by Ben Bova
“It’s a lot o’ work, runnin’ this joint.”
“I guess it is.” The dispenser beeped at last. Grant slid up the plastic guard and reached for his steaming cup of cocoa.
“Need somethin’ to put in it?” Devlin asked.
Grant shook his head. “It’s got enough sugar already, I’m sure.”
“I meant somethin’ stronger.”
Grant blinked at him.
“I know you’re a straight arrow an’ all that,” Devlin said, “but a man can’t go without some stimulation now an’ then, can he?”
“I don’t drink,” Grant said.
“I know.” Devlin patted Grant’s shoulder. “An’ you don’t even take sleepin’ pills, do ya?”
“I’ve never needed them.”
“Until now, huh?”
“I don’t want any. Thanks.”
“Maybe some entertainment?”
“Entertainment?”
“VR, y’know. I could fix you up with some very good stuff. Just like the real thing. Make a new man o’ you.”
“No thanks!”
“Now wait, don’t get all huffy on me. You’re a married man, aren’t you?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I can work up a VR sim for you, special. Just gimme some videos of your wife and I’ll put together a sim that’ll be just like she was with you, just about.”
Grant’s jaw dropped open.
“Sure, I can do it!” Devlin encouraged, mistaking Grant’s shocked silence. “I did it for ’Gon, y’know. Fixed him up with Lainie … in virtual reality.”
My God in heaven, Grant thought. So Egon’s fantasies about Lane aren’t just wet dreams, after all. He’s got a VR session with her in it. Maybe more than one.
“How about it, Grant?” Devlin urged.
But Grant was thinking, If Lane knew about this she’d kill the two of them.
“Well?”
“No thanks,” Grant said firmly. “Not for me.”
He turned and strode away, splashing hot cocoa from the mug onto his hand, thinking that he’d never let that filthy devil get his paws on videos of Marjorie. Never.
Days later, Grant was in the biochemistry lab, checking the delicate glassware he was taking out of the dishwasher, to make certain nothing had been broken or chipped. The glass tubes and retorts were still warm in his hands. He’d been thinking that it would be much more efficient if they made the lab apparatus out of lunar glassteel, which was unbreakable, but then figured it would cost too much. Cheaper to gather up the broken bits and recast them. Just as graduate students were an economic advantage over robots, old-fashioned chippable lab glassware was used instead of glassteel.
“I haven’t seen you for a while.”
The voice startled Grant so badly he nearly dropped the hand-blown tubing he was holding.
Looking up, he saw it was Zareb Muzorawa.
“Oh … I’ve been around,” said Grant. “I’ve … uh, been pretty busy, you know.”
Muzorawa hiked one leg on a lab stool and perched casually on it. Still in those metal-studded leggings, Grant saw.
Very seriously he said, “What happened between Lane and Egon was not your fault, my friend”
“Yeah, sure. I know that” Grant turned back to emptying the dishwasher.
“Lane told me about your conversation with her.”
Grant said nothing, kept busy unloading the glassware.
“You can’t hide all the time, Grant,” Muzorawa said. “The station isn’t that big.”
Straightening and facing the man, Grant said, “I guess I’m embarrassed, pretty much. I feel really rotten about it.”
“It was not your fault. No one is angry at you. Lane and Egon aren’t even angry at each other, not anymore.”
“I don’t see how that could be.”
Muzorawa laughed gently. “They had a peace conference. He agreed to stop telling tales about her and she agreed not to decorate him with food anymore.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Grant felt better than he had in days. “And they’re not boiled at me?”
“Why should they be?”
Before Grant could think of a reply, Muzorawa abruptly changed the subject. “Are you enjoying your work?”
Grant’s heart sank again. “That’s not a joking matter.”
“I was not joking.”
Unloading the dishwasher and putting the gleaming glassware in their proper cabinets as he spoke, Grant confessed, “I don’t mind the labor; it’s the time I’m losing that hurts.”
