Orphans of the Sky Read Online Free Page B

mug from him. "That's enough for now," said Joe. "Tell us about yourself."
           Hugh did so. In detail, being prompted from time to time.
     
           Hugh accepted a de facto condition of slavery with no particular resistance and no great disturbance of soul. The word "slave" was not in his vocabulary, but the condition was a commonplace in everything he had ever known. There had always been those who gave orders and those who carried them out—he could imagine no other condition, no other type of social organization. It was a fact of nature.
           Though naturally he thought of escape.
           Thinking about it was as far as he got. Joe-Jim guessed his thoughts and brought the matter out into the open. Joe told him, "Don't go getting ideas, youngster. Without a knife you wouldn't get three levels away in this part of the Ship. If you managed to steal a knife from me, you still wouldn't make it down to high-weight. Besides, there's Bobo."
           Hugh waited a moment, as was fitting, then said, "Bobo?"
           Jim grinned and replied, "We told Bobo that you were his to butcher, if he liked, if you ever stuck your head out of our compartments without us. Now he sleeps outside the door and spends a lot of his time there."
           "It was only fair," put in Joe. "He was disappointed when we decided to keep you."
           "Say," suggested Jim, turning his head toward his brother's, "how about some fun?" He turned back to Hugh. "Can you throw a knife?"
           "Of course," Hugh answered.
           "Let's see you. Here." Joe-Jim handed him their own knife. Hugh accepted it, jiggling it in his hand to try its balance. "Try my mark."
           Joe-Jim had a plastic target set up at the far end of the room from his favorite chair, on which he was wont to practice his own skill. Hugh eyed it, and, with an arm motion too fast to follow, let fly. He used the economical underhand stroke, thumb on the blade, fingers together.
           The blade shivered in the target, well centered in the chewed-up area which marked Joe-Jim's best efforts.
           "Good boy!" Joe approved. "What do you have in mind, Jim?"
           "Let's give him the knife and see how far he gets."  
           "No," said Joe, "I don't agree."  
           "Why not?"  
           "If Bobo wins, we're out one servant. If Hugh wins,
    we lose both Bobo and him. It's wasteful."  
           "Oh, well—if you insist."  
           "I do. Hugh, fetch the knife."  
           Hugh did so. It had not occurred to him to turn the knife against Joe-Jim. The master was the master. For servant to attack master was not simply repugnant to good morals, it was an idea so wild that it did not occur to him at all.
           Hugh had expected that Joe-Jim would be impressed by his learning as a scientist. It did not work out that way. Joe-Jim, especially Jim, loved to argue. They sucked Hugh dry in short order and figuratively cast him aside. Hoyland felt humiliated. After all, was he not a scientist? Could he not read and write?
           "Shut up," Jim told him. "Reading is simple. I could do it before your father was born. D'you think you're the first scientist that has served me? Scientists—bah! A pack of ignoramuses!"
           In an attempt to re-establish his own intellectual conceit, Hugh expounded the theories of the younger scientists, the strictly matter-of-fact, hard-boiled realism which rejected all religious interpretation and took the Ship as it was. He confidently expected Joe-Jim to approve such a point of view; it seemed to fit their temperaments.
           They laughed in his face.
           "Honest," Jim insisted, when he had ceased snorting, "are you young punks so stupid as all that? Why, you're worse than your elders."
           "But you just got through saying," Hugh protested in hurt tones, "that all our accepted religious notions are