Space Cadet (14 page)

They took the slideway half around the Station, through crowds of gorgeously dressed and hurrying people, past rich and beckoning shops. Matt enjoyed it thoroughly.

“They say,” said Oscar, “that this is what the big cities used to be like, back before the Disorders.”

“It certainly doesn’t look like Des Moines.”

“Nor like Venus.” Oscar found what he was looking for, an automatic laundry service, in a passageway off the waiting room of the emigrant zone. After a considerable wait the uniform came back to them, clean, pressed, and neatly packaged. It being Terra Station, the cost was sky high. Matt looked at what remained of his funds.

“Might as well be broke,” he said and invested the remainder in a pound of chocolate-coated cherries. They hurried back. Tex looked so woebegone and so glad to see them that Matt had a sudden burst of generosity and handed the box to Tex. “Present to you, you poor, miserable, worthless critter.”

Tex seemed touched by the gesture—it was no more than a gesture, since candy and such are, by ancient right, community property among roommates.

“Hurry up and get dressed, Tex. The scooter shoves off in just thirty-two minutes.” Twenty-five minutes later, suited up, they were filing into the airlock, Tex with the chocolates under his arm.

The trip back was without incident, except for one thing: Matt had not thought to specify a pressure container for the candy. Before Tex could strap down the box had bulged. By the time they reached the
Randolph
the front and left side of his space suit was covered with a bubbly, sticky mess compounded of cherry juice, sugar syrup, and brown stains of chocolate as the semi-liquid confection boiled and expanded in the vacuum. He would have thrown the package away had not the oldster, strapped next to him in the rack, reminded him of the severe penalties for jettisoning anything in a traffic lane.

The cadet in charge of the hangar pocket in the
Randolph
looked Tex over in disgust. “Why didn’t you pack it inside your suit?”

“Uh, I just didn’t think of it, sir.”

“Hummph! Next time you will, no doubt. Go on inside and place yourself on the report for ‘gross untidiness in uniform.’ And clean up that suit.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Pete was in their suite when they got back. He came out of his cubicle. “Have fun? Gee, I wish I hadn’t had the duty.”

“You didn’t miss much,” said Oscar.

Tex looked from one to the other. “Gee, fellows, I’m sorry I ruined your liberty.”

“Forget it,” said Oscar. “Terra Station will still be there next month.”

“That’s right,” agreed Matt, “but see here, Tex—tell us the truth. That was the first drink you ever had—wasn’t it?”

Tex looked shamefaced. “Yes…my folks are all temperance—except my Uncle Bodie.”

“Never mind your Uncle Bodie. If I catch you taking another, I’ll beat you to death with the bottle.”

“Aw, shucks, Matt!”

Oscar looked at Matt quizzically. “Easy on that holier-than-thou stuff, kid. Maybe it could happen to you.”

“Maybe it could. Maybe some day I’ll get you to chaperone me and find out what happens. But not in public.”

“It’s a date.”

“Say,” demanded Pete, “what goes on here? What’s it all about?”

Life in the
Randolph
had a curious aspect of timelessness—or, rather, datelessness. There was no weather, there were no seasons. The very divisions into “night” and “day” were arbitrary and were continually being upset by night watches and by laboratory periods at any hour, in order to make maximum use of limited facilities. Meals were served every six hours around the clock and the meal at one in the “morning” was almost as well attended as breakfast at seven hundred.

Matt got used to sleeping when he could find time—and the “days” tumbled past. It seemed to him that there was never time enough for all that he was expected to do. Mathematics and the mathematical subjects, astrogation and atomic physics in particular, began to be a bugaboo; he was finding himself being rushed into practical applications of mathematics before he was solidly grounded.

He had fancied himself, before becoming a cadet, as rather bright in mathematics, and so he was—by ordinary standards. He had not anticipated what it would be like to be part of a group of which every member was unusually talented in the language of science. He signed up for personal coaching in mathematics and studied harder than ever. The additional effort kept him from failing, but that was all.

It is not possible to work all the time without cracking up, but the environment would have kept Matt from overworking even if he had been so disposed. Corridor number five of “A” deck, where Matt and his roommates lived, was known as “Hog Alley” and had acquired a ripe reputation for carefree conduct even before Tex Jarman added his talents.

The current “Mayor of Hog Alley” was an oldster named Bill Arensa. He was a brilliant scholar and seemed able to absorb the most difficult study spool in a single playing, but he had been in the
Randolph
an unusually long time—a matter of accumulated demerits.

One evening after supper, soon after arrival, Matt and Tex were attempting to produce a little harmony. Matt was armed with a comb and a piece of tissue paper; Tex had his harmonica. A bellow from across the hallway stopped them. “Open up in there! You youngsters—come busting out!”

Tex and Matt appeared as ordered. The Mayor looked them over. “No blood,” he remarked. “I’d swear I heard someone being killed. Go back and get your noisemakers.”

Arensa ushered them into his own room, which was crowded. He waved a hand around at the occupants. “Meet the Hog Alley People’s Forum—Senator Mushmouth, Senator Filibuster, Senator Hidebound, Doctor Dogoodly, and the Marquis de Sade. Gentlemen, meet Commissioner Wretched and Professor Farflung.” The oldster went into his study cubicle.

“What’s your name, Mister?” said one of the cadets, addressing Tex.

“Jarman, sir.”

“And yours?”

“We’ve got no time for those details,” announced Arensa, returning bearing a guitar. “That number you gentlemen were working on—let’s try it again. Brace yourself for the downbeat…and a one, and a two!”

