Off The Main Sequence

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Narby shoved it with his foot and spoke to the two orderlies. “Carry it outside," he commanded. They obeyed, seeming relieved at having something to do and someone to tell them to do it. Narby turned back to the silent watching mass. “Does anyone else object to a peace with the muties?"

  An elderly officer, one who had dreamed away his life as judge and spiritual adviser to a remote village, stood up and pointed a bony finger at Narby, while his white beard jutted indignantly. “Jordan will punish you for this! Mutiny and sin — the spirit of Huff!"

  Narby nodded to Joe-Jim; the old man’s words gurgled in his throat, the point of a blade sticking out under one ear. Bobo looked pleased with himself.

  “There has been enough talk," Narby announced. “It is better to have a little blood now than much blood later. Let those who stand with me in this matter get up and come forward."

  Ertz set the precedent by striding forward and urging his surest personal supporters to come with him. Reaching the front of the room, he pulled out his knife and raised the point. “I salute Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!"

  His own supporters were left with no choice. “Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!"

  The hard young men in Narby’s clique — the backbone of the dissident rationalist bloc among the scientist priests — joined the swing forward en masse, points raised high and shouting for the new Captain. The undecided and the opportunists hastened to join, as they saw which side of the blade was edged. When the division was complete, there remained a handful only of Ship’s officers still hanging back, almost all of whom were either elderly or hyperreligious.

  Ertz watched Captain Narby look them over, then pick up Joe-Jim with his eyes. Ertz put a hand on his arm. “There are few of them and practically helpless," he pointed out. “Why not disarm them and let them retire?"

  Narby Eave him an unfriendly look. “Let them stay alive and breed mutiny. I am quite capable of making my own decisions, Ertz."

  Ertz bit his lip. “Very well, Captain."

  “That’s better." He signaled to Joe-Jim.

  The long knives made short work of it.

  Hugh hung back horn the slaughter. His old teacher, Lieutenant Nelson, the village scientist who had seen his ability and selected him for scientisthood, was one of the group. It was a factor be had not anticipated.

  World conquest — and consolidation. Faith, or the Sword. Joe-Jim’s bullies, amplified by hot-blooded young cadets supplied by Captain Narby, combed the middle decks and the upper decks. The muties, individualists by the very nature of their existence and owing no allegiance higher than that to the leaders of their gangs, were no match for the planned generalship of Joe-Jim, nor did their weapons match the strange, long knives that bit before a man was ready.

  The rumor spread through mutie country that it was better to surrender quietly to the gang of the Two Wise Heads — good eating for those who surrendered, death inescapable for those who did not.

  But it was nevertheless a long slow process — there were so many, many decks, so many miles of gloomy corridors, so many countless compartments in which unsubdued muties might lurk. Furthermore, the process grew slower as it advanced, as Joe-Jim attempted to establish a police patrol, an interior guard, over each sector, deck, and stair way trunk, as fast as his striking groups mopped them up.

  To Narby’s disappointment, the two-headed man was not killed in his campaigns. Joe-Jim had learned from his own books that a general need not necessarily expose himself to direct combat.

  Hugh buried himself in the Control Room. Not only was he more interested in the subtle problems of mastering the how and why of the complex controls and the parallel complexity of starship ballistics, but also the whole matter of the blood purge was distasteful to him — because of Lieutenant Nelson. Violence and death he was used to; they were commonplace even on the lower levels — but that incident made him vaguely unhappy, even though his own evaluations were not sufficiently clean-cut for him to feel personal responsibility for the old man’s death.

  He just wished it had not happened.

  But the controls — ahh. There was something a man could put his heart into. He was attempting a task that an Earthman would have rejected as impossible — an Earthman would have known that the piloting and operation of an interstellar ship was a task so difficult that the best possible technical education combined with extensive experience in the handling of lesser spacecraft would constitute a barely adequate grounding for the additional intensive highly specialized training necessary for the task.

