“Well, thanks.” I undid my own webbing. “You bound straight back?”
“Oh, I may have a cup of coffee first somewhere, if I can find somebody worth talking to. But otherwise, yeah, no reason to stay.” He yawned. “You’ll probably be around for days or worse. I do sympathize. Mase us a call the instant you’re through, and if it’s me that’s sent to fetch you, I’ll cram on every g this boat has got.”
It puzzled me. True, he must have visited the ship fairly often; but weren’t she and her folk inexhaustible? I didn’t inquire, because the chamber was now airful and the inner gate had swung wide. Two men waited. The pilot opened a valve for me and I clattered down the cradle stairs and across the deck to greet them.
One was grizzled and portly, his most conspicuous feature a rose nose, his garments a zigzag of reds, blues, and yellows so bright that my eyes hurt. He grabbed my hand and pumped it as if hoping I’d spout water. “Winston Sanders, hey?” he boomed. “Welcome aboard, welcome aboard! I’m your friendly chief engineer of interior power; Hodge is my name, Hodge Furlow, that is. When I heard you were making approach, I came right down to meet you personally. Have a nice trip?”
Slightly deafened, I contented myself with saying, “It was okay, thanks. Er—” My gaze went to the other man, who stood or rather loomed behind Furlow. He was a conspicuous object. Though his enormous shoulders hunched forward, he was a head taller than me, and the beer belly that strained his slovenly coverall didn’t make him appear less formidable. His face did a little: coarse features stubblefield jaw not much forehead, but at least a vacant grin. “Uh, Mr.…?”
“Oh. That’s J. P.,” Furlow said. “My special assistant. You have baggage?”
“A fair amount. I brought my basic gear, instruments, tools, standards … you know.”
Furlow looked hurt. “I assure you we’re well supplied in my department, Win.”
“Where you’re going, you’d better be,” I said snappishly. I don’t like hearing my first name on first acquaintance. “However, I’m used to my own kit. And you’ve not had any dazzling success with yours, have you?”
“True, alas, true.” Furlow dropped his tone to a dull roar. “Well, J. P. will bring it to your quarters.” Turning to his companion. “You read me, J. P.? Go in that boat. Ask for Mr. Sanders’ baggage. Put it on a carrier. Take it to Suite Forty-six on M Deck. Got it?”
“Baggage,” the giant replied. His voice was surprisingly high. “Suite Forty-six. M Deck. Okay.” He slouched off.
Furlow linked arms with me. “Let’s make for my quarters, Win. You must be tired. We’ll chat over a drink and a smoke till lunch.”
Perforce I accompanied him, into a corridor so long that its ends were hidden by the curvature of the ship. Nothing relieved it except doors and side passages. No doubt the decoration of its metal harshness, and that of hundreds like it, would help occupy the man-years of an interstellar voyage. At present it lay eerily empty and silent. I heard pumps throb, I caught gusts of warm, oily air, but chiefly I was conscious of how loudly our foot-falls echoed.
“I’m not tired,” I said. “Slept well last nightwatch. Shouldn’t I pay my respects to the captain?”
“He’s not aboard,” Furlow answered. “Seldom is. What would he be doing? The senior officer on duty in the executive department—um, I can’t think who that’d be, but it doesn’t matter. Some fourth- or fifth-level stripling. I’m sure I rank him, whoever he is. And he’s probably still in bed—not necessarily alone, haw!”—a thumb nearly stove in a rib of mine “—and wouldn’t appreciate having to act official. If he wants to see you, he’ll let us know.”
Oof! my mind exclaimed in its shock. Before me rose the image of every other spacecraft I’d ever been inside, and unterraformed asteroids, unearthly planets, moons of Neptune. The ultimate thin wall between men and raw space was discipline. Do they figure to reach Alpha Centauri in this condition?
“Well,” I said harshly, “in that case, let’s take a look at the system. The sooner I get to work, the sooner I can hope to crack your problem.”
