Higher Education

by Charles Sheffield

  Nothing there about working at a terminal until your eyes popped out of your head and your brain was ready to turn to watery gruel and trickle out through your nose. All the same, he liked the sound of "master craftsman." The suggestion was that you could eventually be one yourself.

  Rick hid away in his cramped cabin and buckled down to his assignments. After the first few hours of stately recession from the Earth-Moon system there was little to see from the Vantage's observation ports, and nothing to do inside but eat, sleep, and work.

  He realized very quickly that there was no possible way he could complete all his assignments in the time available. Two months ago he would have thrown up his hands in despair, turned his back on the whole thing, and guaranteed his own failure. But he was learning. Nobody in the universe could know everything. Therefore, everyone made choices. Success might be no more than the right choice—plus a little bit of luck.

  He examined the list of what he was supposed to do, and decided that the geography of Earth would be invaluable—to someone about to go there. He was heading in the opposite direction. The most important things for him to know were about the Belt. After that he could tackle other planets and moons, and if there happened to be any time left over he would worry about the rest. Not only was it logical to start with the Belt, but he knew from experience how much easier it was to learn about something in which you had a personal interest. Back in school, even the dullest idler had no trouble following the lessons about masturbation and sexual foreplay.

  And what about the other problem they had been set, to estimate the travel time of the ship to the Belt? On the face of it, that was absolutely impossible. He would have to learn all sorts of orbital mechanics, for a body moving under the gravitational influence of the Sun and the Earth and who knew what else. And yet it was totally out of character for a question to be asked that a trainee had no chance of answering. . . .

  Rick put the problem to one side. Instead, he tracked computer references and pulled up the Belt databases. He found that this piece of the assignment was actually fairly interesting. He had heard the word "Belt" thrown around many times since he signed up, and it brought to mind a tidy construct of sizeable planetoids orbiting the Sun in some well-defined and neat region of space. But the reality was more like a disorganized swarm of objects, some bodies dipping in their motions closer to the Sun than the Earth, some as they moved around the Sun also rotating about each other like miniature Earth-Moon systems. The main region of the Belt, between Mars and Jupiter, occupied a trillion trillion cubic kilometers of space. The bodies ranged in size from whole worlds like Ceres, a fifth as big across as the Moon, down to small pebbles and grains of sand.

  From the point of view of Vanguard Mining, neither the very small nor the very large were apparently of interest, except to be avoided. The big ones did not permit Vanguard's secret mining methods, which would be revealed to the apprentices when they were out in the Belt; the smallest ones were simple navigation hazards. The payoff lay in medium-sized bodies between half a kilometer and two kilometers across.

  Even there, composition was important. Some asteroids were ninety-nine percent silicon oxides; in other words, they were just lumps of rock. But others were mostly metals, valuable iron and nickel and platinum and iridium. If a body was really high in metals, mining it was relatively easy—compared with finding it in the first place. You couldn't send a prospecting ship to one little body after another, until you found the one that you wanted by taking material samples from it. That would be too slow and expensive. Instead, the exploration technique called for instrument surveys in which a body's reflected light was measured from a distance in many different parts of the spectrum, then matched with predicted reflectance curves for different mixtures of metals and rocks. Only after that work was all done on the computers did it make sense to send a ship to a promising asteroid and stake a claim.

  For the first time, Rick understood what Jigger Tait had been talking about when he grumbled about Avant Mining. Recently, the Vanguard staff had found, again and again, that when they sent a ship to an asteroid Avant Mining had beaten them to it and already staked a claim.

  Just how did Avant or Vanguard mine an asteroid, once they had mining rights? Rick was all set to follow the data bank pointers and try to find an answer when he halted in mid-command. He had just been told that the Vanguard mining method was proprietary. Chasing information about it would be a pure waste of time. And time to waste was one thing he surely did not have.

  Rick sighed, erased his query, and turned to the next piece of his assignment: learning the names of the major bodies in the Belt, together with their size and composition.

  Within a few minutes he realized that the new task was mind-bogglingly boring. It was a relief to be interrupted by a soft tap on his door. He half-expected it to be Deedee, and he was all set to treat her with the coldness that he felt she deserved. But to his surprise it was Alice Klein.

  "Mind if I come in?" She still had that shy little girl voice, but he noticed that she did not wait for his answer before she entered.

  "What do you want?" He remembered Barney French's warning: Help someone else with their problem if you like, but don't think for one moment that it will get you off the hook with your own assignment. "I don't have time to talk, I'm really busy."

  "That makes two of us." He had the only seat, so she moved to sit on the edge of his folded bunk, as languid and graceful as ever. "I'm not here to pick your brains, Rick. At least, not just for that. I want to suggest that we work together on a problem."

