Helva “looked” up and caught a fascinating panorama of regular, dirty craters on a flaky pink surface. Her hum became a gurgle of surprise. She instinctively regulated her “sight” until the skin lost its cratered look and the pores assumed normal proportions.
“Yes, we have quite a few years of voice training, madam,” remarked Helva calmly. “Vocal peculiarities often become excessively irritating during prolonged intrastellar distances and must be eliminated. I enjoyed my lessons.”
Although this was the first time that Helva had seen unshelled people, she took this experience calmly. Any other reaction would have been reported instantly.
“I meant that you have a nice singing voice… dear,” the lady said.
“Thank you. Would you like to see my work?” Helva asked, politely. She instinctively sheered away from personal discussions, but she filed the comment away for further meditation.
“Work?” asked the lady.
“I am currently reproducing the Last Supper on the head of a screw.”
“Oh, I say,” the lady twittered.
Helva turned her vision back to magnification and surveyed her copy critically.
“Of course, some of my color values do not match the old Master’s and the perspective is faulty, but I believe it to be a fair copy.”
The lady’s eyes, unmagnified, bugged out.
“Oh, I forget,” and Helva’s voice was really contrite. If she could have blushed, she would have. “You people don’t have adjustable vision.”
The monitor of this discourse grinned with pride and amusement as Helva’s tone indicated pity for the unfortunate.
“Here, this will help,” said Helva, substituting a magnifying device in one extension and holding it over the picture.
In a kind of shock, the ladies and gentlemen of the committee bent to observe the incredibly copied and brilliantly executed Last Supper on the head of a screw.
“Well,” remarked one gentleman who had been forced to accompany his wife, “the good Lord can eat where angels fear to tread.”
“Are you referring, sir,” asked Helva politely, “to the Dark Age discussions of the number of angels who could stand on the head of a pin?”
“I had that in mind.”
“If you substitute ‘atom’ for ‘angel,’ the problem is not insoluble, given the metallic content of the pin in question.”
“Which you are programmed to compute.”
“Of course.”
“Did they remember to program a sense of humor, as well, young lady?”
“We are directed to develop a sense of proportion, sir, which contributes the same effect.”
The good man chortled appreciatively and decided the trip was worth his time.
If the investigation committee spent months digesting the thoughtful food served them at the Laboratory School, they left Helva with a morsel as well.
“Singing” as applicable to herself required research. She had, of course, been exposed to and enjoyed a music appreciation course that had included the better known classical works such as “Tristan and Isolde,” “Candide,” “Oklahoma,” and “Le Nozze di Figaro,” along with the atomic age singers, Birget Nilsson, Bob Dylan, and Geraldine Todd, as well as the curious rhythmic progression of the Venusians, Capellan visual chromatics, the sonic concert of the Altairians and Reticulan croons. But “singing” for any shell-person posed considerable technical difficulties. Shell-people were schooled to examine every aspect of a problem or situation before making a prognosis. Balanced properly between optimism and practicality, the nondefeatist attitude of the shell-people led them to extricate themselves, their ships, and personnel from bizarre situations. Therefore, to Helva, the problem that she couldn’t open her mouth to sing, among other restrictions, did not bother her. She would work out a method, bypassing her limitations, whereby she could sing.
She approached the problem by investigating the methods of sound reproduction through the centuries, human and instrumental. Her own sound production equipment was essentially more instrumental than vocal. Breath control and the proper enunciation of vowel sounds within the oral cavity appeared to require the most development and practice. Shell-people did not, strictly speaking, breathe. For their purposes, oxygen and other gases were not drawn from the surrounding atmosphere through the medium of lungs but sustained artificially by solution in the shells. After experimentation, Helva discovered that she could manipulate her diaphragmic unit to sustain tone. By relaxing the throat muscles and expanding the oral cavity well into the frontal sinuses, she could direct the vowel sounds into the felicitous position for proper reproduction through her throat microphone. She compared the results with tape recordings of modern singers and was not unpleased, although her own tapes had a peculiar quality about them, not at all unharmonious, merely unique. Acquiring a repertoire from the Laboratory library was no problem to one trained to perfect recall. She found herself able to sing any role and any song which struck her fancy. It would not have occurred to her that it was curious for a female to sing bass, baritone, tenor, mezzo, soprano, and coloratura as she pleased. It was, to Helva, only a matter of the correct reproduction and diaphragmic control required by the music attempted.
If the authorities remarked on her curious avocation, they did so among themselves. Shell-people were encouraged to develop a hobby so long as they maintained proficiency in their technical work.
On the anniversary of her sixteenth year, Helva was unconditionally graduated and installed in her ship, the XH-834. Her permanent titanium shell was recessed behind an even more indestructible barrier in the central shaft of the scout ship. The neural, audio, visual, and sensory connections were made and sealed. Her extendibles were diverted, connected or augmented and the final, delicate-beyond-description brain taps were completed while Helva remained anesthetically unaware of the proceedings. When she woke, she was the ship. Her brain and intelligence controlled every function from navigation to loading as a scout ship of her class needed. She could take care of herself, and her ambulatory half, in any situation already recorded in the annals of Central Worlds and any situation its most fertile minds could imagine.
