out on the street with few resources. In one of the shelters, she saw a poster about the positronic reactor ships and for the first time, learned that there was an advantage to having been starved as a baby. There was work for a person of small physique if that person had the guts to go into space, crawl through the narrow maintenance tubes every day, and risk gamma ray poisoning as well as all the other dangers of space travel.

Isabet had guts. She didn’t have much else to work with, but her courage and native intelligence won her the job, and she liked it. The voyages to Ganymede were a lot more comfortable for her than the required months of gravity Earthside between trips. It wasn’t just that her pay ran out before it was time to return to the ship. On the North America she didn’t have to fight for a bed in a shelter and then sleep with one eye open and a knife in her hand against the threat of rape or theft or worse.

She scowled as she told Ginger and Happy and Skunk what Tie Dye’d done. “The worst part is,” she concluded, “he’s right. I complained to Command, and they never even answered me.”

“Probably never reached ’em,” Skunk said glumly.

“I think it did. I think they just don’t want to hear it. He’s good—a containment expert, in fact. They need him more than they do me. I’m dispensable.”

“That’s not fair,” Skunk said.

“It’s not right, either.” Isabet wriggled impatiently against the straps that held her on the stool. “Our contracts provide for redress of grievances.”

Ginger sighed. “You’re the only one of us who ever reads those,” she said.

Happy Feet spread his hands. “I, of course, don’t actually read ,” he said slyly.

“Oh, you do, too,” Skunk said. “I mean, you can .”

Happy waggled his eyebrows and did a little freefall dance, feet and hands flashing so that he rose against the restraining straps like a puppy pulling at his leash. “Waste of effort,” he said blithely. “I just dance!”

“In the maintenance tubes?” Skunk said sourly.

Happy chuckled. “If you could only see me.”

Skunk shook his head. “I don’t know how you stay so cheerful. We’re trapped here. No better than slaves.”

“We’re not slaves,” Ginger said.

Isabet said sharply, “That’s right. We get paid, we have opportunities, and responsibilities. We should be treated with respect.”

“I don’t think Tie Dye agrees,” Happy said.

“You better be careful with him,” Ginger warned. “If he catches you alone someplace—”

“Yeah, I know. I can take care of myself.” Isabet paused, tilting her head, listening. “Notice that?”

“What?” Skunk said.

“The ship. We’re getting ready to brake.”

“How can you tell?”

“The vibration changes. You can’t feel it?”

The other three shook their heads. Happy said, “I can’t believe you can tell.”

“You just have to be sensitive to it. Three days now, and we’ll be there.”

“I don’t know how you know that,” Happy Feet said.

Isabet patted his thin cheek. “Reading, Hap. Reading. That thing you say you don’t do.”

The four of them gathered in the aft observation area as Ganymede began to swell against the blackness of space, with the great disc of Jupiter a vague, immense shadow beyond it. As the ship adjusted attitude, they sank to the deck, briefly weighted, then rose again. It was like being aboard an ocean-going vessel, and Isabet saw Ginger swallow and press her hand to her lips. “It’ll pass in a little while,” she said, touching Ginger’s shoulder. “We’ll be in electrogravity soon. It’s magnetic, so we’ll pick it up from the habitat.”

Skunk said, “Wow, Isabet. I don’t know how you know all that.”

“My third voyage.”

“Yeah, but—electro-what?”

“Electrogravity. There’s a great video about the habitat, Skunk. You should see it.”

Ginger nodded, but she still looked a little green. Happy moved close to her other side, and steadied her with his arm. Isabet turned back to gaze with pleasure at the lavender-tinted disc of Ganymede. The poles of the moon glistened faintly, and the pockmarks of craters layered the surface. Isabet pressed her palms together, entranced. This was her reward for putting up with the indignities of the North America , with the insults of Tie Dye and the rest of the crew. She never tired of it. She only wished—

“That’s it?” Ginger said, pointing to the disc.

“That’s it,” Isabet said happily. It was somehow massive and delicate at the same time, and it seemed immune from the ugliness that had overtaken Earth, the crowding, the fouled air, the threatening seas. She sighed with pleasure. “That’s Ganymede.”

“It’s so dim,” Ginger said. “I thought it would be brighter.”