He stopped short and glared down at her. "What are you talking about?"
"Don't jump on me, Dekker, it's a statistical fact. Do you know that two out of three of the Martians that were on Co-Mars Two were in the batch that just got sent down? Don't ask me why. For Earthies it was only about one in ten. Maybe that's just coincidence, but that's bad odds and it's a fact. I didn't make it up. You can look the records up yourself."
"You're no Martian," he pointed out, "and you got sent down."
"That was a whole other thing! I was in an accident," she said harshly. "Don't get nasty with me, Dekker. I've got my own troubles."
"Yes, I know, Annetta. Rich people always think they've got troubles, even if they don't really know what trouble is."
She frowned at the tone of bitterness in his voice, then relented and almost laughed. "I'm not rich, love. You're living in the past."
"But back in Sunpoint City—"
"Back in Sunpoint City," she said patiently, "my father was CEO of a major bank and trust, but that was then. He didn't shift the investments fast enough, and the bank fired him. That was years ago." She wrapped her arms around her breasts, shivering; they were standing in the open, and the breeze coming down from the mountaintop was cold.
"Was it the Bonds?"
"You bet your ass it was the Bonds. He should've got the bank out of them before anybody else; then it was getting too late. So now you know why I've been working for Oortcorp the last four or five years. You Martians cost me my happy little rich-girl life, so it's only fair you should pay me back." She shivered again. "Dekker?" she said. "I kind of like talking to you this way, but it's goddam cold here. Can't we go somewhere else?"
He considered the question. "Where?"
"My rooms're just up the hill," she offered. "I've even got some beer."
Dekker had never been in the permanent staff headquarters before. He wasn't sure why he was there now, either. If a Martian woman had invited him to drink a glass of beer with her in her room back in Sagdayev because it was cold outside—assuming there had been a cold, windswept place to stand anywhere around Sagdayev—he would have understood that the invitation was to be taken at face value. Here, maybe not. After all, Ven Kupferfeld's very similar invitation had turned out to be for considerably more.
So he kept his mouth shut and his options open. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. The building they quartered teachers and staff in had once been another of those resort hotels that Oortcorp had taken over. It was still more ornate, in an old-fashioned kind of opulence, than anything else in Dekker's personal experience. When he walked in with Annetta Bancroft, he half expected someone to ask for his ID. Surprisingly, no one did, not even a remote voice behind a surveillance camera. There didn't even seem to be a surveillance camera. Two or three people were sitting in a corner of the lobby, drinking coffee and chatting; they didn't even look up at Dekker and Annetta as they came in.
As Annetta led him toward elevators he saw another couple of instructors wearing helmets and bodysuits in a little room off the main lobby, off no doubt on some full-body virtual-reality trip, and a woman bent over an origami model by the side of a fountain. None of them looked up, either.
Annetta spoke to no one, not even to Dekker. She led the way down a corridor on the fifth floor and pressed the palm-pad at her door. When it opened she motioned Dekker inside and closed it behind them.
He looked around. Larger than the quarters in the co-Mars stations, but smaller than the rooms he shared with Toro Tanabe. A lot less neat, too. There was a bed, and it was only sketchily made, a spread pulled lumpily up over pillows, and it was covered with skirts and jeans. "I was going to spend the evening sewing my clothes," she said.
He didn't sit. He walked over to the window and glanced out at the mountainside, falling away below them toward the distant lights of Denver. Even above the city skyglow the half-dozen nearest comets were already brightening the sky. As she waved him to a chair and opened the refrigerator he said, "Don't they give instructors better rooms than this?"
She looked at him narrowly, then laughed. "I keep forgetting that Martians say what they think," she said. "I could've had better, if I'd wanted to pay for it. But this is just until they pass me to go back to Co-Mars Two." She handed him a beer and sat down at the end of a little couch. "I hear you don't get along with Jay-John Belster," she said conversationally.
