With no special construction skills, O’Hara’s work was mostly fetch-and-carry. This required a certain amount of delicacy and intelligence.
You get around in a spacesuit with the aid of an “oxy gun,” oxygen being the only gas of which the Worlds always had a surplus. It’s just an aimable nozzle connected to a supply of compressed oxygen: you point it in one direction and hold down the trigger, and you go in approximately the opposite direction. Only approximately.
O’Hara and her buddy would get an order, say, for a girder of such-and-so specifications. They would locate the proper stack on their map and cautiously, very cautiously the first few days, jet their way over to it. The stacks were loose bundles of material that got less orderly as time went on. Once they found the right girder, the fun began.
Those girders weighed exactly nothing, being in free fall, but moving one was not just a matter of putting it on your shoulder and hi-ho, away we go. A tonne of girder still had a tonne’s worth of inertia, even in free fall. Hard to get it started. Hard to point it in the right direction—and hard to tell which direction is right. Because when something’s in orbit, you can’t change its velocity without changing its orbit, however slightly. So you have to aim high or low or sideways, depending on which direction you’re aiming.
O’Hara and her partner would wrestle the girder into what they guessed was the proper orientation, then hang on to either end of it (strong electromagnets on their gloves and boots) and jet away. As the girder crawled its way toward the target, they would use their oxy guns to correct its flight path and slow it down, with luck bringing it to a halt right where the user wanted it. Sometimes they crashed gently, and sometimes they overshot and had to maneuver the damned thing back into position. The work was physically and mentally exhausting, which was just what she needed.
2 
O’Hara clumped into the room she shared with Daniel Anderson and sat down hard on the bed. For a minute she just stared at the floor, sagging with fatigue, maybe depression. Then she arranged both pillows and turned on the wall cube, planning to punch up the novel she was reading. But the cube was showing a pleasant modern dance performance that she’d never seen, so she eased back onto the pillows and let herself be entertained.
In a few minutes Anderson came in. “Home early?” she said.
“Going back later.” He set his bag down on the dresser and stretched. “We started some tests, color chromatography, and can’t do anything until they’re ready. Couple of hours. Eat yet?”
“Not hungry.” She turned off the dance program.
“You ought to eat something.”
“I guess.” She slid down to a horizontal position and put her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling.
“Bad day out there?”
“The usual.” She laughed suddenly. “You know what I’ve got?”
“Is it catching?”
“Penis envy. I’ve got a delayed case of penis envy.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You never studied psychology.”
Daniel shrugged. “The psychology of oil shale is pretty well established. It just sits there. You can say anything about it and it doesn’t mind.”
“Freud thought little girls had penis envy. They saw little boys pee in any direction they wanted, and they knew they’d never be able to do that, and felt uncompleted.”
“Are you serious?”
“Part way, I really am. Not in the Freudian way.” She ran her fingers through her short red hair. “Did you ever try to do anything difficult while wearing a wet diaper?”
He sat on the bed and put his hand, neutrally, on her hip. “I guess learning to walk is pretty challenging. Don’t remember that far back.”
“I tried the catheter-style suit but just couldn’t work in it. It was like…it was awful.”
Daniel nodded. “Most women can’t use them.” He was from Earth but had spent a lot of time in spacesuits.
“So I get a diaper. A wet diaper, if we’re out long enough.”
“Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“Who’s embarrassed? It’s just distracting, uncomfortable. I’m getting a rash. I want a penis and a hose, just during working hours.”
Daniel laughed. “Those hoses aren’t all they might be.
You get cold enough, or startled, and you’ll retract out of it, but it feels like you still have it on. Nasty surprise when you start filling your boot.”
“Really?” She looked thoughtful. “What about erections?”
“Anybody who can get an erection in a spacesuit is in the wrong line of work.” They laughed together and he cautiously moved his hand; she stopped him.
“Not quite yet,” she said quietly.
“It’s all right.” They had been lovers when she went to Earth, and had planned to marry when she came back.
He stood up quickly and went to the dresser—two steps; the bed took up most of the cubicle—and pulled a comb through his hair.
“Do you want me to sleep someplace else until it gets better?” she asked.
“Of course not. I haven’t had such interesting dreams in twenty years.”
“Seriously. I feel like…such a—”
His reflection stared at her. “I can live with your grief easier than you can. And I want to be the one around when you do recover.”
“I didn’t mean I’d move in with somebody else. I could get a hot berth in the labor dormitory.”
“Sure you could. And when they found out I was living here alone, they’d assign me a dormitory space too. Crowded as things are, it might take years to get a room again.”
O’Hara turned to face the wall. “Nice to feel useful.”
He opened his mouth and closed it, and set the comb down quietly. “Anyhow, I’m meeting John for chop. Want to come along?”
“Oh.” She sat up and rubbed her face vigorously with both hands. “Might as well. See what they did to the rice this time.” She went to Daniel and hugged him, or leaned on him, from behind. “I’m sorry.”
He turned around inside her arms, gave her a solid kiss, and eased away. “Let’s get on up there. Running a little late.”
New New, like all of the Worlds, derived its gravity artificially, by spinning. Along the axis of spin, there was no gravity; the farther “out” you went, the greater the force. Most people lived and worked close to the one-gee level, where all the parks and shops were.
There were laboratories, small factories, and some living quarters at the low-gee levels, which is what brought John Ogelby to New New. Born a hunchback with a debilitating curvature of the spine, he had lived most of his life alternating between pain pills and agony. He developed expertise in a particular corner of strength-of-materials engineering, so that he could emigrate to the Worlds and find work in a low-gravity lab, where his back would stop hurting.
He was a close friend of O’Hara’s—she had met Dan Anderson through him—and she and Dan often went up to the quarter-gee area where he lived and worked, to visit the Light Head tavern (now being used for emergency housing), or to take advantage of the short cafeteria lines there. Not many people ate in low gravity often enough to be comfortable with it. A cup of hot coffee can do amazing and painful things.
The quarter-gee cafeteria was the only room in New New that had wooden paneling on the walls. Some philanthropist had shipped it up from Earth after the low-gee hospital saved his life. A few cases of Scotch would have been more appreciated: to people who grew up surrounded by steel, the Philippine mahogany felt sinister and unnatural. (It didn’t look all that homey to people born on Earth, for that matter, since it was secured to the real walls with conspicuous bolts.)