The Rolling Stones

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Dr. Stone wrote them down:

  Dauntless

  Icarus

  Jabberwock

  Susan B. Anthony

  H.M.S. Pinafore

  Iron Duke

  The Clunker

  Morning Star

  Star Wagon

  Tumbleweed

  Go-Devil

  Oom Paul

  Onward

  Viking

  “One would think,” Roger grumbled, “that with all the self-declared big brains there are around this table someone would show some originality. Almost every name on the list can be found in the Big Register—half of them for ships still in commission. I move we strike out those tired, second-hand, used-before names and consider only fresh ones.”

  Hazel looked at him suspiciously. “What ones will that leave?”

  “Well—”

  “You’ve looked them up, haven’t you? I thought I caught you sneaking a look at the slips before breakfast.”

  “Mother, your allegation is immaterial, irrelevant, and unworthy of you.”

  “But true. Okay; let’s have a vote. Or does someone want to make a campaign speech?”

  Dr. Stone rapped on the table with her thimble. “We’ll vote. I’ve still got a medical association meeting to get to tonight.” As chairman she ruled that any name receiving less than two votes in the first round would be eliminated. Secret ballot was used; when Meade canvassed the vote, seven names had gotten one vote each, none had received two.

  Roger Stone pushed back his chair. “Agreement from this family is too much to expect. I’m going to bed. Tomorrow morning I’m going to register her as the R.S. Deadlock.”

  “Daddy, you wouldn’t!” Meade protested.

  “Just watch me. The R.S. Hair Shirt might be better. Or the R.S. Madhouse.”

  “Not bad,” agreed Hazel. “It sounds like us. Never a dull moment.”

  “I, for one,” retorted her son, “could stand a little decent monotony.”

  “Rubbish! We thrive on trouble. Do you want to get covered with moss?”

  “What’s ‘moss,’ Grandma Hazel?” Lowell demanded.

  “Huh? It’s…well, it’s what rolling stones don’t gather.”

  Roger snapped his fingers. “Hazel, you’ve just named the ship.”

  “Eh? Come again.”

  “The Rolling Stones. No, the Rolling Stone.”

  Dr. Stone glanced up. “I like that, Roger.”

  “Meade?”

  “Sounds good, Daddy.”

  “Hazel?”

  “This is one of your brighter days, son.”

  “Stripped of the implied insult, I take it that means yes.”

  “I don’t like it,” objected Pollux. “Castor and I plan to gather quite a bit of moss.”

  “It’s four to three, even if you get Buster to go along with you and your accomplice. Overruled. The Rolling Stone it is.”

  Despite their great sizes and tremendous power spaceships are surprisingly simple machines. Every technology goes through three stages: first, a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom.

  In transportation, the ox cart and the rowboat represent the first stage of technology.

  The second stage might well be represented by the automobiles of the middle twentieth century just before the opening of interplanetary travel. These unbelievable museum pieces were for their time fast, sleek and powerful—but inside their skins were assembled a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery. The prime mover for such a juggernaut might have rested in one’s lap; the rest of the mad assembly consisted of afterthoughts intended to correct the uncorrectable, to repair the original basic mistake in design—for automobiles and even the early aeroplanes were “powered” (if one may call it that) by “reciprocating engines.”

  A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a “water jacket” or “cooling system,” then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.

  What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name “reciprocating”) and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.

  The prime mover was used only to accelerate and to overcome “friction”—a concept then in much wider engineering use. To decelerate, stop, or turn the heroic human operator used his own muscle power, multiplied precariously through a series of levers.

  Despite the name “automobile” these vehicles had no autocontrol circuits; control, such as it was, was exercised second by second for hours on end by a human being peering out through a small pane of dirty silica glass, and judging unassisted and often disastrously his own motion and those of other objects. In almost all cases the operator had no notion of the kinetic energy stored in his missile and could not have written the basic equation. Newton’s Laws of Motion were to him mysteries as profound as the meaning of the universe.

  Nevertheless millions of these mechanical jokes swarmed over our home planet, dodging each other by inches or failing to dodge. None of them ever worked right; by their nature they could not work right; and they were constantly getting out of order. Their operators were usually mightily pleased when they worked at all. When they did not, which was every few hundred miles (hundred, not hundred thousand), they hired a member of a social class of arcane specialists to make inadequate and always expensive temporary repairs.

  Despite their mad shortcomings, these “automobiles” were the most characteristic form of wealth and the most cherished possessions of their time. Three whole generations were slaves to them.

  The Rolling Stone was of the third stage of technology. Her power plant was nearly 100% efficient, and, save for her gyroscopes, she contained almost no moving parts—the power plant used no moving parts at all; a rocket engine is the simplest of all possible heat engines. Castor and Pollux might have found themselves baffled by the legendary Model-T Ford automobile, but the Rolling Stone was not nearly that complex, she was merely much larger. Many of the fittings they had to handle were very massive, but the Moon’s one-sixth gravity was an enormous advantage; only occasionally did they have to resort to handling equipment.