“Ah, yes,” said Muzorawa, shifting slightly on the stool, stretching his legs as if they pained him.
“I’m supposed to be working toward my doctorate in astrophysics,” Grant went on, growing angrier with each word. “How in the name of the Living God can I do that when there isn’t even another blast-dratted astrophysicist on the station?”
Muzorawa nodded solemnly. “Yes, I see. I understand.”
“I could spend my entire four years here without making a nanometer of progress toward my doctorate.”
“That would be a shame.”
“A shame? It’s a tragedy! This is wrecking my whole life!”
“I put in many hours of dog work,” Muzorawa said, “back when I was a grad student in Cairo.”
“You’re Egyptian?” Grant assumed Egyptians were tobacco-hued Arabs, not deeply black Africans.
Muzorawa shook his head. “I am Sudanese. Sudan is south of Egypt, the land that was called Nubia in ancient times.”
“Oh.”
“I received my degrees at the University of Cairo.”
“I see.”
“It’s easier for a black man there than at most European universities.”
“We have laws against racial prejudice in the States.”
Muzorawa grunted. “Yes, I know of your laws. And the realities behind them.”
“The New Morality sees to it that there’s no racial bias in the schools,” Grant said.
“I’m sure.”
“They do!”
With a shrug of his broad shoulders, Muzorawa asked, “Tell me, did you take any undergraduate courses in fluid dynamics?”
Caught off-guard again by another sudden change of subject, Grant answered hesitantly, “Uh, one. You need to know some fluid dynamics to understand how stellar interiors work.”
“Condensed matter.”
Grant nodded. “And degenerate matter.”
Muzorawa nodded back and the two of them quickly slipped into a discussion of fluid dynamics, safe and clean, a subject where mathematics reigned instead of messy, painful human relationships.
Within a few minutes Muzorawa was using one of the chem lab’s computers to show Grant the problems of the planet-girdling Jovian ocean he was working on. Grant understood the basics, and listened avidly as the Sudanese fluid dynamicist explained the details. In the back of his mind he felt warmly grateful that Muzorawa was taking the time to bring some spark of interesting ideas into his dull routine of drudgery.
It ended all too soon. Glancing at the clock display in the lower corner of the computer’s screen, Muzorawa said, “I’m afraid I must go. Wo has called a big meeting with the department heads. Budget proposals.”
Nodding, Grant said, “Thanks for dropping in.”
Muzorawa flashed a dazzling smile. “It was nothing. And stop being a hermit! Join us at dinner.”
“Us?”
“Egon, Tamiko, Ursula…”
“Lane?”
He cocked his head slightly to one side. “Yes, maybe even her. But we’ll keep her on the opposite side of the table from Egon!”
Grant laughed.
“We’ll sit her next to you.”
He was as good as his word.
Apprehensive, uncertain, Grant entered the cafeteria with the first surge of people coming in for dinner. As he slowly made his way along the serving line, pushing his tray and making his
selections absentmindedly, he looked around for Muzorawa or Karlstad or any of the others. None of them in sight.
Then he saw O’Hara getting into the line, with Muzorawa’s bearded face a few heads behind her. By the time he had finished loading his tray, Karlstad, Kayla Ukara, and Tamiko Hideshi were also in line.
Feeling awkward, Grant hesitated a moment, then decided that it was foolish to just stand there dithering. Most of the tables were unoccupied as yet, so he picked an empty one big enough for six and sat down facing the line.
Sure enough, O’Hara came straight to him, still limping slightly. Then Muzorawa and the others. They all sat at Grant’s table and said hello as if nothing had happened. Finally Karlstad picked his way deftly through the line and joined them. Muzorawa had saved a seat for him on the opposite side of the table from O’Hara, who had placed herself next to Grant.
Just as Karlstad sat down, the light panels in the ceiling flickered once, twice. They all looked up.
“Uh-oh,” said Hideshi.
