Starman Jones

by Robert A. Heinlein; Michael Z. Williamson

  “I don’t think so.” Max examined it. It was in fine print and quite thick. But by five in the morning, he had finished it. He woke Sam and gave it back, then went to sleep, his head buzzing with stowage and dunnage, moment arms and mass calculations, hydroponics techniques, cargo records, tax forms, diets, food preservation and preparation, daily, weekly, and quarterly accounts, and how to get rats out of a compartment which must not be evacuated. Simple stuff, he decided—he wondered why such things were considered too esoteric for laymen.

  On the fourth day of his incarceration, Sam fitted him out with spaceside clothes, none of them new, and gave him a worn plastileather personal record book. The first page stated that he was an accepted brother of the Stewards, Cooks, and Purser’s Clerks, having honorably completed his apprenticeship. It listed his skills and it appeared that his dues had been paid each quarter for seven years. What appeared to be his own signature appeared above that of the High Steward, with the seal of the guild embossed through both. The other pages recorded his trips, his efficiency ratings, and other permanent data, each properly signed by the first officers and pursers concerned. He noted with interest that he had been fined three days’ pay in the Cygnus for smoking in an unauthorized place and that he had once for six weeks been allowed to strike for chartsman, having paid the penalty to the Chartsmen & Computers Guild for the chance.

  “See anything odd?” asked Sam.

  “It all looks funny to me.”

  “It says you’ve been to Luna. Everybody’s been to Luna. But the ships you served in are mostly out of commission and none of the pursers happens to be in Earthport now. The only starship you ever jumped in was lost on the trip immediately after the one you took. Get me?”

  “I think so.”

  “When you talk to another spaceman, no matter what ship he served in, it’s not one you served in—you won’t be showing this record to anybody but the purser and your boss anyhow.”

  “But suppose they served in one of these?”

  “Not in the Asgard. We made darn sure. Now I’m going to take you out on an evening of gaiety. You’ll drink warm milk on account of your ulcer and you’ll complain when you can’t get it. And that’s just about all you’ll talk about—your symptoms. You’ll start a reputation right now for being untalkative; you can’t make many mistakes with your mouth shut. Watch yourself, kid, there will be spacemen around you all evening. If you mess it up, I’ll leave you dirtside and raise without you. Let me see you walk again.”

  Max walked for him. Sam cursed gently. “Gripes, you still walk like a farmer. Get your feet out of those furrows, boy.”

  “No good?”

  “It’ll have to do. Grab your bonnet. Well strike while the iron’s in the fire and let the bridges fall where they may.”

  6

  “SPACEMAN” JONES

  The Asgard was to raise the next day. Max woke early and tried to wake Sam, but this proved difficult. At last the older man sat up. “Oh, what a head! What time is it?”

  “About six.”

  “And you woke me? Only my feeble condition keeps me from causing you to join your ancestors. Go back to sleep.”

  “But today’s the day!”

  “Who cares? She raises at noon. We’ll sign on at the last minute; that way you won’t have time to make a slip.”

  “Sam? How do you know they’ll take us?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! It’s all arranged. Now shut up. Or go downstairs and get breakfast—but don’t talk to anybody. If you’re a pal, you’ll bring me a pot of coffee at ten o’clock.”

  “And breakfast?”

  “Don’t mention food in my presence. Show some respect.” Sam pulled the covers up over his head.

  It was nearly eleven thirty when they presented themselves at the gate of the port; ten minutes later before the bus deposited them at the base of the ship. Max looked up at its great, bulging sides but was cut short by a crewman standing at the lift and holding a list. “Names.”

  “Anderson.”

  “Jones.”

  He checked them off. “Get in the ship. You should have been here an hour ago.” The three climbed into the cage; it swung clear of the ground and was reeled in, swaying, like a bucket on a well rope.

  Sam looked down and shuddered. “Never start a trip feeling good,” he advised Max. “It might make you sorry to be leaving.” The cage was drawn up inside the ship; the lock closed after them and they stepped out into the Asgard. Max was trembling with stage fright.

