Temporary Duty

by Ric Locke

  Dreelig perked up. “Another possible product to sell? Multimeter?”

  “Ssth,” said Goofig. “That one wouldn’t be very useful, none of the units make any sense.”

  “Not a problem,” said Peters. “Tell us what units you want and what the numbers look like, and the factory Down can make them just as you like.”

  “Multimeter,” Dreelig said again. “If the readings are useful, do you think other ship crewmen would want them?”

  “What does multimeter cost?” Goofig asked Todd.

  The younger sailor shrugged. “Depends on type. Simple, twenty, ah, four and two eights of dollars.” He counted on his fingers. “Two and an eight of ornh. Like Schott has more expensive, half square of ornh, maybe square.”

  “Ssth. You could sell one to every ship crewman in the web at those prices,” said Goofig. “I’ll give you the ornh now, if you like.”

  “No, we do not have the product for you,” said Peters. “Dreelig, you should ask the next time you go down.”

  “I won’t be going down again,” said Dreelig. “We have everything we think we’ll get, and after some success with Donollo, the people Down have become more rigid again. We’re only buying food, from Mexico and a few other places.” He sighed. “Multimeter. It’s so frustrating that we cannot come to a simple agreement! They keep talking about things that make so little sense they might as well be thukre.” The word parsed to “zero people”.

  “What are thukre?” Peters asked.

  Dee and Dreelig shared a look. “People we can’t talk to because they’re too different,” Dee explained. “Their languages make no sense.”

  “Are many thukre?” Todd asked.

  “Not in this knot of the web. Almost all of the species nearby are of the kree.” She grinned. “Perhaps the thukre think of themselves as kree, and we are thukre to them.”

  “That’s possible,” said Dreelig.

  “I never knew about thukre myself,” said Goofig, in a tone that said he found that remarkable.

  “Yes, the zerkre usually stay apart,” said Dreelig. He sighed. “We’re almost thukre to one another.”

  “Yes.” The engineer stood. “I must go now,” he said. “Dreelig, you Traders may have trouble in the future.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  Goofig smiled. “The sailors are more like zerkre in their thinking than you are,” he said. “It may be hard for you.”

  Dreelig nodded. “They can also think the way we do. It may be interesting for everyone.”

  “Yes, it may be.”

  “Goofig, would you do me a small service?” Peters asked.

  “That depends. What?”

  “Would you please ask Engineer Keezer to meet me tomorrow, at four of the first ande, by retarder controls?” Peters spread his hands. “We still have not resolved the matter of units, and none of us has been trained in operating equipment.” He shook his head and used an English word: “Officers will be arriving in the middle of third ande, and retarders will be needed. We maybe too late, if so we need help.”

  “That’s not such a small service. Keezer doesn’t like to be disturbed.” Goofig smiled. “I have a thick skin, and she is not my superior. I’ll pass the message.”

  * * *

  Well before first meal Peters was rapping on Todd’s door. “What’s up?” the younger sailor asked when he opened up, still in his skivvies.

  “You wanted to go outside,” Peters reminded him. “We got permission, and the zerkre claim they won’t move the ship durin’ first ande.”

  “Two minutes,” said Todd with a grin.

  “We ain’t in all that big a hurry. We ain’t supposed to go out until after the start of first ande, so we can eat first.”

  “Right. Hang on, I’ll get my suit on.”

  “Ain’t seen much of you yesterday. Whatcha been up to?” Peters asked as they came out of the hatch.

  Todd gestured at the bay. “Have a look.” There was no clutter at all visible on the deck; even the bays between the columns were mostly clear, and the few things in them were in order rather than higgledy-piggledy. A First Class wearing dungarees and a sour expression was pushing a broom and not getting much. “We’ve got permission to paint the bay, and they’re gonna provide the paint.”

  “Progress is bein’ made, my man.”

  “Oh, yes.” The elevator started up, and Todd grinned. “We got all the lights on in the hangars. Would you believe nobody knew where the switches were?” He sat down and nodded to a waiter. “Good morning, Zeep,” he said in Grallt. “What special good today?”

