Going Interstellar (collection)

It took ten minutes to reach the ’stat that was on her assignment list, and by the time she did, she felt better. She liked the solitude of the tube. No one could get to her, no one could bother her. It was calming. She flipped up the cover of the ’stat and eyed it. It wasn’t part of the protocol, but she always did a visual scan first. Tie Dye would be surprised to know how much Isabet understood of what the ’stats recorded about the containment ring. She could have told him all about pressure differentials and temperature variations and magnetic flux. She didn’t, though. She tried not to talk to him any more than she had to.

Everything looked fine. She pulled the remote from her belt, pinning herself to one side of the tube in order to get her hand down and then up again. She clamped the remote into its holder, and waited the three seconds it took to record the reading. Finished, she started the long backward slide back to Engineering.

She meant to ignore Tie Dye when she got there. She really did. But when he took the remote from her to pass on to the chief, he brushed her chest with his big, freckled hand. It wasn’t an accident. His fingers lingered on the front of her utility suit at least a full second.

“Back off!” she spat at him. She slapped at his hand, but he pulled it out of her reach. Her fingers curled, longing to claw his fleshy cheeks.

His phlegmy laugh made her skin crawl. “Relax, Itty Bit,” he said. “Just checking to see if they’re as small as the rest of you. I would say—” he grinned wider, showing his big yellow teeth. “I would say the design is consistent!”

“I’ve told you to keep your hands off me,” she said. “I’ve filed a complaint with Command, so you better watch yourself.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. You did it twice, in fact. Waste of time, wasn’t it? You need to understand command priorities.” He stopped grinning, and shook a finger at her. “You ring techs are lucky to have work. One day they’ll invent their way out of the problem with the monitors, and leave you and the rest of them on Earth where you belong. That’ll save a lot of air and food out here.”

“If they could, they would, Tie Dye.” Isabet spun away from him, and kicked off down the corridor toward the mess.

He called after her, “Get used to it, Itty Bit! It’s the way we do things here.”

Over her shoulder she snapped, “Get used to it? This is my third voyage.”

“You should know, then,” he said. “Like I said, you’re one of the lucky ones!”

It was true enough. Isabet and Skunk and Happy and the others were fortunate to have their jobs. Skunk, whose Icelandic name none of them could pronounce, had fled his home as his village disappeared under the cold waves of the North Atlantic. He’d been living on Government rations since he was six, and it showed in his short stature and wispy hair.

Happy Feet had been a dancer Earthside; when he got too old for that, he applied to be a ring tech, and was accepted because of his small size and agility. He joked that he was only here so he could eat. He said, with his high-pitched laugh, “I’d rather soak up G-rays than eat G-rations!”

Ginger almost didn’t fit the profile of a ring tech. She hadn’t starved. She was just naturally small. She had once had a business, something to do with books, Isabet thought, but the Global Depression had wiped out her business and scattered her family. Bony and worn down by sorrow, she was grateful to be aboard the North America. Too grateful, in Isabet’s view. She took Tie Dye’s abuse without the slightest resistance.

Isabet knew she was the luckiest of all. She was also the youngest and the smallest. Abandoned as an infant—a doorstep baby—she had been kicked out of the orphanage at the age of sixteen to find her own way. The orphanage called it graduation, but all it meant to her was being turned out on the street with few resources. In one of the shelters, she saw a poster about the positronic reactor ships and for the first time, learned that there was an advantage to having been starved as a baby. There was work for a person of small physique if that person had the guts to go into space, crawl through the narrow maintenance tubes every day, and risk gamma ray poisoning as well as all the other dangers of space travel.

Isabet had guts. She didn’t have much else to work with, but her courage and native intelligence won her the job, and she liked it. The voyages to Ganymede were a lot more comfortable for her than the required months of gravity Earthside between trips. It wasn’t just that her pay ran out before it was time to return to the ship. On the North America she didn’t have to fight for a bed in a shelter and then sleep with one eye open and a knife in her hand against the threat of rape or theft or worse.

She scowled as she told Ginger and Happy and Skunk what Tie Dye’d done. “The worst part is,” she concluded, “he’s right. I complained to Command, and they never even answered me.”

“Probably never reached ’em,” Skunk said glumly.