"What the heck is a spong?" someone said out of the air behind him.
Charlie looked over his shoulder. Nick Melchior was there, one of his best friends from school, if not the best. There was something about Nick's sense of humor that meshed well with Charlie's, and besides, Nick seemed never to have seen anything even slightly funny about the idea that a kid from as painful and hopeless a background as Charlie's should be unswervingly set on becoming a doctor. Charlie, for his own part, was always amazed that anyone from as unsettled and insecure a background as Nick's should have been able to do as well at school and be as generally good-natured and good-tempered as he was, when at any moment his dad or the whole family might be uprooted and sent off to some distant foreign place to do virtcam work for one of the major news services.
Nick leaned against the mahogany railing around the "operating floor" and stared at the engine.
"I could try to explain what a spong is," Charlie said, "but I'd just confuse myself. I'm not sure / know all of what it is yet. It has to do with the way this thing reflects light… or at least, that's all I can make of it so far… "
Nick pushed away from the railing and walked around the sim, eyeing it. He was fair-haired, green-eyed, biggish across the shoulders, though not one of the taller kids in Charlie's year-unusual when half the juniors in the class seemed to be shooting up like trees, having hit some weird kind of sympathetic growth spurt. Nick seemed stuck at about five four, and for Charlie, who was stuck at five two and was beginning to wonder morbidly whether he had some obscure glandular disorder, it was pleasant to have the company of someone who didn't look down at him as if from a great height and inquire sardonically as to why he didn't go out for basketball. "It looksgood," Nick said.
"Yeah, well, if you put some chest rub in it, it'd make somebody a great cold vaporizer," Charlie muttered. "Go ahead, give it a kick."
"Huh?"
"Go on, kick it. Hard as you can."
The steam engine had four handsome brass-trimmed wheels with iron tires. Nick walked over to one of them, looked it over, and kicked it, hard. Then he started jumping around. "Ow! Sonofa-Wha'd you tell me to do that for?"
Charlie stared, dumbfounded. "Buddha on a bike," he said, "did I fix it?" He went over to the next wheel and kicked it too, quite hard, disbelieving-then joined Nick briefly in the dance. "Oh, crud!"
"Thanks loads, Charlie, like I don't have enough problems today, now I'm lamed for life, too!" Nick was now holding the injured foot and staring at it as if he could see through his boot to tell if something was broken.
"Ow, look, I'm sorry. I fixed it! I guess I must have fixed it, anyway. The train was soft, before, like rubber." Charlie leaned against the railing near Nick, rubbing his own foot and then bearing weight on it gingerly. "Sorry!" He stared at the engine. "What the frack did I fix? I wasn't working on the hardness… "
"You're asking the wrong expert, expert. What you can do, 0 mighty medical talent, is tell me whether my foot's going to be this sore when I come out of virt."
"Dummy," Charlie said. "No. It won't hurt long here, either; you know pain can't be turned up even as high as in real life in here. Just as well. What's your problem, anyway?"
"My foot, clueless one, is-"
"Your other problem. Whatever you were yapping about when you came in."
"Oh. Just my dad."
"Are they sending him somewhere weird again?" Char lie boosted himself up to sit on the railing, morosely studying the steam engine.
"No. No, it's just Net stuff."
Charlie blinked. "What?"
"You remember Joey Bane's domain?"
"Oh, yeah. Death-o-rama or whatever."
"Deathworld."
"Yeah." Charlie had been through one of its upper levels briefly with Nick a couple of months back, but hadn't gone back. It was one of the more expensive domains to spend time in, and besides, he wasn't a big shadow jazz fan. His musical tastes ran more to hopflight, because of the rhythms, and terzia rizz, which was experiencing something of a comeback after four centuries of neglect. "So what's the problem?" Charlie said. "Bills getting too high?"
"Yeah, but that's not most of it. Mostly my mom and dad think it's corrupting me or something." Nick's good-natured face was twisted somewhat out of its usual placid shape, and as he hoisted himself up beside Charlie, the look lingered.
"You?" Charlie blew out an amused breath. "Nothing there to corrupt."
"Thanks loads, Dr. Genius. No, they're just freaked out by the news stories."
"I missed the news today," Charlie said. "It's Saturday.
This is the day I take off from the world, theoretically." "To spend time on really important things."
"James Watt thought so," Charlie said, he hoped not too sharply. "I like retrotech. So splash me. Meanwhile, what happened?"
"Somebody killed himself."
"Someone who'd been doing a lot of Deathworld?"
"Something like that." Nick rolled his eyes expressively, then paused, briefly distracted by the fresco on the ceiling, of the god Apollo receiving Aesculapius into heaven, while a lot of other gods in togas leaned in to observe, and possibly to pass private remarks on the newcorner's snappy cane with the snakes wrapped around it. "Who are all those people?"
"I'll tell you some other time, if I can ever get you to stop interrupting yourself!"
Nick rolled his eyes again. "Some guy in Iowa," he said. "A seventh-circler, apparently. He hanged himself. At least that's what the police were saying."
"Did they say anything else about whether he'd been depressed, or something like that?" Charlie said.
Nick shook his head. "Not that I heard. From the story I heard, it sounded like they were in a hurry to get him buried." He grimaced. "And as soon as my folks heard about it, they went completely voidside. They don't want me going in there, blah, blah, blah… "
Charlie leaned back a little and looked over at his friend with some concern. He had heard about the other suicides, but he hadn't really thought of them as anything significant. Oh, obviously they were tragic for the people involved, and the people left behind, but a certain number of people suicided every year due to misuse or overuse of virtual services of one kind or another, and mostly the psychiatrists figured that these were people who would have found some other reason to do away with themselves if the Net had not existed. Still… it was a little creepy. "This is how many suicides of people associated with Deathworld, now?"
"Six, I think they said."
Charlie looked at the steam engine thoughtfully. "Seems like kind of a lot."
Nick plopped himself down on one of the front-row benches and shrugged a don't-care kind of shrug. "Aw, c'mon, Charlie, don't you side with them, too! You know the world is full of idiots looking for a chance to pop themselves off, and any excuse would do. It can't be Deathworld's fault that they found their way down there at one point or another. If it were, the government would have found out about it and shut them down."
"Well…" Charlie got up with a sigh, walked around the back of the steam engine and had a look at the coal box, which had somehow started to look a little transparent. He touched it. At least it was solid, which it hadn't been until just now. "Net Force is supposed to inspect and certify anything that looks like it might be dangerous to users," he said.
"So since they haven't shut it down, it must be okay," Nick said. He sighed. "Not that my dad is going to care one way or another… "
Charlie kicked the coal box experimentally. It buckled under the kick, and he looked at the half-circle dent and moaned softly. "I am never gonna get the hang of this," he said, and went to sit down by Nick and stare at the steam engine. "Main program, routine six…"