In orbit above the planet Rodeo, a habitat operated (like everything on Rodeo's surface) by the Ampad company houses a great experiment. Ampad's profits are seriously reduced by its workers' need to spend rigorously enforced periods of time at full gravity, because the human body's adaptations to life in free fall (weightlessness) can quickly become irreversible. Ampad thinks that in genetic engineering, it's found the answer to this limitation. Its scientists have created a new species of human, one that finds free fall its natural habitat. Since legs are of no use under such conditions, the genetic engineers have substituted an additional set of arms. Which is why members of this new species call themselves quaddies.
Engineer Leo Graf can't believe what he sees and hears when he's assigned to teach the young residents of the Rodeo habitat how to become crack free fall welders. It's not the quaddies who repel him; he instantly likes the first ones he meets, and quickly establishes a fine teacher/student relationship with those in his classes. What repels Leo is the attitude other Ampad personnel take toward the quaddies, and their legal status. Which is that of Ampad capital assets, not human beings. The habitat's administrator in particular, a former subordinate whom Leo couldn't stand years ago and positively loathes now, takes advantage of the quaddies' innocence and of the dependence to which they've been reared. Leo sees no chance to change their situation, however much he deplores it, until the development of artificial gravity by a recently settled human colony renders Ampad's quaddies obsolete. Overnight, they go from being a valuable asset to something Ampad would destroy outright if it dared. Instead, Ampad plans something that the quaddies - if they knew about it, which Ampad is hoping they won't - would think much worse.
A well told, highly enjoyable book with great characters.
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