Crisis on Conshelf Ten by Monica Hughes

Author:Monica Hughes [Hughes, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

I saw no more of Hilary. She didn't even come to dinner with us. Jon moped around and was poor company. I wondered if he really knew that Hilary was the saboteur. It was hardly something I could ask the guy, and in not communicating we drifted apart.

I was pretty much on my own during the day, and I spent all my time exploring the habitat. Since the luminous markers radiated a thousand feet from Central I was free of the best part of 300,000 square yards of sea bottom. Even among the constant traffic around the buildings the fish tranquilly lived out their regular pattern of life, and for hours I would lie suspended just above the bottom watching the activities of one particular fish defending its territory, or the antics of the friendly octopus that lived in an overturned canister in the centre of the habitat.

Not that Conshelf Ten was a garbage dump. On the contrary it was as neat as a pin. But the octopus had established squatter's rights to that particular canister when Conshelf Ten was being built, and now nobody would think of moving him. He was a recognized part of the habitat.

After a couple of days of goofing off I asked Uncle Ted what I could do to be useful. On Moon nobody was allowed to be just a passenger, and I felt very uncomfortable bumming around while everyone else was working. So I was appointed chief algae cleaner. It was my job to inspect the outside of the

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buildings and clean off the algae that would, if left to itself, cover windows, instrument panels and markers with an opaque green film.

It was an easy job. Working three mornings a week I could cover the whole site in ten days, and that was often enough to keep the place shining. I enjoyed the work—it was a change from the computer programming and vector analysis I'd been slogging away at back on Moon. It gave me time to think about all sorts of things I'd never had time for before, while I soared to the top of a dome to polish the high-frequency antenna, or twisted down with an experienced kick of my fins to clean off the observation port of a living unit.

It was wonderful to be free of the drag-down weight of gravity. How could Earth people stand it? The constant energy drain in pulling one foot off the ground, the constant gross weight of one's own body. As I floated weightlessly down from dome top to sea floor my mind seemed to release itself and soar freely. I began to understand much more clearly what Father was trying to do at the U.N. and before the Congressional Committee on Mineral Exploitation.

Compared with the more radical Conshelfers it seemed to me that we Sellenites were not asking very much. We wanted representation as a trading partner at the U.N., and we wanted a freight-cost write-off on all essential goods from Earth. At the moment we didn't own ourselves, the mining companies did.

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