“We’re arbite women?” she said. “That doesn’t make it less likely—it makes it more. When the men of an oppressed group are beaten down, that tends to make the women stronger, not weaker. Necessity makes them stronger.”
He nodded, slowly.
“Sometime, when this is all over,” he said, “perhaps we can argue about that But right now and here neither one of us ought to be wasting strength on argument.”
“What are we saving our strength for?”
“For ...” He smiled, as grimly as she had smiled at him on occasion. “Mara, you may have given up. I haven’t.”
Her manner softened suddenly.
“Good,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t Then you actually will take over the piloting, and make the second course change to get us to 20B-40?”
“Take over the piloting?” Her casual assumption that he could, almost took his breath away. “I’ve tried to explain how that isn’t possible.”
“What else is there to do?” she asked. “If you haven’t given up it’s because you still think we can get to 20B-40. And if we’re going to get there, who else is going to manage it?”
He laughed. It was a laugh so full of irony that it surprised even him. Whether it surprised Mara, he could not tell. He swung back around to look once more at the alien controls.
“All right!” he said. “Leave me alone for a while. Leave me alone here to study things; and if there’s a miracle capable of being worked, I’ll try it!”
12
Twentieth day—20:45 hours
“All right, Groce,” said Giles. “I want you to sit there and listen to me. And I mean listen. If you don’t understand what I mean, tell me. Interrupt whatever I’m saying and tell me right away. This isn’t a situation where you can—”
He checked himself, as he had come to do so much lately. He had been about to warn Groce that this was not the kind of work situation encountered on Earth where it was safe to pretend understanding when understanding was actually not there. Now, some new sensitivity stopped him.
“This isn’t,” repeated Giles, “a situation where we can take the chance that you and I don’t understand each other. You follow me on that?”
Groce nodded. The man’s face was hardly different of expression than Giles had ever seen it, but Giles felt a sense of excitement rising almost like steam from the small body in the command chair next to his.
“All right,” said Giles. “Now, I do know the broad outlines of what needs to be done. First, we have to establish where we are—what our position is as a moving point along the line of our course. Then we have to establish the position of the destination we want—again as a moving point along the line of its course— and from this work out the direction and angle of change we want in our present course to take it toward that destination.”
To his surprise, Groce nodded.
“Sounds simple,” said the arbite.
“That’s probably because I’m making it sound simple,” said Giles, “so I can explain it. The fact is that it isn’t that simple at all. For the Captain it was. She took observations with the equipment here, or a figure from her book, to locate her ultimate destination, then referred to the book in other ways I don’t know anything about, in order to translate that information into heading and correction factors. I can make observations with the equipment—I can do that much. I can also set a heading and correction factor into the drive control. But the gap lies in what the book would have told the Captain. How do I derive correction figures from the position figures I get by observation?”
“Why the correction?” Groce asked.
“Because this lifeship’s powered by a warp drive, like the Albenareth spaceship was,” Giles said. “You can’t feel it, but about once every eleven minutes the drive is kicking us into warp space and back out again. We cover immense distances of normal space every millisecond that we’re in warp, but we don’t keep moving there more than a few milliseconds because in warp our motion’s got only an eighty percent possibility of being correct You understand? We’re going in the right direction only about eighty percent of the time. Given the proper correction factor, the lifeship’s computer would keep recalculating our path back on target for our destination and putting us back on target for our destination. But even with this, if you could see us from the outside, it’d look like we were wobbling through space in a very erratic manner. Unless we can establish a correction factor, we’ll have to stop and recalculate our position by hand, every time we go in and out of warp—several hundred times every ship-day—until we’re inside the solar system of our destination planet, and it’ll take us a thousand years to get there—a thousand years we haven’t got.” Groce shook his head with continued and determined optimism.
“This compute of mine, and me,” he said, “can give you any constant you need, if I’ve got the rest of the elements of the problem. How do we start?”
“We start,” said Giles, grimly, “by my trying to apply interplanetary navigation to interstellar space. Basically, what we’re up against is a problem in solid geometry, only with moving instead of fixed points....”
He continued explaining. It was a curious situation. Essentially, before they could get to grips with their problem, they had to educate each other. Groce, Giles found, was number-minded rather than space-minded.
Giles had to search and struggle for ways of presenting the problem to Groce in math terms the arbite could understand and use.
“Look,” said Giles, “visualize cutting a triangle out of cardboard, or something of that nature, and holding two points of it with thumb and finger.”
He held up his thumb and middle finger to illustrate. Groce nodded, frowning.
“The point—the angle—” went on Giles, “that you aren’t touching is free to rotate in a circle. You understand?”
Groce nodded.
“All right,” said Giles. “Assume the two angles your fingers are touching represent known positions. Then your position—the angle you aren’t touching—lies somewhere on that circle; and to pin it down to an exact location, you take a third known point and measure the angle between it and either of the first two.”
“Ah!” said Groce, his face lighting. His fingers danced over the keys of his compute, in self-congratulation at his own understanding, as a musician might play his instrument in a like situation.
