This first meeting of my survival class would be on Friday, June 3, 2198. My physical would be one year and six months to the day before we would be dropped on one colony planet or another to actually undergo Trial. There is no rule that says a child has to attend a survival class, but in actual practice everybody takes advantage of the training that is offered. Clear choices as to the best course to take in life are very rare, and this was one of those few. They don’t drop us simply to die. They train us for a year and a half, and then drop us and find out how much good the training has done us.
New classes are started every three or four months and the last one had been in March, so this note was not unexpected. Since Jimmy had been born in November, too, as he had been so quick to point out when we first met, he was bound to be in the same class with me. Frankly, I wanted company on Friday.
“I didn’t know about, this,” Jimmy said. “I should have a note, too. When did this come?”
“Yesterday. I thought you’d call me this morning about it but you didn’t.”
“I’d better check this out. Hold on here.” He went off to find the dorm mother and came back in a few minutes with a note similar to mine. “It was here. I just never looked for it and she never thought to mention it.”
There was one thing that irritated me about Jimmy, but that in a way I admired. Or, perhaps, something I marveled at. On at least two occasions, I had called Jimmy and left a message, once to call me back, once to say I wasn’t going to be able to make our meeting with Mr. Mbele. Neither time did he get the message, because neither time did he stop to look for one. That irritates me. I also feel envious of anyone who can be so unanxious about who might have called. Jimmy simply says that he’s so busy that he never stops to worry about things like that.
Jimmy liked the idea of going to the first meeting on Friday together. To this time, at least, we were not close friends—there was an element of antagonism—but we did know each other and we had Mr. Mbele in common. It seemed to make sense to both of us to face the new situation together.
As we were on our way to Mr. Mbele’s, I said, “Do you remember when I got back from Grainau and I was talking about that boy and his sister to you and Mr. Mbele?”
“The one with the weird ideas of what we’re like?”
“Yes. One of the things they said was that we went around naked all the time. I was objecting to all the things they were saying. I wonder what I would have said if they’d been here to see you on the vid without even your socks on.”
“I suppose they would have thought they were right all along,” Jimmy said reasonably.
“Yes. But they weren’t.”
“I don’t know. I was naked, wasn’t I?”
“Sure, but that was in your own room. I go naked at home, too. They thought we never wear clothes.”
“Well,” Jimmy said brightly, “there’s no real reason we ought to, is there?” He started to pull his shirt off over his head. “We could be just what they think we are, and we wouldn’t be worse because of it, would we?”
“Don’t be perverse,” I said.
“What’s perverse about going naked?”
“I’m talking about your contrariness. Are you going to eat dirt just because they think we do? I shouldn’t have brought the subject up in the first place. It just struck me as something incongruous.”
“Incongruous,” Jimmy corrected, putting the accent on the second syllable where it belonged.
“Well, however you pronounce it,” I said. This comes of reading words and not having heard them pronounced. This also was a matter of talking about the wrong things to the wrong people. It seemed that I might do better just to leave Grainau out of my conversations completely. Just after I’d gotten back home, I’d made the mistake of saying what I really thought about the Mudeaters in front of Jimmy and Mr. Mbele.
“Do they really stink?” Mr. Mbele asked.
Jimmy and I were seated on the couch in Mr. Mbele’s apartment. I had my notebook with notes on my reading, subjects I wanted to bring up,