“Totally normal. It’ll weigh less than nothing when they power up. Don’t forget that the Tachytalk™ intercom has a range of only forty-seven seconds, so don’t stray too far from each other. The batteries will give you an hour’s suit time at anything up to D=.5. Skirt any hot spots and you’ll get longer, but don’t venture inside the main engine room—we think it’s at D=.82 in there. You’ll need these.” He handed us each a marker pen and a whiteboard the size of a legal pad. “Okay?”

“Sort of.”

“Good. You’ll feel a slight thump when you flip the switch, but wait until we get to a safe distance, won’t you? Gravity Suits have an eight percent chance of explosive fragmentation on start-up.”

“Nice to know,” I murmured.

Friday and I exchanged glances and smiled nervously at each other.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” he replied, and I turned my backpack toward him so he could switch it on.

The thump was anything but slight—more like seven idiots hitting you repeatedly all over the body with three-day-old baguettes. I felt the suit creak and flex as the variable-mass substrate started to increase its unidirectional mass to offset any dilation gradient outside the suit. Inside the helmet were a few gauges that could viewed from within—one that listed battery power, a second that was marked “External Flux” and was broken, two that just blinked annoyingly and an analogue clock with two second hands—a normal one and a sweep that rotated the dial once a second. There was an identical clock mounted outside the suit, and as soon as we powered up, the clocks started to run out of sync. I gave a thumbs-up to the protesters and was delighted to find I could move a lot easier in the suit than I could outside it, which was something of a relief, as I wouldn’t need my stick.