  Hugh Hoyland did not know that. So he went ahead and did it anyhow.

  In which attempt he was aided by the genius of the designers. The controls of most machinery may be considered under the head of simple pairs, stop-and-go, push-and-pull, up-and-down, in-and-out, on-and-off, right-and-left, their permutations and combinations. The real difficulties have to do with upkeep and repair, adjustment and replacements.

  But the controls and main drive machinery of the starship Vanguard required no upkeep and no repair; their complexities were below the molar level, they contained no moving parts, friction took no toil and they did not fall out of adjustment. Had it been necessary for him to understand and repair the machines he dealt with, it would have been impossible. A fourteen-year-old child may safely be entrusted with a family skycar and be allowed to make thousand-mile jaunts overnight unaccompanied; it is much more probable that he will injure himself on the trip by overeating than by finding some way to mismanage or damage the vehicle. But if the skycar should fall out of adjustment, ground itself, and signal for a repair crew, the repair crew is essential; the child cannot fix it himself.

  The Vanguard needed no repair crew — save for nonessential ancilliary machinery such as transbelts, elevators, automassagers, dining services, and the like. Such machinery which necessarily used moving parts had worn out before the time of the first Witness; the useless mass involved had gone into the auxiliary Converter, or had been adapted to other simpler purposes. Hugh was not even aware that there ever had been such machinery; the stripped condition of most compartments was a simple fact of nature to him, no cause for wonder.

  Hugh was aided in his quest for understanding by two other facts:

  First, spaceship ballistics is a very simple subject, being hardly more than the application of the second law of motion to an inverse-square field. That statement runs contrary to our usual credos; It happens to be true. Baking a cake calls for much greater, though subconscious, knowledge of engineering; knitting a sweater requires a subconscious understanding of much more complex mathematical relationships: topology of a knitted garment — but try it yourself sometime!

  For a complex subject, consider neurology, or catalysts — but don’t mention ballistics.

  Second, the designers had clearly in mind that the Vanguard would reach her destination not sooner than generations after her departure; they wished to make it easy for the then-not-yet-born pilots who would command her on arrival. Although they anticipated no such hiatus in technical culture as took place, they did their best to make the controls simple and self-explanatory. The sophisticated fourteen-year-old mentioned, oriented as he would be to the concept of space, would doubtless have figured them out in a few minutes. Hugh, reared in a culture which believed that the Ship was the whole world, made no such quick job of it.

  He was hampered by two foreign concepts — distance and metrical time. He had to learn to operate the finder, a delayed-action, long-base, parallax type designed for the Vanguard, and had taken measurements on a couple of dozen stellar bodies before it occurred him that the results he was getting could possibly stand for anything. The readings were in parsecs and without meaning emotionally. The attempt with the aid of the Sacred to translate his readings into linear units he could stand resulted in figures which he felt sure were were obviously preposterous. Check and recheck, followed long periods of brooding forced him unwillingly into some dim comprehension of astronomical magnitu
des.

  The concepts frightened him and bewildered him. For a period of several sleeps he stayed away from the Control Room, and gave way to a feeling of futility and depression. He occupied the time in sorting over the women captives, it being the first time since his capture by Joe-Jim long ago that he had had both the opportunity and the mood to consider the subject. The candidates were numerous, for, in addition to the usual crop of village maidens, Joe-Jim’s military operations had produced a number of prime widows. Hugh availed himself of his leading position in the Ship’s new setup to select two women. The first was a widow, a strong competent woman, adept at providing a man with domestic comforts. He set her up in his new apartment high up in low-weight, gave her a free hand, and allowed her to retain her former name of Chloe.

  The other was a maiden, untrained and wild as a mutie. Hugh could not have told himself why he picked her. Certainly she had no virtues, but — she made him feel funny. She had bitten him while he was inspecting her; he had slapped her, naturally, and that should have been an end to the matter. But he sent word back later for her father to send her along.

  He had not got around to naming her.

