“But you’re a company man—a downsider—why should you…?”

“GalacTech’s not God, Claire. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your firstborn to it. GalacTech—any company—is just a way, one way, for people to organize themselves to do a job that’s too big for one person to do alone. It’s not God, it’s not even a being, for pity’s sake. It doesn’t have a free will to answer for. It’s just a collection of people, working. Bruce is only Bruce, there’s got to be some way to get around him.”

“You mean go over his head?” asked Silver thoughtfully. “Maybe to that vice president who was here last week?”

Leo paused. “Well.,. maybe not to Apmad. But I’ve been thinking—for three days, I’ve been thinking of nothing else but how to blow up this whole rotten set-up. But you’ve got to hang on, for me to have time to work—Claire, can you hang on? Can you?” His hands tightened on hers urgently.

She shook her head doubtfully. “It hurts so much…”

“You have to. Look, listen. There’s nothing I can do here at Rodeo, it’s in this peculiar legal bubble. If it were a regular planetary government, I swear I’d go into debt to my eyebrows and buy each and every one of you a ticket out of here, but then, if it were a regular planet, I wouldn’t need to. Anyway GalacTech has a monopoly on Jump ship seats here, you travel on a company ship or not at all. So we have to wait, and bide our time.

“But in a little time—just a few months—the first quaddies will leave Rodeo on the first real work assignments. Working in and passing through real planetary jurisdictions. Governments too big and powerful even for GalacTech to mess with. I’m sure—pretty sure, if I pick the right venue—not Apmad’s planet, of course, but say, Earth—Earth’s by far the best bet, I’m a citizen there—I can bring a class-action suit declaring you legal persons. I’ll probably lose my job, and the costs will eat me, but it can be done. Not exactly the life’s work I had in mind… but eventually, you can be cracked loose from GalacTech.”

“So long a time,” sighed Claire.

“No, no, delay is our friend. The little ones grow older every day. By the time the legal case goes through, you’ll all be ready. Go as a group—hire out—find work—even GalacTech wouldn’t be so bad as an employer, if you were citizens and regular employees, with all the legal protections. Maybe even the Spacer’s Union would take you in, though that might constrain—well, I’m not sure. If they don’t perceive you as a threat… anyway, something can be worked out. But you’ve got to hang on! Promise me?”

Silver breathed again when Claire nodded slowly. She drew Claire away to the first aid kit on the wall, to apply antisepts and plastic bandages to her torn fingernails, and wipe the blood from her bruised face. “There. There. Better…”

Leo meanwhile restored the airlock control to its original working order, then drifted over to them. “All right now?” He turned his face to Silver. “Is she going to be all right?”

Silver could not help glowering. “As all right as any of us… it’s not fair!” she burst out. “This is my home, but it’s beginning to feel like an overpressurized oxy bottle. Everybody’s upset, all the quaddies, about Tony and Claire. There hasn’t been anything like this since Jamie was killed in that awful pusher accident. But this—this was on purpose. If they’d do that to Tony, who was so good, what about—about me? Any of us? What’s going to happen next?”

“I don’t know.” Leo shook his head grimly. “But I’m pretty sure the idyll is over. This is only the beginning.”

“But what will we do? What can we do?”

“Well—don’t panic. And don’t despair. Especially don’t despair—”

The airseal doors at the end of the module slid open, and the downsider hydroponics supervisor’s voice lilted in. “Girls? We got the seed delivery on the shuttle after all—is that grow-tube ready yet?”

Leo twitched, but turned back one last time before hastening away, to grasp a hand of each quaddie with determined pressure. “It’s just an old saying, but I know it’s true from personal experience. Chance favors the prepared mind. So stay strong—111 get back to you…”he escaped past the hydroponics supervisor with an elaborately casual yawn, as if he’d merely stopped in to kibbitz a moment upon the work in progress.

Silver’s stomach churned as she watched Claire fearfully. Claire sniffled, and turned hurriedly away to busy herself with the grow tube, hiding her face from their supervisor. Silver shivered with relief. All right for now.

The churning in Silver’s stomach was slowly replaced by something hot and unfamiliar, filling it, crowding out the fear. How dare they do this to her—to me—to us? They have no right, no right, no right…

Rage made her head pound, but it was better than the knotting fear. There was almost an exultation in it. The expression Silver bent her head to conceal from the supervisor was a small, fierce frown.

The nutrition assistant, a quaddie girl of perhaps thirteen, handed Leo’s lunch tray to him through the serving window without her usual bright smile. When Leo smiled and said “Thank you,” the responding upward twitch of her mouth was mechanical, and fell away instantly. Leo wondered in what scrambled form the story of Claire’s and Tony’s downside disaster of the previous week had reached her ears. Not that the correct facts weren’t distressing enough. The whole Habitat seemed plunged into an atmosphere of wary dismay.

Leo felt a flash of horrible weariness of the quaddies and their everlasting troubles. He shied away from a collection of his students eating their lunches near the serving window, though they waved to him with assorted hands, and instead floated down the module until he saw a vacant space to velcro his tray next to somebody with legs. By the time Leo realized the legged person was the supply shuttle captain, Durrance, it was too late to retreat.

But Durrance’s greeting grunt was without animosity. Evidently he did not, unlike some others Leo could name, hold the engineer obscurely responsible for his student Tony’s spectacular fiasco. Leo hooked his feet into the straps to free his hands to attack his meal, returned the grunt, and sucked hot coffee from his squeeze bulb. There wasn’t enough coffee in the universe to dissolve his dilemmas.

Durrance, it appeared, was even in the mood for polite conversation. “You going to be taking your downside leave soon?”

“Soon…” In about a week, Leo realized with a start. Time was getting away from him, like everything else around here. “What’s Rodeo like?”

“Dull.” Durrance spooned some sort of vegetable pudding into his mouth.

“Ah.” Leo glanced around. “Is Ti with you?”

Durrance snorted. “Not likely. He’s downside, on ice. He’s appealing.” A twisted grimace and raised eyebrows pointed up the double meaning. “Not, you understand, from my point of view. I got a reprimand on my record because of that damn tadpole. If it had been his first screw-up, he might have been able to duck getting fired, but now I don’t think he has a chance. Your Van Atta wants his pelt riveted to the airlock doors.”

“He’s not my Van Atta,” Leo denied strenously. “If he was, I’d trade him for a dog—”

“—and shoot the dog,” finished Durrance. A grin twitched his mouth. “Van Atta. That’s all right. If the rumor I heard is true, he may not have so long to strut either.”

“Ah?” Leo’s ears pricked hopefully.

“I was talking yesterday to the Jump pilot from the weekly personnel ship from Orient IV—he’d just finished his month’s gravity leave there—listen up to this one. He swears the Betan embassy there is demonstrating an artificial gravity device.”

“What! How—?”

“Piping it in from wormhole space for all I know. You bet Beta Colony is sitting on the math of it, till they make their initial killing in the marketplace and recoup their R&D costs. It’s apparently been kept under wraps by their military for a couple of years already, till they got their head start, damn ‘em. GalacTech and everybody else will be on the scramble to catch up. Every other R&D project in the company is going to have to kiss their budget goodbye for a couple of years, you watch.”