“The first three points,” went on Giles, “need to be unique in appearance, outside the galaxy, and a comfortable distance from the galactic plane—you remember my explaining to you what the galactic plane was?”
“Yes,” said Groce.
“All right, then. Three such suitable points might be S. Doradus, the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy, and the nucleus of the Whirlpool nebula—that’s M51 in Canes Venatici.”
“I don’t—” Groce began.
“That’s right,” said Giles. “You don’t know anything about these names I’m mentioning. Don’t let it bother you. The point is that they’re outside the galaxy, out of the galactic plane, and recognizable from anywhere in our galaxy. What I want you to understand is how we use them to determine our position.”
“I understand that,” said Groce, vigorously. “Of course. It’s just geometry, in three dimensions, like you said.”
“Good,” said Giles. “Then I’ll go on. Now, using those reference points I just mentioned will just give us a general location in our galaxy, so general it very nearly includes the Solar System, Earth, Belben, and 20B-40 all at once. In practice, after getting our general position with these points from outside the galaxy, we’d have to consult star charts and pick three bright, known stars closer to us and refigure to get a more precise location. But, as it happens in this case, we don’t need to do that. I studied the stellar neighborhood of our original route to Belben and I know roughly where we are in a general area.”
Groce nodded. It did not occur to him, evidently, to ask why Giles should have gone to the trouble of studying the star maps an
d other necessary space navigational material.
“I also know the position of 20B-40, in reference to the area of space it inhabits, and the larger stars of its neighborhood,” Giles went on. “So the only thing we need to discover is our own position right now, as precisely as possible, and the angle from that to 20B-40. We’ve only made the single course change at the captain’s hands since we left the original route to Belben, and I’m betting that this involved a single phase shift. Consequently we shouldn’t be more than one phase shift off our original line of travel and still in a stellar neighborhood where I can recognize the larger stars and other light sources visible in the screen there—”
He pointed.
“In fact,” he said, “I do recognize them. So calculating our present position should be relatively simple. I can use the control section of this lifeship well enough to take angle readings on the three stars I’ve pointed out; and that gives us our location, from which we can figure the angle from our present direction or movement to 20B-40. Then we’re ready to make a correctional phase shift.”
“What about what you talked about earlier?” asked Groce. “Everything so far you’ve mentioned is simple. I could run the calculations on something like that in my sleep. But what about that correctional factor you mentioned? Didn’t you say we had only an eighty percent chance of moving correctly through warp space even after we shift the lifeship on a correct course?”
“That’s it,” said Giles. He sat back with a heavy exhalation of breath. “That’s the real problem. The correction factor represents a tendency for the vessel to drift in warp space. The drift is different with every vessel and each separate course it takes. The Captain got it from her book. Somehow we’ve got to work it out for ourselves—that particular adjustment figure that applies to this lifeship and the unique course that exists from where we are at this moment to our destination of 20B-40.”
“How?”
Giles sighed again.
“The only way I can think of,” he said. “We’ve got to calculate our course, then shift and recalculate our new position, to see how far off we are when we come out of shift We keep that up, shift after shift, until we accumulate enough data on the error per shift to guess at a constant correction factor. In other words, something that the lifeship would do automatically, every few minutes or so, we’re going to have to do by hand over and over again, until we learn enough to estimate a correction factor.”
Groce scratched his head.
“Well, Honor, sir,” he said, “we might as well get started, I suppose.”
They got started. Theoretically, Giles had told himself, it was just a matter of doing the necessary work, sticking to it until enough data could be accumulated. Sooner or later they would have it done. Then would come the unsure part—the guessing at a correction factor and, with it, worry. But up until that point things, he had imagined, should go with fair smoothness.
But they did not For one thing, the ib vine had been becoming steadily less productive all the while, and this was now becoming a factor that influenced everyone aboard.
The tiny food ration per person that the vine produced seemed adequate; no one had any real appetite. But the amount of juice the pulp produced was now noticeably less than what they all would have preferred, even those who at first had found the juice sickly sweet and unsatisfying. Thirst ruled everything. There were always at least three or four of them awake at all times now, keeping a jealous watch on the fruit picked and on the juice container. Their skins were tight and shiny, their mouths always dry. They looked at one another with suspicion.
To complicate matters, there was the Captain, still lying on the cot where they had put her, breathing so slowly it was hard to tell if she breathed at all, neither alive nor dead—but able to swallow automatically the daily ration of juice Giles insisted be given the alien along with everyone else. Mutterings about the waste of that ration of juice rose among the others and finally forced Giles to leave his calculations and face them all down.
“But why?” Di wailed. “She’s not even human. And she’s the one who got us in this fix! Anyway, she’s probably already as good as dead—”
“She’s alive!” snapped Giles. His own thirst had brought him close to the end of his tight-leashed temper. “If we refused an Albenareth care in a situation like this it’ll give the Albenareth an excuse to refuse care to humans if another situation like this ever happens and it’s the Albenareth who’ve got the chance to keep the juice, or whatever’s needed, for themselves. We’ve got a responsibility to treat this alien just exactly the way we’d want ourselves treated if it was the other way around.”
