Teague was scowling at the switch. He said, “I’d better go and check out everything in the Life-Support module. And Ching, you check out everything in the computer tie-ins—”
“It couldn’t be the computer,” she said positively, but at Moira’s glare, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll check every linkage! But do you mind if I clean up this mess in here, and go and change my clothes first — and have a shower?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
As she showered, Ching thought about that.
She had insisted on cleaning up the mess in the gymnasium unaided (it had rained to the floor in a smelly shower when the gravity came on) before going to clean herself. Now she stood under the shower and scrubbed fiercely, letting the hot water wash away disgust and filth, sudsing detergent vigorously through her short straight hair.
Was it all in her mind? Granted, she had not specialized in psychology and, in fact, considered it a sloppy and inexact science. But Teague was right; as a G-N, she should have had perfect inner-ear channels, and this sudden nausea was evidently some kind of failure. She found it both puzzling and frightening. She had had perfect health all her life, except for a broken finger when she was nine, and the occasional 24-hour-virus. Now her body had betrayed her, and done it in the most humiliating way possible. Well, not quite, she told herself with a touch of bleak humor. She could have wet herself, or her bowel sphincters could have failed her like that, in public; that would have been considerably worse!
But she expected herself to be perfect, had taken her perfect body’s co-operation for granted — she had never even had a cavity in a tooth! Feeling the comfort of the hot shower, flooding down, blessedly down on her, she felt a sudden surge of repeated panic, if the gravity suddenly went off in here, I’d drown, and firmly reminded herself not to be foolish. The DeMags were backed up by all sorts of fail-safe systems. She wouldn’t drown before she could get the water turned off. Why was she being such a fool?
She stepped out, air-dried and combed her hair, enjoying the feel of its cleanness, and slipped into a clean tunic and panties, slid her feet into paper slippers. She thought, I had better go and check the computer tie-ins. Though it can’t be in computer… and again she felt the feeling of sudden, wavery panic.
Unknown I’m supposed to have a perfect body, complete with perfect inner-ear labyrinths. If my own body can go back on me like this, can I trust the computer?
Teague had gone to check on the DeMag and Life-Support units, and Fontana, as his second, had gone with him. Ravi, whose shift it was, had gone up to the Bridge to make the routine check of course, chronometer time, and navigation instrument readings. Peake and Moira, having nothing else to do, had remained in the gym, Peake completing his running laps, and Moira working on gymnastic equipment.
Peake completed the hundredth lap — which gave him a day count of a two-mile run — and slid down, folding his long legs, to watch Moira whirling herself over the parallel bars. He thought; if the gravity failed when she’s doing that, she’d break her neck! and felt himself shudder.
She saw him watching her and jumped down.
“You’re practically good enough for the Olympics,” he said, smiling.
She said, with her throaty chuckle, “Quite a lot of us are. We train very hard, after all, and there are a lot of high-mesomorph types in the Academy — short, compact, muscular. It’s one of the physical arrangements that goes with high intelligence. The other kind is like you — long, scrawny, ectomorph. There’s even been some talk of entering a few of us. Only the question is, what country’s team would we join? Australia? The world would complain, if Australia had a gene-pool like ours to dip into. Our own? Nobody’s supposed to know where we come from, and this would bring us back into national politics again. So — no Olympic stars from the Academy.”
“What country would you have competed in, if you had?” Peake asked, “Would you have liked to?”
She shrugged. “I sometimes think it would have been nice. I do like the limelight. Only if I’d had that kind of ambition, I’d hardly have made it in the Academy, would I?” she said, answering the last question first. “I don’t think I ever knew your real name, did I, Peake?”
“David Akami,” he said, “and I’m from South Africa. And you—”
“Ellen Finlayson,” she said, “and I was born in Scotland, or so they tell me — I don’t remember, so it’s hearsay evidence, after all.” She chuckled again. “Do you mind if I turn the DeMags off again? I had some training in free-fall when Teague and I installed the drives, and I’ve always wanted to try free-fall acrobatics — I watched the telecast from the Lunar Dome the last three Earth Days.”
“Fine with me,” Peake replied, and Moira turned off the stud, feeling the gravity slowly, slowly go off; at first they felt faintly light-headed, a brief flash of dis-orientation, then the exhilaration of floating. Moira bounded up into midair, turning a rapid series of somersaults, spinning on her own center like a top; came to rest laughing and flushed, stretching back and turning on her own momentum, arms splayed out.
“I wonder why Ching got sick? There doesn’t seem to be anything sickening about it,” she said, “I actually like the sensation of weightlessness.”
“Her inner-ear channels may not be as stable as yours.”
“Oh, come,” Moira scoffed, “she’s a G-N.”
“In that case,” Peake said, “it’s only a matter of acclimatization; she’ll get used to it very quickly. Don’t make fun of her, Moira.”
“I wasn’t making fun of her, Peake,” Moira said soberly, “I felt sorry for her. She’s always been so perfect and self-controlled. Maybe that’s it — it scares her to be out of control, because that’s just one of the givens of her life. Being perfect. Like a computer. Any G-N takes it for granted — being perfect, I mean. You, and I, and all the rest of us, have to live with the fact that we’re just conglomerations of random genes; if we made it into the Academy, that means that we’re the end product of natural selection. You, more than me, because in your country the weaker ones die out in famines and so forth. So we know, if we get this far, it’s because we, or our ancestors, had some superior stuff inside us, body and brain. Ching doesn’t have that to lean on — whatever there is that’s superior about her, she knows it’s just that some scientist tinkered around with her parents’ germ plasm. No roots.”
All this was true, Peake thought; but he was surprised that it should be the tough-minded Moira who said it. He had not thought her sensitive enough to be aware of that. He discovered that he was looking at Moira in a new way; she too could be sympathetic, where, always before, she had intimidated him a little.
She pulled him up beside her; he felt himself bounce a little on the cushiony air. “As I remember, you’re a fair acrobat yourself,” she said. “Come on, let’s try double-spins around a common center—”
Seizing her hands, spinning, Peake felt the curious sensation that the world, not himself, was spinning while he remained wholly stationary at the center of the module which was dancing, somersaulting around them; that the absolute center of the universe was located somewhere in the small, lessening space between Moira’s curled body and his own as the module whirled round them as the whirling stars moved… at the end of a long spin they slowly came to rest, almost in each other’s arms. Slowly, holding each other, they drifted down.
Moira had felt it too, as if the universe centered to the location in the narrowing space between their bodies; she was reluctant to break the contact.
Peake said, laughing, “You’re good at that for a woman!”