  Having to wear a vacuum suit while doing mechanic’s work was a handicap but they were not conscious of it. They had worn space suits whenever they were outside the pressurized underground city since before they could remember; they worked in them and wore them without thinking about them, as their grandfather had worn overalls. They conducted the entire overhaul without pressurizing the ship because it was such a nuisance to have to be forever cycling an airlock, dressing and undressing, whenever they wanted anything outside the ship.

  An IBM company representative from the city installed the new ballistic computer and ran it in, but after he had gone the boys took it apart and checked it throughout themselves, being darkly suspicious of any up-check given by a manufacturer’s employee. The ballistic computer of a space ship has to be right; without perfect performance from it a ship is a mad robot, certain to crash and kill its passengers. The new computer was of the standard “I-tell-you-three-times” variety, a triple brain each third of which was capable of solving the whole problem; if one triplet failed, the other two would outvote it and cut it off from action, permitting thereby at least one perf
ect landing and a chance to correct the failure.

  The twins made personally sure that the multiple brain was sane in all its three lobes, then, to their disgust, their father and grandmother checked everything that they had done.

  The last casting had been x-rayed, the last metallurgical report had been received from the space port laboratories, the last piece of tubing had been reinstalled and pressure tested; it was time to move the Rolling Stone from Dan Ekizian’s lot to the port, where a technician of the Atomic Energy Commission—a grease monkey with a Ph.D.—would install and seal the radioactive bricks which fired her “boiler.” There, too, she would take on supplies and reactive mass, stabilized monatomic hydrogen; in a pinch the Rolling Stone could eat anything, but she performed best on “single-H.”

  The night before the ship was to be towed to the space port the twins tackled their father on a subject dear to their hearts—money. Castor made an indirect approach. “See here, Dad, we want to talk with you seriously.”

  “So? Wait till I phone my lawyer.”

  “Aw, Dad! Look, we just want to know whether or not you’ve made up your mind where we are going?”

  “Eh? What do you care? I’ve already promised you that it will be some place new to you. We won’t go to Earth, nor to Venus, not this trip.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  “I may just close my eyes, set up a prob on the computer by touch, and see what happens. If the prediction takes us close to any rock bigger than the ship, we’ll scoot off and have a look at it. That’s the way to enjoy traveling.”

  Pollux said, “But, Dad, you can’t load a ship if you don’t know where it’s going.”

  Castor glared at him; Roger Stone stared at him. “Oh,” he said slowly, “I begin to see. But don’t worry about it. As skipper, it is my responsibility to see that we have whatever we need aboard before we blast.”

  Dr. Stone said quietly, “Don’t tease them, Roger.”

  “I’m not teasing.”

  “You’re managing to tease me, Daddy,” Meade said suddenly. “Let’s settle it. I vote for Mars.”

  “It’s not subject to vote.”

  Hazel said, “The deuce it ain’t!”

  “Pipe down, Mother. Time was, when the senior male member of a family spoke, everybody did what he—”

  “Roger, if you think I am going to roll over and play dead—”

  “I said, ‘pipe down.’ But everybody in this family thinks it’s funny to try to get around Pop. Meade sweet-talks me. The twins fast-talk me. Buster yells until he gets what he wants. Hazel bullies me and pulls seniority.” He looked at his wife. “You, too, Edith. You give in until you get your own way.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “See what I mean? You all think papa is a schnook. But I’m not. I’ve got a soft head, a pliable nature, and probably the lowest I.Q. in the family, but this clambake is going to be run to suit me.”

  “What’s a ‘clambake’?” Lowell wanted to know.

  “Keep your child quiet, Edith.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I’m going on a picnic, a wanderjahr. Anyone who wants to come along is invited. But I refuse to deviate by as much as a million miles from whatever trajectory suits me. I bought this ship from money earned in spite of the combined opposition of my whole family; I did not touch one thin credit of the money I hold in trust for our two young robber barons—and I don’t propose to let them run the show.”

  Dr. Stone said quietly, “They merely asked where we were going. I would like to know, too.”

  “So they did. But why? Castor, you want to know so that you can figure a cargo, don’t you?”

  “Well—yes. Anything wrong with that? Unless we know what market we’re taking it to, we won’t know what to stock.”

  “True enough. But I don’t recall authorizing any such commercial ventures. The Rolling Stone is a family yacht.”

  Pollux cut in with, “For the love of Pete, Dad! With all that cargo space just going to waste, you’d think that—”

  “An empty hold gives us more cruising range.”

