Free Exiled to the Stars by William Zellmann Page B

climbing back into her shipsuit, her body and hair still wet. The supply pack with its spare shipsuits, vacuum-packed towels and genuine shampoo, was a greater gift than its weight in gold.
    While Susan hurried back to her bunk to examine her bounty in detail, Ron took the larger package into the training room, and then sought out Raymond.
    The Captain had been as good as his word. The package contained twenty, one piece plastic side-handle batons. Each baton was a simple cylinder some 75 cems in length, and slightly over five cems in diameter. A fifteen-cem handle protruded from one side near the textured grip.
    The batons were a simple variation on the cave man's club, but they were very effective in skilled hands; and Raymond planned to ensure that the hands of every militiaman were skilled!
    An excited Raymond grabbed one of the batons and a VR helmet, and was soon dancing around the room waving the baton in response to the instructions coming over the VR system.
    Ron shrugged and returned to the mess room, gathering Susan on the way. They were soon once again engrossed in planning.
    With two hundred residents, fifty stations, and four teachers, it would seem a simple process to set up a training schedule. But there were complications.
    Many of the people either wanted or didn't want to be in the same class with certain other persons. Older illiterate residents did not want to be in class with younger, better-educated children and teens, especially their own grandchildren. And many residents didn't want to be there, period. Only Cesar Montero's bullying had made them agree to attend.
    But finally the schedule was taking shape. They had divided the residents into day and night shifts, and then further divided them into two classes for each shift. School sessions would be four hours long, to dovetail with the dining schedule.
    Now that they were underway, the dining schedule, established by the ship's computer, was much more flexible. They were no longer constrained by Earth's rotation. "Days" and "nights" were arbitrary. Dining hours could be established at any time of the "day" or "night," as could the dorm lighting systems. In fact, EarthGov had expected that the colonists would split into shifts, simply for additional room, if for no other reason.
    So, Ron would begin classes after breakfast in the day shift's "morning", and continue until lunchtime, four hours later. Vlad would begin classes after the day shift lunch, and continue until the day shift dinner.
    The night shift's schedule was a mirror image of the day shift's. Susan would start classes after the night shift's breakfast and continue until lunchtime, and Robert Franks would run the "afternoon" classes.
    Robert Franks had been pathetically grateful for his rescue from the Undie dorm. He had been reticent up there, but here he talked freely. As he had told Ron, he held a master's degree in computer science. During an all-night drinking-and-vid game session, he had taken a friend's challenge to hack into the EarthGov tax computer. His attempt was detected immediately, and by the time he had sobered up, he was enroute to the Classification Center.
    He, too had several years' experience teaching undergraduate classes, though that had been years ago. Robert was a bit introverted, and lacking in social skills, but he had a dry sense of humor and quiet cheerfulness that brought people to ignore his physical cowardice. Aside from Cesar, he was the most qualified fourth teacher available; and Cesar had other duties.
    They were combining their student lists with Cesar's shift lists almost an hour later when a broadly smiling Raymond Koh hurried into the mess room and clapped Ron on the back.
    "They're perfect !" He gushed. "You can attack, defend, and even if your opponent has one, without training he doesn't stand a chance!"
    Ron grinned. "So, when do you start organizing your militia?"
    Raymond's answering grin was wide. "I've already started. I've put together a