Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  • Again as we were leaving, helping refine our comet map of the Oort Cloud, detecting comet nuclei with radar.

  • Once we were good and gone, measuring, in situ, the density, charge, mass, species, velocity, and temperature characteristics of interstellar plasma and gas.

  • Continuous measurement of the orthagonal components of the galactic magnetic field.

  • Continuous monitoring of the interstellar medium for molecular species. Determination of mass, composition, size distribution, and frequency of interstellar grains. Performance of interstellar erosion experiments with various models of shield configurations.

  • Using the long baseline formed by the starship and Solar System to carry out high-resolution astronomical measurements with optical and radio interferometry. Performing astrometric measurements of nearby stars, extrasolar planet detection, extrasolar planet imaging, and atmospheric spectroscopy. Using the same long-baseline techniques for astrophysical measurements, for example, to image radio galaxies, quasars, and neutron stars.

  (It had long been hoped that with multiple starships under way at the same time, the capability of this long baseline interferometry could be vastly enhanced by combining their observations of distant sources. It didn’t seem to be working out well: the problem in this kind of interstellar interferometry was how to agree on common time-tagging of data from probes moving in different directions at significant fractions of the speed of light.)

  • Observation of low energy cosmic rays, normally excluded from the Solar System.

  • Attempting detection of gravity waves from astrophysical processes such as supernovae or neutron stars, by tracking anomalies in the Doppler effect of our signals.

  • Refinement of the dark matter map of the Galaxy…

  …and so on. Mind you, all these are from the list of jobs Dr. Jaymes figured he could train just about any chimp aboard to do satisfactorily. But before he sent me those, he sent another, shorter list of jobs for especially smart people, with specific qualifications, which I won’t even bother to excerpt, because I didn’t understand it.

  He appeared to be saying that he wanted to make an extremely intensive examination of the sun—our sun—okay, our former sun—of Sol, all right?—even as we were leaving it behind us forever at high speed. Why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think if there was an adequately studied star in the universe, it would be Sol. Studied even from vessels receding at fractions of c, if that made some sort of difference. And information about that particular star was going to be of purely academic interest to anyone we would ever meet again. But Dr. Jaymes certainly sounded terribly concerned about it. When I told him I lacked the qualifications for his first list of jobs, he allowed his disappointment to show even through mail; whereas when I politely declined his second list, too, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had been forced to pick one of those I just listed as my shipboard occupation, I think the option I’d have selected instead would have been euthanasia. Like any literate citizen, I love to read what astronomers have to say after years of patient data collection and astute analysis… but the actual gathering of the data was not my idea of a way to spend the next twenty years.

  When I came right down to it, not much was.

  It was that growing realization, about five or ten scrollings down the list, which caused me to stop and approach it from the other direction. Instead of wading through the Big List of Jobs, the sensible way to do this was to make a Small List of Jobs I would be willing to endure for twenty years, if I had to, and then see if by chance any of them were on the Big List.

  By dinnertime I had settled on the following:

  • Teach the saxophone. Or composition. Or music history. Or history.

  But did I in fact have any pedagogic skills? Forget the skills: did I have the talent? The indefinable intangible something that would make strangers find learning from me preferable to learning by themselves? How the hell did I know?

  • Conduct. Assuming an orchestra of some kind could be assembled out of five hundred people, and made good enough to be listened to by the rest.

  Again: Did I possess whatever variant offshoot of charisma it was that would make musicians find watching me more helpful than listening to their own internal metronome?

  • Act. An orchestra might prove to be beyond the resources at hand, but surely a theater company or trideo studio would form sooner or later.

  Let’s just keep assuming the unanswerable question, “But did I have a particle of talent for that endeavor?” from here on.

  • Direct, for either live or canned drama.

  • Write, either live, canned, or prose fiction. Or nonfiction if necessary; I’d been given to understand that it did not pay a writer to be too fussy. Just possibly journalism, if it turned out that a town of five hundred souls produced enough gossip to need writing down. Herb could give me pointers.

  And finally, of course:

  • Play the furshlugginer saxophone. There were other venues aboard offering dining or entertainment or dancing. If I could line up enough different sorts of gigs, in different musical genres, then between that and private parties it might just be possible to make a whole entire livelihood out of my single favorite activity, pushing air out the end of a pipe.

  That, God damn it, was finally something I did know I had the talent for. The crucial question however was: Did anybody care? Or rather, did enough people care that I would be able to live on my tips?

  I looked back over my list gloomily, and detected a pattern. All the occupations that interested me shared two characteristics: they all might just manage to sustain me during the two decades of the voyage… and they would all become nearly worthless when we reached Immega 714. Pioneers don’t have a lot of time or energy for art, either making it or consuming it. It was unlikely that anybody would be willing to feed me just because I made a pretty noise, or made up stories, or pretended to be someone more interesting.

  But what did it matter? Doubtless I would end up scratching so hard to feed myself and get warm and dry that most of those things would lose their appeal for me, too.