"Should I?" he asked, annoyed by the fact that everybody on this world seemed to know a great deal about what he had considered his private life and therefore sparring with her.
"Come on, Dekker, this is your old pal Annetta talking to you. To answer your question, yes. You should get along with Belster, and with Ven Kupferfeld, even if you don't want to boff her anymore, and in fact you really ought to try to get along with everybody, because that's your Law of the Raft, isn't it?"
That stung a little. "I don't think Belster cares about getting along with everybody. I don't think he cares about anything that doesn't do some good for himself."
"Do you think I do?"
He considered the question. "I don't know you well enough to have an opinion," he said.
She didn't dispute it. She picked up the blouse and held it to the light, then began to repair a seam. "I hate this," she said. "I hate being poor. Tell me what you don't like about Jay-John."
"Why?"
She shrugged, and bit off a thread. "He and I are friends. He's poor, too."
He couldn't help laughing. "So you're friends with everybody who's poor?"
"No," she said, not smiling, "just with the ones who are willing to do something about it."
"Do what? Belster's a violent man, Annetta. I can't help thinking—"
She waited, and when he didn't finish the sentence she nodded. "I think I get it. You don't like dishonest and violent people."
"That," Dekker said, "is an accurate statement."
"And you've got the idea that Jay-John is up to something criminal. Probably you think Ven is, too. Do you also think I'm part of it, Dekker?"
"How the hell do I know?"
She studied him for a moment, then sighed. "Oh, shit, Dekker," she said, "I know what's bothering you. You think Jay-John should be a Boy Scout because he's Martian. You don't want to believe that a Martian could be doing anything crooked."
"Not just crooked! I don't like the way he talks, or Ven, either, a lot of the time."
She sighed. "I guess they had more hopes for you than I did, Dekker."
He scowled at her. "What kind of hopes are you talking about?"
"Well, hopes that—never mind. Just hopes. Look, Dekker. Suppose you're right. Suppose there's some sort of criminal activity going on. What would you do about it?"
"Why—why, I don't know. It depends on what it is."
"But if it was violent, you'd feel obliged to stop it, wouldn't you?"
"Of course," he said, surprised.
She was grinning now. "I'm sorry, Dekker," she said. "It's just that you're so Martian. Anyway, you're partly right. There is something, and it's against the law, only you won't do anything about it. When you're poor, and you don't want to stay poor, you have to take some shortcuts. That's what we do. Do you want to hear what the shortcuts are?"
He considered that for a moment. Then, honestly, "I don't know if I do."
"Well, I know, so I'm going to tell you. What we do is sell information to people who want it—information, for instance, about what the tests are going to cover. Do you think that's wicked of us, Dekker? I don't. I think we're just trying to get even with the system that screwed us up."
He set his beer down in indignation. "Hell, Annetta! It's not just some prep-school course here! If you're letting people pass who don't really know what they're doing, you're endangering the whole project—not to mention actual human lives!"
She shook her head. "Wrong. I've been there," she reminded him. "Once you start work on a control station you've got the old hands standing over you for the first
month, watching you like hawks. Anything you don't know when you got there, you're going to learn before they let you handle anything yourself. So there's your conspiracy, Dekker," she finished. "And now why don't you just go back to your dorm and get a good night's sleep? Because you can't blow the whistle on us, you know."
"The hell I can't!"
"But you can't," she said seriously, "because you'd be out on your ass if you did. Remember the entrance test you took? The one your father gave you the answers for before you took it? Well, hell, Dekker! Where do you think he got them?"
33
Some of the students at the Oortcorp training school called Phase Six the "garbage course." When those students graduated and shipped out to work for the project they might change their minds, because Phase Six was important.
The reason it was important had to do with the places where they would go to work. Those places were spread out over many billions of kilometers of space and they performed quite different functions, but they all had one vital feature in common. Each one was no more than a metal shell that was afloat in the most hostile environment human beings have ever tried to survive in: space.
