Mercenary

Mercenary Read Free Page B

Book: Mercenary Read Free
Author: Piers Anthony
Tags: Science-Fiction, Fantasy
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foolish as this may seem.
    Acceleration measured in this fashion came to 32 feet per second squared, for one gee. 3,600 seconds in an hour meant—this was pretty good mental exercise, because of the irregular intervals between units—about 115,000 feet per second in an hour of gee, which seemed to be what we had experienced.
    There were—I strained to remember—5,280 feet in a mile. That meant we were traveling about 22 miles per second now, or close to 80,000 miles per hour. Fifteen hours at that velocity would be about 1,200,000 miles. But we would not be traveling straight in toward Jupiter; we would angle back to intercept the bubble as it overhauled Leda in its smaller, faster orbit. The bubble was probably about ten million kilometers out from Jupiter, compared to Leda's eleven million—oops, I had slipped back into the metric system!
    At any rate, I was satisfied that the bubble was about 90 percent of Leda's distance out, in this miniature Solar System that was the Juclip, and that we would not be carried far from Leda in the ten days Joe said we would be picking. That reassured me; I didn't want to get lost and not be on hand to recover my identification.
    We did indeed arrive on schedule, decelerating at gee for an hour and docking on the bubble. Our ship simply hooked onto a rack awaiting it and hung nose-out, suddenly upside down as the gee resumed.
    The bunks were made to take it; they could be used from either side. The bubble was rotating one complete turn every minute and a half, so that centrifugal force brought our weight at its surface to almost gee, Earth-normal gravity.
    We climbed the ladder-tube up into the bubble. Inside, we stepped out of the lock onto the great, curving inner surface. I stood, dazzled by it.
    The bubble was a virtually hollow sphere about a thousand feet in diameter. From a mirror in its center shone the sun; or rather, the twenty-sevenfold magnified image of the sun, projecting the hellish intensity of Earth-normal solar radiation to the broad, curved expanse of green plants. I knew I would not be able to tolerate that very long; the radiation would soon blister my skin.
    The bubble was, of course, oriented so that its pole pointed to the sun. Otherwise the light would have been flashing on and off in sub-two-minute cycles, not good for the plants. This way, the bubble's rotation was irrelevant; the mirror moved independently, beaming the light to cover one-third of the inner surface, rotating in the course of twenty-four hours to complete the circuit. Earth plants preferred the Earth cycle, and produced most abundantly with it, and so they got it. That, in addition to the absence of all Earth diseases and predators and inconstancies of nature, meant that these plants were many times as productive as they could have been on Earth itself.
    “Get over to the harvest station,” Gallows told us. That turned out to be a pavilion a short distance away, on a terrace up the slope. Gee was only full and vertical at the bubble's equator, of course; the terraces became increasingly steep as the poles were approached. Otherwise, the plants and soil would simply have tumbled in a jumble to the equator. We hastened to comply, scrambling up the path.
    Organization did not take long. We were issued broad-brimmed hats, gloves, and heavy shirts to protect us from the concentrated sunlight, and each of us was given a large plastic bucket on a belt. This was a pepper dome; we were to fill our buckets with the red peppers. About one hundred peppers filled a bucket. When we brought a filled bucket to the foreman, he would issue a ticket worth a dime. The more buckets we filled, the more dimes we earned. It was a remarkably simple system.
    Theoretically the average worker would fill one bucket in five minutes, twelve per hour, and squeeze it up to about a hundred buckets in the full eight-hour working day. The overall mathematics of it generated a schedule for our thirty-man crew to complete the

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