by Larry Niven
Chanda tapped her stylus rhythmically against the rim of the Brain speaker.
The dining area was raucous with the sound of breathing and the stealthy shuffling of feet. Everyone seemed to be leaning forward.
The Brain answered in swiftly moving dots of light. Chanda said, "Immediately replace— Eye of Kdapt!"
Chanda looked very startled, then grinned around at Verd. "Sorry, Captain. 'Immediately replace Verd Spacercaptain with Strac Astrophysics in supreme command over Hogan's Goat.'"
In the confusion that followed, Verd's voice was easily the loudest. "Everybody out! Everybody but Strac Astrophysics."
Miraculously, he was obeyed.
Strac was a long, tall oldster, old in habits and manners and mode of dress. A streak of black-enameled steel wool emphasized his chocolate scalp, and his ears spread like wings. Once Verd had wondered why Strac didn't have them fixed. Lafer he had stopped wondering. Strac obviously made a fetish of keeping what he was born with. His hairline began not between his eyes, but at the very top of his forehead, and it petered out on his neck. His fingernails grew naturally. They must have needed constant trimming.
He sat facing the members of the crew, waiting without impatience.
"I believe you've traveled on my ship before," said Verd. "Have you ever said or done anything to give the Brain, or any passenger, the idea that you might want to command the Hogan's Goat?"
"Certainly not!" Strac seemed as ruffled by the suggestion as Verd himself. "The Brain must be insane," he muttered venomously. Then his own words backlashed him, and in fear he asked, "Could the Brain be insane?"
"No," Chanda answered. "Brains of this type can be damaged, they can be destroyed, but if they come up with an answer it's the right one. There's a built-in doubt factor. Any ambiguity gives you an Insufficient Data."
"Then why would it try to take my command?"
"I don't know. Captain, there's something I should tell you."
"What's that?"
"The Brain has stopped answering questions. There seems to be some progressive deterioration going on. It stopped even before the passengers left. If I give it orders in Winsel it obeys, but it won't answer back."
"Oh, Kdapt take the Brain!" Verd rubbed his temples with his fingertips. "Parliss, what did the Brain know about Strac?"
"Same as any other passenger. Name, profession, medical state and history, mass, world of origin. That's all."
"Hmph. Strac, where were you born?"
"The Canyon," said Strac. "Is that germane?"
"I don't know. Canyon is a lonely place to grow up, I imagine."
"It is, in a way. Three hundred thousand is a tiny population for a solar system, but there's no room for more. Above the Canyon rim the air's too thin to breathe. I got out as soon as I could. Haven't been back in nearly a century."
"I see."
"Captain, I doubt that. In the Canyon there's no lack of company. It's the culture that's lonely.
Everybody thinks just like everybody else. You'd say there's no cultural cross-fertilization. The pressure to conform is brutal."
"Interesting," said Verd, but his tone dismissed the subject. "Strac, do you have any bright ideas that the Brain might have latched onto somehow? Or do you perhaps have a reputation so large in scientific circles that the Brain might know of it?"
"I'm sure that's not the case."
"Well, do you have any ideas at all? We need them badly."
"I'm afraid not. Captain, just what is our position? It seems that everyone is dead but us. How do we cope with an emergency like that?"
"We don't," said Verd. "Not without time travel, and that's impossible. It is, isn't it?"
"Of course."
"Chanda, exactly what did you ask the Brain? How did you phrase it?"
"Maximize the probability of our surviving for maximum time. That's what you asked for. Excuse me, Captain, but the Brain almost certainly assumed that 'maximum time' meant forever."
"All right. Parliss, how long will the ship keep us going?"
Parliss was only thirty years old, and burdened with youth's habitual unsureness; but he knew his profession well enough. "A long time, Captain. Decades, maybe centuries. There's some boosterspice seeds in our consignment for the Zoo of Earth; if we could grow boosterspice aboard ship we could keep ourselves young. The air plant will work as long as there's sunlight or starlight. But the food converter— well, it can't make elements, and eventually they'll get lost somewhere in the circuit, and we'll start getting deficiency diseases, and— hmmm. I could probably keep us alive for a century and a half, and if we institute cannibalism we could—"
"Never mind. Let's call that our limit if we stay in space. We've got other choices, Strac, none of them pleasant.