  Metrical time caused him as much mental confusion as astronomical distances, but no emotional upset The trouble was again the lack of the concept in the Ship. The Crew had the notion of topological time; they understood “now," “before," “after," “has been," “will be," even such notions as long time and short time, but the notion of measured time had dropped out of the culture. The lowest of earthbound cultures has some idea of measured time, even if limited to days and seasons, but every earthly concept of measured time originates in astronomical phenomena; the Crew had been insulated from all astronomical phenomena for uncounted generations.

  Hugh had before him, on the control consoles, the only working timepieces in the Ship — but it was a long, long time before he grasped what they were for and what bearing they had on other instruments. But until did, he could not control the Ship. Speed, and its derivatives, acceleration and flexure, are based on measured time.

  But when these two new concepts were finally grasped, chewed over, and ancient books reread in the light of these concepts, he was, in a greatly restricted and theoretical sense, an astrogator.

  Hugh sought out Joe-Jim to ask him a question. Joe-Jim’s minds were brilliantly penetrating when he cared to exert himself; he remained a superficial dilettante because he rarely cared.

  Hugh found Narby just leaving. In order to conduct the campaign of pacification of the muties it had been necessary for Narby and Joe-Jim to confer frequently; to their mutual surprise they got along well together. Narby was a capable administrator, able to delegate authority and not given to useless elbow jogging; Joe-Jim surprised and pleased Narby by being more able than any subordinate he had ever dealt with before. There was no love wasted. between them, but each recognized in the other both intelligence and a hard self-interest which matched his own. There was respect and grudging contemptuous liking.

  “Good eating, Captain," Hugh greeted Narby formally.

  “Oh — hello, Hugh," Narby answered, then turned back to Joe-Jim. “I’ll expect a report, then."

  “You’ll get it," Joe agreed. “There can’t be more than a few dozen stragglers. We’ll hunt them out, or starve them."

  “Am I butting in?" Hugh asked.

  “No — I’m just leaving. How goes the great work, my dear fellow?" He smiled irritatingly.

  “Well enough, but slowly. Do you wish a report?"

  “No hurry. Oh, by the bye, I’ve made the Control Room and Main Drive, in fact the entire level of no-weight, taboo for everyone, muties and Crew alike."

  “So? I see your point, I guess. There is no need for any but officers to go up there."

  “You don’t understand me. It is a general taboo, applying to officers as well. Not to ourselves, of course."

  “But … but — that won’t work. The only effective way to convince the officers of the truth is to take them up and show them the stars!"

  “That’s exactly my point. I can’t have any officers upset by disturbing ideas while I am consolidating my administration. It will, create religious differences and impair discipline."

  Hugh was too upset and astounded to answer at once. “But," he said at last, “but that’s the point. That’s why you were made Captain."

  “And as Captain I will have to be the final judge of policy. The matter is closed. You are not to take anyone to the Control Room, nor any part of no-weight, until I deem it advisable. You’ll have to wait."

  “It’s a good idea, Hugh," Jim commented. “We shouldn’t stir things up while we’ve got a war to attend to."

  “Let me get this straight," Hugh persisted. “You mean this is a temporary policy?"

  “You could put it that way."

  “Well — all right," Hugh conceded. “But wait — Ertz and I need to train assistants at once."

  “Very well. Nominate them to me and I’ll pass on them. Whom do you have in mind?"

  Hugh thought. He did not actually need assistance himself; although the Control Room contained acceleration chairs for half a dozen, one man, seated in the chief astrogator’s chair, could pilot the Ship. The same applied to Ertz in the Main Drive station, save in one respect. “How about Ertz? He needs porters to move mass to the Main Drive."

  “Let him. I’ll sign the writing. See that he uses porters from the former muties — but no one goes to the Control Room save those who have been there before." Narby turned and left with an air of dismissal.

  Hugh watched him leave, then said, “I don’t like this, Joe-Jim."

  “Why not?" Jim asked. “It’s reasonable."