“Are you the solid-state citizen!” Furlow shook his head and clicked his tongue. “As you wish. To be frank, I doubt if you can accomplish much. No reflection on you, my boy. But your old Uncle Hodge isn’t a complete fumblethumb, if I say it as shouldn’t. No, he’s not quite ready for the last orbit, these old brain cells still have some juice in them—and I’ve been working for months, Win, months, without getting into trajectory. With my whole team, remember, and a holdful of apparatus. I probably should have hollered to your company earlier, but I thought and I think, if we couldn’t track down the cause, nobody can. You see, I don’t believe the trouble has any simple cause.”
He showed me to a lift shaft. Actually, we floated down, though that took me by surprise for a moment till I realized what it meant. Unlike more conventional vessels, this one imitated a terraformed asteroid in having Emetts at the center which generated a radial weightfield. The heart of the interior power complex was many decks inward from the hull.
Most of the levels we passed were deserted; nobody was living there yet, or nothing stored, or nothing installed. In a few, workmen were busy. It pleased me to glimpse their clean, efficient movements. “Any of those fellows coming along on the trip?” I asked.
Furlow guffawed. “You have a great sense of humor. Win. I like you. I really do. Tell you what. We’ll stop at the Pallas Palace, it’s right on the way, and I’ll buy you a drink. Don’t refuse. Man needs a quick drink, this hour.”
“The Pallas Palace?”
“Our bar. The one that’s open, I mean. Goes without saying, we’ll need more en route. It’s a long dry way to Alpha C, hey?”
We swung ourselves out into a section that looked more cheerful than what I’d seen hitherto. Corridors were painted and padded; an occasional door stood ajar, showing a piece of room and furnishing. Evidently this was where some of the crew—those whose jobs already kept them in the ship part of the time—resided. Probably the work gangs, who’d return home when their tasks were done, used unoccupied cabins elsewhere. Single men in temporary housing wouldn’t fix it up this elaborately.
We met a number of dwellers as we walked, male and female, moving along the halls or in and out of the apartments. They hailed Furlow, who seemed popular, and he made jovial response. The place might almost have been a small new settlement in the Belt.
Almost. Not quite. The difference, the wrongness grew on me with each step I took.
There were no children; that was to be expected at this stage. But there were too many old people. Nearly half of those I saw were wrinkled, white-haired, worn down by time. They kept their vigor; decks have been mopped with more than one Earthside tourist who referred to an aged asterite as a Senior Citizen. But they had spent most of their years.
And their briskness was lacking in the young. With few exceptions, those in the prime of life sauntered rather than strode, loafed around in a park circle through which we passed, sat slackly behind half-open doors watching 3V. Unlike the old, they tended to be pale and soft.
I did spy one good-looking group of youngsters, bounding along in a cloud of laughter. But they weren’t on duty. The apparatus they carried was for a game of spaceball. And … I’m no prude, but some of the boy-girl antics weren’t seemly … in public … on a ship!
“Haven’t they anything better to do?” I exclaimed.
“Why, no,” Furlow said. “Isn’t it common knowledge? Part of the eventual crew are already aboard because they’re concerned with preparations or maintenance, like me. But a larger part is simply here for the free food and lodging. How else could we attract them?”
Awhirl with bewilderment, I barely noticed his continuing talk while he hustled me onward:
“Getting back to our trouble, I’m sorry to say it of your outfit, Win, but I’m certain the fault is lousy design. No blame on you; you didn’t draw the plans. And the components are okay. You know your company doesn’t make but
a few of those. It buys units from specialist manufacturers and fits them together. The black box principle, hey, boy? When something blows, you don’t muck around trying to find one transistor or whatever the little dingbat is, one out of maybe a million, and fix it or replace it. No, you see right away on the meter which sealed unit isn’t taking in the input or putting out the output. You yank that whole unit, plug in a fresh one, and repair the damage at your leisure.”
