Empty Space by Black, Alan

if it meant the bales just dropped into the container without any order. He volunteered to stand inside the container and restack the bales to make the most effective use of the storage space. The bales weighed around a hundred pounds standard, but Liberty’s gravity was at ninety percent standard. It would still have been a challenge if he had not been used to working out in almost one and a half gravities. Rather than wait for the bales to fall before picking them up and moving them, he began catching them in mid-air, dropping them into place. They laughed as the boy throttled the baler’s speed up, pushing forward quicker than any of the others could move. Their speed encouraged other teams and drivers to move faster and faster. Only one man ran the newest baler. It ran the slowest as the automatic’s design moved at little more than a snale’s pace. Several two-man teams tried to keep up with York, Fugget and Toby, but couldn’t. The rhythm of the machine was mind numbing, yet they ran out of bales long before York was ready to quit. It’d been a close race whether the sun would set first or they would run out of hay. The sun won, but not by much and they finished the job using floating overhead lights. It wasn’t any more tiring than a normal afternoon on the weight machines. The big surprise came when Altamont shook his hand, thanked him for his extra effort, and held his hand in the air in front of the rest of the workers as if he was the greatest champion hay baler of all ti