You learned to live with it.
The suits were damned expensive and rather difficult to operate. Simpler attire was available for worlds where the conditions were known ahead of time. But it was profitable to outfit a planet’s first Tamer team this way, since the only alternative was to send an unmanned probe ahead first. And the biggest expense in any Levant-Meyer Translation was energy, which was the same whether you were transporting a fully outfitted team or a small probe. Or a rusty beer can, for that matter.
Someone who was body-modest or squeamish could never learn to get along with a GPEM suit. You became too intimately a part of it; it recycled everything. Fortunately, those who got past all the tests and training to finally become Tamers couldn’t possibly be squeamish. And modesty was unlikely to be a strong force in their character.
Fitting yourself into the rigid suit was an operation similar to what a medieval knight had to go through to get into his armor. From a waist-high platform you lowered yourself into the bottom half. While your arms are still free, you hooked up the abdominal and femoral sensors and relief channels. Then a crane lowered the top half of the suit over you while you held your arms up, so that they slid easily into the suit’s arms. (Which was the reason for the difficulty in scratching your nose. There was just enough room inside the suit to twist and turn and manage to get one hand free without dislocating your shoulder. But it took time and determination.) An automatic locking mechanism sealed the top half to the bottom. With your tongue and chin you turned on the suit’s radio and optical circuits… and you were ready to go.
Jacque clicked on his radio. “I’ve never been in one of these things for a week,” he said. “It must get pretty ripe after a few days.”
“Some people, yes,” Tania said. “It’s all in your head.”
That’s right, Jacque thought, my nose is in my head. He experimented with the image amplifier, tonguing it from infrared to ultraviolet and back. It didn’t make much difference in the indirectly lit room; the pastel colors just washed out and came back.
“Well,” Ch’ing said. “Shall we-“
The door swung open and four suited figures came into the room, moving easily in their tonne-weight suits. Just returned from God-knows-where, their suits had a coating of pale blue dust. A thrill moved up Jacque’s back and set his scalp prickling, a feeling he had subdued for the past six years, knowing that not one candidate in twenty actually made Tamer 1.
He was going off the earth. Even if it turned out to be just an airless slab of cold granite, it was a place that no human had ever seen before.
“Let’s go.” They followed Tania into the sterilizing room, a cubicle with mirrors for walls, floor, and ceiling. Every half meter there was a slender ultraviolet-to-gamma tube. “Keep well spread apart. At least a meter between your outstretched arm and the next person.”
The reflections of the five people bounced back and forth, multiplying them into a vast army that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The door sealed and a pump throbbed somewhere, sucking air out of the chamber.
“Turn off your eyes.” The feeling of being in the middle of a huge crowd was replaced by claustrophobia: sealed inside a roomy coffin. Jesus, Jacque thought, how long could you stay sane if your opticals failed?
“Okay.” They turned their eyes back on and followed her to the LMT chamber. Two technicians on the other side of a window watched them file in. The light from the window was the only light in the room, but it was adequate to show them the way to the crystal. “Four minutes, ten seconds.”
The crystal was a glass gray circle, 120 centimeters in diameter. Tania stepped just over the edge of it.
“Carol, you can be on the bottom with me. Ch’ing and Vivian next, then Jacque on top.” Here any similarity between the GPEM suits and old-style armor vanished. Tania and Carol stood face to face in the middle of the circle while the next two climbed up to stand on their shoulders. Then Jacque clambered over all of them to be King of the Mountain. The gyroscopic stabilizers that ringed their suits’ waists kept the fragile pyramid from collapsing.