Orbit 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?” the girl said. “Like being in a birdcage—only I can’t tell which way is up.”

  “Up is always an illusion on a ship,” Daw told her. “Why have illusions?” He was already far over her head, exploring. “No chairs, no beds. I like it.”

  “You mean they don’t rest?” The girl had launched herself toward him now, and she put herself into a slow roll so that, to her eyes, the interior of the module revolved around her.

  “No.” Daw moved closer to one of the great mechanisms. “Look, on our ship we have couches and chairs with thousands of little suction holes in them, so that when your clothes touch them you stay where you put yourself. But somebody who might have been doing something more valuable had to make every one of those pieces of fancy furniture, and then a hundred times their cost was spent lugging them up out of Earth’s gravity well into space. Then their pumps require power, which means waste heat the ship has a hard time getting rid of—and any time we want to go anywhere on reaction drive—all the close-in maneuvers—we have to accelerate their mass, and decelerate it again when we get there. All this to hold you down on a ship that never gets up much over half a G, and in addition to the crash couches on the tenders and lifeboats.”

  “But we have to lie down to sleep.”

  “No, you don’t; you’re simply accustomed to it. All you really have to do is pull your feet off the floor, turn out the lights, and hold onto something—like this guy wire—with one hand. Which is probably what the people who built this ship did. Our ancestors, in case you’ve forgotten, were a tree-dwelling species; and when we go to sleep with our hands around anything that resembles a limb, we automatically tighten up if it starts to slip out.”

  “You still think this ship was built by human beings?”

  Daw said carefully, “We’ve never found one that wasn’t.”

  “Until now.”

  “You don’t.”

  There was no reply. Daw looked at the girl to make certain she was all right, jockeyed himself to within touching distance of the great machine, then repeated, “You don’t?”

  “People? With no airlock?”

  “The hatch we used may not have been intended for use in space. Or there might be safety devices we don’t know about, deactivated now.”

  “There wasn’t any atmosphere, even before we opened it; as large as this place is, it would have to discharge for hours, and we’d have felt the push as we came through. There wasn’t anything. You said yourself that they didn’t mind vacuum.”

  Daw said, “I was thinking they might use this one for some special purpose, or they might wear suits all the time in here.”

  “Captain, I love mankind. I know when somebody says that, it’s usually just talk; but I mean it. Not just the people who are like me, but all human beings everywhere. And yet I don’t like this ship.”

  “That’s funny.” Daw swung himself away from the machine he had been examining. “I do. They’re better naval engineers—I think—than we are. Do you want to go back?”

  “No, of course not. The job is here. What are you going to do now?”

  “First check out a few more modules; then have some of our people land on the opposite corner of this thing with routes mapped out for them that will take at least one man through every module. They can work their way toward us, and I’ll take their reports as they come in.”

  “Are you going into some of the other modules now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll come with you. I don’t like it here.”

  * * * *

  It was almost ten hours later when the first searchers reached the point where Daw and the girl waited, having traversed the diagonal length of the ship. They came in talking, in threes and fours, having met when their lines of search converged. Daw, who except for one brief return to Gladiator had spent the time studying some of the devices in the corner module and those immediately adjacent, broke up the groups and questioned each man separately, using a private communication frequency. Helen Youngmeadow chatted with those waiting for debriefing and waved to each party going back to ship.

  In time the groups thinned, fewer and fewer men clustered around the girl; and at last the last crewman saluted and departed, and she and Daw were alone again. To make conversation she said, “It always seems so lonely on our ship, but seeing all these men makes me realize how many there are; and there are some I’d swear I’ve never even met.”

  “You probably haven’t,” Daw said. The list Gladiator was flashing on his in-helmet display showed one man still out, and he was not sure the girl was aware of it—or that she was not.

  “I’ve been wondering what they all do. I mean, the ship can almost run itself, can’t it?”

  “Yes, Gladiator could pretty well take care of herself for a long time, if nothing had to be changed.”

  “If nothing had to be changed?”

  “We have to worry about damage control too, on a warship; but adaptability is the chief justification for a big crew. We can beat our swords into plowshares if we have to, and then our plowshares back into swords; in other words we can rewire and re-rig as much as we need to—if necessary fit out Gladiator to transport a half million refugees or turn her into a medical labor factory. And when something like this comes up we’ve got the people. This ship is too big to have every part visited by a specialist in every discipline, but the men I’ve just sent through her included experts in almost any field you could think of.”

  She was too far off for him to see the beauty of her smile, but he could feel it. “I think you’re proud of your command, Captain.”

  “I am,” Daw said simply. “This was what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it.”

  “Captain, who is Wad?”

  For an instant the question hung in the nothingness between them; then Daw asked, “How did you meet Wad?”

  “I asked the ship something—a few hours ago when we went back—and she referred me to him. He looks like you, only . . .”

  “Only much younger.”

  “And he’s wearing some sort of officer’s insignia—but I’m certain I’ve never seen him before, not at mess or anywhere else.”

  “I didn’t think Gladiator would do that,” Daw said slowly. “Usually Wad only talks to me—at least that’s what I thought.”

  “But who is he?”

