Chapter 2

Over the next few days, I rearranged my schedule so I could see more of Marianne. It only required a few changes like working out in the early morning and going to bed earlier when I could because of my study load. There were a few other changes also but nothing really major. This was why I was at the gym a week plus later when another stranger arrived.

I was working out on the free weights when the man walked in, but Marianne was still sitting down having just finished some leg exercises on one of the machines. This stranger was a very large individual standing at least 7’-0’’ tall and easily weighting close to 300 pounds. He walked right up to where Marianne was sitting, but apparently never noticed the huge amount of weight that she had on the machine.

“You fucked up my little brother and put him in the hospital. Now you’re going to pay for it,” he growled at her and lunged forward to grab her from where she was sitting, perhaps to pull her to her feet so he had her in a better position to hit her.

His intentions didn’t matter in the least for as fast as he moved, it was slow compared to Marianne’s reactions. She immediately grabbed both of his wrists and yanked him toward her from his now off balance position, and head butted him in the face breaking his nose and his cheek bones. At the same time her right foot came up into his crotch which was now in the perfect position thanks to him being moved forward when she pulled him toward her. Her right booted foot slammed into him, and we later learned that the blow had destroyed his testicles, and crushed his penis as well as fracturing the lower bones of his pelvis. The man collapsed to the floor as Marianne shoved him away from herself. The campus police were called this time along with an ambulance.

Marianne was sitting in the same position when the campus police plus the city police and the ambulance attendants arrived, as she hadn’t moved. There was a lot of confusion and many questions initially. It required four men to move the unconscious man onto the gurney. The police had taken his picture and fingerprints on arriving, but already knew who he was, and that he was wanted for other crimes before he was wheeled out to the waiting ambulance. They still had a lot of questions for Marianne and me, but Mac brought out the security recordings from the cameras that are required by the school’s insurance company and are always on in the gym when anyone is here in case of accidents or injuries. He had the police watch the entire encounter from four different angles in slow motion before they asked her any official questions.

During the viewing, I heard a number of expletives as well as things like, “did you see that?” and “play that part back again,” a number of times. Following seeing what had happened, there were still a few questions.

“We’ll need to impound those recordings as part of our investigation,” the detective in charge told Mac who handed the memory units over. I later learned that he had replaced the memory units that he had removed and had recorded everything that occurred in the gym following the removal of the original devices as a precaution.

The police took everyone’s’ name and address finishing with Marianne who was still sitting in the same place.

“One last question, Miss Riedasel, what is your home planet?” the detective asked her.

“Telchines,” she answered and several of the officers there turned pale.

“Telchines?” the detective asked to be sure that he had heard her correctly.

“Yes, do you need me to prove that?” she asked in a calm but resigned voice.

“Ah... ?” was the detective’s reply.

“Please move then so I can get up,” she asked, and then rose, walked over to the pile of free weights, and picked up the bar with the 800 pounds of weights on it and carried it over to the workout area, where she commenced to effortlessly do a series of lifts with the weights.

“That’s 800 pounds on that bar,” Mac told the detective, who turned more than a little pale again on watching her workout.

“Thank you, Miss Riedasel for your help. We just needed to be sure. It’s obvious that this was a case of self-defense, and we won’t be bothering you any further,” the detective finished, picked up the recordings, and he and the others departed. Marianne returned the weights to their place and went to take a shower and change clothes without saying anything.

“You better go with her, Will. She looks a bit upset to me,” Mac told me, and I hurried to shower and change so we could leave together. Mare was just coming out of the women’s locker room, as I emerged from the men’s.

“Buy you breakfast?” I asked as casually as possible, as we both turned toward the exit. It was a stupid question and an even worse opening line, as we all had our meals already paid for as a part of our tuition package, but it was the only thing that I could think of at the time, and she nodded in assent.

I was about to take her hand, as I normally would with any young woman that I was walking with, as we moved toward the cafeteria, when I remembered how violently she had objected to being touched without permission at the party and kept my hands to myself, for now anyway.

We had a quick breakfast and were on time for our first class, but there hadn’t really been any time to discuss what had happened in the gym. It didn’t appear that the story had gotten out on campus yet as no one had said anything to either of us yet about it. We had a half hour before our next class in another building, and as we walked toward it together, I looked over at her and asked, “Are you all right?”

“No,” she answered in a choked up voice. She turned toward me then, and I could see the tears on her face.

“Let’s sit down here for a couple of minutes,” I told her as there was an unoccupied bench just off the path near us. She collapsed onto the bench which groaned a little from her weight, and I sat beside her. She had her hands in her lap and was looking at her feet or the ground and crying quietly.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, and I don’t want to be expelled,” she told me with a sob. “When he lunged at me, it was all reflex,” she finished with another sob. A light came on in my brain.

“You were picked on in school!” I said in a quiet but knowing voice.

“Yes,” she sniffled, “I was always the smallest one in my class, and the others picked on me. I learned to defend myself early. My aunt who wasn’t much bigger than I am now taught me how to defend myself as a young girl. Of course that was on Telchines where the others were as fast as I am and were built as I am just larger. What I did would have given one of them a bloody nose and some sore testicles, but that would have been all.

“Here everyone is so ... so fragile!” she exclaimed in disbelief. “I’m afraid to touch them as they might break. I always have to be so ... so careful,” she finished near tears again.

“Yes, I noticed the difference when I first arrived from Vespa II. Of course, it wasn’t as great a difference as what you have,” I told her and was silent for a few minute.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked again, before adding, “You know that he would have hurt you if you hadn’t stopped him. Well, he would have tried anyway,” I amended.

“Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, I’ll be okay,” she said with another sniff, as she dried her eyes on her sleeve.

