The Sunspacers Trilogy (15 page)

“Probably.” I should have kept my mouth shut. “I’ll just have to wait and see.”

He was silent.

“Dad, it’ll be okay,” I insisted, “believe me.”

Mom called a few minutes later.

“Joe, are you really going to do this?”

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” There was no way they could stop me.

She took a deep breath. “When did you think of this?”

“I need the time off, Mom.” One, two, three.

“You’ll just lose time.”

“It’s not wasting time to consider what I want.”

My words seemed to crawl across space.

“You could do that while finishing school.”

“Come on, Mom, saying it won’t make it work.”

She glared at me. “I’ll call back after your father and I discuss what to do.”

I got angry. “You can’t scare me, Mom. I didn’t say anything when you two separated. That was your own business. Why can’t you leave me alone?” I felt terrible saying it, as if I were a criminal.

They’ll get used to the idea, I thought as she faded away.

The phone rang again.

“Joe—why don’t you just come home?” Dad said as he faded in. “You won’t have to work. You’ll rest up and we can talk, and we … you could visit your mother.” And report back to you, I said to myself silently. “Well?”

“But I want to work, Dad.” One, two, three.

“You don’t have to.”

“And I want to stay here.”

“Is it someone—a girl?” he asked after the pause.

“That’s only part of it.”

He stared. “Oh—Eva thought you didn’t want to come home because we weren’t together.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference.”

He seemed relieved. “Did you get the money we put in your account for Christmas?”

“Sure did. Thanks. By the way, I got A’s.”

“Great! Eva thought it might have been your studies.”

“She could have asked.” One, two, three.

“We’re not ourselves, Joe. It’s hard to start life again, alone.”

“I guess.”

There was a knock on my door.

“Call you next week, Dad. I’ve got to go.” I hung up and turned around. “Come in!”

The door slid open, and Bernie came in. He sat down on my bed and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I’ve been running all day and doing zero. You’ve got the job, by the way.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, sitting back in my chair.

“Building Trades Guild complains I haven’t been training enough apprentices.”

“You’ve been sick!”

“I could work full time again. Passed my new physical, so they can’t do a thing.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

He looked at me with lips pressed together. “Their trying to retire me hurts,” he piped, “even if the attempt failed. Can’t slow down or be sick without someone fishing for your job.”

“Don’t you work directly for Bernal?”

“I work for the Town Councils. They trust my word, even though Artificial Intelligence Brain’s monitors say the same. But the Guild claims any inspector can do as well, that all I do is agree with the sensors. Who do they think installed those mites in the first place, or replaced most of them at least once? I know every link and cable, and I have a way of talking to the AI Brain so it tells me things without knowing.”

It was never work for Bernie, I realized. He was afraid that one day something stupid would be decided and he would lose a way of life; for him it would be the same as dying.

He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb and seemed to breathe easier. “I look out from my house mornings and feel good that the whole inside is green and living, that the towns have electric and water. We built this world out here in the middle of nothing at all. It catches the Sun, gives people a place to live and poke at the universe from.”

There was a renewed hope and joy in what he said, pointing to a whole universe outside my problems. It was obvious that he was completely recovered.

“Will I be working for you, Bernie?”

“If nothing goes wrong.” He gazed at me with his youthful blue eyes, then scratched his white curls. “Go down to the town hall and register as soon as you can. Are you over sixteen?”

“I’m seventeen.” He put out his hand. I reached over and shook it. “You’re not an apprentice, though, not unless you sign a contract.”

“I know.”

“It’ll be nice to work with you, Joe.”

I smiled. “Same here, Bernie.”

I felt bad not telling him it would only be till Ro and I left for Mercury.

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Working

All during January I watched Bernie work, helping him as I learned. We crawled into every nook and cranny of the colony—under the housing complexes, under the open land, checking the ecosystems, electrical conduits, neutrino-sensor links, water and ventilation passages. It brought home to me how necessary the service level was to Bernal’s survival and well-being. The same was true of any building ever built, so there was nothing special about Bernal except the details.

