There was a stir at the back of the class. A short-haired and overweight blond girl was moving toward the door.
“Now where are you going?” Gossage did not raise his voice. “Leaving us already?”
She turned angrily at the doorway. “Yes, I am.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Gladys de Witt. I didn’t read none when I was in school, and I’m damned if I’m going to start now I’m out of it. Go screw yourself, Gossage. You think you’re the boss, but you’re not. You can’t stop me leaving. I seen the contract. I don’t have to stay. It says you can’t use violence on me, neither.”
“That’s quite true. I can’t prevent any one of you from leaving. I can’t be violent with you—though we might disagree on what constitutes violence. And I can’t make you complete your assignments.” Gossage nodded slowly. “Very true. All I can do, Gladys de Witt, is explain these to you.” He held up a handful of small pink cards. “They are meal vouchers. You need one to obtain food from the cafeteria service system. When you complete your assignment satisfactorily—by this evening, or tomorrow morning, or tomorrow midday, or whenever—you will receive one voucher. But if you fail to complete your assignment to my satisfaction, you will not.”
“You can’t do that to me!”
“I’m afraid I can. Read your contract. Vanguard Mining, in loco parentis, decides the manner and extent of trainee nutrition. Now, Gladys. Are you going to leave? Or would you like to stay here with the rest of the trainees while I explain today’s assignment? Dinner is lasagna with mushrooms, peppers, and garlic bread. The choice is yours.”
Turkey Gossage could smile and coax with the best of them, but he was one tough son of a bitch. His language would have horrified Mr. Hamel, and he hadn’t been kidding about the food voucher policy. After a few missed meals and a taste of CM-2 gruel, even the toughest and most ornery—and hungriest—trainee came into angry line.
Rick observed closely, then put Turkey Gossage into his “handle with care” category. What he couldn’t understand, though, was how Gossage had found himself such a pleasant, easygoing—and droolingly sexy—assistant.
Gina Styan was a graduate trainee from three years back, returned for two months to work with Gossage on CM-2 before she went to her post on the newest of the thirty-eight Belt mines. She had a figure that made Juanita Cesaro and Monkey Cruse look like boys, clear dark skin, and short-cropped black hair that emphasized delicate bone structure and high cheekbones. Those, plus what Rick read as an unmistakable interest in her brown eyes whenever she looked at him, bristled the hair on the back of his neck. The sight of her made him catch his breath.
She had the hots for him. He was sure of it. All it would take was a quiet place and an opportunity.
Which seemed to be exactly what CM-2 was designed not to provide. It was just as well that Deedee Mao’s liftoff invitation to Cabin Twenty-Eight had been bogus, because it now proved to be impossible. She shared her tiny cabin with three other trainees, including Monkey Cruse. Rick would love to have heard the conversations in there, but when it came to accommodation he was no better off. His cabin had five recruits in it, including Cokie Mulligan, who snored like a saw in freefall though he swore he hadn’t when he was back on Earth.
Vido Valdez, thank goodness, was two cabins along, bunked with Chick Teazle and a couple of East Coasters. Vido and Rick still glared at each other whenever they met, but apparently Valdez was willing to see their feud damped down—at least for the time being.
Privacy was no better during work periods. The recruits were never out of each other’s sight, except when they were busy on work assignments. Then they were permitted the privacy of a single small cubicle. After the first week Rick suspected Turkey Gossage of doing that on purpose. When the only way to be alone was to sit in a little room by yourself and pretend to study, you found yourself actually studying part of the time out of sheer boredom. Almost against his will, Rick found himself starting to read. He still wasn’t good, and he resented every word, but within a couple of weeks he’d have beaten everybody in his old class and most of his fellow trainees. He was in no hurry to rush on ahead. After reading, Turkey Gossage threatened pure and applied mathematics—"the queen of the sciences, the high spot of all your training,” as he put it, without convincing anyone. And before they could graduate, every one of them had to write a letter home.
“What the hell for?” Chick Teazle protested. “My mother hates my guts—and anyway, she can’t read.”
“I’m sure she loves you dearly.” The smile never left Turkey’s face. “She’ll find a reader, or get somebody else to read it to her. But even if she doesn’t, even if she tears it up and throws it straight down the chute, that doesn’t let you off the hook. You still have to write—and I have to be able to read it.”
Rick had started a letter three times in the first two weeks, and scrapped the result after a couple of sentences. What was he supposed to say? That he preferred it out here to being with his mother and Alick? Even if that was true, Rick suspected that Turkey Gossage wouldn’t let a letter go out that way. The problem of what to write was going to be as difficult as the writing itself.
Rick crumpled up his fourth shot at writing, threw it away, and stared at the cubicle wall. Never mind letters to his mother. They wouldn’t make him feel any less horny. The big problem now was Gina Styan. How was he ever going to make out with her if they were never alone?
A possible answer came in the third week, when the pure theory of space operations gave way to practical experience. All the trainees had become accustomed to freefall, so nausea was a thing of the past. But manual work in space was another matter. That took lots of practice.
And practice they were going to get, in assignments that Turkey Gossage described as “Manual coordination and control in a weightless environment.” A euphemism, as Rick soon discovered, for unpaid hard labor.
Weightless environment. Moving things around in space, where an object didn’t weigh anything, sounded easy as breathing. Nothing to it. Jigger Tait, staying a while on CM-2 with Turkey Gossage before shipping to the Belt again, assured Rick as much. Then he and Rick went together to the deep interior of CM-2 to clear one of the chambers. They moved massive pilings and metal I-beams and irregular chunks of rock.
After four hours of that Rick ached in every bone. His burdens might have no weight, but they still possessed inertia. And inertia was worse than weight. In fact, it was twice as bad. Back on Earth, once you had lifted something you could just let it drop and gravity would do the rest. Here you had to work to start a rock moving, then put in just as much labor to stop it.
But Jigger had not been lying. He did the work effortlessly. It was easy as breathing—for him.
Rick wondered how many other half-truths and hidden catches were tucked away in the Vanguard Mining training program. Turkey Gossage was sticking to his policy on the meal vouchers. After two bowls of cold and sticky oatmeal, Rick had finally handed in his last assignment. He had been handed a meal ticket just before he left with Jigger. It sat burning a hole in his pocket while his stomach growled in protest. He could hardly wait for the word to quit.
But when Jigger Tait told him they were done for the day, Rick still had enough energy and curiosity to notice something when they emerged through the airlock from the planetoid’s stony interior. It was a different lock from their entry point, and next to it sat another small chamber. It was like no other structure that Rick had seen. There were flat, solid, windowless walls and a massive close-fitting door.