Free Metal Boxes by Alan Black

had was ice cream ,” said Stone, looking confused.
    “Did it taste good?” Wright asked.
    Stone nodded, “Yes, not quite as sweet as some I have had on board, but the best flavor I have tasted so far.”
    “It’s not really ice cream,” Wright said with a grin. “It is a sorbet made from goat’s milk. This is the closest officer’s wardroom to the cross tower corridor near my office in tower one. So, we come here a lot. The head chef is a senior chief petty officer that grew up on a farm somewhere. He really knows how to use what we grow.”
    “What you grow, Commander? This is vat grown substitute?” Stone asked.
    “Heavens no, Mister Stone,” Wright replied laughing. “You must not have been over to tower one yet. I am really just a commander in name only. I am a veterinarian and all of tower one is my farm.”
    Stone looked startled. “The whole tower?”
    Wright said, “Yes, Mister Stone, the whole tower from top to bottom. Well, except for the command bridge at one end, the emergency engines in the backend, the hanger decks and a few gun emplacements here and there. Where do they have you working, Mister Stone?”
    “I am in t ower three, whiskey deck, Commander.”
    “Whiskey deck? I imagine that sounds like more fun than it really is. Then you know that the central tower is broken down into decks and offices with enough corridors to keep a person busy full time just trying to map it out. Six of the seven outer towers are broken into various warehouse components depending on storage requirements. Well, my tower is all hollow in the middle with the artificial gravity set so the inside of the cylinder is down. Most of the deck has six to ten meters of rocks, sand and soil planted with grass, except where we have planted crops. All figured in we have a huge amount of farmland. As a midshipman, you are still working your studies, correct? So we have a sixteen kilometer long cylinder with an eight kilometer diameter. What is the surface face of the interior of the cylinder?”
    “Um, sir, well…math is pretty much my weakest subject, but isn’t it pi times the radius squared times the height?” Stone tried to answer.
    “Don’t ask me, Mister Stone ,” Wright laughed. “I am a vet. I can tell you which end of a pig to feed and which end the fertilizer comes out of, but I don’t know math. That is why I have a whole staff of officers and a whole office full of computers.”
    Allie shook her head. “Stone, you are close, but that is not quite right. That equation will give you the volume of a cylinder. You want an equation that gives you the lateral area, although in this case , I believe there is a negligible difference between interior and exterior surfaces. Try two times pi times the radius times the height.” She looked at Wright. “I assume you were asking about the sides only as the ends are taken up in storage, offices, bridge space and the aft docks.”
    “Wow. I knew they grew them big in the marines,” Wright grinned. “But, I didn’t know they made them into math whizzes.”
    “I received a teaching degree in math,” Allie shrugged. “But teaching didn’t allow me the opportunity to kill anything, so I joined the Empire’s marines.”
    “They frown on killing your students where you come from?” Wright asked with a laugh.
    Allie nodded. “Strange isn’t it? That was frustrating as all get out on some days.”
    “I get 80,384 square kilometers,” Stone said.
    “ Not even close, Stone,” Allie said. “I got enough spare time I can help you if you are having math issues. What say you to a bit of special tutoring?”
    Skippy whooped. “Hey, Vedrian, you can tutor me any day.”
    “Skippy, you wouldn’t last the day,” Allie replied with a snort.
    Wright said, “Allie, if you and Mister Stone need a quiet place to study you can come by my office. We’ve got plenty of spare space. Hey, there is nothing like studying math under an open sky.”
    Stone shuddered