Space is lethal to a degree that nothing on Earth can match. Stripped naked of resources anywhere on Earth, a human being could still survive, at least for a time. He could go weeks without food, days without even water. Without air to breathe, though, he would die at once. If that same human being were cast unprotected into space his lungs would burst, his blood would boil, and he would be dead in minutes.
The only thing that keeps all spacefarers from suffering that quick and brutal death is their complex of pumps and water purifiers and air regenerators and power-plant and life-support systems, and those systems were practically identical in every station of the Oortcorp project.
If anything went wrong—as, sooner or later, something always does—it had to be fixed at once. If it wasn't, people would die. There would be no outside experts to save them. There wasn't any plumber to call up or ambulance to summon across the million-kilometer stretches of empty space. The people who worked there had no one to rely on but themselves. It was they alone who had to learn every last one of the skills that were needed to keep that complex and fallible system running; and that was what Phase Six was all about.
34
Dekker's class had started out with a full complement of thirty-four chosen men and women, every one of them carefully selected for education, ability, and intelligence. It dwindled fast.
By the end of Phase Five nearly half of the original thirty-four were gone. Dekker DeWoe was still there. So were Ven Kupferfeld, and Toro Tanabe, and Shiaopin Ye, and Jay-John Belster, and a dozen or so others from the original roster, but that was all. Sixteen of those bright and able students had turned out to be not quite bright and able enough—or, Dekker could not help reminding himself, dishonest enough—to keep their grades and psychological fitness high enough to survive the ordeal, and so the class number was down to eighteen . . . for one night.
When that night came Dekker didn't know it was coming. He was getting ready for bed, staring into the mirror as he brushed his teeth, not liking what he saw. It wasn't the physical reflection that bothered him; physically Dekker was in about the best shape of his life. The polysteroid and calcium shots were down to bare maintenance levels, and the braces had lain untouched under his bed for months now. It was almost possible for Dekker to forget that he was a Martian suffering from the environment of a more dire planet than his own . . . except when, now and then, he was reminded by such bizarre happenings as the sudden, surprising first autumn fall of snow. Snow! And his progress at the school was—well—optimal. It deserved congratulation . . . provided you didn't know how it had been made possible.
After all, simply getting as far as Phase Six was a victory of sorts in itself. What spoiled it for Dekker DeWoe was the knowledge that the victory was riddled with fraud. Not just his own, either. Dekker hadn't talked much with Toro Tanabe after the conversation with Annetta Bancroft, because after that he had understood at last how the Japanese had breezed through so easily. When he looked at the rest of his classmates it was with suspicion: how many of them were fakes, too? And when he looked in the mirror what he saw was that very un-Martian creature, a cheat.
It was terrible to know that Annetta, and probably Ven, and perhaps any number of other people knew the truth about him; but the worst part of all was simply knowing it of himself.
Even the little bits of recent good news had suddenly turned into bad. It was good that his mother would be there for his graduation . . . but, when he saw her, what was he going to tell Gerti DeWoe?
When, that night, he heard a commotion in the hall outside his quarters, he peered out of the bathroom, toothbrush in his hand, to see what might be going on. Toro Tanabe was already at the hall door, talking excitedly to someone outside. When Tanabe turned and saw Dekker, he called, "Come and see, DeWoe! We have some new blood for Phase Six." And when Dekker hesitated, he added irritably, "It doesn't matter that you are getting ready for bed, come anyway. Hurry."
Dekker did hurry, after his fashion. That is to say that when he washed his face and pulled on a robe he did it rapidly, but by the time he got to the door the last of the new people was already disappearing into a doorway down the hall. Dekker looked after him in puzzlement. "Did you say they're coming into Phase Six with us?"
"Yes, exactly, DeWoe. But that is not all. They are not ordinary students. These people are all veterans—eight of them—and from the Oort cloud itself, actually! They have been on Earth on R-and-R between tours of duty, only instead of going back to the Oort they have been ordered to join us for a refresher course and then to go to Co-Mars Two."
