Charles Sheffield: Higher Education

He could not avoid contact now. But at least the question of identity would be answered. Rick waited, and knew the exact moment when the other saw him. There was a reflexive jerk in the suit’s arms and head, followed by a slight alteration of thrust vector.

“You’re pretty early,” said a voice in Rick’s headset.

It was Jigger Tait, heading straight toward him.

“Yeah. You too.” Rick at once thought of Deedee’s worried face. There was no reason at all why Jigger should not be out here—he was senior enough to go anywhere he pleased—but that did not explain why he would choose to be wandering around outside, alone.

“You mean for heat-cleaning the smelter?” Jigger spoke casually, as though meeting Rick was the most natural thing possible. “Oh, I won’t be staying for that. I’ve seen it before, with other apprentice groups, and anyway I have work that needs doing inside. I’ll see you later.”

He jetted off and entered the open outer door of the airlock, leaving Rick perplexed. Jigger had offered not one word of explanation as to what he was doing. Rick could think of no reason why Jigger needed to be wandering around— prowling around, in Deedee’s word—the smelting module. On the other hand, if Jigger wanted to prowl the interior unobserved, he would soon have the perfect opportunity with the apprentices all busy outside.

Hopes for a quiet half-hour of serious thinking had faded at the first sight of that red spacesuit beacon. It faded farther when the airlock opened again and another suited figure emerged.

Rick’s initial thought—Jigger returning—vanished with one look at the newcomer. She was as slim as Jigger was muscular, and considerably shorter. He also knew exactly who it was. An apprentice’s style in manipulating the motion controls of a spacesuit was as individual as a walk.

“Hi, Alice.” Rick moved toward her. “We’re early.”

She must have expected to be alone, because he saw the instinctive jerk of surprise.

“Rick? I didn’t think there would be anybody else out here yet.”

“Me neither.” He advanced until they were within a few feet of each other. “But you were exactly right. Initiative is the name of the game, and Polly sure grabbed it.”

“For today she did.” Alice didn’t sound upset, the way that Rick felt. “What was it you told me Vido Valdez said, when the two of you were always fighting? Are you still fighting, by the way?”

“No. We get on just fine.”

“But you’re not close?”

“No, I wouldn’t say we are.” The conversation wasn’t making a lot of sense to Rick. “What Vido said to me when?”

“When Dr. Bretherton told the two of you to cool it, or get thrown out.”

“Oh, yeah. Vido told me, ‘It ain’t over ’til I say it’s over.’ ”

“That’s what I meant. Well, I feel the same about Polly. She’s riding high at the moment, but she hasn’t won until we say she has. We just have to come up with better ideas.”

“Great.” Rick knew his skepticism was showing through. “Got any?”

“Not yet. That’s why I’m here. But we will have. Come on.”

She led the way over to the smelter. It was open and airless and they wandered inside it together, examining the odd airlock, the places where suits could be stored, and the array of monitoring instruments on the lower flat end. They looked at the great inductive heating coils, which would soon raise the whole interior to a temperature of thousands of degrees. At the other end of the smelter Alice made another inspection of the control panel that allowed the segmented metal sectors to iris open or to close for an airtight seal. Finally they moved together along the curved outer surface of the cylinder, studying the little fusion drives that caused the cylinder to spin on its central axis or to slow to a halt.

“Ideas?” Rick asked as they cycled back to their starting point at the base of the cylinder.

“Some. I don’t want to talk about them, though—they’re still half-baked.”

Rick understood that completely. You might get what seemed like the world’s greatest idea for the first half hour, and a day later you’d realize that it was a complete crock. In any case, this was no time for discussing secrets. The rest of the apprentices were beginning to appear from the lock, wandering in small groups over to the smelter. Because Rick and Alice were already there, it was natural for the others to treat them as a group center and gather around them.

Polly arrived last, followed by Barney French. “I would like to describe the plan for today,” she said in a wobbly voice, while she was still approaching the rest of the group.

She was nervous, and no wonder. Everyone would have a role, but this was Polly’s show. Barney wouldn’t let her do anything that might destroy or damage the smelter, but it would be almost as bad to be given a public warning, or to have one of the other apprentices point out why what she was suggesting was crazy and dangerous.

Polly moved to stand in front of the triple airlock. “The good news,” she said, “is that we won’t have to worry about rotating the smelter, because we don’t have ore to melt and centrifuge. That means we don’t need to inspect the fusion engines on the outside. The other good news is that we won’t need to go to four thousand degrees, even though the structure can stand it. Twenty-eight hundred degrees will be enough to oxidize and vaporize all the residues that line the smelter.

“Finally, we won’t need anything like full atmospheric pressure for this to work. If we use pure oxygen at one thirtieth of a standard atmosphere, that will do nicely.

“The bad news is something that I didn’t realize when I first thought of using heat to clean the inside of the smelter. When you melt a metallic asteroid by electric inductive heating, there is good conduction through all parts of it. In other words, heat travels easily to everything you want to melt. But we are dealing with just a thin layer of residue, too thin in places to conduct much of anything—heat or electricity. That means induction is inefficient, and so is conduction. Instead, we have to make the whole interior of the smelter into a radiating enclosure at a uniform temperature—a black body, that’s called in physics. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about black bodies—regardless of what some people around here might think.”

It produced a laugh, as Polly had intended. Rumors of her affair with Vido Valdez, darkest-skinned of all the apprentices, were widespread.

“I still don’t understand black body radiation,” she went on. “Chick Teazle did all the work for me, and I want to give him credit.”

“Credit for me if it works,” Chick said cheerfully. “But Polly’s fault if it goes wrong.”

“It had better not go wrong.” Now Polly was not joking. She had too much riding on this. “I’ve worked up the inspection schedule that has to be done before we begin, and the assignment for each of you will show on your suit’s interior display. If anybody doesn’t know what to do, or has trouble when they start doing it, come back to me. I’ll be standing right here.”

Rick’s assignment was straightforward: inspect the power supply for four of the inductive heating units on the periphery of the smelter. As he moved to do it, he realized that Polly had the worst job of all. She would just hover in space with no assignment, waiting and worrying until everyone else was finished.

On the other hand, he wasn’t going to skimp his own task for the sake of Polly’s peace of mind. He checked the power supply, slowly and systematically, then the transformers, and finally the inductive coils themselves. Beside him, Gladys de Witt did the same thing for four other units. In the well-lit interior he could recognize her by the color coding bars on her suit.