But what details! There was an average of five feet of soil, more than enough for rose gardens and trees; then twenty feet of service level, followed by fifty of outer shell, mostly tons of slag shielding and water-filled cavities as a guard against meteor penetration and hard solar radiation. The slag was left over from Lunar mining processes, hurled into L-5 space by the Moon’s mass thrower—a big bucket on a fast track. There would always be enough materials for as many habitats and manufacturing centers as the Sunspacers cared to build.

Bernie not only liked to check when something was wrong—when the Brain picked up a sensor alarm—but he also liked to just nose around. He carried thousands of possible trouble spots in his head, and some part of him was always thinking about what might go wrong.

Of course, he wasn’t the only one who knew a lot about the place, but many of the others were no longer on Bernal. Bernie didn’t want to live anywhere else; the whole place was alive in his mind.

“You don’t have to, Joe,” he said to me one day. We were on our knees, staring down into one of the water cavities. A sensor had died, denying us readings of heat changes in the outer shell, as the big ball turned in and out of direct sunlight. Bernal’s rotation averaged out the temperature in the outer shell, but the heat exchanges weren’t perfect.

“The water may be frozen near the bottom,” Bernie said. “One damaged sensor isn’t crucial, but it can probably be repaired rather than replaced.”

“I’ll get it.”

He gave a tug on the sensor’s line. “It’s stuck about twenty feet down.”

I put on the mask, adjusted the rebreather pack on my back, and jumped in.

The water was cool, but it got colder as I pulled myself lower. The light beam from my mask played on the cable. The water was gray-blue, foggy.

I pulled lower, shivering as I imagined that I would reach Bernal’s outer shell and look out into space, where Earth and Moon swam in a black sea. It was strange to realize that I was swimming toward the stars.

A milky surface lay below me. I reached the floor of ice and saw where the floating sensor had been caught by the freeze. Taking out a small pick, I chipped away until the small device came loose. Bernie whisked the unit away when I tugged on the line.

I cast my beam in a circle, looking to see what else might need tending, then pushed off from the bottom. I was beginning to get cold by the time I surfaced.

“Not much to fix,” Bernie said. “Just a plug-in, and we can drop it back on a shorter line.” He was rummaging around in his tool bag for the replacement part as I climbed out. “Good going, Joe. Anything else?”

“No,” I said as my teeth began to chatter. But it felt good to do something and see the use of it right away—no waiting for distant moments of achievement that might never come, as Morey would have to do. I still felt a bit guilty about Morey. You have no faith in yourself, he would probably say. But working with Bernie made me feel good about myself, and I needed that.

Several times a month Bernie sat before his terminal and punched what he knew—observations, drawings, suspicions—into Bernal’s Brain. He loved the colony and was trying to put his whole mind into the central banks of the cyber-intelligence. He was part of the settlement, as much as the recyclers and solar power plants.

The administrators had long ago learned to let Bernie do all the checking he wanted. He often seemed a pest to the younger bureaucrats, but was too frequently right to be ignored. Bernie was a natural resource, a maker of traditions; and if the cyber-intelligences ever became the equals or superiors of the human mind in creative capacity, it would be because they had been weaned and raised by people like Bernie.

I rented a room in Bernie’s house. There were fifty such modular houses in the North Low-G Park, mostly single-floor blocks in an open, grassy area with scattered trees. Bernie owned his house, but many of the other tenants were skilled transients, working at specialized short-term jobs in the space factories near Bernal. Some were planning to go on to the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids—wherever they got the best offers. Most were from Earth, having come out under one kind of contract or other. There were married couples, brothers and sisters, teams of siblings and parents, as well as bands of men and women brought together only by skills—all hoping to make it in off-planet industries. Very few would climb high in the companies and agencies for which they worked, but the pay and benefits were good, the opportunities for education excellent. The work was often dangerous, but there was more of it than could ever be done by the number of applicants.