Her first actual flight, for she and her kind had made mock flights on dummy panels since she was eight, showed her to be a complete master of the techniques of her profession. She was ready for her great adventures and the arrival of her mobile partner.
There were nine qualified scouts sitting around collecting base pay the day Helva reported for active duty. There were several missions that demanded instant attention, but Helva had been of interest to several department heads in Central for some time and each bureau chief was determined to have her assigned to his section. No one had remembered to introduce Helva to the prospective partners. The ship always chose its own partner. Had there been another brain ship at the base at the moment, Helva would have been guided to make the first move. As it was, while Central wrangled among itself, Robert Tanner sneaked out of the pilots’ barracks, out to the field and over to Helva’s slim metal hull.
“Hello, anyone at home?” Tanner said.
“Of course,” replied Helva, activating her outside scanners. “Are you my partner?” she asked hopefully, as she recognized the Scout Service uniform.
“All you have to do is ask,” he retorted in a wistful tone.
“No one has come. I thought perhaps there were no partners available and I’ve had no directives from Central.”
Even to herself Helva sounded a little self-pitying, but the truth was she was lonely, sitting on the darkened field. She had always had the company of other shells and, more recently, technicians by the score. The sudden solitude had lost its momentary charm and become oppressive.
“No directives from Central is scarcely a cause for regret, but there happen to be eight other guys biting their fingernails to the quick just waiting for an invitation to board you, you beautiful thing.”
Tanner was inside the central cabin as he said this, run
ning appreciative fingers over her panel, the scout’s gravity-chair, poking his head into the cabins, the galley, the head, the pressured-storage compartments.
“Now, if you want to goose Central and do us a favor all in one, call up the barracks and let’s have a ship-warming partner-picking party. Hmmmm?”
Helva chuckled to herself. He was so completely different from the occasional visitors or the various Laboratory technicians she had encountered. He was so gay, so assured, and she was delighted by his suggestion of a partner-picking party. Certainly it was not against anything in her understanding of regulations.
“Cencom, this is XH-834. Connect me with Pilot Barracks.”
“Visual?”
“Please.”
A picture of lounging men in various attitudes of boredom came on her screen.
“This is XH-834. Would the unassigned scouts do me the favor of coming aboard?”
Eight figures galvanized into action, grabbing pieces of wearing apparel, disengaging tape mechanisms, disentangling themselves from bedsheets and towels.
Helva dissolved the connection while Tanner chuckled gleefully and settled down to await their arrival. Helva was engulfed in an unshell-like flurry of anticipation. No actress on her opening night could have been more apprehensive, fearful or breathless. Unlike the actress, she could throw no hysterics, china objets d’art or grease-paint to relive her tension. She could, of course, check her stores for edibles and drinks, which she did, serving Tanner from the virgin selection of commissary.
Scouts were colloquially known as “brawns” as opposed to the ship “brains.” They had to pass as rigorous a training program as the brains and only the top one percent of each contributory world’s highest scholars were admitted to Central Worlds Scout Training Program. Consequently the eight young men who came pounding up the gantry into Helva’s hospitable lock were unusually fine-looking, intelligent, well coordinated and adjusted young men, looking forward to a slightly drunken evening, Helva permitting, and all quite willing to do each other dirt to get possession of her.
Such a human invasion left Helva mentally breathless, a luxury she thoroughly enjoyed for the brief time she felt she should permit it.
She sorted out the young men. Tanner’s opportunism amused but did not specifically attract her; the blond Nordsen seemed too simple; dark-haired Alatpay had a kind of obstinacy with which she felt no compassion; Mir-Ahnin’s bitterness hinted an inner darkness she did not wish to lighten, although he made the biggest outward play for her attention. Hers was a curious courtship, this would be only the first of several marriages for her, for brawns retired after 75 years of service, or earlier if they were unlucky. Brains, their bodies safe from any deterioration, were indestructible. In theory, once a shell-person had paid off the massive debt of early care, surgical adaptation and maintenance charges, he or she was free to seek employment elsewhere. In practice, shell-people remained in the service until they chose to self-destruct or died in the line of duty. Helva had actually spoken to one shell-person 322 years old. She had been so awed by the contact she hadn’t presumed to ask the personal questions she had wanted to.
Her choice of a brawn did not stand out from the others until Tanner started to sing a scout ditty, recounting the misadventures of the bold, dense, painfully inept Billy Brawn. An attempt at harmony resulted in cacophony and Tanner wagged his arms wildly for silence.
“What we need is a roaring good tenor. Jennan, besides palming aces, what do you sing?”
“Sharp,” Jennan replied with easy good humor.
“If a tenor is absolutely necessary, I’ll attempt it,” Helva volunteered.
“My good woman,” Tanner protested.
“Sound your ‘A’,” laughed Jennan.
Into the stunned silence that followed the rich, clear, high “A,” Jennan remarked quietly, “Such an A, Caruso would have given the rest of his notes to sing.”
It did not take them long to discover her full range.