Thus was born the Hog Alley band. It grew to seven pieces and started working on a repertoire to be presented at a ship’s entertainment. Matt dropped out when he became eligible for the space polo league, as he could not spare time for both—his meager talent was no loss to the band.

Nevertheless he remained in the orbit of the oldster. Arensa adopted all four of them, required them to report to his room from time to time, and supervised their lives. However, he never placed them on the report. By comparing notes with other youngster cadets on this point, Matt discovered that he and his friends were well off. They attended numerous sessions of the “Forum,” first by direction, later from choice. The staple recreation in the
Randolph
, as it is in all boarding schools, was the bull session. The talk ranged through every possible subject and was kept spiced by Arensa’s original and usually radical ideas.

However, no matter what was discussed, the subject usually worked around to girls and then broke up with the unstartling conclusion: “There’s no sense in talking about it—there aren’t any girls in the
Randolph
. Let’s turn in.”

Almost as entertaining was the required seminar in “Doubt.” The course had been instituted by the present commandant and resulted from his own observation that every military organization—with the Patrol no exception—suffered from an inherent vice. A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

The method was the discussion group, made up of youngsters, oldsters, and officers. The seminar leader would chuck out some proposition that attacked a value usually regarded as axiomatic. From there on anything could be said.

It took Matt a while to get the hang of it. At his first session the leader offered: “Resolved: that the Patrol is a detriment and should be abolished.” Matt could hardly believe his ears.

In rapid succession he heard it suggested that the past hundred years of Patrol-enforced peace had damaged the race, that the storm of mutations that followed atomic warfare were necessarily of net benefit under the inexorable laws of evolution, that neither the human race nor any of the other races of the system could expect to survive permanently in the universe if they deliberately forsook war, and that, in any case, the Patrol was made up of a bunch of self-righteous fatheads who mistook their own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature.

Matt contributed nothing to the first discussion he attended.

The following week he heard both mother love and love of mother questioned. He wanted to reply, but, for the life of him, could think of no other answer than “Because!” Thereafter came attacks on monotheism as a desirable religious form, the usefulness of the scientific method, and the rule of the majority, in reaching decisions. He discovered that it was permissible to express opinions that were orthodox as well as ones that were unorthodox and began to join the debate by defending some of his own pet ideas.

At once he found his own unconscious assumptions that lay behind his opinions subjected to savage attack and found himself again reduced to a stubborn and unvoiced “Because!”

He began to catch on to the method and found that he could ask an innocent question that would undermine someone else’s line of argument. From then on he had a good time.

He particularly enjoyed it after Girard Burke was assigned to his seminar. Matt would lie in wait until Girard would express some definite opinion, then jump him—always with a question; never with a statement. For some reason not clear to Matt, Burke’s opinions were always orthodox; to attack them Matt was forced to do some original thinking.

But he asked Burke about it after class one day. “See here, Burke—I thought you were the bird with a new slant on everything?”

“Well, maybe I am. What about it?”

“You don’t sound like it in ‘Doubt.’”

Burke looked wise. “You don’t catch me sticking my neck out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think our dear superiors are really interested in your bright ideas? Won’t you ever learn to recognize a booby trap, son?”

Matt thought about it. “I think you’re crazy.” Nevertheless he chewed it over.

The days rolled past. The pace was so hard that there was little time to be bored. Matt shared the herd
credo
of all cadets that the
Randolph
was a madhouse, unfit for human habitation, sky junk, etc., etc.—but in fact he had no opinion of his own about the school ship; he was too busy. At first he had had some acute twinges of homesickness; thereafter it seemed to recede. There was nothing but the treadmill of study, drill, more study, laboratory, sleep, eat, and study again.

He was returning from the communications office, coming off watch late one night, when he heard sounds from Pete’s cubicle. At first he thought Pete must be running his projector, studying late. He was about to bang on his door and suggest going up to the galley to wheedle a cup of cocoa when he became convinced that the sound was not a projector.

Cautiously he opened the door a crack. The sound was sobbing. He closed the door noiselessly and knocked on it. After a short silence Pete said, “Come in.”

Matt went in. “Got anything to eat?”

“Some cookies in my desk.”

Matt got them out. “You look sick, Pete. Anything wrong?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Don’t give me the space drift. Out with it.”

Pete hesitated. “It’s nothing. Nothing anybody can do anything about.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. Tell me.”

“There’s nothing you can do. I’m
homesick
, that’s all!”

“Oh—” Matt had a sudden vision of the rolling hills and broad farms of Iowa. He suppressed it. “That’s bad, kid. I know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t. Why, you’re practically
at
home—you can just step to a port and
see
it.”

“That’s no help.”

“And it hasn’t been so terribly long since you’ve been home. Me—it took me two years just to make the trip to Terra; there’s no way of telling when I’ll ever see home again.” Pete’s eyes got a faraway look; his voice became almost lyrical. “You don’t know what it’s like, Matt. You’ve never
seen
it. You know what they say: ‘Every civilized man has two planets, his own and Ganymede.’”

“Huh?”

Pete did not even hear him. “Jupiter hanging overhead, filling half the sky—” He stopped. “It’s beautiful, Matt. There’s no place like it.”

Matt found himself thinking about Des Moines in a late summer evening…with fireflies winking and the cicadas singing in the trees, and the air so thick and heavy you could cup it in your hand. Suddenly he hated the steel shell around him, with its eternal free fall and its filtered air and its artificial lights. “Why did we ever sign up, Pete?”