There was some more, equally uncomplicated. He took the yellow and green vats; she took the red and blue. They had worked in the choking stench and heat for perhaps three hours before Ross finished one temperature check and descended to adjust a gas tap. He found Helena, spent and gasping, on the floor, hidden from the rest of the shop by the bulky tanks.
“Heat knock you out?” he asked briskly. “Don’t try to talk. I’ll tote you over by the wall away from the burners. Maybe we’ll catch a little breeze from the windows there.” She nodded weakly.
He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.
It’s been a long time, he thought—and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a drowsy smile
on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.
Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.
Wildcat!
Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. “I’m dreadfully sorry,” he sputtered. “Please accept my sincerest——”
The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she’d be set back three years if he told anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no right to treat her that way, and what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when everybody knew you went crazy from it.
He soothed her—from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.
Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn’t this shift ever going to end?
All the shifts ended in lime. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner—porridge!—and then came the evening shift on the dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got plenty to eat.
But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he had painted to himself back on Halsey’s Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior of humanity. . . .
Ross, the semipermanent KP.
He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly clear that there no longer was a Franklin Foundation on Gemser, but more had been lost than time and effort. For Ross himself, he silently admitted, was as close to lost as he ever wanted to be. He was, in effect, a prisoner, in a prison from which
there was no easy escape as long as he was cursed with youthfulness. . . .
Of course, the implications of that were that there was a perfectly easy escape in time. All he had to do was get old enough to matter, on this insane planet. Ninety, maybe. And then he would be perfectly free to totter out to the spaceport, dragoon a squad of juniors into lifting him into the ship, and take off. . . .
Helena was some help. But only psychologically; she was pleasant company, but neither she nor anyone else’ in the roster of forty-eight to whom he was permitted to speak had ever heard of the Franklin Foundation, or F-T-L travel, or anything. Helena said, “Wait for Holiday. Maybe one of the grownups will tell you then?”
“Holiday?” Ross slid back and scratched his shoulder blades against the corner of his bed. Helena was sprawled on the floor, half watching a projected picture on the screen at the end of the dormitory.