“All Tanner asked for was one roaring good lead tenor,” Jennan said jokingly, “and our sweet mistress supplied us an entire repertory company. The boy who gets this ship will go far, far, far.”
“To the Horsehead Nebula?” asked Nordsen, quoting an old Central saw.
“To the Horsehead Nebula and back, we shall make beautiful music,” said Helva, chuckling.
“Together,” Jennan said. “Only you’d better make the music and, with my voice, I’d better listen.”
“I rather imagined it would be I who listened,” suggested Helva.
Jennan executed a stately bow with an intricate flourish of his crush-brimmed hat. He directed his bow toward the central control pillar where Helva was. Her own personal preference crystallized at that precise moment and for that particular reason, Jennan, alone of the men, had addressed his remarks directly at her physical presence, regardless of the fact that he knew she could pick up his image wherever he was in the ship and regardless of the fact that her body was behind massive metal walls. Throughout their partnership, Jennan never failed to turn his head in her direction no matter where he was in relation to her. In response to this personalization, Helva at that moment and from then on always spoke to Jennan through her central mike, even though that was not always the most efficient method.
Helva didn’t know that she fell in love with Jennan that evening. As she had never been exposed to love or affection, only the drier cousins, respect and admiration, she could scarcely have recognized her reaction to the warmth of his personality and thoughtfulness. As a shell-person, she considered herself remote from emotions largely connected with physical desires.
“Well, Helva, it’s been swell meeting you,” said Tanner suddenly as she and Jennan were arguing about the baroque quality of “Come All Ye Sons of Art.” “See you in space some time, you lucky dog, Jennan. Thanks for the party, Helva.”
“You don’t have to go so soon?” asked Helva realizing belatedly that she and Jennan had been excluding the others from this discussion.
“Best man won,” Tanner said, wryly. “Guess I’d better go get a tape on love ditties. Might need ’em for the next ship, if there’re any more at home like you.”
Helva and Jennan watched them leave, both a little confused.
“Perhaps Tanner’s jumping to conclusions?” Jennan asked.
Helva regarded him as he slouched against the console, facing her shell directly. His arms were crossed on his chest and the glass he held had been empty for some time. He was handsome, they all were; but his watchful eyes were unwary, his mouth assumed a smile easily, his voice (to which Helva was particularly drawn) was resonant, deep, and without unpleasant overtones or accent.
“Sleep on it, at any rate, Helva. Call me in the morning if it’s your opt.”
She called him at breakfast, after she had checked her choice through Central. Jennan moved his things aboard, received their joint commission, had his personality and experience file locked into her reviewer, gave her the coordinates of their first mission. The XH835 officially became the JH-834.
Their first mission was a dull but necessary priority (Medical got Helva), rushing a vaccine to a distant system plagued with a virulent spore disease. They had only to get to Spica as fast as possible.
After the initial, thrilling forward surge at her maximum speed, Helva realized her muscles were to be given less of a workout than her brawn on this tedious mission. But they did have plenty of time for exploring each other’s personalities. Jennan, of course, knew what Helva was capable of as a ship and partner, just as she knew what she could expect from him. But these were only facts and Helva looked forward eagerly to learning that human side of her partner which could not be reduced to a series of symbols. Nor could the give and take of two personalities be learned from a book. It had to be experienced.
“My father was a scout, too, or is that programmed?” began Jennan their third day out.
“Naturally.”
“Unfair, you know.
You’ve got all my family history and I don’t know one blamed thing about yours.”
“I’ve never known either,” Helva said. “Until I read yours, it hadn’t occurred to me I must have one, too, someplace in Central’s files.”
Jennan snorted. “Shell psychology!”
Helva laughed. “Yes, and I’m even programmed against curiosity about it. You’d better be, too.”
Jennan ordered a drink, slouched into the gravity couch opposite her, put his feet on the bumpers, turning himself idly from side to side on the gimbals.
“Helva, a made-up name…”
“With a Scandinavian sound.”
“You aren’t blonde,” Jennan said positively.
“Well, then, there’re dark Swedes.”
“And blonde Turks and this one’s harem is limited to one.”
“Your woman in purdah, yes, but you can comb the pleasure houses,” Helva found herself aghast at the edge to her carefully trained voice.
“You know,” Jennan interrupted her, deep in some thought of his own, “my father gave me the impression he was a lot more married to his ship, the Silvia, than to my mother. I know I used to think Silvia was my grandmother. She was a low number so she must have been… a great-great-grandmother at least. I used to talk to her for hours.”
“Her registry?” asked Helva, unwittingly jealous of everyone and anyone who had shared his hours.
“422. I think she’s TS now. I ran into Tom Burgess once.”
Jennan’s father had died of a planetary disease, the vaccine for which his ship had used up in curing the local citizens.
“Tom said she’d got mighty tough and salty. You lose your sweetness and I’ll come back and haunt you, girl,” Jennan threatened.
Helva laughed. He startled her by stamping up to the column panel, touching it with light, tender fingers.
“I wonder what you look like,” he said softly, wistfully.
Helva had been briefed about this natural curiosity of scouts. She didn’t know anything about herself and neither of them ever would or could.
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