Daddy came home about ten minutes later. I asked him if things had gone as he had expected them to, and he said yes.
“I cleared up the dishes,” I said.
Daddy said, “I never doubted you would for a minute.”
At our next meeting I asked Mr. Mbele if he’d expected the decision to go the way it had.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Your father’s point of view is widely shared in the Ship. That is why he’s Chairman.”
9
It may sound like an anachronism to speak of seasons on a Ship, but we always did: that is, July, August and September were “summer,” as an example. This never struck me as odd until I was fifteen or sixteen when I was going into the factors responsible for planetary weather, and one day I really thought about the meaning of the terms we used so casually. It was obvious that through time they had lost their weatherly connotations and now simply referred to quarters of the year — well, for that matter, the fact that we use the Old Earth Year at all is an anachronism, but we do it anyway.
At the time I was doing my puzzling about this, I mentioned it to a friend of mine. (Since he appears in this book several times, I won’t mention his name — he has enough burdens without being made to sound stupid here.) I said, “Do you realize that our calling November ‘fall’ means that most of the people on the Ship probably came originally from the Northern Temperate Zone on Earth?”
He said, “Well, if you wanted to know that, all you have to do is call for the original Ship Lists from the library.”
I said, “But don’t you think this is interesting?”
He said, “No.”
Perhaps stupid is not the word I intended. Perhaps contentious.
In any case, the summer when I was twelve passed. I think of it as a busy block with a whole number of items, and I’m not sure in what exact order any of them happened. I could invent an order, but since none of them is central, I won’t. For instance, during that summer, I had my first menstrual period — that’s important insofar as I took it as a sign that I was growing up, but that’s about all you can say for it. Then there were dancing lessons. You might well wonder what we were doing with dancing lessons, but they were actually a part of our Survival Class training.
Mr. Marechal said, “This isn’t meant to be fun and it isn’t meant to be funny. It is deadly serious. You stumble over your own feet. You don’t know what to do with your hands. When you are in a position where you have to do the exact right thing in an instant, deft movement is the most important element. You want your body to work for you, not against you. Not only, by God, am I going to give you dancing lessons, but I’m going to start you on needlepoint.”
We not only got needlepoint, dancing lessons, hand-to-hand combat training, and weapon instruction, but Mr. Marechal was our tutor in all of them. He showed us films of people drawing hand-guns and dropping them, of people falling off horses (I did that a couple of times myself), of people in a blue funk. The films were taken on an obstacle course where, for instance, if you didn’t watch out, the ground might suddenly fall out from underneath your feet. There might be a rope to grab, or you might simply have to land without breaking your ankle. At the end of the summer, when we moved up from Sixth Class to Fifth, we started going through obstacle courses ourselves. The primary aim was not to teach us any individual skill, but how to react smoothly and intelligently in difficult situations. We were shown how to do individual things, but that wasn’t the primary aim of the instruction.
All of this adds up to the fact that I had been wrong in thinking it would be simply businesslike first to last. Survival Class was earnest, it was businesslike, but it was intelligent and interesting, too. What it was not was an adventure, but since I had my desire for an adventure settled very shortly it no longer bothered me that Survival Class was not an adventure.
Survival Class gave me a whole new set of friends, and they began taking up enough of my time that I saw less of people like Zena Andrus. I did see Mary Carpentier once more, but we found that we didn’t have a great deal to say to one another and we never seemed to call each other again.
Most important, though, out of the thirty-one of us in the Survival Class, there drew together a nuclear group of six. This was hardly pure friendship since some of my best friends were not in it and Venie Morlock was. It was just… the group. We drew together originally through a non-adventure. At Jimmy’s urging, I took a group of kids up to the Sixth Level and we spent the day exploring. The six of us who went were me and Venie and Jimmy, Helen Pak, Riggy Allen and Attila Szabody. Attila and Helen, and, I guess, Jimmy were my particular friends. Riggy was a good friend of Attila’s, and Helen and Riggy both saw something in Venie. That was the way the group hung together, and the trip to the Sixth Level — I guess it was something of an adventure for some of the others and it was fun for me — provided another bond. We usually saw each other for an hour or two after each Survival Class and sometimes on weekends. There were a few others who joined us from time to time, but they were just comers-and-goers.
After Survival Class one day, five of us were sitting in the snackery of the Common Room of Lev Quad on the Fifth Level. By shuttle this wasn’t really far from Entry Gate 5, and it was the most convenient central point for all of us. A few changes on the shuttle and we were all home. We didn’t know anybody in Lev Quad and we couldn’t have found our way around it very well, but still we had our place here, our regular corner, and after a little while we no longer felt so much like intruders.
The missing number was Jimmy. He’d been hurrying off one place and another during the past week after class, mumbling and chuckling around as though he had his little business and would be damned if he’d tell it, and in the meantime was enjoying it thoroughly.
I was doodling on a piece of paper, working out an idea I had in mind. We were sitting at the table with food and drink, but not a lot of it. We were mostly taking up table space and talking. Our regular table was this one, a red-topped affair set in a corner on the left in the under-fourteen area.
We were talking of a prospective soccer game to be played on Saturday morning in Attila’s home quad, Roth Quad on the Fourth Level, if we could raise the necessary players. I was thinking that I’d certainly come a long way from the time — not that long ago — when all that it took to page me was a simple call on my homequad speaker system. I was no longer quite the stick-at-home I’d been then.
“Will Jimmy play?” Attila asked. He was the biggest amongst us, but a quiet boy for all that. He generally didn’t say a lot, but would just sit back and then from time to time come out with some comment that was completely surprising, and all the more surprising because he wasn’t the person you’d pick as likely to say anything bright or clever or knowledgeable.
“Mia can ask him,” Helen said.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll have him call you. Unless he’s too busy with this whatever-it-is of his, I think he’ll want to play. He’s a good halfback.” I turned my attention back to my scribble.
“What is that you’re doing there?” Riggy asked, and snatched it away. Riggy is somebody I have to describe as a meatball — he was hardly my favorite person in the world. He’s one of those people who have no governor, who’ll do the first thing that pops into their heads whether or not it makes a lick of sense — and then, if necessary, be heartily sorry afterwards. He wasn’t stupid, or clumsy, or incompetent — he simply had no sense of proportion at all.
“And what’s that supposed to be?” he asked, pointing at the paper. Venie and Helen on his side of the table both looked at it, too.