  “But—”

  “Take it easy. This subject is tabled for the moment. What do you two propose to do about your educations?”

  Castor said, “I thought that was settled. You said we could go along.”

  “That part is settled. But we’ll be coming back this way in a year or two. Are you prepared to go down to Earth to school then—and stay there—until you get your degrees?”

  The twins looked at each other; neither one of them said anything. Hazel butted in: “Quit being so offensively orthodox, Roger. I’ll take over their educations. I’ll give them the straight data. What they taught me in school durn near ruined me, before I got wise and started teaching myself.”

  Roger Stone looked bleakly at his mother. “You would teach them, all right. No, thanks, I prefer a somewhat more normal approach.”

  “‘Normal!’ Roger, that’s a word with no meaning.”

  “Perhaps not, around here. But I’d like the twins to grow up as near normal as possible.”

  “Roger, have you ever met any normal people? I never have. The so-called normal man is a figment of the imagination; every member of the human race, from Jojo the cave man right down to that final culmination of civilization, namely me, has been as eccentric as a pet coon—once you caught him with his mask off.”

  “I won’t dispute the part about yourself.”

  “It’s true for everybody. You try to make the twins ‘normal’ and you’ll simply stunt their growth.”

  Roger Stone stood up. “That’s enough. Castor, Pollux—come with me. Excuse us, everybody.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Sissy,” said Hazel. “I was just warming up to my rebuttal.”

  He led them into his study, closed the door. “Sit down.”

  The twins did so. “Now we can settle this quietly. Boys, I’m quite serious about your educations. You can do what you like with your lives—turn pirate or get elected to the Grand Council. But I won’t let you grow up ignorant.”

  Castor answered, “Sure, Dad, but we do study. We study all the time. You’ve said yourself that we are better engineers than half the young snots that come up from Earth.”

  “Granted. But it’s not enough. Oh, you can learn most things on your own but I want you to have a formal, disciplined, really sound grounding in mathematics.”

  “Huh? Why, we cut our teeth on differential equations!”

  Pollux added, “We know Hudson’s Manual by heart. We can do a triple integration in our heads faster than Hazel can. If there’s one thing we do know, it’s mathematics.”

  Roger Stone shook his head sadly. “You can count on your fingers but you can’t reason. You probably think that the interval from zero to one is the same as the interval from ninety-nine to one hundred.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Is it? If so, can you prove it?” Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it into his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of the fields of mathematics invented thus far by the human mind. “Let’s see you find your way around that page.”

  The twins blinked at it. In the upper left-hand corner of the chart they spotted the names of subjects they had studied; the rest of the array was unknown territory; in most cases they did not even recognize the names of the subjects. In the ordinary engineering forms of the calculus they actually were adept; they had not been boasting. They knew enough of vector analysis to find their way around unassisted in electrical engineering and electronics; they knew classical geometry and trigonometry well enough for the astrogating of a space ship, and they had had enough of non-Euclidean geometry, tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to get along with an atomic power plant.

  But it had never occurred to them that they had not yet really penetrated the enormous and magnificent field
of mathematics.

  “Dad,” asked Pollux in a small voice, “what’s a ‘hyper-ideal’?”

  “Time you found out.”

  Castor looked quickly at his father. “How many of these things have you studied, Dad?”

  “Not enough. Not nearly enough. But my sons should know more than I do.”

  It was agreed that the twins would study mathematics intensively the entire time the family was in space, and not simply under the casual supervision of their father and grandmother but formally and systematically through I.C.S. correspondence courses ordered up from Earth. They would take with them spools enough to keep them busy for at least a year and mail their completed lessons from any port they might touch. Mr. Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master.

  “Now, boys, about this matter of cargo—”

  The twins waited; he went on: “I’ll lift the stuff for you—”

  “Gee, Dad, that’s swell!”

  “—at cost.”

  The twins suddenly looked cautious. “How do you figure ‘cost’?” Castor asked.

  “You figure it and I’ll check your figures. Don’t try to flummox me or I’ll stick on a penalty. If you’re going to be businessmen, don’t confuse the vocation with larceny.”

  “Right, sir. Uh…we still can’t order until we know where we are going.”

  “True. Well, how would Mars suit you, as the first stop?”

  “Mars?” Both boys got far-away looks in their eyes; their lips moved soundlessly.

  “Well? Quit figuring your profits; you aren’t there yet.”

  “Mars? Mars is fine, Dad!”

  “Very well. One more thing: fail to keep up your studies and I won’t let you sell a tin whistle.”

  “Oh, we’ll study!” The twins got out while they were ahead. Roger Stone looked at the closed door with a fond smile on his face, an expression he rarely let them see. Good boys! Thank heaven he hadn’t been saddled with a couple of obedient, well-behaved little nincompoops!