"We can get to any planet in the solar system using the matter-conversion drive. We've enough solid chemical fuel in the landing rockets to land us on any world the size of Venus or smaller. With the matter-conversion drive we can take off from anywhere, but the photon beam would leave boiling rock behind us. We can do all that, but there's no point to it, because nothing in the solar system is habitable."
"If I may interrupt," said Strac. "Why do we have a matter-conversion drive?"
"Excuse me?"
"The Hogan's Goat has the Jumper to move between worlds, and the solids to land and take off. Why does such a ship need another reaction drive? Is the Jumper so imprecise?"
"Oh. No, that's not it. You see, the math of Jumper travel postulates a figure for the mass of a very large neighborhood, a neighborhood that takes in most of the local group of galaxies. That figure is almost twice the actual rest mass in the neighborhood. So we have to accelerate until the external universe is heavy enough for us to use the Jumper."
"I see."
"Even with total mass conversion we have to carry a tremendous mass of fuel. We use neutronium; anything less massive would take up too much room. Then, without the artificial gravity to protect us it would take over a year to reach the right velocity. The drive gives us a good one hundred gee in uncluttered space." Verd grinned at Strac's awed expression. "We don't advertise that. Passengers might start wondering what would happen if the artificial gravity went off.
"Where was I? ... Third choice: we can go on to other stars. Each trip would take decades, but by refueling in each system we could reach a few nearby stars in the hundred and fifty years Parliss gives us.
But every world we ever used must be dead by now, and the G-type stars we can reach in the time we've got may have no useful worlds. It would be a gamble."
Strac shifted uneasily. "It certainly would. We don't necessarily need a G-type sun, we can settle under any star that won't roast us with ultraviolet, but habitable planets are rare enough. Can't you order the Brain to search out a habitable planet and go there?"
"No," said Lourdi, from across the room. "The telescope isn't that good, not when it has to peer out of one gravity well into another. The light gets all bent up."
"And finally," said Verd, "if we did land on an Earth-sized planet that looked habitable, and then found out it wasn't, we wouldn't have the fuel to land anywhere else. Well, what do you think?"
Strac appeared to consider. "I think I'll go have a drink. I think I'll have several. I wish you'd kept our little predicament secret a few centuries longer." He rose with dignity and turned to the door, then spoiled the exit by turning back. "By the way, Captain, have you ever been to a one-face world? Or have your travels been confined to the habitable worlds?"
"I've been to the Earth's Moon, but that's all. Why?"
"I'm not sure," said Strac, and he left looking thoughtful. Verd noticed that he turned right. The bar was aft of the dining room, to the left.
Gloom settled over the dining area. Verd fumbled in his belt pouch, brought forth a white tube not much bigger than a cigarette. Eyes fixed morosely on a wall, he hung the tube between his lips, sucked through it, inhaled at the side of his mouth. He exhaled cool, thick orange smok
e.
The muscles around his eyes lost a little of their tension.
Chanda spoke up. "Captain, I've been wondering why the Brain didn't answer me directly, why it didn't just give us a set of detailed instructions."
"Me too. Have you got an answer?"
"It must have computed just how much time it had before its motor aphasia became complete. So instead of trying to give a string of detailed instructions it would never finish, it just named the person most likely to have the right answer. It gave us what it could in the few seconds it had left."
"But why Strac? Why not me, or one of you?"
"I don't know," Chanda said wearily. The damage to the Brain had hit her hard. Not surprising; she had always treated the Brain like a beloved but retarded child. She closed her eyes and began to recite,
"Name, profession, mass, world of origin, medical history. Strac, astrophysics, the Canyon..."
***
In the next few days, each member of the crew was busy at his own specialty.