I thought, vaguely, that he didn’t mean to insult me with a kindergarten lecture. He merely suffered from logorrhea. Perhaps he wasn’t even listening to himself. I tried not to. The thunders rolled remorselessly on:
“Well, now. Our power grid worked fine at first. Just fine. But then, several months back, it started going floomp. Irregular intervals, no predicting when. Nor any predicting which boxes would blow. They might be in the voltage regulation, the phasing control, the amplification, anywhere. Suddenly, boom, several units stop operating. Alarms sound, ring-ding-ding, poor Uncle Hodge got to tumble out of a sound sleep, like as not, and come fixeefixee. We’ve got bypasses and standbys, sure. Nothing bad happens, no shutdown. But you don’t like being without plugged-in spares, not in space you don’t, hey? So you replace the blown units.
“Then you try to figure out what made them blow. I took charge of that. Opened each one myself. That was another reason I prevailed on the Foundation to delay calling in the contractor. We have to be absolutely certain that we can make every repair ourselves. You can’t trot across any four and a half light-years to lend a hand, can you, my boy?
“In every box, the inside components were fused, so badly that it wasn’t worth repairing, not even worth removing the parts that had escaped damage.”
I grew alert. He hadn’t told me anything I didn’t know, but he sounded as if now he might. “I’d like to check those boxes too,” I said.
Furlow raised beefy shoulders and let them fall again. “Sorry. I only kept one to show. For the rest, well, you realize how it is, Win. Skilled labor is worth more, by a good big factor, than the machine time it takes to make new units like these. So, like I said, repairing them wouldn’t pay. However, each one is pretty damn expensive. Think of those rare elements and special isotopes that have to be put into the crystal structures just so. They don’t come cheap. In fact, the Foundation’s getting awful worried about these losses.
“So, trying to save the project what money I could. I’ve been shipping the ruined units to Mountain King Electronics on Hebe. They buy ’em to salvage the valuable nuclides. That way, a little of the cost gets returned to the Foundation. Not much, but a little.”
I hadn’t known that, though it was obvious that continual replacement of sophisticated black boxes would in time become financially murderous. My concern had been with the functioning of the system itself. Furlow was right; once the ship was off in interstellar space, he couldn’t order supplies or bring in consultants. And what Astra could carry was limited.
And without interior power—for light, heat, ventilation, weight, bionics, utilities, a thousand different and essential machines—her people were dead.
“You have kept a spoiled unit, you said?” I asked.
“Yes, sure, sure, I expected somebody’d want to see one. It’s from a six-way junction-point current distributor. You can take my word its condition is typical.… But here we are. Here’s the dear old fuel tank.”
A racket of voices and boom-boom music had been growing around us. Turning a corner, we saw the Pallas Palace. It was a sizable cabin with a vitryl bulkhead fronting on the hall. A bar was to the rear, tables to the front, a small dance floor on one side. Despite the early hour, it held a score or so, and saxophones were moaning out of a speaker. I don’t like saxophones. My boyhood was misspent on a farm asteroid, and I got tired of listening to lovesick cows.
We made our way through the air, which was smoky enough to cut, among beer-wet tables and past squirming dancers, to the bar. It had live service. That didn’t surprise me; why haul the mass of needless automata out of the Solar System? What did surprise, and dismay, was that crewfolk—they could only be crewfolk—were behaving like this.
“Morning, Ed, morning!” Furlow bellowed above the noise. “Double bourbon, straight, and what’ll you have, Win? On me.”
I tried to refuse, but he was so insistent that finally I took a soft drink. I also hate soft drinks.
We were standing there sipping, Furlow hailing everybody in sight and occasionally reaching out to paw some giggling girl, when a hand closed around my arm and a voice said, “My God, if it isn’t Winston Sanders! Hoy, lad!”
I turned, and choked. The man was slim, dapper, sharp-featured, with slick black hair and snapping brown eyes. I knew him of old, a college chum. We’d seen each other infrequently since I became an engineer dispatched from world to world and he settled down in an insurance agency on Juno; but our reunions were good. It had saddened me two years ago to see, in a letter from a mutual acquaintance, that Jake Jaspers had been convicted of embezzlement.
