Charles Sheffield: Higher Education

Fortunately, he knew exactly where that was. He ran down two flights of stairs, along the corridor, and entered the room exactly on time. He had half expected to find Vido already there, but the room was empty. Rick looked around him with a good deal of curiosity. He had never been here before.

The room was one big cube. Walls, floor and ceiling were all alike, flat planes of smooth grey plastic. The only difference was the sprinkler system in the ceiling, what looked like a plastic observation window in one wall, and a set of drain grilles in the floor. In the exact center of the room stood a single piece of equipment. It consisted of three great hoops, mounted with axes at right angles to each other but with a common center. They formed the outer skeleton of a great ball, four meters across. At the center of the ball, attached to the hoops by strong metal struts, sat a chair. It had solid arm rests, foot supports, and a tall back, and loose straps dangled down from it. A short metal ladder led up toward it.

All this, for a test? Rick was walking forward to examine the structure more closely when Tess Shawm came into the room behind him. She was holding a black plastic coverall suit. “You’ve never had one of these before, I assume?” she said.

Rick shook his head. The hoops looked as though each one could swivel independently of the other two. As each hoop turned, the chair would turn with it. So the chair could face in every direction and at any angle, including upside down.

“Well, it’s really pretty simple,” Shawm continued. “Put this suit on over your clothes, and zip it up. Those big hoops on the test rig are on what’s called gimbals, and they’re independently driven by motors in the base. There’s also a centrifuge effect. You know about that?”

“Sure.” Rick knew that he had been told about centrifuges, back in school, but he didn’t want to admit that he couldn’t remember what they did. He slipped the black plastic suit on, and found that it fitted snugly and zipped all the way up to his neck.

“Good.” Tess Shawm checked the top of the zipper. “You hear a lot about freefall, and how it can upset your stomach. It can and it does, but it turns out that almost everybody gets used to it after a while. A week or two in space, and you hardly think about it.

“Anyway, we can’t easily test freefall tolerance down here on Earth. What we can test, and what we’re going to test today, is tolerance to changes in attitude and acceleration. There’s a lot of individual variability in that from one person to another, and in space that actually causes more trouble than freefall. Go ahead, climb up the ladder.”

Rick thought he knew what was coming, and it didn’t sound like a big deal. He had been on the wildest rides that the city’s amusement parks had to offer, and he loved every one. According to Hoss Carlin and Screw Savage, Rick was like a rat. Mr. Hamel had once told them that rats didn’t have any way to throw up, and that’s why rat poisons worked in the school basement. The rats swallowed the bait, but they couldn’t vomit it out.

Poison or no poison, though, the basement always seemed to have plenty of rats left.

He climbed up the short ladder with Tess Shawm right behind. “Put your forearms flat along the supports,” she said, “and make yourself comfortable in the seat. When I fasten the straps, let me know if they feel too tight. They have to hold you in for any position of the chair, but they shouldn’t be in the slightest bit painful. The head band stretches, so you can move your head forward if you want to.”

Rick grinned at her as he leaned back so that she could place a broad band around his forehead. “That all feels fine. Best seat I ever sat in. Like a king on a throne up here.”

She gave him a peculiar look, and said, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Sit tight, your majesty. I’m going down to start the ball rolling. Call out if you want to stop—I’ll be able to hear you.”

She retreated down the stepladder, picked it up, and carried it out of the room with her. She closed the tight-fitting door. A few seconds later Rick saw her face at the observation window, high on one of the walls. He could not wave, but he gave her a big grin. She nodded back. A few seconds later there was a whine of electric motors and the chair began to tilt backward and to the left.

Gradually, the pace picked up. Rick could see the observation window, floor grilles, and ceiling sprinklers rotating steadily past him. He told himself that this was just another ride, one that he would have paid good money for a few weeks ago.

The walls were going past faster. Another component was adding to the motion. It was a curious, irregular back-ward-and-forward shift, as though the chair could not only rotate in any direction, but could at the same time be jerked up, forward and sideways away from the center of the hoops. Rick could feel new forces, pulling him every which way. It took a few seconds to realize that this must be the “centrifuge effect” that Tess Shawm had casually mentioned. It took less time than that for Rick to decide that he did not like what he was feeling.

Ceiling, walls and floor were turning into one continuous blur. He was no longer sure which way was up. Rick swallowed hard, and at once felt an urge to belch. He did so, and the sour taste of tomato paste came to his mouth. The vision of the mound of spaghetti that he had eaten swam before his eyes, and he tried desperately to think of something else.

All he had to do was yell, and the test would stop. Tess Shawm had promised it. The only thing that stopped him was the idea of how Vido would gloat next time they met. Someone had warned Valdez, he had known not to eat a lot. That wasn’t fair.

Fair or not, Rick knew he could not stand much more. He was full of a terrible sense of dizziness, and the chair that held him seemed to swing and turn and veer faster than ever. His stomach felt three times its usual size. It was pressing upward toward his throat.

Stop!

Rick opened his mouth to shout the word. Instead of sound, a great gush of yellow vomit flew out and away. Stop! No word came. He leaned forward against the pull of the head band and threw up again, still unable to speak. When he closed his mouth, a sour jet spurted from his nose. When he opened his mouth again, the urge to retch made it impossible to breathe. He closed his eyes and hung against the chair straps in utter misery. As each new spasm hit him, he felt ready to die. And still he could not call out for it to end.

A sudden jolt of cold hit him in the face. He shivered and opened his eyes—and found that he was sitting upright in a chair that was rotating horizontally and steadily slowing. Jets of cold water from the overhead sprinkler system were sluicing down, over him and all over the room. Streaks of yellow and red—his last meal—were steadily disappearing from walls and floor.

He leaned back, welcoming the chill of cold water on his forehead. Although his eyes told him that the chair was stationary now, when he closed them he was sure that he was still turning end over end. He was still dizzy and panting for breath. He had thrown up so hard that his stomach and his throat felt raw and strained. Even so, it was bliss just to sit there and think that, no matter how bad he felt, it was over.

He closed his eyes again. This time everything held steady. He did not move until he heard the outer door open and the clatter of the stepladder.

“Still feeling like a king?” Tess Shawm was ascending the ladder beside the chair. There was something different in her expression. He thought at first that she was gloating over his misery, and then he realized that wasn’t it. For the first time, she was grinning at him as though he was a human being and not just a test subject. She released his right hand, and he raised it to wipe the wet palm across his mouth.