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physics classes and he'd even gotten into reading science fiction, partially because all the geeks in the class read it and he couldn't get most of their jokes without some basis. There were hardly any new books out but the old guys were still pretty popular. He'd gotten hooked on the vision of space as the next frontier. He wasn't old enough to remember Grandpa Allen, who had been a kid when his parents moved to the Missouri frontier. But he'd heard the stories. There might not be red Indians, but there were Horvath and Glatun and more and more star systems getting opened up all the time. Truth was, space was the place.
    And this question was dead easy for once.
    “Depending on the system,” Butch said, “inch and a half to two and a half inches, Mr. Methvin.”
    “Right,” Mr. Methvin said, walking over to a sheet of steel he had propped up. Butch noted that there was another, much thicker, piece of steel behind it. “Behold,” Mr. Methvin said, holding the Optical Welder about a yard away from the plate. He fiddled with the controls for a second then held it out. “Goggles.”
    Even with the goggles, Butch could see the beam from the optical welder. And it cut through the steel faster than any oxy rig he'd ever used.
    “Whoa,” one of the guys in the class said.
    “A Mark Four has a maximum range of about six meters,” Mr. Methvin said, cutting off the beam. “Which is just a stupid design. There's a way to set the beam for any length you want, from either a tiny little beam that's not much thicker than a hair to one thick as a finger and six meters long. Which you monkeys are probably going to cut each other up with once you get in space. But I don't get to tell the people that design these things they're idiots. So I'm telling you. They're idiots. You're idiots. And if you ever use a long beam on one of these things, you're probably gonna kill some other idiot . . .”
    “Welcome to your final exam,” Mr. Monaghan said. He'd been Butch's instructor for “theory and practice of space movement” and he'd been an absolute bastard. Now he was the “faculty advisor” for the “extreme confinement environment test.”
    They'd been warned that the test wasn't just “can you handle an extreme environment?” It was “can you handle an extreme environment under enormous stress?” Stress wasn't just cumulative, it was multiplicative. General stress, is everything okay at home, got multiplied by other stress, am I going to make my car payment, got multiplied by other stress, is my air working, until just about anyone had a break point.
    The ECET wasn't designed to find that break point. Everyone has a break point and if you hit it what you have afterwards is what's called PTSD and generally you were busted for space work. It was designed to find people whose break point was too low.
    Nate had flunked out on the ECET. The ECET was the last major test before you went to the “space environment” portion of the training, going out in the Black. Because they weren't going to spend the money on boosting and planting you if you couldn't pass the ECET.
    “The first thing I want to stress,” Mr. Monaghan said. “Is that this test is perfectly safe. The reality is that you will never be in danger. Since the grabber material does not allow for movement, you can't even get the mask off. And if you can't get the mask off, you, probably, can't die.”
    The ECET was simple. You got loaded in a steel tube, put on a mask, a bunch of gunk got poured in on you that prevented you from moving, at all, and you got asked questions. For hours.
    Most of the answers were less important than how you handled them. The point was that you had to be hard, not impossible, to get upset in the test. The ones that were important were the ones that related to your field. There were two hundred of those alone and you had to have the answers at the tip of your tongue.
    “In the, likely, event that you totally freak out,” Mr. Monaghan