Survey Ship

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Full gravity,” Peake said, “at least for the first hour. One hour workout at full gravity, plus a four-hour sleep period at full gravity, will keep muscles and internal organs in tone. After that, if you want to experiment with low-gravity acrobatics, that’s up to you. But as the medical officer, I make it a professional recommendation with all necessary force — no less than one hour of full-gravity exercise per crew member per twenty-four hour ship’s day!”

  “My, how solemn,” Moira laughed, coming in behind him. “We ought to have chosen you for captain, Peake, you have the right accent and the proper authoritarian manner!”

  “I’m a doctor,” he replied. “This isn’t an opinion, this is a medical necessity. Just a simple fact. Ignore it at your body’s peril.”

  “Gravity set,” Teague said, and went to an anchored rowing machine, where he sat down and began to pull against it with his powerful muscles. Fontana, standing at one edge of the cubical module, looked appreciatively at his bare shoulders, then began a slow jog around the room. After a few seconds, in spite of the fact that she was an extremely healthy young woman, she felt her heart pounding, let herself collapse for a moment to the floor.

  Peake went and bent over her. “Trouble, Fontana?” He felt for her pulse and frowned.

  “Tell me, did you sleep at full gravity last sleep period?”

  Fontana felt the color rising in her cheeks, and looked quickly, guiltily at Teague. They had kept the DeMag units just high enough to keep them from drifting apart as they made love; afterward they had slept in zero gravity, floating. She shook her head.

  “Now you see why you have to,” Peake said soberly. “It doesn’t take the heart very long to adapt to zero-gravity, and the heart’s like any other muscle, it gets lazy when it isn’t working; the muscles in the human body were made to operate at one gee. You’ll need to work out twice as long today, and don’t try that again.”

  She stared at him rebelliously, but the thumping of her heart had frightened her. Could they really lose fitness so swiftly outside the familiar gravity of Earth? “All right,” she said soberly, “I’ll remember, Peake.”

  Peake nodded and went off to jog around the edge of the room, setting himself a hard, unrelenting pace. At one side, Ching was clinging to a ballet barre, doing smooth, fluid knee bends — Peake rummaged in a packrat memory for the word, plies. During a lifetime of physical training, all of them had had introductory ballet exercises for fitness, and some of the women still used them as a training routine. Ravi was running too, on a treadmill. Peake ran on, feeling the pounding of his bare feet against the floor, enjoying the slow acceleration of his heartbeat. He was, he assessed himself mentally, in excellent condition. He intended to stay that way, though he supposed the novelty of doing exercises in the little gym module might wear off fairly soon.

  As he ran around the small arena, recurrently, he passed Teague at the rowing machine, and about the fourth time he realized that he, too, was looking at the red-haired youngster’s superb muscled physique. Not, especially, with desire; just, he became aware that he was noticing Teague, and it dismayed him, ha hadn’t looked at anyone that way in years. Not since he and Jimson — he cut off that thought in midair, knowing Fontana had been right; looking back was pointless, simply a way to torture himself.

  No harm in looking, he told himself grimly as he pounded around the track. Especially when that’s all it can ever come to. Teague and Ravi are both woman-chasers. Which is just as well because neither of them is my type, or ever could be.

  He had never thought about anyone that way — not, anyhow, after adolescence — except Jimson.

  But why not? Why was I different? He had read the theory that homosexuality or heterosexuality is firmly established by the age of two or three. When the practice is free of social stigma, as in the Academy, at least one out of every five or six men will be homosexual; and there had been four or five besides himself in their class. All but himself and Jimson had experimented with women, too; they had simply been too wrapped up in one another.

  I don’t know how I feel about women. I never bothered to find out. And then Peake, running, realized that this kind of thought was the sort of thing which hard exercise was intended to exorcise; wholly preoccupied with the body, awareness and morbid introspection left the mind. He sped up his running to sprint level, and thought dropped away; he was simply enjoying the feel of his body, his feet drumming the track, his heart pounding, the feel of sweat bursting from his body.

