The Forever War #4.1
„All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there‘s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‚ice‘ and fracture it... and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You‘ll never feel a thing. „Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts. „I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?“ He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. „He‘s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds‘ pressure exerts five pounds‘ force; three pounds‘ gives ten; four pounds‘, twenty-three; five pounds‘, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you‘d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It‘d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You‘d die no matter which won. „The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you‘re really skilled, don‘t try to run, or jump. You‘re likely to trip, and that means you‘re likely to die.“ „Charon‘ s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it‘s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it‘d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It‘s a slow way to travel. „Tomorrow morning, we‘ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I‘ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That‘s all, Sergeant.“ Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclaimed the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door. It was pretty much like the ones on Luna. „First I want Private Omar Ahnizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I‘ll call you over the squawker.“ „Alphabetical order, sir?“ „Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.“ That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about getting sacked.