Lourdi Coursefinder spent most of her time at the telescope. It was a powerful instrument, and she had the Brain's limited help. But the worlds of even the nearest stars were only circular dots. The sky was thick with black suns, visible only in the infrared. She did manage to find Earth's Moon— more battered than ever, in a Trojan orbit, trailing sixty degrees behind the parent planet in her path around the Sun.
Parliss Lifesystems spent his waking hours in the ship's library, looking up tomes on the medical aspects of privation. Gradually he was putting together a detailed program that would keep the passengers healthy for a good long time, and alive for a long time after that, with safety factors allowing for breakdown of the more delicate components of the life-support system. Later he planned to prepare a similar program using cannibalism to its best medical advantage. That part would be tricky, involving subtle psychological effects from moral shock.
Slowly and painfully, with miniature extensible waldos, Chanda searched out the tiny burns in the Brain's cortex and scraped away the charred semiconducting ash. "Probably won't help much," she admitted grimly, "but the ash may be causing short circuits. It can't hurt to get it out. I wish I had some fine wire."
Once he was convinced that the Jumper was stonecold dead, Verd left it alone. That gave him little to do but worry. He worried about the damage to the Brain, and wondered if Chanda was being overoptimistic. Like a surgeon forced to operate on a sick friend, she refused even to consider that the Brain might get worse instead of better. Verd worried, and he checked the wiring in the manual override systems for the various drives, moving along outside the hull in a vac suit.
He was startled by the sight of the braking spine. Its ultrahard metal was as shiny as ever, but it was two-thirds gone. Sublimation, over several billion years.
He worried about the passengers too. Without the constant entertainment provided by the Brain, they would be facing the shock of their disaster virtually unaided. The log had a list of passengers, and Chanda got the Brain to put it on the screen, but Verd could find few useful professions among them.
Strac Astrophysics
Jimm Farmer
Avran Zooman
The other professions were all useless here. Taxer, Carmaker, Adman— he was lucky to find anything at all. "All the same," he told Lourdi one night, "I'd give anything to find a Jak FTLsystems aboard."
"How 'bout a Harlan Alltrades?"
"On this tub? Specializing nonspecialists ride the luxury liners." He twisted restlessly in the air between the sleeping plates. "Wanta buy an aircar? It was owned by a sniveling coward—"
Jimm Farmer was the heavy-planet man, with long, smooth muscles and big broad feet. His Anxian accent implied that he could probably kick holes in hullmetal. "I've never worked without machinery," he said. "Farming takes an awful lot of machinery. Diggers, plowers, seeders, transplanters, aerators, you name it. Even if you gave me seeds and a world to grow them on, I couldn't do anything by myself." He scratched his bushy eyebrows. For some reason he'd let them grow outward from the end of his hairline, like the crossbar on an upside-down T. "But if all the passengers and crew pitched in and followed directions, and if they didn't mind working like robots, I think we could raise something, if we had a planet with good dirt and some seeds."
"At least we've got the seeds," said Verd. "Thanx, Mr. Farmer."
Verd had first seen Avran Zooman walking through the hall at the beginning of the trip. Zooman was a shocking sight. Histhin strip of hair was bleached-bone white and started halfway back on his scalp. His skin had faint lines in it, like the preliminary grooves in tooled leather. Verd had avoided him until now.
Obviously the man belonged to one of those strange, nearly extinct religious orders which prohibit the taking of boosterspice.
But he didn't behave like a religious nut. Verd found him friendly, alert, helpful, and likable. His thick We Made It accent was heavy with stressed esses.
"In this one respect we are lucky," Avran was saying. "Or you are lucky. I should have been lucky enough to miss my ship. I came to protect your cargo, which is a selection of fertile plant seeds and frozen animal eggs for the Zoo of Earth Authority."
"Exactly what's in the consignment?"
"Nearly everything you could think of, Captain. The Central Government wished to establish a zoo to show all the life that Earth has lost as a result of her intense population compression. I suspect they wished to encourage emigration. This is the first consignment, and it contains samples of every variety of nondomestic life on We Made It. There were to be other shipments from other worlds, including some expensive mutations from Wunderland designed to imitate the long extinct 'big cats.' We do not have those, nor the useless decorative plants such as orchids and cactus, but we do have everything we need for farming."