“Son of a bitch!” The traditional spaceman’s oath sputtered out of me. He grabbed my hand almost as energetically as Furlow but, somehow, more warmly. After a second I put aside both astonishment and moralism. We pounded each other on the back and I ordered a beer after all.
“What’re you doing here, Jake?”
“Oh, passing the time. I’m in the steward’s department, accounting office, but till the next load of gear arrives, I’ve nothing to account about, and my wife—say, I bet you don’t know I’m married. Can you come to dinner? Have you signed on with us?”
“No, I’m troubleshooting. But, uh, that is, I heard——”
Jaspers laughed, entirely at ease. “That! My sentence was suspended on condition I join this ship. We’ve got quite a few like me.”
I was glad for his sake. You can debate whether the Republic is right in rejecting Earth-style psycho-rehabilitation as an insult to the individual and a menace to liberty. But you can’t blink the fact that our labor bases are pretty bleak. Not inhumane, of course; most have facilities for recreation, conjugal visits, spare-time education; and the work done is socially useful; but I’d hate to spend several years in one, and it’d have been worse for a bon vivant like Jake Jaspers.
Nevertheless—a starship with criminals in the crew?
“Sure, I’d be happy to come eat,” I mumbled. He told me his apartment number, we set a time, and then I managed to detach Furlow from the bar.
He guided me through several deeper levels. Near the axis of the vessel, we stopped. Here was the core of the complex over which he presided: control rooms, workshops, the great central computer and its satellites scattered through the whole ship. On the way I had mentally reviewed the schematics.
The energy source was the same set of fusion reactors that activated the gyrogravitic drive. There was no reason to install another set for Furlow’s department. If either engines or interior grid failed, the ship was equally doomed. But naturally, this mutual use complicated an already difficult problem.
The reactors had given no trouble. They continued faithfully furnishing as much power as desired. What kept breaking down was the distribution of that power.
“I take for granted you’ve run independent checks on the computers,” I said.
“Independent and exhaustive, my boy. On the main one, on the auxiliaries, and on the lot of them in every combination and permutation. Look over my results if you want. Nothing came out less than magnificent.” Furlow puffed himself up. “If I couldn’t make sure of that, I shouldn’t be in this job, hey?”
I nodded irritably. It was a duck-billed platitude. The chief electrical engineer had to be good in all specialties that concerned his work, but first and foremost he had to be a computerman.
The schematics went on running through my brain. Counting the square kilometers of inside space—cabins, holds, corridors, shops, machine sites—Astra had the dimensions of a large city. And her power requiremen
ts were more, in volume as well as intricacy. Life might flourish aboard her, balancing its intake and outgo as automatically as life does on the mother world. But maintaining an environment where this was possible—in a hull alone for decades in airless, sunless, radiation-riddled space—took a network of artifacts whose complexity approached that of a living organism. And every one of those artifacts drew the energy that ran it from the electrical web which, simultaneously, linked them all together.
Here a heater, there a cooler; here a light, there a stove; here a cybernet requiring EMF exact to the microvolt, there a superwaldo drawing five hundred amps; here a radiation meter detecting single electrons, there a screen field which, created in an emergency, sucked megajoules in its first few seconds of buildup; and on and on, endless kilometers of wire, millions of transformers, transducers, electronic valves, amplifiers, regulators, generators, motors.… The human mind could no more visualize this creation of the human mind than an embryo can imagine the adult into which it will change itself.
“Okay,” I said, foreseeing the answer, “what do you think is at fault in these breakdowns?”
“I told you,” Furlow stated. “Rotten design. Maybe no one could’ve done better than your company did. Nothing quite like this has ever been made before. But the upshot is, the system’s unbalanced. It’s liable to violent surges, where positive feedback sets in—not throughout the whole, which’d at least trip circuit breakers, but locally. Before safety devices can operate, a number of components have gotten more juice than they can take.”
“But the computers,” I objected, “especially the main one, the computers are supposed to keep track of the current flow and vary it according to capacity as well as demand.”
Tales of the Flying Mountains Page 22