“About the party where all of this started, I only wanted to see what it was like here. I don’t usually go out drinking or anything like that on Telchines but wanted to see what it was like. I didn’t want to go alone however,” she told me.

“No, it’s never good to go out alone somewhere that you aren’t familiar with,” I agreed. We resumed our walk toward our next class following that, and we were just in time to get seated.

Following the last class of the day, we had dinner, and it was on the way back to our dorm that I raised the question.

“Did you understand what the professor was talking about in the last class?” I asked her.

“Sure, what’s the problem?” she asked in a cheerful voice.

“Maybe I’m dense, but I’m having a hard time with it. My folks are all in management, and things like that never came up in their discussions. Not that I’m saying it wasn’t a problem, but they never discussed it where I could hear them,” I told her. She just smiled.

“You want to come up to my room, and I’ll explain it to you. I saw all kinds of problems when I worked in the mines at home,” she told me, and that’s how I learned what room she was in. It turned out to be on the third floor of the building, and she hated it, she told me.

“We don’t have any buildings over two stories at home. You fall too fast over that height in our gravity,” she explained on the way to her room, when I had asked why.

“So you actually worked in the mines on Telchines?” I asked, as we approached her room.

“Yes, all of the kids do when they reach ten years standard. Everyone learns how to work in the mines even if they intend to do something else when they graduate from school. It’s just a matter of safety, since everyone has to be able to help if there is a collapse at one of the mines.

“Telchines has an abundance of heavy elements, which is part of the reason that we have such a high gravity. The entire planet is rich in precious metals, especially the heavier ones. There are some mines so hot that they have to be worked by robots because of the radiation. The miners guide the robots by remote control to do the things that men usually would in the mines. They need to work in heavily shielded buildings.

“We need to import a lot of our food, as many of the local plants are poisonous since they contain so many heavy metals, and even those Earth type plants modified to grow there can pick up too many heavy metals if grown in the wrong places,” she told me.

Mare, she had told me that was her nickname, was as good as she had promised and explained what the professor had been talking about and a bit more that evening. She also told me more about working in the mines.

“Because I was smaller than the others my age, they made me a ‘powder monkey’. I brought in the explosives when they were ready to blast. I worked with a guy who was taller than average, but a bit slow in the thinking department. We both worked for an old man who everybody in the area called ‘Gus’. I’m not sure if that was his real name or not, but that was what he was called. He had been the Chief Explosives Master at the local mines for years, as was his father before him. That may have been where he got the name, but I can’t say for sure.

“I learned a lot from Gus. He taught me a lot, more than even most of the older miners knew. He was the first one to tell me that I was sharp and quick on the uptake. He also said that anyone can pound rocks, but it took someone with brains and training to tell them where to start and when to continue, though they could usually figure out when to quit a vein,” she told me. I learned more about explosives from her over the course of our schooling than even some of our professors seemed to know.

“We needed to use the most powerful explosives available and plenty of it because of the high gravity on Telchines. You’ll need to use a bit more explosives on Vespa II than the Earth formulas call for,” she advised me during one of our classes when the subject of explosives came up. She never told any of the instructors or professors that they were wrong about something, but she would smile in a certain way so that the off-planet students knew that a correction factor for our planets was required. The professors never caught on, or if they did, they never said anything. We would also see the ‘rock miners’ as the asteroid miners were called, smile at some of the things that were said in class.

Mare and I saw a lot more of each other over the following weeks. We would work out together at the gym, eat together, and study together. Of course, we were in the same classes all of the time but now sat next to each other. The studying wasn’t always in one of our rooms, as CSM has a good number of study areas, and of course a large library. There were numerous computer terminals in these areas, and we could download the information that we needed to our personal data units which also had our books downloaded on them.

It was a couple of weeks after the last incident in the gym when Mare invited me up to her room on a Friday night, after we had finished our studies. This was a bit unusual, so I was wondering if there was a problem and what it could be? I soon found out.

We had removed out coats and thrown them on a chair when Mare had a question for me.

“Do you like me, Will?” she asked shyly in a quiet voice. I was a bit surprised by this.

“Of course I like you, Mare. You’re a very sweet young woman,” I answered.

“Do you like me enough to have sex with me?” she asked next, as she moved closer to me. Wow, that really surprised me. I knew that many of the students here at CSM had paired up or formed even larger liaisons of various kinds, even some of the other off-planet students, but I had not thought of Mare in a sexual manner before this.

“Yes,” I answered, “Are you interested in having sex?”

“Yes, I love sex. I have a ... lover for want of a better word on Telchines, and we made love often, but he is a long ways from here, and I still need sex,” she told me shyly before adding, “We will be married after I return to Telchines.”

“You aren’t worried about cheating on him while here?” I asked, as I felt that she might be feeling guilty. Those of my friends on Vespa II certainly would.

“No, I’m sure that he is having sex with someone else while I’m away. We are very liberal minded about sex before marriage, but once married, it is considered inappropriate to have sex with someone other than your mate,” she told me. I was quite surprised on hearing this, of course I knew very little about daily life on Telchines.

Still, I was somewhat surprised on hearing this as it was different from how sex was viewed and treated on Vespa II. Those from the families of the original settlers and those from well-to-do families were introduced to sex at the appropriate age by several visits to a professional that had been arranged by the head of their family. They were taught the various ways of having sex by those professionals, and they could arrange for further instructions or visits if they could afford it. One just wasn’t allowed to pick up anyone for sex, but there were liaisons allowed when one was engaged to be married to a suitable spouse. However, those visits to professionals were often continued after marriage by both partners. Children were not allowed to happen between customers and professionals. The rules for the lower classes on Vespa II were somewhat different and looser however. Because of all of this, it took me a short time to answer her.

“Things are a bit different on Vespa II,” I told her but continued, “Still I would like to have sex with you if it’s all right.”