I thought little about going back to school. I had a lot of respect and affection for Bernie, and he said I was good at what I did. The tiredness at the end of each workday freed me from the pressure of worrying about the future. I felt like someone else; my name was just a tag from the past, like my shirt or shoe color. What is it that makes you what you are? Maybe we have to be forced to learn what we’re good at, and that marks us for life, not what we
think
we are or should be.

I had little time for reading, except as part of the job. I would go over to Cole Hall and have dinner with Rosalie. Between seeing her and the job, I had no time for anything, not even for worrying if I had been crazy to sign up for Merk. It sometimes occurred to me that I was happy here. So why was I going? Because I still thought I was special and could make a difference. Old ideas die hard.

Bernie came home one Saturday afternoon in March and sat down in the old chair facing the sofa, where I was taking a nap. I usually lounged around on my day off, watching newscasts from Earth, waiting for Ro to give me a call when she was done with schoolwork.

Bernie stared at me strangely, and I wondered if what he had to say would make it harder for me to tell him my news.

I sat up. “What is it? You took as if you’d been chased by the Brain’s ghost on the engineering level.”

He smiled feebly. “It’s not that. They’re sending me to Merk, to work on the habitat.”

“Oh.” For a moment I had thought it was something really bad. “Don’t you want to go?”

“I should. They need people who can do things well.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “It’s bad out there. The way it’s been is Earth gets various ores while getting rid of undesirables. But there are children and young people out there now who will have it even harder if the habitat isn’t built well.”

I could see he was being pulled two ways. He liked being needed for a worthy project, but he didn’t want to leave home. Maybe the hospital stay had taken something out of him. For the first time since I had met him, I felt a moment of disappointment.

“I should go,” he repeated, “even if the working conditions aren’t perfect.” He looked at me, and I felt that I had missed the point. But then it all dawned on me, and I knew that I would surprise him.

He took a deep breath. “I was hoping … that you’d apprentice with me and we’d go together. I would need you.”

We stared at each other.

“A lot of kids your age are going,” he said before I could tell him. He looked down at the carpet.

“Bernie—Ro and I have volunteered.”

He looked up and smiled, and I saw how much he had become attached to me. “But don’t you plan to go back to school?” He had thought that I would refuse.

I shrugged. “Not just yet.”

“But will you apprentice with me? No one wants to sign if it means going to Mercury.”

“What else is going on? Tell me.”

“Well, the agreement calls for a certain number of workers to be sent, and there just aren’t that many volunteers who qualify, not yet anyway. They just about said I would have to go, if only to be able to come back and keep my position here.”

“They threatened you?”

He nodded. “Why should I protest? It’s a good cause. Bernal can get along without me now.”

“Bernie!”

“I know, I know. Earth Authority has people here, pressuring the Guilds. I get an apprentice and go, or I don’t work again.”

“It’s wrong,” I said, appalled. “How can they?”

“They’ll force my retirement—even if they have to invent a charge. It would be a lot of trouble for me to fight, even if it didn’t stick. There’s a lot of push to get this job done, Joe. The pressure’s on from the top down to raise the skilled work force. Earth has to have the resources, and it’s gotten tired of the guilt publicity.”

“And you still want to go?” I was ready to go punch someone.

“What Earth Authority thinks doesn’t matter. I should go, and I should take an apprentice with me. There aren’t enough people. The work will be useful and challenging.”

“You’ll have me with you,” I said, feeling angry that this wonderful man was being pushed around to do what he would have agreed to anyway.

Ro and I were finishing dinner on the terrace of Cole Hall. The dinner hour was over, so we were alone.

“I knew he would probably go,” she said after I had told her about Bernie. “They’ll need thousands of people before it’s over, and they don’t have enough to even start. The pay they’re offering doesn’t compare with other things, so they’re using pressure to get people, wherever they can.”