  He had expected to be sworn into the ship’s company by the first officer, as called for by law. But his reception was depressingly unceremonious. The crewman who had checked them into the ship told them to follow him; he led them to the Purser’s office. There the Chief Clerk had them sign and thumbprint the book, yawning the while and tapping his buck teeth. Max surrendered his forged personal record book, while feeling as if the deception were stamped on it in bold letters. But Mr. Kuiper merely chucked it into a file basket. He then turned to them. “This is a taut ship. You’ve started by very nearly missing it. That’s a poor start.”

  Sam said nothing. Max said, “Yessir.”

  The Chief Clerk went on, “Stow your gear, get your chow, and report back.” He glanced at a wall chart. “One of you in D-112, the other in E-009.”

  Max started to ask how to get there, but Sam took his elbow and eased him out of the office. Outside he said, “Don’t ask any questions you can avoid. We’re on Baker deck, that’s all we need to know.” Presently, they came to a companionway and started back down. Max felt a sudden change in pressure, Sam grinned. “She’s sealed. Won’t be long now.”

  They were in D-112, an eight-man bunkroom, and Sam was showing him how to set the lock on the one empty locker when there was a distant call on a loudspeaker. Max felt momentarily dizzy and his weight seemed to pulse. Then it stopped. Sam remarked, “They were a little slow synchronizing the field—or else this bucket of bolts has an unbalanced phaser.” He clapped Max on the back. “We made it, kid.”

  They were in space.

  E-009 was down one more deck and on the far side; they left Sam’s gear there and started to look for lunch. Sam stopped a passing engineer’s mate. “Hey, shipmate—we’re fresh caught. Where’s the crew’s mess?”

  “Clockwise about eighty and inboard, this deck.” He looked them over. “Fresh caught, eh? Well, you’ll find out.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  “Worse. A madhouse squared. If I wasn’t married, I’d’a stayed dirtside.” He went on his way.

  Sam said, “Ignore it, kid. All the old-timers in a ship claim it’s the worst madhouse in space. A matter of pride.” But their next experience seemed to confirm it; the serving window in the mess room had closed at noon, when the ship lifted; Max mournfully resigned himself to living with a tight belt until supper. But Sam pushed on into the galley and came out presently with two loaded trays. They found empty places and sat down.

  “How did you do it?”

  “Any cook will feed you if you let him explain first what a louse you are and how by rights he doesn’t have to.”

  The food was good—real beef patties, vegetables from the ship’s gardens, wheat bread, a pudding, and coffee. Max polished his platter and wondered if he dared ask for seconds. He decided against it. The talk flowed around him and only once was there danger that his tyro status might show up, that being when a computerman asked him a direct question as to his last trip.

  Sam stalled it off. “Imperial survey,” he answered briefly. “We’re both still covered.”

  The computerman grinned knowingly. “Which jail were you in? The Imperial Council hasn’t ordered a secret survey in years.”

  “This one was so secret they forgot to tell you about it. Write ’em a letter and burn them out about it,” Sam stood up. “Finished, Max?”

  On the way back to the Purser’s Office, Max worried as to his probable assignment, checking over in his mind the skills and expe
rience he was alleged to have. He need not have worried; Mr. Kuiper, with a fine disregard for such factors, assigned him as stableman.

  The Asgard was a combined passenger liner and freighter. She carried this trip Hereford breeding stock, two bulls and two dozen cows, and an assortment of other animals consigned for ecologic and economic reasons to colonies—pigs, chickens, sheep, a pair of Angora goats, a family of llamas. It was contrary to Imperial policy to plant most terrestrial fauna on other planets; the colonials were expected to establish economy with indigenous flora and fauna—but some animals have been bred for so many generations for the use of man that they are not easily replaced by exotic creatures. On Gamma Leonis VI(b), New Mars, the saurians known locally as “chuckleheads” or “chucks” could and did replace Percherons as draft animals with greater efficiency and economy—but men disliked them. There was never the familial trust that exists between horses and men; unless a strain of chucks should develop a degree of rapport with men (which seemed unlikely), they would eventually die out and be replaced by the horse, for the unforgivable sin of failing to establish a firm treaty with the most ravenous, intolerant, deadly, and successful of the animals in the explored universe, Man.

