He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.
It's been a long time, he thought—and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a drowsy smile on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.
Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.
Wildcat!
Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. "I'm dreadfully sorry," he sputtered. "Please accept my sincerest——"
The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she'd be set back three years if he told anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no right to treat her that way, and what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when everybody knew you went crazy from it.
He soothed her—from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.
Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn't this shift ever going to end?
All the shifts ended in lime. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner—porridge!—and then came the evening shift on the dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got plenty to eat.
But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he had painted to himself back on Halsey's Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior of humanity. . . .
Ross, the semipermanent KP.
He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly clear that there no longer was a Franklin Foundation on Gemser, but more had been lost than time and effort. For Ross himself, he silently admitted, was as close to lost as he ever wanted to be.
He was, in effect, a prisoner, in a prison from which there was no easy escape as long as he was cursed with youthfulness. . . .
Of course, the implications of that were that there was a perfectly easy escape in time. All he had to do was get old enough to matter, on this insane planet. Ninety, maybe. And then he would be perfectly free to totter out to the spaceport, dragoon a squad of juniors into lifting him into the ship, and take off. . . .
Helena was some help. But only psychologically; she was pleasant company, but neither she nor anyone else' in the roster of forty-eight to whom he was permitted to speak had ever heard of the Franklin Foundation, or F-T-L travel, or anything. Helena said, "Wait for Holiday. Maybe one of the grownups will tell you then?"
"Holiday?" Ross slid back and scratched his shoulder blades against the corner of his bed. Helena was sprawled on the floor, half watching a projected picture on the screen at the end of the dormitory.
"Yes. You're lucky, it's only eight days off. That's when Dobermann———" she pointed to the foreman———"graduates; he's the only one this year. And we all move up a step, and the new classes come in, and then we all get everything we want. Well, pretty near," she amended. "We can't do anything bad. But you'll see; it's nice."
Then the picture ended, and it was calisthenics time, and then lights out. Forty-eight men and women on their forty-eight bunks—the honor system appeared to work beautifully; there had been no signs of sex play that Ross had been able to see—slept the sleep of the innocent. While Ross, the forty-ninth, lay staring into the dark with rising hope.
In the kitchen the next morning he got more information from Helena. Holiday seemed to be a cross between saturnalia and Boy's Week; for one day of the year the elders slightly relaxed their grip on the reins. On that day alone one could Speak Before Being Spoken To, Interrupt One's Elders, even Leave the Room without Being Excused.
Whee, Ross thought sourly. But still. . .
The foreman, Dobermann, once you learned how to handle him, wasn't such a bad guy. Ross, studying his habits, learned the proper approach and used it. Dobermann's commonest complaint was of irresponsibility—irresponsibility when some thirty-year-old junior was caught sneaking into line ahead of his proper place, irresponsibility when Ross forgot to make his bed before stumbling out hi the dark to his kitchen shift, one awful case of irresponsibility when Helena thoughtlessly poured cold water into the cooking vat while it was turned on. There was a sizzle, a crackle, and a puff of steam, and Helena was weeping over a broken heating element.
Dobermann came storming over, and Ross saw his chance. "That is very irresponsible of you, Helena," he said coldly, back to Dobermann but entirely conscious of his presence. "If Junior Unit Twenty-Three was all as irresponsible as you, it would reflect badly on Mr. Dobermann. You don't know how lucky you are that Mr. Dobermann is so kind to you."
Helena's weeping dried up instantly; she gave Ross one furious glance, and lowered her eyes before Dobermann. Dobermann nodded approvingly to Ross as he waded into Helena; it was a memorable tirade, but Ross heard only part of it. He was looking at the cooking vat; it was a simple-minded bit of construction, a spiral of resistance wire around a ceramic core. The core had cracked and one end of the wire was loose; if it could be reconnected, the cracked core shouldn't matter much—the wire was covered with insulation anyhow. He looked up and opened his mouth to say something, then remembered and merely stood looking brightly attentive.
"——looks like you want to go back to the vats," the foreman was finishing. "Well, Helena, if that's what you want we can make you happy. This tune you'll be by yourself, too; you won't have Ross to help you out when the going's rough. Will she, Ross?"
"No, sir," Ross said immediately. "Sir?"
Dobermann looked back at him, frowning. "What?"
"I think I can fix this," Ross said modestly.
Dobermann's eyes bulged. "Fix it?"
"Yes, sir. It's only a loose wire. Back where I come from, we all learned how to take care of things like that when we were still in school. It's just a matter of——"
"Now, hold on, Ross"; the foreman howled. "Tampering with a machine is bad enough, but if you're going to turn out to be a liar, too, you're going just too far! School, indeed! You know perfectly well, Ross, that even I won't be ready for school until after Holiday. Ross, I knew you were a troublemaker, knew it the first day I set eyes on you. School! Well, we'll see how you like the school I'm going to send you to!"
The vats weren't so bad the second time. Even though the porridge was cold for two days, until somebody got around to delivering a different though equally worn-out cooking vat.
Helena passed out from the heat three times. And when, on the third time, Ross, goaded beyond endurance, kissed her again, there were no hysterics.
6
FROM birth to puberty you were an infant. From puberty to Dobermann's age, a junior. For ten years after that you went to school, learning the things you had neither the need nor the right to know before.
And then you were Of Age.
Being Of Age meant much, much more than voting, Ross found out. For one thing, it meant freedom to marry— after the enforced sexlessness of the junior years and the directed breeding via artificial insemination of the Scholars. It meant a healthy head start on seniority, which carried with it all offices and all power.