“Wait,” Muzorawa replied softly. “I think it’s stabilized…”
The lights suddenly went out altogether, plunging the crowded cafeteria into complete darkness. Grant heard the throng of diners moan, an instinctive collective sob of fear and tension that quickly dissolved into grumbling and muttering. He felt his heart thumping beneath his ribs.
“It’s stabilized, all right.” Karlstad sneered.
“What is it?” Grant asked, breatheless with anxiety. “What’s going on?”
Dim emergency lighting winked on, throwing the cafeteria into pools of faint light and deep shadow.
“Power outage,” Ukara said, almost hissing the words.
“It happens every now and then,” Muzorawa said, calm and reassuring.
We need electrical power to keep the air pumps going, Grant realized, sitting wire-tense in his chair.
“It might be Io’s flux tube expanding,” Karlstad suggested.
“More likely a plasma circuit between Io and the planet,” said Ukara.
“Yes,” Muzorawa agreed. “We probably passed through a plasma cloud and it overloaded our generators.”
“I don’t like this,” Hideshi admitted, her voice trembling.
Grant asked, “Plasma clouds jump from the cloud tops to Io?” His own voice sounded high and shaky.
“Not often,” Muzorawa replied. “But it has been observed from time to time.”
Karlstad muttered, “And we’re just lucky enough to be in the middle of it.”
“How long—”
The lights came back on. Everyone sighed gratefully. The cafeteria echoed with a hundred chattered, relieved conversations.
It took a while for Grant to feel at ease again. Losing electrical power could be fatal. There are backup generators, he reassured himself. And superconducting batteries that can run the life-support systems for days on end. Still, he treasured the bright, glareless light from the ceiling panels.
Everyone seemed to relax.
“Hell, I was looking forward to a candlelight dinner,” someone shouted. People laughed: too loudly, Grant thought.
They’re forcing themselves to forget the blackout, he realized. To bury it, pretend it never happened, or at least pretend it’ll never happen again.
Karlstad started making cynical jokes about someone in the biology department whom Grant actually knew, a fussy little neurophysiologist who was counting the days until his time was up and he could head back to Earth. O’Hara added to the moment with a story of how she had slipped data from the neurophysiologist’s own brain scan into the file for Sheena.
“That was after the gorilla’s brain-boost?” Hideshi asked.
“It was,” said O’Hara, grinning broadly. “Just a few days after he’d injected Sheena with the neuronal growth hormones.”
“But he was looking at data from his own brain?” asked Karlstad.
“That he was. He took one look at the neuronal activity and thought he was going to get the Nobel Prize!”
They all roared with laughter.
“Didn’t Sheena break his arm later on?”
“No, that was Ferguson.”
“Oh, right. The surgeon.”
Abruptly the overhead speakers blared, “GRANT ARCHER, REPORT TO THE DIRECTORS OFFICE.”
Suddenly fearful, Grant look up toward the ceiling. “What does he want me for?”
“It won’t be good news,” Karlstad muttered. “It never is when he calls you to his office.”
“You’d better get going,” Muzorawa said.
“Now? In the middle of dinner?”
Karlstad pointed a finger at him. “When our peerless leader calls, you answer. Without hesitation.”
“And without dessert,” O’Hara added.
Grant pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Doesn’t he care at all about us?”
Karlstad shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he cares about anything anymore. Since the accident he’s been—”
Muzorawa laid a heavy hand on his wrist and Karlstad snapped his mouth shut with an audible click of his teeth.
“You’d better get to the director’s office,” the fluid dynamicist said softly. “Dr. Wo doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Grant nodded and headed out of the cafeteria.
There was a dinner tray on Dr. Wo’s desk, but Grant saw that the director had hardly picked at his food. The office was uncomfortably warm, as before. Is it part of his dominance technique? Grant wondered. Does he enjoy watching me sweat?
Finally he looked up at Grant, scowling. “You have been in this station long enough to know your way from the Cafeteria to this office,” Wo rasped as Grant sat before his desk.
“Yessir, I do.”
