Stewards of the Flame by Sylvia Engdahl Page B

was older than the rest struck home. He had never thought much about age. In space, he was a Captain. Everybody looked up to a Captain. Here . . .
    “Really,” persisted Peter. “You might surprise yourself.”
    “I’d look like a fool, floundering around out there.”
    “I’ll tell you how to make real fun of it, and not flounder,” Peter said, with a rather cryptic smile. “Jump off the high rock there. You’ll sink, of course. The trick is to relax completely as you come up. Don’t try to swim. Just let yourself rise to the surface and float—”
    He broke off in response to what Jesse had hoped was an impassive face. “Yes, I can imagine how it might feel to do it that way if you’ve never been in deep water before. But that’s the fun part, you see. Isn’t it? I mean, why do people ride roller coasters? Why do they jump out of planes? God, Jess, what do spacers do for that kind of fun?”
    Well, nothing, thought Jesse, which was one of the things you learned about the difference between what you thought space would be, and what it turned out to be after you got there. Peter’s argument was unassailable. The difficulty was that Peter wasn’t in a position to imagine how it would feel in his case. He didn’t know about the phobia, and even if he had known, it was unlikely that this man had ever feared anything in his life.
    “Come on,” said Peter, standing up. “I dare you, Jess.”
    He seemed eager—too eager, Jesse thought suddenly. It was irrational for a grown man to play with dares. Yet wasn’t it even less rational to see hidden menace in this? There could be no conceivable motive. His own nerves were playing tricks on him, surely.
    Carla approached them. “He’s a trained lifeguard,” she remarked, her eyes sparkling. “There’s no way you can drown.”
    She smiled brightly at him, not in a taunting way, but with genuine enthusiasm. She too was much younger than he was, which was a thought he did not relish.
    Jesse rose and stripped to his briefs. What the hell, he thought sardonically. How you felt scarcely mattered; you upheld the honor of Fleet. Not Fleet as it really was—God, what a travesty—but as these young people on an isolated world believed it to be.
    He climbed to the rim of the rock and jumped.
    He had known he would sink far below the surface; he had not realized quite how far, or how fast. He had the presence of mind to keep his mouth closed, but his lungs were bursting—he hadn’t stopped to think of filling them beforehand. That was the only real discomfort. In airlock emergency drill you learned to deal with such things. Somewhere along the way it dawned on him that the plunging sensation itself was not much after zero-g, a condition he hadn’t yet experienced at the age of four.
    As he rose, he made a conscious effort not to struggle. He surfaced, throwing himself onto his back to breathe free air. Peter was in the water with him. So was Carla. They were laughing, but not in ridicule—it was sheer exuberance and playfulness. He found himself laughing with them. He wasn’t really floating, they were holding him up; but he knew that by tomorrow he could float.
    “We’ll have you scuba diving before the offshift’s over,” Peter remarked as they climbed out onto the low rocks. Jesse perceived that this had been meant quite seriously.
    The afternoon passed, then the evening. Everyone sat on the porch to watch the sun go down, dipping toward the western horizon to stripe now-grey water with orange. As dark came on the air turned cool; lightweight sweaters covered the thin shirts. People talked. They drank wine. They shared the intimacy of mutual trust. But nothing more than that happened.
    It was unnatural, Jesse thought, perplexed. They were not what he’d first assumed, that was evident—but they weren’t strangers to each other, either. It was not as if they lacked sexual feelings. The undercurrents between them were unmistakable. Why should they behave