  “Good morning, Todde, Peterz,” said the waiter. “All the food comes from the same cold room. What would you like?”

  They ordered. “You gonna be ready for the officers to come aboard?” Todd asked.

  “Hunh. Maybe, maybe not. We still ain’t got the numbers figured out. I got to hunt Hernandez down. Worst case, I reckon Keezer can get a crew of zerkre up here.”

  “She won’t be pleased.”

  Peters grimaced. “Probably not. I ain’t, neither.”

  Zeep began dealing crockery. “Thank you,” Todd told him in Grallt, then to Peters: “babble.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means something like ‘eat up’ or ‘eat happy,’” Todd told him. “Goofig used it.”

  “Mn. Well, eat happy to you, too.”

  They finished their meal a little faster than usual. “It ain’t time yet,” said Peters with a frown. “Oh, well, time we get there it’ll probably be OK. It’s quite a hike.”

  * * *

  “I expected it to be scary,” Todd said when they were outside. “This isn’t any worse than the flight deck of the carrier.”

  Peters snorted. “It’s twice as big in both directions, for one thing.”

  They set off to explore. The white surface had three-armed padeyes every five meters or so, and it was faster to grab them and pull than it was to use the suit thrusters.

  “This is easy if I think of it as a wall I’m climbing,” Todd commented.

  “Not me. I’m crawlin’ along the floor.” Peters chuckled. “Truth is, it ain’t like nothin’ I’ve done before. I reckon everybody’s got to cope with it their own way.”

  Slant-sided blisters were set at twenty-meter intervals, each with a single hatch; the hatches didn’t budge when they tried to turn the wheels. “Gun turret, you reckon?”

  “They don’t turn,” Todd objected.

  “They don’t need to.” Peters waved to indicate the rest of the ship. “There’s plenty of them, and they all point in different directions. No matter where they want to shoot there’s bound to be enough guns. If they had to turn there’d be the chance they’d jam.”

  “Well, we knew this thing was military surplus.” Todd pushed off and looked around.

  “Hah. Granpap said we imagine there’s such a thing as peace, ‘cause there’s been a few times when there ain’t nobody fightin’. Reckon space people ain’t much different. Woulda been nice, though.” Peters sighed. “You been out here long enough to get the idea?”

  “I think so.” Todd looked around. “We ought to bring a beach ball, maybe some other stuff, when we bring the others out.”

  “Golf clubs.”

  “Golf clubs?”

  “Yeah.” Peters sighed again as they made their way across the white plain. “Granpap’s a bug about space stuff. One time we scraped up enough cash for gas to run the generator so’s the TV would work, and he showed me a lot of old movies. One of the guys as went to the moon a hunnert years ago, he took along a golf club and a ball.”

  “Hunh.” said Todd. “Golf clubs. There’s the hatch.” He gripped the coaming and looked into the trunk. “You know, I came within that of just popping through. It’s, what, three meters to the bottom?”

  “Be nice to forget and just jump through, gravity inside takes over. Splat.” Peters grinned. “I got four ornh says it happens at least once when we’re shepherdin’ s
ailors out here.”

  “No takers here.”

  It almost happened to Todd anyway, but they both got in without breaking anything. “This’s gonna be a problem,” Peters observed when they were in the airlock. “Can’t get but two, maybe three people in here at a time. Gonna take a while to cycle everybody through.”

  “Can’t be helped.” Todd shook his head. “So, same time, same place, tomorrow morning? We’d better make sure we know what we’re doing before we start turning the animals loose.”

  “And it’s fun, too,” said Peters. “Yeah. I ain’t gonna be ready to take ‘em outside tomorrow, we might as well take the chance to play on our own again.”

  “I know what I’m gonna do,” Todd declared. “I’m gonna go in and out of that hatch maybe a hundred times, ‘till I can do it without looking and make it look easy. Then I’m gonna stand around and chuckle, real soft, while those apes fall on their ass trying it.”

  “You’re a hard man, Todd,” said Peters with a chuckle. “Sounds good to me. See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow,” the younger sailor agreed. He continued down the stairs, bound for the bay and the cleanup effort, and Peters sighed and headed aft. The next class would be wondering where he’d took off to, and he’d better show up or have Chief Joshua all over his butt. Another llor in the Space Navy, he thought resignedly.