“Then why did it take you so long to get here?” Wo demanded in his grating voice. “Did you go the long way around?”
Grant felt like getting up and storming out of the office, but he held his temper and said nothing.
After a long, silent moment, the director announced grudgingly, “Your duties as a lab assistant are finished. You will report to Dr. Muzorawa tomorrow morning to begin training with the fluid dynamics group.”
Grant felt an electric current of surprise race through him.
“That is all. You may go.”
“I’ll be working with Dr. Muzorawa?” he heard himself say, his voice high with wonder and disbelief.
“That is what I told you, isn’t it? Now stop wasting my time. The working day begins at eight hundred hours. Sharp! Understand me?”
“Yessir,” Grant said, scrambling to his feet, trying to keep his face impassive and hide the ecstatic grin that wanted to break out. “Thank you, sir.”
Wo waved one hand as if brushing away an annoyance.
Grant stepped out into the corridor, slid Dr. Wo’s door shut, and leaned against it, his legs rubbery. I’ll be doing real work! he rejoiced. Not astrophysics, but real, actual scientific research!
Then his surge of joy drained out of him. I’ll be learning more about what they’re doing, he thought. I’ll be finding out things I should report to the New Morality.
BOOK II
Make me know Thy ways, O Lord; Teach me Thy paths.
Psalm 25
COMING-OUT PARTY
When Grant got back to the cafeteria and broke the news of his promotion to his friends, Muzorawa smiled as if he’d known it all along. Grant realized that this was so; the Sudanese must have asked Wo to allow Grant to join his team.
“Zeb, you did this for me!” he gushed. “I don’t know how to thank you!”
Muzorawa said, “I did it for me, my friend. I need as much help as I can get Wo to give me. Just do a good job, that’s all the thanks you need to give.”
“This calls for a celebration,” said Karlstad. “It’s not every day that a grad student is elevated to the ranks of we scooters.”
“I’m a scooter now!” Grant realized.
They all nodded,
laughing. Ukara actually thumped him on the back.
“What kind of celebration, ’Gon?” asked O’Hara.
“We could go to the staff lounge, I suppose,” Muzorawa suggested.
“And drink fruit juice while Wo records every word we say?” Karlstad sneered.
“The lounge is dull,” Ukara agreed.
“And bugged,” added O’Hara.
Gesturing to the remains of their dinners, littered across the round table, Karlstad replied, “Back in my quarters I’ve got something a little more celebratory than this glorified pond scum.”
“Soymeat isn’t pond scum,” Hideshi said, feigning indignation. “It’s a staple for half the world’s population.”
“He’s talking about the algal salad,” Ukara said, almost growling. “And I agree with him.”
“Come on,” said Karlstad, getting up from the table. “You’re all invited to Grant’s coming-out party.”
“Coming out?”
“Out of slavery,” Karlstad said. “Out of the bondage of lab assistantship—”
“And into the indentured servitude of scooterdom,” O’Hara finished for him.
As they went down the hall, Grant asked, “Where did that term ‘scooter’ come from?”
“It means scientist,” Ukara answered. “It’s a derogatory term invented by the administrators.”
“You mean the beancounters,” Hideshi said.
“But why ‘scooters’?” Grant persisted. “How’d that word get chosen to mean ‘scientist’?”
“It’s likely a corruption of the word ‘scholar,’ I should think,” said O’Hara.
“Which was in and of itself a derogatory term created by the beancounters,” Karlstad added.
“The only time they ever showed any creativity whatsoever,” Ukara said, her tone bitter with contempt.
“Maybe it’s a corruption of the word ‘scoter,’” Hideshi suggested.
Karlstad asked, “Scoter? Isn’t that some kind of duck?”
“That’s right. An appropriate name for a scientist, don’t you think?”
“Queer ducks, that’s what we are, for certain,” O’Hara agreed.
“Quack, quack,” Ukara added, a rare burst of humor for her.
“You mean quark, quark,” said Karlstad.
