Charles Sheffield: Higher Education

He was gone. Rick and Vido stared at each other warily. Doctor Bretherton was no longer in the dormitory, but his presence seemed to hang over the room.

“Better get back there,” Rick muttered at last.

“Yeah. I guess.”

They headed for the door at the same time and wedged into it together. Neither one was willing to give way. They turned, so that they were face to face and staring into each other’s eyes as they edged through into the corridor.

Vido raised his fist toward Rick, then dropped it to his side. “You got away this time, Luban. He saved your hairy ass, and you know it. I’m not dumb enough to do anything right now, not after what the doc said. But you better remember something, scumball.”

His hand came up, to rub at his bloodshot left eye. “This ain’t over. It ain’t over ’til I say it’s over.”

Weeks of mind-numbing tests, mental and physical, and the discomforts that went with them; they were all converging now, collapsing to a single and final minute.

Rick had been strapped into his seat for more than an hour. Next to him sat Deedee Mao, another of Vanguard Mining’s recent recruits. Like him she had been expelled from her school at sixteen, but as he had discovered in the last hour of conversation they had little else in common. She and a dozen other trainees had been flown to the White Sands launch site from an East Coast medical test facility, two thousand miles away, to join Rick and the rest of his group. She was big, loud, and self-confident, just the sort of aggressive female that he hated. She and Rick had found themselves arguing almost from the first sentence. As the single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle came closer to departure, however, they had both gradually quietened. For the past quarter of an hour neither of them had said a word.

That silence suited Rick. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could not take his eyes from the changing digits of the display. Sixty-two—sixty-one. A siren began to wail inside the ship. Only one more minute to lift-off.

He knew, intellectually, that riding the single stage vessel to orbit was not much more dangerous than taking a PV across the city. So why was he gripping the arms of his seat so hard?

There was an odd whirring sound and a vibration of the metal surface beneath Rick’s feet. The hatch was moving to its final sealed setting. That meant that the lasers were powered up, waiting for their first discharge. The cover beneath the SSTO would have opened, to reveal the ablative layers.

Rick tried to concentrate on factual matters. The first minute would be the most uncomfortable. That’s when he and Deedee and the eighteen other trainees aboard would feel the highest acceleration. After that the ground lasers would be switched off and the onboard nuclear rocket would cut in. The acceleration force on them would drop to two gees.

Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty. . .

There were voices in the background: the ground crew for the ship, just three people. Their duties had been explained to Rick as part of the “informed consent” briefing.

The moving display in front of him seemed to have slowed, minutes passing between each second. Before he got here, Rick had imagined that travel to and in space would be conducted wearing spacesuits. The first White Sands briefing had taught him that was an idiotic idea, as out-of-date as the notion that aircraft passengers all wore parachutes. Rick was dressed in the same informal uniform of blue shirt and slacks that had become familiar to him since the day he arrived in New Mexico for the medical tests.

Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . .

Almost as safe as a trip on the PV, the briefings said. But every day the media carried news of PV accidents. The vehicle he was sitting in felt far more vulnerable. Laser power could fail; the nuclear rocket could refuse to cut in; or it could refuse to turn off at the right time and hurtle the passengers away to oblivion. You could sometimes walk away from a PV accident. Had anyone ever walked away from an SSTO failure? There had been failures, he knew that for a fact.

Rick tried to steel himself for anything. He failed. It was with total astonishment that he suddenly felt a hand on his thigh.

You were supposed to keep your arms and hands flat on the padded seat support during launch. Rick turned. Deedee Mao was staring straight ahead of her. Her high-cheekboned, yellow face was oddly pale and rigid, but her fingers were squeezing and rubbing his leg.

“Wanna get it on when we’re at the transfer station?”

She could only be speaking to him, but he could hardly hear her or see her lips moving. “Y’know, in freefall. I hear it’s somethin’ special.”

It was the worst possible time for a sexual proposition. Even if he had known Deedee well, even if had liked her, Rick was far too nervous to feel horny.

But he wasn’t going to admit to her or anyone else just how he did feel.

“Sure.” His voice sounded like an old man’s. He cleared his throat. “Sure.” Then he couldn’t say any more.

Twelve, eleven, ten. . .

“I’ll be in c-cabin t-t—.” Deedee’s fingers on his thigh were trembling. “Cabin t-t-twenty-eight.”

Five, four, three—

“Oh, sweet Lord—”

Her hand was trembling worse. With fear, not passion. Rick felt an unexpected sympathy. Deedee was seeking distraction, anything to help her through the first seconds of launch.

“She’s tracking,” a crewman’s voice said.

“Mirror’s free.”

Two, one. . .

Anything to help. And he needed distraction as much as she did.

Zero.

“Up ship.”

As the final digit flickered into sight, Rick broke the rules, too. He lifted his arm from the padded support, placed his hand on top of Deedee’s, and patted it.

Within half a second he knew that he had made the mistake of the century. Lift had begun. Deedee’s hand and his own were suddenly welded together, pressed down by more than five gees of acceleration. His leg was tilted slightly upward and their joined hands inched up his thigh toward his groin.

Rick gasped with pain. If that monster weight kept moving up his body, it would turn him into a eunuch. He tried to lift his hand and arm and found them sheathed in lead. He could not raise his hand, let alone Deedee’s. All he could do, with one desperate jerk, was push their hands a couple of inches away along his leg and hold them there.

The pain and pressure was excruciating. Deedee’s whole forearm lay across his thigh. He could feel bruises forming there in real-time. He sat silent and sweating, pushing and pushing forever, until without warning all weight vanished completely. His stomach at once came free of its moorings and started to float up into his throat, but before he had time to gag he was again pressed back into his seat. This time the force was endurable. It had to be the two gees of the nuclear drive, but compared with the laser-boosted liftoff it felt like nothing.

Rick lifted his hand away from Deedee’s, closed his eyes, and relaxed. After a few moments he felt her hand leave his thigh.

“Luban. That your name?”

“Yeah?” He opened his eyes and glanced across at her. Deedee Mao’s smooth face was still pale but now it bore its old belligerent expression.

“Don’t get no funny ideas, Luban.”

“Like what?”

“I mean, about what I might have said back there at liftoff.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean, I was just making conversation.”

Rick couldn’t let that pass. “Like hell! You were scared white. You should change your name from Deedee to pee-pee. You were ready to pee in your pants.”