The Sunspacers Trilogy by George Zebrowski Page B

about.
    I liked my teachers; they made me feel that I could accomplish everything. I felt happier, just lying there, than I had ever felt before in my life, even though part of me knew that I had to be kidding myself. I didn’t want to admit that what I could do fairly well was probably not what I wanted to do at all—but what was there for me to do? How can you be happy when you suspect that you no longer know what you want, and refuse to face up to the problem? I wanted to be here, to be part of the Sunspace way of life. School, I realized dimly, had only been my way of getting out here.
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9
    Rosalie
    I felt great for about six weeks.
    Fantastic classes.
    Discussions spilling over into the snack bar, to dinner and late into evenings. I felt I really belonged.
    Individual arguments with professors and tutors.
    Akhmatova, Azap, Praeger, and Vidich loaded us with ammunition, and we fired it at each other without mercy. They fought us tooth and brain, yet managed to stay on our side. I had no time to think about myself.
    There weren’t the jokers and class clowns of high school, or the troublemakers who would get suspended.
    Even obnoxious Van Cott seemed more human, and it didn’t seem to matter what I thought of him.
    For a while Morey and I became friendly with two students down the hall, David Kihiyu and Marco Pellegrini. We often ate together, and sometimes studied with them and Marco’s girlfriend, Narita Sykes. But I soon noticed how much like Morey they were, and that reminded me that I was pretending to fit in, so I could get through school as I had decided. David and Marco wanted to know everything. David would sometimes wake us up in the middle of the night to tell us about an idea he’d dreamed, and Morey would listen while I drifted off. Narita was more like Van Cott. I was sure she and Marco talked physics in bed. I knew dedication when I saw it, and I felt bad that I didn’t have it; but it was easy, at first, to ignore my feelings.
    The days were exciting, intense, and tiring, especially when you were forced to listen to technical talk in the showers. We took a field trip to the Research Shacks near the outer edge of L-5’s volume of space, where they did the dangerous work with dense states of matter, the control of inertia, and the further applications of negative-g, which still couldn’t do more than hurl a ship off-planet; but one day negative-g would push a ship directly, as part of its drive, and take us out to the stars. Doing that was a more exciting idea, for me, than understanding the physics that would make it possible.
    The Shacks looked like a collection of giant tin cans as our shuttle pulled away. I felt a thrill at knowing what was being done there.
    It was a short hop back to Bernal, but the Moon was as far away as Earth. As seniors we would visit the big labs on Lunar Farside; some of us would even work there one day, the recruiters had assured us.
    As I gazed at Luna’s dry, silvery face, I felt the vast emptiness of space, the smallness of worlds where life had fought to establish itself, and I remembered that I was still a problem to myself.
    “You’re not very serious about physics,” Morey said to me on the last evening in August. David and Marco had just left. We were at our desks, entering the day’s work. I stopped and stared at him.
    “Come on, Joe, you just don’t have the way of talking. You don’t go after things.”
    “You mean I’m not Van Cott,” I said nervously.
    “I’m your friend and should tell you.”
    “Well you’re wrong.”
    “I hope.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re always running off somewhere.”
    “So?”
    “You’re not doing enough work.”
    “My grades are as good as yours!”
    He clenched his teeth and smiled. “You know that doesn’t mean much by itself.” He had lost some weight, making him look less bearlike, taller. “You’re knocking off the work quite well, even expertly, but you’re not