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.
Working the lock to the great outside was a simple matter. You began by pushing a priority button, since there was no sense in being embarrassed halfway in or out by somebody trying to come the other way. Going out, you let air into the lock, entered the lock yourself, let air out, and then went outside. Coming in, you let air out of the lock (if there was any), entered the lock, filled it with air, and then passed into the Ship. Since Riggy had let the air out of the lock in order to pass out of it, we locked the controls (which also insured the farther lock door was completely closed) and filled the lock with air.
As we went in, Att said, “Don’t be too mad with Riggy. At least wait until you’re all safely back here.”
Jimmy nodded, and with everybody saying “Good luck” to us we went into the airlock. Quite frankly, my nerves felt they could use all the good luck they could get. That was the biggest reason that I was, unnaturally for me, saying little or nothing. The door closed behind us and with it the sight of that cheery bare little room and our friends.
As the air silently slipped away around us in response to button pushing by Jimmy, he said, “When Riggy comes up and goes ‘Boo’ or whatever stupid thing he has in mind, just pretend you don’t see him at all. Ignore him completely.”
I didn’t like Riggy’s butting in, so I nodded. “All right.”
Then the air was all out, and Jimmy opened the door at our feet. Since we were on the First Level, which was down as far as you could go by the Ship’s internal orientation, we had to go farther ‘down’ to go out. Jimmy motioned at the ladder, which reminded me of something, I wasn’t exactly sure what.
“Go ahead,” he said.
I grabbed the ladder and began to