  When it happened it was not the way he had always thought it would be if such a thing happened. First he felt his feet slip slightly, as if the floor had suddenly become tacky and his bare feet lost their traction. Then, since he was moving too swiftly to check himself, he felt himself slip loose and plummet, free of gravity,

  toward the far wall. Inertia, he thought, an object keeps travelling in the same direction unless something happens to stop it…he twisted as hard as he could to roll up in a ball, struck hard with one shoulder and slid along — no longer down — the wall. He looked around. Ching was floating, clinging with one hand to the ballet barre, looking suprised and panicky; the force of her kick had flung her into the air with nothing to bring her down again. Fontana, Ravi, and Moira were floating in midair, while Teague, still in the rowing machine, was staring in dismay as it wobbled under him.

  Moira, with the skill of the free-fall-trained athlete, was already aware of what had happened, and making sturdy swimming motions down toward the DeMag unit.

  “The gravity went off,” she announced, superfluously. “You didn’t set it properly, Teague.”

  “Yes I did,” Teague objected, climbing out of the machine with some difficulty, “See, it’s still turned full ON — one full gravity.”

  Fontana came and joined them. “Granted, I’m not quite the expert on DeMag technology that you are, Teague, I do know something about them, and a properly set DeMag doesn’t go off that way. There’s supposed to be a fail-safe device in them which lessens the gravity very slowly, to prevent just this kind of accident. Someone could have been hurt—”

  Teague had already removed the panel over the unit and was peering into its interior. Fontana thought he looked very strange, as if he were swimming down toward it, his legs sticking straight up from inside the box. Moira shoved Fontana to one side and joined Teague there.

  She said, “There’s nothing wrong with the unit. Are you sure you set it properly, Teague?”

  “Positive,” he said, “and if I hadn’t, it couldn’t go off suddenly like that.” He withdrew his head slowly from the box. “It’s all tied into the central computer for Life Support, and when it lets go — and nothing is perfect — it’s backed up so that the changes in gravity are very, very gradual. It doesn’t matter so much when the gravity goes off — but suppose we’d all been in free-fall, doing acrobatics or something?” He pointed at Ching, still holding the barre. “Anyone who’d been in midair like that would have come down with an impact — one of us could have broken a leg, a kneecap, a shoulder — what’s the matter, Moira?” he asked, for the red-headed woman had gone white, her freckles standing out like blots.

  Her smile wavered. She said, “I — I’m not sure. It’s like that other time—”

  Teague looked grim. He said, “I think we treat Moira the way coal-miners used to treat their canaries —when the bird keels over, something’s wrong even if the miner doesn’t feel it yet. When Moira looks like this, we assume there’s a real emergency. Ching, if it’s something in the computer— ” remembering that free-fall bothered her, he pushed up, floating, took her hands and gently steadied her as she lowered herself toward the floor.

  He said softly, for her ears alone, “It’s got to be in your mind, Ching. You’re a G-N; your inner-ear channels are by definition perfect.”

  She said, shakily, “I think somehow the geneticists missed that one,” and unexpectedly, vomited messily into the air.

  “Let her alone,” Peake said swi
ftly, “Get her down!”

  Ching moaned, still retching, “There isn’t any down.!”

  Peake came and took over, checking her pulse, wiping her face. The others, with varying expressions of disgust and exasperation, were dodging drifting globules of vomit. Fontana — she too, Peake recalled, was medically trained — came over to them, a dampened towel in one hand.

  She wiped Ching’s face with it, gently. Ching was still retching emptily and crying, but as Fontana touched her she made a noticeable effort to control herself.

  “I’m all right. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Here, Teague, did you need help?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the setup,” Moira said, her hands caressing the DeMag machinery. “It’s perfect, nothing wrong with it.”

  Fontana said with asperity, “Maybe we all dreamed it.”

  Moira’s voice was impatient. “No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean, since there’s nothing wrong with the functioning of the DeMag, whatever it is, it’s got to be in the computer tie-in.”