  "Which one?" Rick knew from what Barney French had said that Alice still had problems with math. He didn't, at least so far, which meant that working with her would be a one-way street.

  "The problem we all have. The time it will take us to get to CM-26, out in the Belt. Have you looked at that yet?"

  "Not yet." Rick's skepticism increased. To tell the truth, he had mentally given up on the problem. It didn't just call for straight learning of facts. You had to understand loads of math and orbital equations, which even Gina Styan admitted was a job for specialists. He wasn't sure where to start. "Do you know how to do it?"

  It was a question designed to get rid of her. He was convinced that Alice would have no idea. She would admit her ignorance, and then he'd ask her to go away. But she was pursing up her mouth and wrinkling her nose.

  "I don't know." The grey, wide eyes focused on Rick—for the first time, she seemed to be looking at him and not through him. "Back when we were studying for our theory test, Turkey Gossage told me something that he said I ought to keep in mind for future reference. I have, but I don't know what to do with it. That's why I came to you. You're smart, you can see through things."

  She was praising him, buttering him up. Rick knew that, but still he was pleased. Flattery, even when you recognized it, made you feel good. Maybe because it showed somebody thought you were worth flattering.

  "What did Turkey tell you?"

  "He said that the Sun's gravity controls the movements of every body in the solar system."

  "Big deal. We all know that."

  "Yes. But he went on to say that the real surprise was how small the Sun's gravitational force is. For instance, he told me that if you work out the acceleration on an object at Earth's distance from the Sun, you find that it's less than a thousandth of a gee. And when you get out to the Belt, it's less than one ten-thousandth of a gee."

  "So?" But Rick already had the conviction that Alice was on to something.

  "Well, we were told to assume that this ship is accelerating at a quarter of a gee."

  "I believe that, it certainly feels about right."

  "But that means once we get well away from Earth, the gravity forces from Earth and Sun and every other planet are nothing, compared with the ship's own acceleration. I feel sure this is relevant to the problem—only I don't see how to use it."

  "But I think I do! Give me a minute." Rick sat staring at nothing
. If all other accelerations on the ship were hundreds of times smaller than the ship's own acceleration—

  "Alice, we don't need to know a whole slew of orbital theory. Our own ship's acceleration is so high, we can get a good value for our travel time by assuming that we travel in a straight line and ignoring everything else. All we need is our own acceleration, and the distance we have to go."

  "But we don't know the distance—CM-26 keeps moving."

  "Sure it does." The boredom and frustration had been swept away by excitement and certainty. Rick suddenly had a clear mental picture in his head. "See, here's what we do. We make two tables. The first has two columns. It shows times, say, every hour from the time we started, in the left column. The right column shows the distance from CM-2, where we started, to CM-26 for the corresponding time. It has to be a table, because CM-26 keeps moving. The information to make that distance table comes right out of the coordinates given to us in the problem packet."

  "But we don't know the travel time—that's what we're supposed to find out!"

  "I know. Let me finish. Now, we make another table. This one also has two columns. The left column is the same list of times, in hours. The right column says how far the ship goes in that much time, assuming that we accelerate for half the time, and decelerate for the other half. We already had the formula in class for the distance traveled in a given time with a given constant acceleration. It's just half the time multiplied by the final speed."

  "But we don't know the final speed!"

  "Yes we do—at least, we know the formula for it. We had it on a test, it's just the acceleration multiplied by the time."

  "If you say so. But I still don't know what we do next."

  "We're almost finished. We have two time/distance tables, right? Now we plot them both as curves on one graph. The first curve is the distance to CM-26, hour by hour. The second curve shows the ship's distance traveled, also hour by hour. Those two curves cross somewhere—they have to, or we'd never be able to reach CM-26. And the time where they cross is the travel time—our answer. It's the time when the ship will have gone just far enough to reach the position of CM-26. An approximation, but I bet it will be closer than ten percent."

  Alice was shaking her head. "You'll have to go through all that again. You went too fast for me. Say it one more time."

  "I'll do more than say it—we'll do it, together. You make the table for the distance to CM-26. I'll make the table for ship's distance traveled. Then we compare and make the graph. Here's a calculator for you."

  While Alice began to work out distances to CM-26, Rick began to make the table for ship's distance. The result made him whistle in astonishment. A quarter of a gee didn't sound like much of an acceleration, compared with the five gees and more that they had briefly endured on the way up to low Earth orbit. But keep it going, and the results were amazing. After an hour of accelerating and another of decelerating, you had traveled over thirty thousand kilometers. No big deal. Increase that to two days, though, and you were eighteen million kilometers away from your starting point. And in eight days. . .

  "Alice, I want you to check this and see if I'm screwing up somewhere."

