Falling Free

“No!” He grabbed the pack backwards over both shoulders with his upper hands and rocked forward violently. It came up and balanced precariously on his back. He kept his left upper hand on it to steady it and hopped forward on his right, his lower palms shuffling along under his hips. “I got it, go, go!”

The shuttle was parked in a cavernous hangar, a vast dim gulf of space roofed by girders. The girders behind the overhead lights would have been an excellent hiding place, if only one could swoop up there. But everything not rigidly fastened was doomed to fly to the one side of the room only, and stick there until forcibly removed. There was a lopsided fascination to it.…

“Oh…” Claire hesitated. Leading from the hatch to the hangar floor was a kind of corrugated ramp. Clearly, it was designed to break down the dangerous fight with the omnipresent gravity into little manageable increments. “Stairs.” Claire paused, head down. Her blood seemed to pool dizzyingly in her face. She gulped.

“Don’t stop,” Tony gasped pleadingly behind her, then gulped himself.

“Uh… uh…” In a moment of inspiration, Claire turned around and began to back down, her free lower palm slapping the metal treads with each hop. It was still uncomfortable, but at least possible. Tony followed.

“Where now?” Claire panted when they reached the bottom.

Tony pointed with his chin. “Hide in that jumble of equipment over there, for now. We daren’t get too far from the shuttles.”

They scuttled along over the downside surface of the hangar. Claire’s hands quickly became smudged with oil and dirt, a psychological irritation as fierce as an unscratchable itch; she felt she might gladly risk death for a chance to wash them. Claire remembered watching beads of condensed humidity creeping by capillarity across surfaces in the Habitat, until she’d smeared them to oblivion with her dry-rag, just as she and Tony crept now.

As they reached the area where some pieces of heavy equipment were parked, a loader rolled into the hangar and a dozen coveralled men and women jumped off it and began swarming over the shuttle, organized confusion. Claire was glad for their noise, for Andy was still emitting an occasional whimper. Fearfully, she watched the maintenance crew through the metal arms of the machinery. How late was too late to surrender?

Leo, half suited-up in the equipment locker, glanced up anxiously as Pramod swooped across the room to fetch up gracefully beside him.

“Did you find Tony?” Leo asked. “As gang foreman, he’s supposed to be leading this parade. I’m only supposed to be watching.”

Pramod shook his head. “He’s not in any of the usual places, sir.”

Leo hissed under his breath, not quite swearing. “He should’ve answered his page by now…” He drifted to the plexiport.

Outside in the vacuum, a small pusher was just depositing the last of the sections for the shell of the new hydroponics bay in their carefully arranged constellation. It was to be built before the Operations Vice President’s eyes by the quaddies. So much for Leo’s faint hope that screw-ups and delays in other departments might cover those in his own. It was time for his welding crew to make its debut.

“All right, Pramod, get suited up. You’ll take over Tony’s position, and Bobbi from Gang B will take yours.” Leo hurried on before the startlement in Pramod’s eyes could turn to stage fright. “It’s nothing you haven’t practiced a dozen times. And if you have the least doubts about the quality or safety of any procedure, I’ll be right there. Reality first—you people are going to be living in the structure you build today long after Vice President Apmad and her travelling circus are gone. I guarantee she’ll have more respect for a job done right, however slowly, than for a piece of slap-dash fakery.”

For God’s sake make it look smooth, Van Atta had instructed Leo urgently, earlier. Keep to the schedule, no matter what—we’ll fix the problems later, after she’s gone. We’re supposed to be making these chimps seem cost-effective.

“You don’t have to try and seem to be anything but what you are,” Leo told Pramod. “You are efficient—and you are good. Instructing you all has been one of the great unexpected pleasures of my career. Be off, now, I’ll catch up with you shortly.”

Pramod sped away to find Bobbi. Leo frowned briefly to himself, and floated up the length of the locker room to the comconsole terminal at the end.