  “The DeMags are all programmed alike,” said Ching, holding herself down with one hand and peering into the box. “If there’s anything wrong with the way this one’s set, they’d all have been doing it. And they’re all fine.”

  “Everybody hang on tight,” said Teague, “I’m going to try something.” He moved the stud on the DeMag unit all the way toward the OFF position. Then, firmly, he moved it again toward ON.

  Ching felt herself slide toward the floor; the gym was, reassuringly, right side up again, and her insides settled into comfort. She made a face of disgust at her stained tunic, splattered with vomit and half-digested meat and salad.

  Ravi said, “And this time it went on the way it was supposed to; slowly and gradually, so that nobody plunged down and sprained an ankle or anything.”

  Teague was scowling at the switch. He said, “I’d better go and check out everything in the Life-Support module. And Ching, you check out everything in the computer tie-ins—”

  “It couldn’t be the computer,” she said positively, but at Moira’s glare, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll check every linkage! But do you mind if I clean up this mess in here, and go and change my clothes first — and have a shower?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As she showered, Ching thought about that.

  She had insisted on cleaning up the mess in the gymnasium unaided (it had rained to the floor in a smelly shower when the gravity came on) before going to clean herself. Now she stood under the shower and scrubbed fiercely, letting the hot water wash away disgust and filth, sudsing detergent vigorously through her short straight hair.

  Was it all in her mind? Granted, she had not specialized in psychology and, in fact, considered it a sloppy and inexact science. But Teague was right; as a G-N, she should have had perfect inner-ear channels, and this sudden nausea was evidently some kind of failure. She found it both puzzling and frightening. She had had perfect health all her life, except for a broken finger when she was nine, and the occasional 24-hour-virus. Now her body had betrayed her, and done it in the most humiliating way possible. Well, not quite, she told herself with a touch of bleak humor. She could have wet herself, or her bowel sphincters could have failed her like that, in public; that would have been considerably worse!

  But she expected herself to be perfect, had taken her perfect body’s co-operation for granted — she had never even had a cavity in a tooth! Feeling the comfort of the hot shower, flooding down, blessedly down on her, she felt a sudden surge of repeated panic, if the gravity suddenly went off in here, I’d drown, and firmly reminded herself not to be foolish. The DeMags were backed up by all sorts of fail-safe systems. She wouldn’t drown before she could get the water turned off. Why was she being such a fool?

  She stepped out, air-dried and combed her hair, enjoying the feel of its cleanness, and slipped into a clean tunic and panties, slid her feet into paper slippers. She thought, I had better go and check the computer tie-ins. Though it can’t be in computer… and again she felt the feeling of sudden, wavery panic.

  Unknown I’m supposed to have a perfect body, complete with perfect inner-ear labyrinths. If my own body can go back on me like this, can I trust the computer?

  Teague had gone to check on the DeMag and Life-Support units, and Fontana, as his second, had gone with him. Ravi, whose shift it was, had gone up to the Bridge to make the routine check of course, chronometer time, and navigation instrument readings. Peake and Moira, having nothing else to do, had remained in the gym, Peake completing his running laps, and Moira working on gymnastic equipment.

  Peake completed the hundredth lap — which gave him a day count of a two-mile run — and slid down, folding his long legs, to watch Moira whirling herself over the parallel bars. He thought; if the gravity failed when she’s doing that, she’d break her neck! and felt himself shudder.

  She saw him watching her and jumped down.

  “You’re practically good enough for the Olympics,” he said, smiling.

  She said, with her throaty chuckle, “Quite a lot of us are. We train very hard, after all, and there are a lot of high-mesomorph types in the Academy — short, compact, muscular. It’s one of the physical arrangements that goes with high intelligence. The other kind is like you — long, scrawny, ectomorph. There’s even been some talk of entering a few of us. Only the question is, what country’s team would we join? Australia? The world would complain, if Australia had a gene-pool like ours to dip into. Our own? Nobody’s supposed to know where we come from, and this would bring us back into national politics again. So — no Olympic stars from the Academy.”

