“The first problem,” said Ralph, in his best lecture-room manner, “is to swing the ship. As you are all, no doubt, aware, we possess no gyroscopes. Even so, such devices are not essential. The master of a windjammer had no gyroscopes to aid him in setting and steering a course . . .”
“He had a rudder,” I said, “acting upon and acted upon by the fluid medium through which his hull progressed.”
Ralph glared at me. “A resourceful windjammer master,” he stated flatly, “was not utterly dependent upon his rudder. Bear in mind the fact that his ship was not, repeat not, a submarine and, therefore, moved through no less than two fluid mediums, air and water. His rudder, as you have been so good to tell us, acted upon and was acted upon by the water in which it was immersed. But his sails acted upon and were acted upon by the air.” He paused for breath. “We, in this vessel, may consider light a fluid medium. Now, if you will observe carefully . . .”
We observed. We watched Ralph’s capable hands playing over the control panel. We watched the TV screen. We saw the spars extend from the hull so that the ship, briefly, had the appearance of some spherical, spiny monster. And then the roller reefing gear came into play and the sails were unfurled—on one side a dazzling white, on the other jet black. We could feel the gentle centrifugal force as the ship turned about her short axis, bringing the Lorn sun dead astern.
Then spars rotated and, as far as that camera mounted at the end of its telescopic mast was concerned, the sails were invisible. Their white surfaces were all presented to the Lorn sun, to the steady photon gale. We were running free, racing before the interstellar wind.
I realized that Ralph was singing softly:
“Way, hey, and up she rises,
Way, hey, and up she rises,
Way, hey, and up she rises . . .
Early in the morning!”
Chapter 12
So there we were, bowling along under full sail, running the easting down. In some ways the Erikson drive was a vast improvement over the Mannschenn Drive. There was not that continuous high whine of the ever-precessing gyroscopes, there was not that uneasy feeling of déjà vu that is a side effect of the Mannschenn Drive’s temporal precession field. Too, we could look out of the control room and see a reasonable picture of the Universe as it is and not, in the case of the Galactic Lens, something like a Klein bottle fabricated by a drunken glass blower.
Flying Cloud was an easy ship, once the course had been set, once she was running free before the photon gale. She was an easy ship—as a ship, as an assemblage of steel and plastic and fissioning uranium. But a ship is more than the metals and chemicals that have gone into her construction. In the final analysis it is the crew that make the ship—and Flying Cloud was not happy.
It was the strong element of sexual jealousy that was the trouble. I did my best to keep my own yardarm clear, but I could observe—and feel jealous myself. It was obvious that Sandra was Captain’s lady. It was obvious, too, that both Martha Wayne and Peggy Simmons had aspired to that position and that both were jealous. And Doc Jenkins couldn’t hide the fact, for all his cynicism, that he would have welcomed a roll in the hay with Martha. The only one who was really amused by it all was Smethwick. He drifted into the Control Room during my watch and said, “Ours is a happy ship, ours is.”
“Are you snooping?” I demanded sharply. “If you are, Claude, I’ll see to it, personally, that you’re booted out of the service.”
He looked hurt. “No, I’m not snooping. Apart from the regulations, it’s a thing I wouldn’t dream of doing. But even you must be sensitive to the atmosphere, and you’re not a telepath.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I am sensitive.” I offered him a cigarette, took and lit one myself. “But what’s new? Anything?”
“The flap seems to have died down on Lorn,” he told me. “We’re a fait accompli. Old Grimes got Livitski—he’s the new Port Forlorn Psionic Radio Officer—to push a message through to wish us well and to tell us that he has everything under control at his end.”
“Have you informed the master?” I asked.
“He’s in his quarters.” he said. “I don’t think that he wants to be disturbed.”
“Like that,” I said.
“Like that,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
We sat in silence—there was still enough acceleration to enable us to do so without using seat belts—smoking. I looked out of the transparency at the blackness, towards the faint, far spark that was the Grollor sun. Claude looked at nothing. I heard the sound of feet on the control room deck, turned and saw that the faint noise had been made by Peggy Simmons. She said, “I’m sorry. I . . . I thought that you were alone, Peter . . .”
“Don’t let me interfere with love’s young dream,” grinned Smethwick, getting to his feet.
“You’ve a dirty mind!” flared the girl.
“If it is dirty,” he told her nastily, “it’s from the overflow from other people’s minds. But I’ll go away and leave you to it.”
“I’m on watch,” I said virtuously. “And, in any case, Peggy has probably come here to report some mechanical malfunction. Or something.”
“Yes,” she said.
She dropped into the chair that had been vacated by the telepath, accepted a cigarette from my pack. I waited until Claude was gone and then asked, “What’s the trouble, Peggy?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing mechanical, that is. Although I should check some of the wiring where the shell splinters pierced the inner sheathing.”
“Then why don’t you?” I asked.
“Because,” she told me, “for the first few days in space one has more important things to worry about. There’s the file, and the auxiliary machinery, and . . .”
“Surely the wiring is part of the auxiliary machinery,” I pointed out.