  I brooded about it for the rest of the evening without useful result. I was about to collapse my keypad for the night when I noticed that I had incoming mail. That was odd. Practically everyone I knew lived in my room. Surely my Relativist acquaintances were all too busy for chat. Then I saw the header title, “Where are you?” and felt my pulse begin to rise as I leaped to the conclusion that it was from Jinny.

  But no. Instead, it was from the Zog. My job search was over, at least for a while. Reality had caught up to me.

  I wrote back that I would report at the start of shift next morning, at 0900. Then I went directly to bed and immediately to sleep, determined to be at his office no later than 0800.

  I had formally reported to the Zog back on the morning of my second day aboard the Sheffield—but found now that I had almost no memory of the event, or the man. Indeed, I had very little recall of anything that had happened that day, or for that matter any of those last days we’d spent in Terran orbit. This was not surprising, for two reasons.

  First, it turns out to be oddly difficult to make a human brain remember events that occurred in free fall: the sleeping brain, which does the filing, insists on treating such experiences as dreams. The phenomenon wears off after a few weeks of zero gee, but we hadn’t hung around in orbit that long.

  And second, I had spent that whole period in a mental-emotional state approaching fugue—the sort of zombie numbness one must maintain during the process of sawing off the trapped limb. The Zog must have taken one look at me and realized I would be useless until we left the Oort Cloud.

  With that symbolic cutting-of-the-cord, and the colossal bender with which I had marked it, and finally my musical catharsis with silver Anna at the Horn of Plenty, I had finally snapped out of my funk, rebooted my brain—just that day, really.

  And se
veral decks away, a man who had seen my vacant face exactly once, for less than a minute, had sniffed the air that morning and somehow sensed that I had finally germinated, and was ready to plant. That’s the Zog for you.

  Kamal Zogby was a Marsman who made you think of Martians. He didn’t have three legs—as far as I know—but he was unreasonably tall and thin, even for a Marsman, and bowlegged, and slow moving unless he was in a blurring hurry, and he had an almost Martian distaste for sitting down or any posture but bolt upright. Also he was as taciturn as a Martian, with a similar sort of gravitas, and sometimes could be almost as hard to read. And like a Martian, the Zog never needed to look anything up.

  But no Martian ever had a nose like that great ice-axe Lebanese honker of his—or many humans, for that matter. Nor did Martians have teeth anywhere near that big and white and frequently displayed. And he was unlike any Martian ever hatched in two important ways that made it possible to work for him. He genuinely cared about everybody he ever met, found them interesting. And he had a strong and subtle sense of humor.

  He was not a botanist, or an agronomist, or a plant physiologist, or a hydroponicist, or an anythingist, really—not on paper, anyway. He had no degrees at all. He was just the Straw Boss.

  Back on Mars, literally dirt poor, he had once kept a whole dometown in food, water, and air for twenty years after a catastrophic ecocollapse nearly wiped them out. They said if a thing could be grown, under any circumstances, he could grow it hydroponically. He could grow lemon trees hydroponically, or succulents, or even fungi.

  And in theory we might even have managed to survive a hypothetical total failure of the hydroponic farm—because with part of his time the Zog also oversaw an experimental two-hectare half-meter-deep dirt farm that took up an entire deck, just above the Hydroponics Deck. It attempted to mimic the conditions we expected to find on our new home-to-be, Brasil Novo, second planet of Immega 714. The hope was that by the time we got there, we would know as much about how to dirt farm there as we knew about hydroponics now. And meanwhile, if something ever went horribly wrong down on the Hydroponics Deck, two hectares of land were just barely enough to feed five hundred people. In theory.

  Finding the Zog’s office, down on the Voyage Farm Deck, was easy. Gaining access was even easier, even though I had arrived well before the beginning of shift as planned. There was no execassist or persec or even door sentinel program to run interference for him. There was no door. Just an open doorway beneath a sign that read “Straw Boss.” Unfortunately, there was no Zog on the other side of it either. Or anyone else; the office was empty. I waited expectantly for his desk to tell me where he was, or at least when he would arrive, but it didn’t. So I told my own doppleganger to consult the ship system and locate him. After a noticeable hesitation, the ship politely declined to cooperate: the Zog was delisted. If he had a schedule on file it was not public. The ship declined to make an appointment in his name. It advised me to either take my chances and wait, or leave a message for him and go do something else.

  I didn’t much like either alternative. Especially after looking around the office: my strong impression was that he dropped by there once or twice a week at best. So I decided to hunt around for him.

  The choices were a) this, the hydroponic Voyage Farm Deck, or b) the dirt-based Destination Farm Deck immediately above it. The choice kind of made itself.

  The hydroponic farm operation was as intricately choreographed, complexly layered, and densely packed as any terrestrial jungle, with trays of assorted growing things stacked up to four high in places on frail-looking frames, and a bewildering variety of different lighting, watering, drainage and airflow systems, each tailored to a different variety of crops. The longest uninterrupted sight line on that deck was about three meters—and the lighting was so weird, with LEDs, metal halides, and sodium bulbs of assorted colors and intensities competing and clashing in odd ways at different places that you wouldn’t have wanted to see much farther than a few meters in any direction anyway. The air circulation was so intense, in order to carry away the heat from all those lights, that there was a constant wash of white noise muffling all other sounds.

