Rite of Passage

Jimmy was stunned momentarily, but then he made the best of things. “It was nice to see you again,” he said politely to the dear old lady, and then walked after me. I shot a glance back at her and then Jimmy caught up with me and we both broke into a run and left her looking speechlessly after us.

When we were out of breath and out of sight, we stopped running and flung ourselves down panting on a flight of stairs. Then we started laughing, partly because it seemed terribly funny and partly from sheer relief.

When I’d caught my breath and stopped laughing, I looked soberly at Jimmy and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take the long way around from now on.”

“That’s a pretty obvious thing to say,” Jimmy said.

“Well, I’m not a very brave person.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you. I’m going to be careful, too.”

When we got to the lock room, Helen was waiting in the hallway. All of us looked in both directions, and then Helen stepped up to the black door and gave a knock that was recognizably a signal and not a casual rapping by some passerby with an unaccountable desire to tap on black doors. The door swung open immediately and we all piled inside. Att, standing behind the door, gave us just time enough to get completely in and then shut the door behind us.

The room was green-colored, small and bare. The lock door was directly opposite the door we’d come in. The suits had been hung on racks that apparently were designed to hold them.

Jimmy looked around in satisfaction. “Ah,’ he said. “Very, very good. Let’s get the suits on, Mia.”

I looked around at Venie and Helen and Att and said, “Where’s Riggy?”

Att said, “I couldn’t talk him out of it. He brought along an extra suit. You know how he wanted to go outside, too. Well, he went.”

Looking very unhappy, Jimmy said, “Well, couldn’t you stop him, Venie? You could have kept him from taking an extra suit.”

Venie said defensively, “If you only wanted one suit between the two of you, I could have made him leave one behind. He said he had as much right to go out as you two did.”

Att said, “You know how mad he can get. We told him it wasn’t a good idea but he wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Oh, well,” I said.

Helen said, “He’s going to ‘surprise’ you.”

“I guess so,” Jimmy said, somewhat sourly. “Well, let’s go ahead with what’s left of this adventure.”

He was obviously quite disgruntled, but trying not to let it show. Or, perhaps, trying to let it show just enough so that he could be a good sport about it all. I’ve not been above that one myself.

We put on the suits. They were about as similar to the old-time pressure suits described in the novels I liked to read as the Ship is to that silly sailboat I once got so sick in. (In passing, I want to say that it used to strike me as odd the way nobody in the Ship wrote novels at all; nobody had for years and years and years, so that what I read dated from before the Population Wars. Right now I’m not even sure why I liked to read them. Most of them weren’t very good by any objective standard. Escapism, maybe…) Anyway, our suits were an adaptation of the basic discontinuity principle that the Ship used, too. To be analogous (and thereby inaccurate), remember that old saw about reaching inside a cat, grabbing it by the tail, and turning it inside out? The discontinuity effect, as far as the Ship is concerned, grabs the universe by the tail and turns it inside out so as to get at it better. Strictly a local effect, but in the process getting from here to there becomes a relatively simple matter instead of an intensely difficult one. The discontinuity effect doesn’t work the same way in the suits — they are more of a self-contained little universe of their own. They were originally invented, my reading tells me, to fight battles in — part of a continuing effort to render individual soldiers invulnerable — and hence were light in weight, carried their own air, heat, air-conditioning, light, etc., plus being proof against just about everything from concentrated light beams to projectiles to any of the unpleasant battery of gases that had been invented. Turned out, of course, that the suits were far more useful for constructive purposes (building the Ships) than they had ever been in wartime. Militarily, of course, they were a bust — everybody on Old Earth who fought in one was long dead — but in their peaceful adaptations they were still useful and still in use, as witness.