“Damn the responsibility!” muttered a male voice. Giles looked about quickly and met the sullen eyes of Frenco, Groce, and Esteven. Only Hem returned his gaze without hint of mutiny.
“We won’t damn responsibility or anything else,” Giles said slowly, looking at each one of them in turn, “while I’m here. Is that clear?”
They made no sound. They were not yet ready to defy him face to face, but from then on, he made a point of breaking off work and watching when it came time for one of the others to lift the alien head and hold a partially filled cup of the precious juice to the unconscious lips. Twice he caught one of the men going through the motions with an empty cup. After that he gave himself the added task of actually bringing the juice to the Captain and getting it down her throat.
Meanwhile, even the calculations in which he and Groce were engaged did not go well. Under the nagging discomfort of his continual thirst, Giles blamed himself for not being more clearheaded when the first of the obviously wrong results showed up. Groce’s compute, he reminded himself, was after all immune to thirst. He painstakingly recalculated with the other man’s help, found a difference he was too weary to check out and carried it through to a conclusion that appeared to check out.
But the same thing happened several times, and in a moment of fury he snapped at Groce, who exploded in denial.
“Wrong? How can I be wrong? I’ve never made a mistake. Never! It’s your figures that’re wrong—Honor, sir!”
The “Honor, sir” came out as an obvious, if not intentional, afterthought Groce did not stop at that, but continued on for some seconds, in an injured tone of voice, reiterating over and over again how impossible a mistake was on the part of himself and his compute.
“All right all right I believe you,” said Giles, finally. “Now, let’s drop the subject and recalculate.”
They did. But in spite of going over this particular calculation twice more, they still got a figure that was obviously wrong.
“We can’t have moved that far on the last warp shift,” muttered Giles. “That much of a shift would give us an error greater than our total progress....” He made up his mind. “Groce, let me see that compute!”
Groce handed it to him reluctantly. Giles examined it, but could find nothing out of the ordinary about it. It was simply a sealed box with ranks of keys with either numbers or symbols on them. Even if he could open it up, he would not be able to tell if anything was wrong with its interior construction, and Groce knew no more about that than he did.
“All right,” said Giles, handing the instrument back. “We’ll do it once more, from the beginning, slowly, and double-check every step as we go.”
They began the recheck. In spite of himself, Giles found he was watching each calculation Groce made with a sort of paranoid intensity. Many of the motions Groce’s figures made on the buttons were meaningless to Giles, but when it came to the other man entering up the compute figures that Giles had just told him...
“Groce!” roared Giles, suddenly—and Groce’s fingers checked abruptly on the keys as if arrested by a paralytic spasm. “Groce!” Giles’ voice was lower now, but snarling. “Groce, that was a nine I just gave you. You punched a five.”
Groce raised his eyes from the compute to Giles’ face, the arbite’s mouth open to protest But no sound came forth. Seeing the expres
sion of the other as a minor to his own, Giles realized that there must be murder written on his own features. Words came softly, viciously, from his throat without his willing them.
“So,” he said, “you never make a mistake, you and your compute? You never make a mistake ...”
His voice was rising in spite of himself. A madness born of thirst and frustration was beating in a pulse at his throat He was beginning to rise from his chair—when an unexpected hoarse shout in Hem’s voice broke in on the mounting tide of his fury.
“Wrong!” Hem was shouting. “Let go—stand back. Honor, sir—come! Come quick!”
Giles bolted from his chair and brushed past Groce, who was in the outer of the two command chairs. He went with long strides back through the openings in the two screen partitions, to find all the others clustered around the cot where the long, dark body of the Captain lay. Hem was holding Biset by the shoulder with one massive hand. His other was clenched in a fist with which he was warning the others back.
“Honor, sir!” he said, his face lighting up with relief as he saw Giles. “I knew you wouldn’t want them to. I told them you wouldn’t But she went ahead anyway—”
He gestured toward Biset with his fist. The Policewoman met Giles’ eye fiercely and without fear.
“That” said Biset nodding at the silent shape of the Captain, “is a threat to all our lives. I was going to put out of her misery.” Biset looked down at the tom-off sleeve of an arbite shipsuit that half covered the Captain’s mouth and nose.
“I don’t know that she’s in any misery. Neither do you,” said Giles, harshly. “In any case, it’s not up to you—any of you—to do anything about it.”
He looked around at the rest of them. They all but glared back. Even Mara’s face was still and set.
“You, too?” he said to Mara.
“Me, too,” she said, clearly. “I wouldn’t have done it myself, but I can’t stand in the way of people who want to live. This isn’t earth, Adelman. This is a lifeship lost somewhere in space with humans on board it who didn’t ask to be here, and who’ve got a right to live.”
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