  There was also a cage of English sparrows. Max never did find out where these noisy little scavengers were believed to be necessary, nor was he acquainted with the complex mathematical analysis by which such conclusions were reached. He simply fed them and tried to keep their quarters clean.

  There were cats in the Asgard, too, but most of these were free citizens and crewmen, charged with holding down the rats and mice that had gone into space along with mankind. One of Max’s duties was to change the sand boxes on each deck and take the soiled ones to the oxidizer for processing. The other cats were pets, property of passengers, unhappy prisoners in the kennel off the stables. The passengers’ dogs lived there, too; no dogs were allowed to run free.

  Max wanted to look back at Earth and see it as a shrinking globe in the sky, but that was a privilege reserved for passengers. He spent the short period when it would have been possible in hauling (by hand) green timothy hay from the hydroponics air-conditioning plant to the stables and in cleaning said stables. It was a task he neither liked nor disliked; by accident he had been assigned to work that he understood.

  His immediate boss was the Chief Ship’s Steward, Mr. Giordano. Mr. “Gee” split the ship’s housekeeping with Mr. Dumont, Chief Passengers’ Steward; their domains divided at Charlie deck. Thus Mr. Dumont had passengers’ quarters, officers’ country, offices, and the control and communication stations, while Giordano was responsible for everything down (or aft) to but not including the engineering space—crew’s quarters, mess, and galley, stores, stables and kennel, hydroponics deck, and cargo spaces. Both worked for the Purser, who in turn was responsible to the First Officer.

  The organization of starships derived in part from that of military vessels, in part from ocean liners of earlier days, and in part from the circumstances of interstellar travel. The first officer was boss of the ship and a wise captain did not interfere with him. The captain, although by law monarch of his miniature world, turned his eyes outward; the first officer turned his inward. As long as all went well the captain concerned himself only with the control room and with astrogation; the first officer bossed everything else. Even astrogators, communicators, computermen, and chartsmen were under the first officer, although in practice he had nothing to do with them when they were on duty since they worked in the “worry hole” under the captain.

  The chief engineer was under the first officer, too, but he was nearly an autonomous satrap. In a taut, well-run ship he kept his bailiwick in such shape that the first officer did not need to worry about it. The chief engineer was responsible not only for the power plant and the Horst-Conrad impellers but for all auxiliary engineering equipment wherever located—for example the pumps and fans of the hydroponics installations, even though the purser, through his chief ship’s steward, took care of the farming thereof.

  Such was the usual organization of starship liner-freighters and such was the Asgard. It was not identical with the organization of a man-of-war and very different from that of the cheerless transports used to ship convicts and paupers out to colonies that were being forced—in those ships, the purser’s department was stripped to a clerk or two and the transportees did all the work, cooking, cleaning, handling cargo, everything. But the Asgard carried paid passengers, some of whom measured their wealth in megabucks; they expected luxury hotel service even light-years out in space. Of the three main departments of the Asgard, astrogation, engineering, and housekeeping, the Purser’s was by far the largest.

  A first officer could reach that high status from chief astrogator, from chief engineer, or from purser, but only if he were originally an astrogator could he go on to captain. The three officer types were essentially mathematicians, business managers, or physicists; a captain necessarily had to be able to practice the mathematical skill of astrogation. First Officer Walther, as was usually the case with a liner, had formerly been a purser.

  The Asgard was a little world, a tiny mobile planet. It had its monarch the captain, it’s useless nobility the passengers, its technical and governing class, and its hewers of wood and drawers of water. It contained flora and fauna in ecological balance; it carried its miniature sun in its power plant. Although its schedule contemplated only months in space, it was capable of staying in space indefinitely. The chef might run out of caviar, but there would be no lack of food, nor of air, nor of heat and light.