  “Perhaps it is. But — well, damn it! It seems to me, somehow, that truth ought to be free to anyone — any time!" He threw up his hands in a gesture of baffled exasperation.

  Joe-Jim looked at him oddly. “What a curious idea," said Joe.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s not common sense, but it seems like it ought to be. Oh, well, forget it! That’s not what I came to see you about."

  “What’s on your mind, Bud?"

  “How do we — Look, we finish the Trip, see? We’ve got the Ship touching a planet, like this —" He brought his two fists together.

  “Yes. Go on."

  “Well, when that’s done, how do we get out of the Ship?"

  The twins looked confused, started to argue between themselves. Finally Joe interrupted his brother. “Wait a bit, Jim. Let’s be logical about this. It was intended for us to get out — that implies a door, doesn’t it?"

  “Yeah. Sure."

  “There’s no door up here. It must be down in high weight."

  “But it isn’t," objected Hugh. “All that country is known. There isn’t any door. It has to be up in mutie country."

  “In that case," Joe continued, “it should be either all the way forward, or all the way aft — otherwise it would not go anywhere. It isn’t aft. There’s nothing back of Main Drive but solid bulkheads. It would need to be forward."

  “That’s silly," Jim commented. “There’s the Control Room and the Captain’s veranda. That’s all."

  “Oh, yeah? How about the locked compartments?"

  “Those aren’t doors — not to the Outside anyway. Just bulkheads abaft the Control Room."

  “No, stupid, but they might lead to doors."

  “Stupid, eh? Even so, how are you going to open them — answer me that, bright boy?"

  “What," demanded Hugh, “are the 'locked compartments’?"

  “Don’t you know? There are seven doors, spaced on the main shaft in the same bulkhead as the door to Main Control Room. We’ve never been able to open them."

  “Well, maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Let’s see!"

  “It’s a waste of time," Jim insisted. But they went.

  Bobo was taken along to try his monstrous strength on the doors. But even his knotted swollen muscles couldn’t budge the levers which
appeared to be intended to actuate the doors. “Well?" Jim sneered to his brother. “You see?"

  Joe shrugged. “O.K. — you win. Let’s go down."

  “Wait a little," Hugh pleaded. “The second door back — the handle seemed to turn a little. Let’s try it again."

  “I’m afraid it’s useless," Jim commented. But Joe said, “Oh, all right, as long as we’re here."

  Bobo tried again, wedging his shoulder under the lever and pushing from his knees. The lever gave suddenly, but the door did not open. “He’s broken it," Joe announced.

  “Yeah," Hugh acknowledged. “I guess that’s that." He placed his hand against the door. It swung open easily.

  The door did not lead to outer space, which was well for the three, for nothing in their experience warned them against the peril of the outer vacuum. Instead a very short and narrow vestibule led them to another door which was just barely ajar. The door stuck on its hinges, but the fact that it was slightly ajar prevented it from binding anywhere else. Perhaps the last man to use it left it so as a precaution against the metal surfaces freezing together — but no one would ever know.

  Bobo’s uncouth strength opened it easily. Another door lay six feet beyond. “I don’t understand this," complained Jim as Bobo strained at the third door. “What’s the sense in an endless series of doors?"

  “Wait and find out," advised his brother.

  Beyond the third door lay, not another door, but an apartment, a group of compartments, odd ones, small, crowded together and of unusual shapes. Bobo shot on. ahead and explored the place, knife in teeth, his ugly body almost graceful in flight. Hugh and Joe-Jim proceeded more slowly, their eyes caught by the strangeness Of the place.

  Bobo returned, killed his momentum skillfully against a bulkhead, took his blade from his teeth, and reported, “No door. No more door any place. Bobo look."

  “There has to be," Hugh insisted, irritated at the dwarf for demolishing his hopes.

  The moron shrugged. “Bobo look."

  “We’ll look." Hugh and the twins moved off in different directions, splitting the reconnaissance between them.