Brucco had left Jason to practice alone. When his aching hand could take no more, he stopped and headed back toward his own quarters. Turning a corner, he had a quick glimpse of a familiar figure going away from him.
“Meta! Wait for a second! I want to talk to you.”
She turned impatiently as he shuffled up, going as fast as he could in the doubled gravity. Everything about her seemed different from the girl he had known on the ship. Heavy boots came as high as her knees, her figure was lost in bulky coveralls of some metallic fabric. The
trim waist was bulged out by a belt of cannisters. Her very expression was coldly distant.
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I hadn’t realized you~ were in this building.” He reached for her hand but she moved it out of his reach.
“What is it you want?” she asked.
“What is it I want!” he echoed with barely concealed anger. “This is Jason, remember me? We’re friends. It is allowed for friends to talk without ‘wanting’ anything.”
“What happened on the ship has nothing to do with what happens on Pyrrus.” She started forward impatiently as she talked. “I have finished my reconditioning and must return to work You’ll be staying here in the sealed buildings so I won’t be seeing you.”
“Why don’t you say with the rest of the children-that’s what your tone implies. And don’t try walking out, there are some things we have to settle first-”
Jason made the mistake of putting out his hand to stop her. He didn’t really know what happened next. One instant he was standing-the next he sprawled suddenly on the floor. His shoulder was badly bruised, and Mete had vanished down the corridor.
Limping back to his own room, he muttered curses under his breath. Dropping onto his rock-hard bed, he tried to remember the reasons that had brought him here in the first place. And weighed them against the perpetual torture of the gravity, the fear-filled dreams it inspired, the automatic contempt of these people for any outsider. He quickly checked the growing tendency to feel sorry for himself. By Pyrran standards, he was soft and helpless. If he wanted them to think any better of him, he would have to change a good deal.
He sank into a fatigue-drugged sleep then, that was broken only by the screaming fear of his dreams.
7
In the morning, Jason awoke with a bad headache and the feeling he had never been to sleep. As he took some of the carefully portioned stimulants that Brucco had given him, he wondered again about the combination of factors that filled his sleep with such horror.
“Eat quickly,” Brucco told him when they met in the dining room. “I can no longer spare you time for individual instruction. You will join the regular classes and take the prescribed courses. Only come to me if there is some special problem that the instructors or trainers can’t handle.”
The classes, as Jason should have expected, were composed of sternfaced little children. With their compact bodies and no-nonsense mannerisms, they were recognizably Pyrran. But they were still children enough to consider it very funny to have an adult in their classes. Jammed behind one of the tiny desks, the redfaced Jason did not think it was much of a joke.
All resemblance to a normal school ended with the physical form of the classroom. For one thing, every child-no matter how small-packed a gun. And the courses were all involved with survival. The only possible grade in a curriculum like this was roe per cent and students stayed with a lesson until they had mastered it perfectly. No courses were offered in the normal scholastic subjects. Presumably these were studied after the child graduated survival school and could face the world alone. Which was a logical and coldblooded way of looking at things. In fact, logical and coldblooded could describe any Pyrran activity.
Most of the morning was spent on the operation of one of the medikits that strapped around the waist. This was an infection and poison analyzer that was pressed over a puncture wound. If any toxins were present, the antidote was automatically injected on the site. Simple in operation but incredibly complex in construction. Since all Pyrrans serviced their own equipment-you could then only blame yourself if it failed-they had to learn the construction and repair of all the devices.