  The farm immediately overhead, on the other hand, was basically a huge heap of somewhat modified dirt, above which a few seedlings, sprouts, and shoots should just be starting to become visible. If the Zog was on that deck, I could probably pick him out by eye very quickly. It was definitely the place to start looking. And I had a hunch it was where I would find him: where green things grew up out of soil you could plunge your hands into.

  It wasn’t quite that easy, in fact. But close. The Destination Farm was designed to be as close as possible to one enormous deck, with long sight lines in nearly all directions. But it was also designed to be kept at destination-normal conditions. That meant, among other things—at least at the moment—air that was half again as rich in oxygen, slightly denser, a lot more humid, and a bit warmer than ship-normal (Terran Sealevel Standard). All of which meant, among other things, weather—specifically, fog. It was controlled somewhat by air circulation, but less than it could have been, obviously by intent. Apparently we were all going to spend our golden years on a planet that was prone to low-lying fogs and mists for at least part of the year. Brasil Novo would be a kind of Jungle World, a steamy hothouse of a place.

  (It began to dawn on me that there was a lot I did not know about our destination planet—my new home-to-be. I had more or less presumed that if a whole lot of people were willing to go there, forever, it must be a nice place. It might, I thought, be well to delve into that just a little deeper.)

  Another problem facing me was that since this was the deck with the most open space and the most experimental food, this was the deck where the majority of the livestock was quartered and processed. Not to put too fine a point on it, the fog stank, and rude noises seemed to come distantly from all directions, as if some mad ventriloquist had descended to fart jokes.

  And finally, it was blinkin’ dark in there. Brasil Novo had a day just a hair over twenty-four Terran Standard hours long—thirty-six minutes longer. Therefore so did this deck, which meant that its day and ours diverged. And had been diverging since whenever the Zog had started its clock. It was the beginning of the morning shift everywhere else in the Sheffield, but here it appeared to be at least an hour before dawn.

  Despite all these handicaps I found the Zog within a minute or two of my arrival. I had heard him laugh once before, and heard him now from a few hundred meters away. That got me started in the right direction, and luck took me the rest of the way. If that’s the word I want: he was at the goat quarters, one of the riper of the animal enclaves. Goats just are not happy unless you give them some equivalent of a cave or shed to hide in at night, even though there’s nothing to hide from… and then it concentrates the smell wonderfully. Maybe that’s what they like about it.

  Admittedly they are worth a bit of smell. A goat eats ten percent as much as a cow, but produces twenty-five percent as much milk. And many, among them me, say it tastes better than cow’s milk. It’s also easier to digest.

  “Ah, Joel.” He looked up from a hoof he was trimming and gave me a slow once-over, beginning and ending at my eyes. He had done that the first time we’d met, too. I wondered why I didn’t find it offensive. When he was done, he smiled with his whole face. “I’m very glad to see you’re in better spirits.”

  “Director Zogby, I want—”

  “Zog, please.”

  “Zog, I appreciate your understanding and patience, this last week. I needed to work some things out, and I have.”

  “I can see that. You’re ready to come to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is Kathy—she’s a Marsman like me, new to farming.”

  Intent on my new boss, I had almost completely tuned out the companion holding the goat for him. She was about my age, slim, fit, and extremely uncomfortable holding a goat. We exchanged polite noises.

  “K
athy, Joel’s from Ganymede. He has a lot of farming experience, dirt and hydro both. You’ll be his assistant.” She nodded, too busy to keep eye contact.

  I took a deep breath. I was not looking forward to this next bit, but there was no sense putting it off any longer. “Uh, Zog, perhaps I should correct one small mis—oh, shit.”

  The sentence aborted in that odd way because I had just seen what she was about to do. There was no time for me to say anything to stop her—and it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t have gotten a hand free without being kicked. There was just time for me to drop to my knees, cup one hand behind her head, place my other index finger just below her nose, and press hard. She let out a yelp and tried to shake free, but I wouldn’t let her until I was sure the job was done. Then I released her at once and backed away.

  “I’m very sorry, Kathy,” I said. “I had to do that.”

  She was staring at me as if I’d grown fangs. “Why?”

  “It’s the only sure way I know to stop someone from sneezing.”

  “What?”

  “Excuse me just a minute, Kathy,” Zog interrupted. “Joel, what was it you were just about to say?”

  “Oh. Uh…”

  “You were going to correct something?”

  “Why shouldn’t I sneeze if I want to?”

  “You really don’t want to sneeze in a goat shed,” I told her. “Look, Zog, I—”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Kathy, please, he’ll explain in a minute. Go on, Joel. Correct what?”

  “No, wait a minute, Zog,” she insisted. “That hurt.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I’m really very sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I started to argue, and stopped. “You’re right. I kind of feel like you had it coming, for not knowing what you’re doing. And now I’m also a little annoyed at you for presuming that I don’t. If you’d—”