“Not this wiring. It’s the power supply to the trimming and reefing gear—and we won’t be using that for a while, not until we make landfall.”
“Planetfall,” I corrected.
“Ralph says landfall,” she told me.
“He would,” I said. “He must have brought at least a couple of trunks full of books about windjammers—fact, fiction and poetry—away with him. Mind you, some of it is good.” I quoted:
“I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her by . . .”
I gestured widely towards the Grollor sun, the distant spark that, thanks to the Doppler effect, was shining with a steely glitter instead of its normal ruddiness. I said, “There’s his star to steer by.” I thumped the arm of my chair. “And here’s his tall ship.”
“And so he has everything he wants,” she said.
“Everything.” I decided to be blunt. “He’s got his tall ship, and he’s got his star to steer by, and he’s got his woman.”
“But,” she said, “I could give him so much more.”
“Peggy,” I admonished, “don’t kid yourself. You’re attractive, and you’re capable—but Sandra is rather more than attractive. And she’s a good cook. Take my advice: just forget any schoolgirlish ideas you may have of becoming the captain’s lady. Make this voyage—after all, you’ve no option now—and then get the hell out . . .”
“And marry and raise a family,” she concluded. “But I don’t want to, Peter. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be the wife of some grubby little clerk or mechanic and spend all my remaining days on Lorn.”
“All right,” I said, “if that’s the way you feel about it. But this is an order, Peggy. Lay off Ralph. We’re probably in enough trouble already without having triangles added to our worries.”
She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it and put it to her mouth. She stared at the eddying wisps of smoke. She said, “That poetry you quoted. Tall ships and stars. That’s what Ralph really wants, isn’t it?”
“Tall ships and stars and the trimmings,�
�� I said.
“Never mind the trimmings,” she told me. “And when it comes to trimmings, I can outtrim Sandra.”
“Peggy,” I said, “you can’t. You’re not . . . experienced.”
Her face lit up briefly with a flash of humor. “And whose fault is that?” she asked. Then, soberly, “But I can give him real trimmings. Any woman can sprawl in bed, arms and legs wide open—but I’m the woman who can make Ralph, and his ship, go down in history.”
“Judging by the flap when we shoved off,” I said, “they already have.”
She said, “Correct me if I’m wrong—but the Erikson drive, as it stands, will never be a commercial success. It takes far too long for a cargo, even a non-perishable cargo for which there’s no mad rush, to be carted from point A to point B. And there’s the problem of manning, too. As far as this ship was concerned, Uncle Andy was able to assemble a bunch of misfits with no close ties for the job, people who wouldn’t give a damn if the round voyage lasted a couple of objective centuries. But it mightn’t be so easy to find another crew for another lightjammer. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said, after a pause.
She went on, “I’m new to space, but I’ve read plenty. I’m no physicist, but I have a rough idea of the modus operandi of the various interstellar drives. And, so far, there’s been no faster-than-light drive.”
“What!” I exclaimed.
“No, there hasn’t. I’m right, Peter. The basic idea of the Ehrenhaft drive was that of a magnetic particle trying to be in two places at the same time in a magnetic field or current, the ship being the particle. But, as far as I can gather, space was warped so that she could do just that. I couldn’t follow the math, but I got the general drift of it. And then, of course, there’s the Mannschenn Drive—but there the apparent FTL speeds are achieved by tinkering with time.”
“Hmm,” I grunted. “Hmm.”
“Getting away from machinery,” she said, “and back to personalities, Ralph loves his ship. I’m sure that if he had to make a choice between Sandra and Flying Cloud it wouldn’t be Flying Cloud left in the lurch. But . . . but what do you think he’d feel about a woman who made him the captain of the first real FTL starwagon?”
I said, “You’d better see Doc on your way aft. He stocks quite a good line in sedative mixtures.”
She said, “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m not,” I assured her. “But, Peggy, even I, and I’m no physicist, can tell you that it’s quite impossible to exceed the speed of light. As you have already pointed out, we can cheat, but that’s all. And in this ship we can’t even cheat. We can no more outrun light than a windjammer could outrun the wind that was her motive power.” I pointed to a dial on the panel before me. “That’s our log. It works by Doppler effect. At the moment our speed is Lume 0.345 and a few odd decimals. It’s building up all the time, and fast. By the end of the watch it should be about Lume 0.6 . . .”
She said, “A fantastic acceleration.”
“Isn’t it? By rights we should be spread over the deck plates like strawberry jam. But, thanks to the anti-gravity, this is almost an inertialess drive. Anyhow, thanks to our utterly weightless condition, we may achieve Lume 0.9 recurring. But that’s as high as we can possibly get.”
“I see,” she said doubtfully. Then she added, “But . . .” She shrugged and said, “Oh, never mind.”
She got up to leave.
“Thanks for dropping in,” I said.
“And thanks for the fatherly advice,” she said.
“Think nothing of it,” I told her generously.