  “What country would you have competed in, if you had?” Peake asked, “Would you have liked to?”

  She shrugged. “I sometimes think it would have been nice. I do like the limelight. Only if I’d had that kind of ambition, I’d hardly have made it in the Academy, would I?” she said, answering the last question first. “I don’t think I ever knew your real name, did I, Peake?”

  “David Akami,” he said, “and I’m from South Africa. And you—”

  “Ellen Finlayson,” she said, “and I was born in Scotland, or so they tell me — I don’t remember, so it’s hearsay evidence, after all.” She chuckled again. “Do you mind if I turn the DeMags off again? I had some training in free-fall when Teague and I installed the drives, and I’ve always wanted to try free-fall acrobatics — I watched the telecast from the Lunar Dome the last three Earth Days.”

  “Fine with me,” Peake replied, and Moira turned off the stud, feeling the gravity slowly, slowly go off; at first they felt faintly light-headed, a brief flash of dis-orientation, then the exhilaration of floating. Moira bounded up into midair, turning a rapid series of somersaults, spinning on her own center like a top; came to rest laughing and flushed, stretching back and turning on her own momentum, arms splayed out.

  “I wonder why Ching got sick? There doesn’t seem to be anything sickening about it,” she said, “I actually like the sensation of weightlessness.”

  “Her inner-ear channels may not be as stable as yours.”

  “Oh, come,” Moira scoffed, “she’s a G-N.”

  “In that case,” Peake said, “it’s only a matter of acclimatization; she’ll get used to it very quickly. Don’t make fun of her, Moira.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of her, Peake,” Moira said soberly, “I felt sorry for her. She’s always been so perfect and self-controlled. Maybe that’s it — it scares her to be out of control, because that’s just one of the givens of her life. Being perfect. Like a computer. Any G-N takes it for granted — being perfect, I mean. You, and I, and all the rest of us, have to live with the fact that we’re just conglomerations of random genes; if we made it into the Academy, that means that we’re the end product of natural selection. You, more than me, because in your country the weaker ones die out in famines and so forth. So we know, if we get this far, it’s because we, or our ancestors, ha
d some superior stuff inside us, body and brain. Ching doesn’t have that to lean on — whatever there is that’s superior about her, she knows it’s just that some scientist tinkered around with her parents’ germ plasm. No roots.”

  All this was true, Peake thought; but he was surprised that it should be the tough-minded Moira who said it. He had not thought her sensitive enough to be aware of that. He discovered that he was looking at Moira in a new way; she too could be sympathetic, where, always before, she had intimidated him a little.

  She pulled him up beside her; he felt himself bounce a little on the cushiony air. “As I remember, you’re a fair acrobat yourself,” she said. “Come on, let’s try double-spins around a common center—”

  Seizing her hands, spinning, Peake felt the curious sensation that the world, not himself, was spinning while he remained wholly stationary at the center of the module which was dancing, somersaulting around them; that the absolute center of the universe was located somewhere in the small, lessening space between Moira’s curled body and his own as the module whirled round them as the whirling stars moved… at the end of a long spin they slowly came to rest, almost in each other’s arms. Slowly, holding each other, they drifted down.

  Moira had felt it too, as if the universe centered to the location in the narrowing space between their bodies; she was reluctant to break the contact.

  Peake said, laughing, “You’re good at that for a woman!”

  “That’s nonsense,” she laughed, without rancor, “That’s like saying, you play the violin pretty well for a man! Do you really think skill at acrobatics is gender-linked?”

  He shook his head. “Women have a higher percentage of body fat to muscle; their center of gravity is lower,” he said, “and so, in general, men are somewhat better athletes. Or at least, so I understood, as a medical man — I’m not claiming to be an expert on athletics. If women are men’s equals in that field, I apologize — I spoke out of ignorance, Moira, not male chauvinism.”