He keyed in his ID. “Page,” he instructed it. “Dr. Sondra Yei.” At the same moment a message square in the corner of the vid began to blink with his own name, and a number. “Cancel that instruction.”

He punched up the number and raised his brows in surprise as Dr. Yei’s face appeared on his vid. “Sondra! I was just about to call you. Do you know where Claire is?”

“How odd. I was calling to ask you if you knew where I could reach Tony.”

“Oh?” said Leo, in a voice suddenly drained to neutrality. “Why?”

“Because I can’t find her anywhere, and I thought Tony might know where she is. She’s supposed to be giving a demonstration of child care techniques in free fall to Vice President Apmad after lunch.”

“Is, um,” Leo swallowed, “Andy at the creche, or with Claire, do you know?”

“With Claire, of course.”

“Ah.”

“Leo…” Dr. Yei’s attention sharpened, her lips pursed. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“Ah…” he eyed her. “I know Tony has been unusually inattentive at work for the last week. I might even say—depressed, except that’s supposed to be your department, eh? Not his usual cheerful self, anyway.” A knot of unease, tightening in Leo’s stomach, gave his tongue an unaccustomed edge. “You, ah, got any concerns that you may have forgotten to share with me, lady?”

Her lips thinned, but she ignored the bait. “Schedules have been moved up in all departments, you know. Claire received her new reproduction assignment. It didn’t include Tony.”

“Reproduction assignment? You mean, having a baby?” Leo could feel his face flushing. Somewhere within him, a long-controlled steam pressure began to build. “Do you hide what you’re really doing from yourselves with those weasel-words, too? And here I thought the propaganda was just for us peons.” Yei started to speak, but Leo overrode her, bursting out, “Good God! Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D…”

Yei’s face darkened, her accent grew clipped. “An engineer with romance in his soul? Now I’ve seen everything. Don’t get carried away with your scenario, Mr. Graf. Tony and Claire were assigned to each other in the first place by the exact same system, and if certain people had been willing to abide by my original timetable, this problem could have been avoided. I fail to see the point of paying for an expert and then blithely ignoring her advice, really I do. Engineers…!”

Ah, hell, she’s suffering from as bad a case of Van Atta as I am, Leo realized. The insight blunted his momentum, without bleeding off internal pressure.

“—I didn’t invent the Cay Project, and if I were running it I’d do it differently, but I have to play the hand I’m dealt, Mr. Graf. Blast—” she controlled herself, almost visibly wrenching the conversation back on its original track. “I’ve got to find her soon, or I’ll have no choice but to let Van Atta start the show ass-backwards. Leo, it’s absolutely essential that Vice President Apmad get the creche tour first, before she has time to start forming any— do you have any idea at all where those kids may be?”

Leo shook his head; an inspiration turned the truthful gesture to a lie even before he’d finished it. “But will you give me a call if you find them before I do?” he pleaded, his humble tone offering truce.

Yei’s stiffness wilted a bit. “Yes, certainly.” She shrugged wryly, a silent apology, and broke off.

Leo swung back to his locker, peeled out of his work suit, donned coveralls, and hastened off to track down his inspiration before Dr. Yei duplicated it independently. He was certain she would, and shortly, too.

Silver checked the work schedule on her vid display. Bell peppers. She floated across the hydroponics bay to the seed locker, found the correct labeled drawer, and withdrew a pre-counted paper packet. She gave the packet an absent shake, and the dried seeds made a pleasing rattle.

She collected a plastic germination box, tore open the packet, and coaxed the little pale seeds into the container, where they bounced about cheerfully. To the hydration spigot next. She thrust the water tube through the rubber doughnut seal on the side of the germination box and administered a measured squirt, and gave the box an extra shake to break up the shimmering globule of liquid that formed. Shoving the germination box into its slot in the incubation rack, she set it for the optimum temperature for peppers, bell, hybrid phototropic non-gravitational axial differentiating clone 297-X-P, and sighed.