  Max decided that he was lucky to be assigned to Mr. Giordano rather than to Chief Clerk Kuiper. Mr. Kuiper supervised his clerks minutely, but Mr. Gee did not often stir his fat frame out of his office-state room. He was a jovial boss—provided everything ran to suit him. Mr. Gee found it an effort to go all the way down to the stables; once he became convinced that Max was giving the animals proper care and keeping the place clean, he gave up inspecting, merely requiring Max to report daily. This gave Giordano more time for his principal avocation, which was distilling a sort of vodka in a cubby in his stateroom, using materials grown in the hydroponds—also in his charge. He carried on a clandestine trade in his product with the crew. By keeping his mouth shut and his ears open, Max learned that this was a usual prerogative of a chief ship’s steward, ignored as long as the steward had the judgment to limit his operations. The ship, of course, had a wine mess and bar, but that was for the “beasts”—crewmen could not patronize it.

  “I was once in a ship,” Sam told Max, “where the First clamped down—busted up the still, busted the steward to cleaning decks, and generally threw the book.” He stopped to puff on his cigar, a gift from the passenger steward; they were hiding out in Maxstables, enjoying a rest and a gab. “Didn’t work out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Use your head. Forces must balance, old son. For every market there is a supplier. That’s the key to the nutshell. In a month, there was a still in durn near every out-of-the-way compartment in the ship and the crew was so demoralized it wasn’t fit to stuff vacuum. So the Captain had a talk with the First and things went back to normal.”

  Max thought it over. “Sam? Were you that ship’s steward?”

  “Huh? What gave you that idea?”

  “Well . . . you’ve been in space before; you no longer make any bones about it. I just thought—well, you’ve never told me what your guild was, nor why you were on dirt, or why you had to fake it to get back to space again. I suppose it’s none of my business.”

  Sam’s habitual cynical smile gave way to an expression of sadness. “Max, a lot of things can happen to a man when he thinks he has the world by the tail. Take the case of a friend of mine, name of Roberts. A sergeant in the Imperial Marines, good record, half a dozen star jumps, a combat decoration or two. A smart lad, boning to make warrant officer. But he missed his ship once—hadn’t been on Terra for some time and celebrated too much. Should have tu
rned himself in right away, of course, taken his reduction in rank and lived it down. Trouble was, he still had money in his pocket. By the time he was broke and sober it was too late. He never quite had the guts to go back and take his court martial and serve his sentence. Every man has his limits.”

  Max said presently, “You trying to say you used to be a Marine?”

  “Me? Of course not, I was speaking of this guy Richards, just to illustrate what can happen to a man when he’s not looking. Let’s talk of more pleasant things. Kid, what do you plan to do next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what do you figure on doing after this jump?”

  “Oh. More of the same, I guess. I like spacing. I suppose I’ll try to keep my nose clean and work up to chief steward or chief clerk.”

  Sam shook his head. “Think it through, kid. What happens when your record in this ship is mailed to the guild? And another copy is mailed to the Department of Guilds and Labor?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you. Maybe nothing happens at first, maybe you can space for another cruise. But eventually, the red tape unwinds, they compare notes and see that while your ship lists you as an experienced steward’s mate, there isn’t any Max Jones in their files. Comes the day you ground at Terra and a couple of clowns with sidearms are waiting at the foot of the lift to drag you off to the calabozo.”

  “But Sam! I thought it was all fixed?”

  “Don’t blow a gasket. Look at me, I’m relaxed—and it applies to me, too. More so, for I have other reasons we needn’t go into to want to let sleeping dogs bury their own dead. As for it being ‘all fixed,’ it is—everything I promised. You’re here, aren’t you? But as for the files: old son, it would have taken ten times the money to tamper with guild files, and as for locating a particular microfilm in New Washington and substituting a fake that would show the record you are supposed to have—well, I wouldn’t know how to start, though no doubt it could be done, with enough time, money, and finesse.”