  But the session went well. Nobody fell out, nobody spewed, and nobody gave him any lip; all the sailors got so they could get across the practice room and predict where they’d hit, which was about where Peters had been before pulling his Major Mike act. Now for a bite to eat and tackle the Keezer problem. Time was running out.

  * * *

  Keezer was waiting by the retard consoles—or rather walking away, having given up waiting. Peters started to run, then looked around. A dozen or so sailors were painting, cleaning, and generally lurking around the bay. He converted his run into a brisk walk, head up. The Grallt saw him, probably recognizing the blank suit, and held up short of the aft hangar bay access.

  “Pleasant greetings, and apologies, Keezer,” he said when he got within earshot.

  “Yes,” said the zerkre, without any reaction that Peters could detect. “Did you want further instruction in the retarders?”

  “Yes, but I have a more immediate problem. Were you aware that our prime group would be returning in this llor?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “When will they arrive?”

  “During third ande.”

  Keezer’s face contorted, and she made an angry gesture. “An ande from now? There is nothing quite so effective as advance planning, is there?”

  “I’m sorry.” Peters spread his hands.

  “Ssth. It’s clear you are just a messenger. You could have brought the message sooner, though.”

  Peters sighed. “Yes.”

  Keezer nodded. “I have a full schedule, but it’s clear I must alter it. I’ll speak to my superiors.”

  “Good.” Peters frowned. “First we must solve a problem. We need information so we can convert our units to yours. We have the conversion for time, but mass and distance are more difficult.”

  “Hm. I can help you with distance.” She fingered open a pocket, pulled out something shiny, handed it to Peters. “Can you read the numbers?”

  “Yes, but what—ah.” He pulled out the tab of a tape measure; the case was circular, but it was otherwise familiar, down to the slight transverse curve that made the blade stiff when extended. “Thank you, Keezer. I do not—don’t think it will be damaged. I will return it to you as soon as possible. Which unit is tell?”

  “This.” She pointed to lines going all the way across the blade, repeated about every thirty centimeters. “One interval is tell.”

  “Thank you,” Peters said again.

  “Mass. Mass is, as you said, more difficult.” Keezer looked across the bay, fingering her jaw. “I think you don’t have some of the words, but perhaps after a little time…”

  It took a lot of backing and filling before Keezer got Peters to understand “electron”, and “proton” took longer because he didn’t know the word in English. One of each made up the lightest substance possible, a gas that burned in air with a blue flame and was very light. “Hydrogen,” he was inspired to say.

  Keezer grimaced. “I hope that’s the correct word in your language,” she warned. “Seven eights of those make the smallest unit of mass.” She smiled. “That’s a mistake. The unit was intended to be one babble of babble.” When Peters didn’t respond she knelt and slapped the deck. “The ship is made of babble.” The second word: iron. Todd had found that out. “But one babble of iron has less mass. The difference is energy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Peters. “But I will remember.”

  “I hope so,” said Keezer. “I don’t remember things I don’t understand.” She paused. “This unit is very small, so small it isn’t useful. A square of twos of that unit is a small unit called anthu. A square of squares of anthu is a gorz.”

  Peters sighed. “Thank you. Now please excuse me. I must find my associate while I still remember. Can we meet here at the beginning of third ande?”

  Keezer shook her head in irritation. “Or a few tle after. I must collect my people.”

  “I must as well. Good day.”

  * * *

  Hernandez took the tape measure with delight, but Peters’s explanation of gorz didn’t click at first. After the third repetition a light seemed to dawn. “OK, run the numbers,” he told the other programmer. “What’s two to the sixty-fourth hydrogen atoms weigh? No, wait.” He looked at his own screen, not seeing it. “Fifty-six hydrogen atoms, times two to the sixty-fourth.”

  Clark tapped keys. “‘Bout a tenth of a gram.”

  “And a square of squares—hah! That’s easy. What’s 4096 times that? Sixty-four sixty-fours.”

  “453 grams,” Clark got. “Point one-oh-oh-six.”