“I shan’t,” she said, with what I belatedly realized was deliberate ambiguity.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 13
It was a couple of mornings later as measured by our chronometer, and, after a not very good breakfast, I was making rounds. It’s odd how that unappetizing meal sticks in my memory. Sandra was acting third mate now, and Ralph had decreed that Martha Wayne take over as catering officer. And Martha, as the old saying goes, couldn’t boil water without burning it. Sandra’s scrambled eggs had always been a delight—fluffy but not watery, with the merest hint of garlic, prettied up with chopped parsley and paprika, piled high on crisp, lavishly buttered toast. The less said about Martha’s scrambled eggs the better.
Anyhow, I was not in a good mood as I made my way aft from the wardroom. Flying Cloud was still accelerating slightly, so “down” was aft. Rather to my disappointment I discovered nothing with which to find fault in the farm, the compartment housing the hydroponic tanks and the yeast and tissue-culture vats. I hurried through the anti-matter room—frankly, that huge, spherical casing surrounded by great horseshoe magnets always gave me the shivers. I knew what was inside it, and knew that should it ever make contact with normal matter we should all go up in a flare of uncontrolled and uncontrollable energy. In the auxiliary machinery space I did start finding fault. It was obvious that Peggy had done nothing as yet about removing the splinter-pierced panels of the internal sheathing to inspect the wiring.
But there was no sign of Peggy.
I continued aft, through the reactor room and then into the tunnel that led to the extreme stern. As I clambered down the ladder I heard the clinking of tools and the sound of a voice upraised in song. It was Doc Jenkins’s not unpleasant tenor.
“Sally Brown, she’s a bright mulatter—
Way, hey, roll and go!
She drinks rum and chews terbaccer—
Spend my money on Sally Brown!
“Sally Brown, she’s a proper lady—
Way, hey, roll and go!
Got a house right full o’ yaller babies—
Spend my money on Sally Brown!”
I dropped the last few feet into the transom space, landing with a faint thud. Doc Jenkins and Peggy looked up from what they were doing. Doc was wearing only a pair of shorts and his pudgy torso was streaked with grime and perspiration. Peggy was clad in disreputable overalls. She was holding a welding torch.
She said, rather guiltily, “Good morning, Peter.”
“Good morning,” I replied automatically. Then, “I know that I’m only the mate, but might I inquire what you two are up to?”
“We’re going to make this bitch roll and go,” replied Peggy happily.
“What do you mean?” I asked coldly.
I looked around the cramped compartment, saw two discarded space-suits that had been flung carelessly on to the deck. And I saw what looked like the breech of a gun protruding from the plating. Around its circumference the welding was still bright. I looked from it back to the spacesuits.
“Have you been outside?” I demanded.
“No,” said Peggy.
“Don’t worry, Peter,” said Jenkins. “We didn’t lose any atmosphere. We sealed the transom space off before we went to work, and put the pump on it . . .”
“Remote control,” said Peggy, “from inside.”
“And you pierced the hull?” I asked with mounting anger.
“Only a small hole,” admitted the doctor.
“Damn it!” I flared. “This is too much. Only four days out and you’re already space-happy. Burning holes in the shell plating and risking all our lives. And I still don’t know what it’s all about. When Ralph hears of this . . .”
“He’ll be pleased,” said Peggy simply.
“He’ll be pleased, all right. He’ll roll on the deck in uncontrollable ecstasy. He’ll have your guts for a necktie, both of you, and then boot you out of the airlock without a spacesuit. He’ll . . .”
“Be reasonable, Peter,” admonished Jenkins.
“Be reasonable? I am being reasonable. Peggy here has work that she should be doing, instead of which I find her engaged in some fantastic act of sabotage with you, one of the ship’s executive officers, aiding and abetting.”
“Come off it, Peter,” said the Doc. “I’m second mate of this wagon, and I signed the articles as such, and one of the clauses say
s that deck and engine room departments should cooperate . . .”
“Never mind this second mate business,” I told him. “As ship’s surgeon, you’re still a member of the deck department, ranking with, but below, the mate. And as far as I’m concerned, the prime function of the engine room department is to do as it’s bloody well told.”
“Then why don’t you tell me something?” asked Peggy, sweetly reasonable.
“I will,” I promised. “I will. But, to begin with, you will tell me something. You will tell me just what the hell you two are playing at down here.”
“Is that a lawful command?” asked Peggy.
“I suppose so,” admitted Jenkins grudgingly.
“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll tell you. What you see . . .” she kicked the breech of the cannon with a heavy shoe . . . “is the means whereby we shall exceed the speed of light.”
“But it’s impossible,” I said.
“How do you know?” she countered.
“It’s common knowledge,” I sneered.
“Way back in the Middle Ages,” she said, “it was common knowledge that the sun went around Earth . . .”
But I was giving her only half my attention. Out of the corner of my eyes I was watching Doc Jenkins. He was edging gradually towards the switch of the power point into which the welding tool was plugged. I shrugged. I didn’t see why he had to be so surreptitious about it. If Peggy wanted to finish whatever welding she had been doing when I had disturbed them, what did it matter?
Or perhaps it did matter.
I said, “I suppose this welded seam is tight?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Then we’ll get back amidships. You’ve plenty of work to do in the auxiliary motor room.”
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