Charles Sheffield: Higher Education

“I’m not sure. Until two days ago I’d have agreed with everything you just said. We’ve seen a lot of weird things since we shipped up from Earth, and Jigger has been one of our only points of continuity. It’s almost uncanny, the way he shows up when anything is happening—like when you had your fight with Vido—but you always felt you could rely on him.”

“So what happened two days ago?” It seemed to Rick that she was having trouble getting to the point. Diffidence and uncertainty were not the usual Deedee. “Spit it out, Dee.”

“Remember the big group meeting with Barney, the first one we had after we got here? She started to talk about assignments, and I had left my problem set in my room. I sneaked out while she was going over the list of what came next, and I came back here to pick it up. And I saw Jigger. He didn’t see me, but it looked as though he had just come out of my room and was heading away along the corridor.”

“Why didn’t you say something to him?”

“I was too surprised—and I was in a hurry to get back to the meeting. But it looked like he was going into Goggles Landau’s room. After the meeting with Barney was over, I asked Goggles if he had been doing any work with Jigger. He said ‘Work? No. I haven’t spoken to Jigger since we got here,’ and he stared at me as though I was off the wall.”

“Why didn’t you talk to Barney?”

“And tell her what? I couldn’t see any sign in my room that Jigger had been there. I wasn’t even sure he had. Barney would have ripped me to pieces.”

“She might.” Rick tried to sound sympathetic, and failed. “She certainly ought to. You didn’t see anything. Nothing happened to your room, or Goggles’s. You don’t have a thing to go on, except some weird suspicion.”

“I haven’t finished,” Deedee said quietly. “I knew all that, but I was still worried. Today we were all together in the smelter, and it was the first time the whole group had met in two days. I don’t know if you noticed, but Gina Styan was there as well as Barney French. Everybody who came out to CM-26 with us was there—except Jigger.”

“So? He was busy elsewhere.”

“He was. I sneaked out of the SM before the meeting ended, and came back here to my room. I left my door open, but I stayed out of sight on my bunk. If Jigger came along and saw me I was going to say I wasn’t feeling good. And he did come along.”

“Into your room?”

“No. But he went into Alice Klein’s, and he went into Skip Chung’s. He was about ten minutes in each one.”

“Why didn’t you go in after him?” It was the obvious thing to do, and Rick was losing patience. “Just ask him what he was doing there.”

“This is going to sound stupid, Rick, but I was scared. I am scared. It’s like you feel you know someone really well, and then they suddenly do something so out of character that you realize you don’t know them at all. Can you understand that?”

Rick thought he understood exactly. It was his own feeling, right now. This wasn’t the Deedee Mao that he knew and liked.

“What do you want me to do, Dee?”

“I don’t know. I guess for the moment, nothing. I’m going to keep an eye on Jigger, and on anyone else who comes prowling near my room for the next few days.” She paused. “But if anything bad should happen to me—well, I want to be sure that at least one person around here will be asking questions.”

Rick didn’t forget what Deedee had said, but the activities of the next few days pushed it away from the center of his attention.

For one thing, he had grappled hard with the problem of the spinning ring, to the point where he believed that he knew what must happen. After many hours he could see that hoop, rotating in front of his eyes. It was spinning about the center of attraction. Then you cut all the strings. At that point the ring would wobble, just the tiniest bit, because any real system always did. One side of the hoop would move a fraction closer to the center of attraction. Once that happened that same part would be pulled a little bit harder toward the center by the gravitational force, because gravity was stronger with decreasing distance. At the same time, because that side was closer to the center of rotation but the rotation speed hadn’t changed, the outward centrifugal force on it would become a tiny bit less. Both those would act to make that part of the hoop move toward the center of attraction.

Meanwhile, because the hoop was strong and solid, the part on the opposite side had to be pushed a little bit farther away from the center of attraction. The gravity force on it would be less, and the centrifugal force bigger. That part of the hoop would feel a force to move it away from the center of attraction. In other words, both sides of the hoop would feel forces that amplified the original wobble. The hoop would move more and more off-center, until part of it hit the central attracting point. The strings had been absolutely essential, to prevent any asymmetry in the movement growing and growing.

That was the mental picture. Unfortunately, Rick knew there was no way he could put it into mathematics. The tools were still far beyond him, and his deadline for submission of an answer was close. He wrote out, carefully and laboriously, his train of logic, and added a note: For the same reason, if the rings of Saturn were solid hoops, their motion would be unstable. They would move until a part of every ring hit the planet and the whole thing would disintegrate.

He checked the spelling of every doubtful word, worried about what he might have missed, and handed his efforts over to Barney French. She looked at him skeptically when he said he thought he had the answer, but she offered no comment. Even after he had handed in his solution he could not stop thinking about the problem. His obsession ended only when the time came to leave the main body of the station to work on the cleanup of the SM.

The smelter had been filled with air, and after the apprentices had stripped off their suits each one of them was assigned a section of the inner wall to scrape clean.

“Good enough to see your face in every bit,” Barney French announced. “Until it’s like that, you’re not finished. It’s possible, because it’s been done before. The last group of apprentices managed the whole thing in two days.”

She might have meant to encourage, but after four hours of unpleasant work her words had the opposite effect. Every apprentice was filthy, covered by a layer of metallic ash and gritty powder. It was in their eyes, ears, and hair, and when they paused for a meal break they could feel it grinding between their teeth. Rick, looking at the section assigned to him, realized that he had done no more than five percent of the work. At this rate he would be at it for weeks.

When the work first started the apprentices had been cheerful and talkative. During the second four-hour stint they were all looking at their neighbors, wondering if someone else had been given an easier or a smaller section to work on. Not one of them could see any hope of finishing the job in two days.

Finally Barney told them it was time to quit. She was still cheerful—and clean. She had kept her suit on, and ash and grit did not stick to it. Exposed skin was another matter. The grime that went on so easily was the very devil to get off. Rick, after half an hour of effort, still went to bed with matted hair and the taste of metallic oxides in his mouth.

The next morning he returned to the main hall, reluctantly ready to go back to work. He was a little surprised to see Polly Quint already there and standing next to Barney French. Polly was a notorious sluggard, usually the last to arrive at any event beginning before noon. She was grinning all over her face.