  “That’s a gorz, then,” said Hernandez with satisfaction. “453.1006 grams. Why does that sound so familiar?”

  “You ain’t gonna like this,” warned another sailor, who was fiddling with the tape measure.

  “Spit it out, Vogt,” Hernandez growled.

  Vogt grinned. “454 grams is a pound, old style. And this—” he pointed at the tape measure, “—near as I can get it, the marks are right at 303 millimeters, maybe 303.4. A foot’s 304.8 millimeters. Feet and pounds. Quarters and eighths and sixteenths. Granny always said we never shoulda gone to the metric system. Looks like Granny was right.”

  The specs they had had been digitized from the original manuals, which had numbers in feet and pounds. The AI routines had put in conversions to metric, but the original values were on the bitmaps. Conversion to gorz was redundant, as Vogt pointed out. “Just put in pounds, right from the manual, except in backwards base eight. The difference is less than a quarter of a percent, and we don’t know what they’ve done to the planes anyway.” It took longer to disable the automatic conversion routines than it would have to convert the metric measurements to Grallt. Peters left them to it, and went to hunt down Warnocki. Time was running out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You know you’re not going to be leading PO, right?” Howell demanded, his tone half sneering, half truculent. “You ain’t got the stripes.” He was a Boatswain’s Mate (Aviation) First Class, the highest rating aboard qualified on arresting gear, and claimed the lead position by simple seniority.

  Peters sighed and looked around. Each of the consoles was manned by a Grallt, zerkre with blue above the waist and white below, and Keezer, her arms folded and an expression matching Howell’s on her face, stood by Number One. Sailors in deck gear stood a pace or two behind, looking over Grallt shoulders or watching the byplay, according to personality type. “No, I ain’t gonna be leadin’ PO of the retarder team,” he said. “But for right now, I know the language an’ you don’t. Keezer, yonder, is in charge, and she’d take it kindly if you’d
pay attention. I ain’t nothin’ but a translator.”

  “Long as that’s clear.” Howell waved. “You’ll be lead on Console Three just from your time in rate, but I’m in charge here, you got that?”

  “I got it.”

  “Good. You got figures we can read for this stuff?”

  “Right here.” Peters had taken the numbers Vogt had given him, converted them to Grallt numerals, and written the result on slips of paper. He handed the slips over, hoping he’d gotten the transcriptions right, and went to deliver another copy to Keezer. “These are the masses of the two types of—” he looked for a word “—small ships we use. Is this helpful?”

  “Necessary,” the engineer snapped. “Do you have velocity figures as well?”

  “Here.”

  Keezer nodded. “You will have to identify the ship types to us so that we can make the appropriate settings. —Tell that person that if he doesn’t keep his fingers away from those controls I will break them for him.”

  Howell was fiddling with the console. “Ms. Keezer done said we ain’t to be messin’ with the controls yet,” Peters told him mildly. “She was kind of emphatic about it.”

  The other sailor backed away. “What does that one do?”

  “That’un controls the approach lights, like the meatball back home,” Peters told him. “Right’s off, center’s normal, left is wave-off.”

  “That’s the LSO’s job,” Howell objected. He was right; Landing Signal Officer is one of the most responsible jobs aboard ship.

  “Not here,” Peters said, and had the satisfaction of seeing Howell flinch. The Grallt who was responsible for Number One console moved back into place, pushing Howell aside with a black look. “Excuse me,” Peters told her, “I would like to show my colleague how to make the correct settings.” She looked up at Keezer, who nodded, and stepped back.

  “All right, we’ll set up for a Tomcat. This knob here sets the mass. See how I wrote the numbers? These lines here are a vernier, ‘cept it reads backwards to what you’re used to. Try it.” Howell scowled and moved the knob. “That’s right,” Peters approved; the man wasn’t stupid or he wouldn’t be here in the first place. “Now the speed, the other knob. The big ‘un stays on zero, ain’t none of our folks gonna be goin’ fast enough to need it. Just the little one.” Howell got that right, too, after a bit of fumbling. “Real good. Lemme show the others, and you get your backups up to speed, OK?”