Dekker looked at his roommate in perplexity. "I never heard of such a thing," he said.
"There has never been such a thing! It is quite irregular. Do you see, DeWoe, it must mean that Co-Mars Two needs people very badly!"
"My name," the Phase Six instructor said the next morning, "is Marty Gillespie, and I used to be head of services at the Nairobi Skyhook plenum until I retired." He looked retired; he was an elderly man with no hair at the top of his head but a scraggly white pigtail tied over the back of his neck. He was short and plump, and there were lines in his face, but he looked amiable enough as he studied his new class. "What you're going to learn here is what you need to know about housekeeping on a space station, but before we get into that I want you all to stand up and tell me your names."
Dekker, up close to the instructor, turned around to see which were the new ones. They weren't hard to pick out. There were eight people who had been in the Oort, six men and two women, and they were conspicuous among the familiar faces. They carried themselves with an air of assurance that most of the others lacked, and they had clumped themselves together in a tight group. Dekker noted that one of the women, though apparently a little older than himself, was quite tall and not at all unpleasant to look at. He filed her name away in his mind: Rima Consalvo.
Gillespie had also noted the grouping and shook his head. "You're going to have to pair off to share terminals, and I don't want you new people all sticking together; so if you're one of the ones that're in from the cloud, I want you working with a buddy that isn't. You can tell him what things are like out in the field, and he can tell you what he's just learned here and you've probably forgotten. So, let's see, you and you, you go with her, you two together—"
Dekker recognized a chance when he saw it. All it took then was a little inconspicuous sidling through the crowd, and when Gillespie came to Rima Consalvo, Dekker was right beside her. She gave him a quizzical look, then, when Gillespie obligingly paired them, a grin.
"Nice to meet you," Dekker whispered, and she nodded.
"Remember who you're with," the instructor ordered. "Now, you probably want to know what I mean by housekeeping. I don't just mean tidying up your quarters, though you'll have to do that, too. Mostly I mean staying alive, you yourself and
everybody in the station with you. That means knowing how to deal with power loss, or accident, or fire. Second, I mean making sure the station does its job: that's instrument and communications maintenance. Last there's keeping the crew fed and healthy and reasonably happy in their work, which means food preparation, laundry, cleanup, and general repair—anything from fixing a squeaking door to tackling a stopped toilet. Any questions about any of that?"
He was looking around at the expressions on the faces of the class. None of them were looking pleased, but it was Toro Tanabe who put his hand up first. "I did not enter this course to fix toilets!" he said.
"Nobody ever does," Gillespie said pleasantly, "but sometimes the toilets have to be fixed. You crap in them, you fix them if you have to. Any other questions?" He looked around briefly, then said, "You probably don't know what to ask yet, do you? Well, let's get into it. You teams take your places—pick any screens you want, they're all the same—and let's start with a look at how we go about maintaining pressure integrity."
When they had their seats, Rima looked at Dekker inquiringly, Dekker nodded, and so she was the one who started the display.
It was, like all the school's training programs, clear and complete—though not, to Dekker, very interesting. Maintaining pressure integrity was not a challenging subject for someone who had grown up in an airtight Martian deme. It wasn't for someone who had spent four years in the Oort cloud, either. All the same, side by side they watched the 3D schematics of a station's air system, along with the automatic programs for sealing every door and bulkhead in the event of pressure drop; Dekker noticed approvingly that Rima Consalvo paid attention, in spite of the fact that she, too, must have known all this long before. He considered that her attitude was very nearly Martian. They had an interactive screen, of course, but for this first tutorial there was nothing for them to do but watch, and they both kept their hands off the keypad. Dekker had plenty of chances to notice that Rima Consalvo had a nice profile and that, although her perfume wasn't Ven Kupferfeld's, it was still quite pleasant.