  "What's wrong?" She had been working steadily, sitting on the folded bunk and biting her lip in concentration. Now she paused and smiled at Rick. For a change, the smile involved her whole face. Looking at her it was hard to believe that she usually seemed remote and uninvolved.

  Rick held out his calculation. "According to this, if we travel for eight days we'll have gone almost three hundred million kilometers. We'd be out in the Belt!"

  "Let me look." And, as she quietly did her own calculation. "You know, nobody said the trip out would take weeks and weeks—we just assumed it. Maybe that's the point of the problem we were all given."

  "You mean, they want to see if we can figure out for ourselves that we're going to be there sooner than we thought?"

  "That's right. You know what Turkey told us. The zingers wouldn't stop when we left him." She studied the final number on her calculator. "I get a different answer—twice as big as what you said."

  "Let me take a look." Rick studied what she had done. "You weren't listening to me. You've accelerated the ship for the whole eight days. You can't do that. Look at your final speed, it's nearly seventeen hundred kilometers a second. You'd go right through the Belt like—" Rick paused; like shit on skates was what he had been about to say, but he couldn't see that expression pleasing Alice. "—like lightning," he finished weakly. "You have to accelerate for half the time, then decelerate the other half, so you're not going fast when you get there."

  "Let me do it again." She repeated the calculation, slowly and carefully, and nodded. "I agree with you now. Four days accelerating at a quarter of a gee, then four days decelerating, takes you about two hundred and ninety million kilometers."

  "That could be more than enough to get you to Ceres." Rick decided he sounded a bit know-it-all, and added, "I was just learning the asteroid distances when you came in."

  Instead of replying, Alice got up from the bunk, went across to the door, and locked it. She came back and stood directly in front of Rick. "You've finished the problem, everything but comparing the two tables."

  "You did it, too. I had no idea where to start. You brought me the key information."

  "But I'd never have figured out how to use it without you. You provided the brain power, not me. My question is, what now?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "Do we keep this to ourselves?"

  Rick hadn't thought about that, but it didn't take long to reach a decision. "Of course we do! Barney French said we could cooperate, but she didn't say we had to. I don't know about you, but I need all the extra credits I can get. There's no reason to share what we've done with everybody else."

  "With anybody else?"

  "With anybody else."

  "Good." Alice motioned for Rick to stand up, and quietly folded his chair into its niche in the wall. "It's a deal, then. Our big secret, just the two of us. I like that." She studied his face, alive with excitement at the work they had just done together. "And I like you, Rick. I watched you dance the other night, and I wished that you were dancing with me."

  "I didn't realize that."

  "No reason you should. I didn't have the sense to come over and ask you, did I? That won't happen again."

  The months since he left school had been filled with surprises, but there had been nothing as surprising or exciting as Alice. To think that he had known her since the first bus trip from Albuquerque airport, and not really known her at all. He had never suspected that her face could flush so vividly, and those wide, grey eyes could look at him with such excitement.

  A soft chime over the ship's central communication system brought him out of his reverie. It meant that first mess was beginning, and if he wanted to eat at second sitting he had just twenty minutes to get up, dress, and make his way to the little food service area. When he had first seen it, he had never imagined that it might be the only place to eat on the whole ship. But it was. The apprentices ate there in relays.

  He dressed slowly and folded away his bunk, then paused for another look at the time/distance tables that he and Alice had generated to solve the problem of travel to CM-26. After dinner he would go over their work again, but he was not worried. What they had done had the right feeling to it, the feeling that you couldn't describe but also couldn't mistake. Once you hit on the right method, a problem suddenly became ridiculously easy. It seemed like a general truth: what you knew was easy; what you didn't know was hard.

  Rick wandered slowly along the narrow corridor to the mess area. He had never felt so good in his whole life. He arrived just as the first sitting apprentices were getting ready to leave and dumping their plates and cups in the hopper to be vacuum cleaned. Alice was at the table nearest to Rick. He walked over to her.

  She stood up, turned toward him—and hurried past him as though he did not exist. Befo
re he could think of what to say she was out of the room. He took two steps after her, then paused. Deedee Mao was entering, blocking the way, walking right up to Rick and smiling at him.

  "The first person here again. You got a tapeworm, or just hollow legs?" She frowned at him. "What's wrong, Rick? Are you feeling all right?"

  "Yeah—I guess." Rick slumped down bewildered at one of the tables. What was going on with Alice? Why had she cut him cold like that, after what had happened between them? "Yes, I'm fine."

  "Well, let's see what tonight's mystery is. I'm getting fed up with squid pie." Deedee sat down right opposite Rick. The people assigned to different sittings changed all the time, but they all went through the same ritual. You were served an anonymous lump of something for the main course, and you guessed what it might be. The winner was the one who came up with the most imaginative—usually rude—suggestion.