"Have you got an incubator for the animals?"
"Unfortunately not. Perhaps I could show you how to make one out of other machinery." Avran smiled humorously. "But there is a problem. I am fatally allergic to boosterspice extract. Thus I will be dead in less than a century, which unfortunately limits the length of any journey that I cail make."
Verd felt his face go numb. He was no more afraid of death than the next man, but— frantically he tried to sort his climbing emotions before they strangled him. Admiration, wonder, shame, horror, fear. How could Avran live so casually with death? How could he have reached such a state of emotional maturity in what could be no more than fifty years? Shame won out, shame at his own reaction, and Verd felt himself flushing.
Awan looked concerned. "Perhaps I should come back later," he suggested.
"No! I'm all right." Verd had found his tabac stick without thinking. He pulled in a deep, cooling draft of orange smoke, and held it in his lungs for a long moment.
"A few more questions," he said briskly. "Does the Zoo consignment have grass seed? Are there any bacteria or algae?"
"Grass, yes. Forty-three varieties. No bacteria, I'm afraid."
"That's not good. It takes bacteria to turn rock dust into fertile soil."
"Yes." Avran considered. "We could start the process with sewage from the ship mixed with intestinal flora. Then add the rock dust. We have earthworms. It might work."
"Good."
"Now I have a question, Captain. What is that?"
Verd followed his pointing finger. "Never seen a tabac stick?"
Avran shook his head.
"There's a funny tranquilizer in tobacco that helps you concentrate, lets you block out distractions.
People used to have to inhale tobacco smoke to get it. That caused lung cancer. Now we do it better.
Are there tobacco plants in the consignment?"
"I'm afraid not. Can you give up the habit?"
"If I have to. But I'll hate it."
Verd sat for a moment after Avran had left, then got up and hunted down Parliss. "Avran claims to be allergic to boosterspice. I want to know if it's true. Can you find out?"
"
Sure, Captain. It'll be in the medical record."
"Good.
"Why would he lie, Captain?"
"He may have a religious ban on boosterspice. If so, he might think I'd shoot him full of it just because I need him. And he'd be right."
There was no point in interviewing Strac Astrophysics again. Parliss told him that Strac spent most of his time in his room, and that he had found a pocket computer somewhere.
"He must have something in mind," said Parliss.
The next day Parliss came to the cabin. "I've gone through the medical histories," he said. "We're all in good shape, except Avran Zooman and Laspia Waitress. Avran told the truth. He's allergic to boosterspice. Laspia has a pair of cultured arms, no telling how she lost the old ones, and both ulnas have machinery in them. One's a dooper, one's a multirange sonic. I wonder what that sweet girl is doing armed to the teeth like that."
"So do I. Can you sabotage her?"
"I put an extension-recharger in her room. If she tries to shoot anyone she'll find her batteries are drained."
***
The sixth day was the day of mutiny.
Veid and Parliss were in the crew common room, going over Parliss' hundred-and-fifty-year schedule for shipboard living, when the door opened to admit Chanda. The first hint came from Chanda's taut, determined expression. Then Verd saw that someone had followed her in. He stood up to protest, then stood speechless as a line of passengers trooped into the crew common room, filling it nearly to bursting.
"I'm sorry, Captain," said Chanda. "We've come to demand your resignation."
Verd, still standing, let his eyes run over them. The pretty auburn-haired woman in front, the one who held her arms in an inconspicuously strained attitude-she must be Laspia Waitress. Jimm Farmer was also in the front rank. And Strac Astrophysics, looking acutely embarrassed. Many looked embarrassed, and many looked angry; Verd wasn't sure what they were angry at, or who. He gave himself a few seconds to think. Let 'em wait it out...
"On what grounds?" he asked mildly.
"On the ground that it's the best chance we have to stay alive," said Chanda.
"That's not sufficient grounds. You know that. You need a criminal charge to bring against me: dereliction of duty, sloppiness with the drive beam, murder, violation of religious tenets, drug addiction.