  “First I’d like to know what question you had that made the ship turn you over to him—and how he answered it.”

  “I don’t think it was anything important.”

  “What was it?”

  “I think she just felt—you know—that it needed the human touch.”

  “Which Wad has in plenty.”

  “Yes.” Helen Youngmeadow sounded serious. “He’s a very sympathetic, very sensitive young man. Not like an empathist of course, but with some training he could become one. Is he your second in command?”

  Daw shook his head, though perhaps she could not see it. “No,” he said, “Moke’s my second—you’ve met him.” He thought of the times he and Moke had shared a table with Helen Youngmeadow and her husband—Youngmeadow slender and handsome, a bit proud of his blond good looks, intelligent, forceful and eloquent in conversation; Moke’s honest, homely face struggling throughout the tasteless and untasted meal to hide the desire Young-meadow’s wife waked in every man, and the shame Moke felt at desiring the wife of so likeable a shipmate as Young-meadow.

  “Then who is Wad?”

  “If I tell you, will you tell me what it was you asked him?”

  The girl’s shoulders moved, for Daw could see the bulky metal shoulders of her suit move with them. “I suppose so—Gladiator would tell you if you asked.”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t be the same thing as your telling me, Mrs. Youngmeadow. You see, Wad is me. I suppose you could say, too, that I am Wad, grown up.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you know how ship captains are trained?”

  “I know a
n officer’s training is very hard—”

  “Not officers—captains.” Unexpectedly Daw launched himself toward her, his arms outstretched like a bird’s wings, dodging the wide-spaced guy wires until, almost beside her, he caught one and swung to a stop.

  “That was good,” she said. “You’re very graceful.”

  “I like this. I’ve spent a lot of time in space, and you won’t find any of that sucking furniture in my cabin. You can laugh if you like, but I think this is what God intended.”

  “For us?” He could see the arch of her eyebrows now, through the dark transparency of her faceplate.

  “For us. Leaping between the worlds.”

  “You know, understanding people is supposed to be my profession—but I don’t think I really understand you at all, Captain. How are captains trained, anyway? Not like other officers?”

  “No,” Daw said. “We’re not just officers who’ve been promoted, although I know that’s what most people think.”

  “It’s what I thought.”

  “That was the old way. I suppose the British carried it to the ultimate. Around eighteen hundred. Have you ever read about it?”

  The girl did not answer.

  “They put their future skippers on board warships when they were boys of eight or nine—they were called midshipmen. They were just children, and if they misbehaved they were bent over a gun and whipped, but at the same time they were gentlemen and treated as such. The captain, if he was a good captain, treated them like sons and they got responsibility shoved at them just as fast as they could take it.”

  “It sounds like a brutal system,” Helen Youngmeadow said.

  “Not as brutal as losing ship and crew. And it produced some outstanding leaders. Lord Nelson entered the navy at twelve and was posted captain when he was twenty; John Paul Jones started at the same age and was first mate on a slaver when he was nineteen and a captain at twenty-three.”

  “I’m sorry. . . .” The girl’s voice was so faint in Daw’s earphones that he wondered for a moment if her suit mike was failing. “I’ve never heard of either of those men. But I’ll look them up when we get back to Gladiator.”

  “Anyway,” Daw continued, “it was a good system—for as long as people were willing to send promising boys off to sea almost as soon as we’d send them off to school; but after a while you couldn’t count on that anymore. Then they took boys who were almost grown and sent them to special universities first. By the time they were experienced officers they were elderly—and the ships, even though these weren’t starships yet, had become so large that their captains hadn’t had much real contact with them until they were nearly ready to take command of a ship themselves. After a hundred years or so of that—about the time the emphasis shifted from sea to space—people discovered that this system really didn’t work very well. A man who’d spent half his life as a subordinate had been well-trained in being a subordinate, but that was all.”

  The taut cable beneath Daw’s suit-glove shook with a nearly undetectable tremor, and he turned to look toward the hatch, aware as he did that the girl, who must have felt the same minute vibration, had turned instead to the mouths of the connecting tubes that led deeper into the ship.

  The man coming through the hatch was Polk, the cyberneticist, identifiable not by his face but by the name and number stenciled on his helmet. He saluted, and Daw waved him over.

  “Got something for me, Captain?”

  “I think so, the big cabinet in the center of this module. It’s their computer mainframe, or at least an important part of it.”

  “Ah,” said Polk.

  “Wait a minute—” There was an edge of shrillness to Helen Youngmeadow’s voice, though it was so slight Daw might easily have missed it. “How can you know that?”

  “By looking at the wiring running to it. There are hundreds of thousands of wires—braided together into cables, of course, and very fine; but still separate wires, separate channels for information. Anything that can receive that much and do anything with it is a computer by definition—a data-processing device.”

  Polk nodded as though to support his captain and began examining the great floating octahedron Daw had pointed out. After a minute had passed the girl said in a flat voice, “Do you think theirs might be better than ours? That would be important, I suppose.”

  Daw nodded. “Extremely important, but I don’t know if it’s true. From what I’ve been able to tell from looking into that thing they’re a little behind us, I think. Of course there might be some surprises.”

  Polk muttered, “What am I looking for, Captain, just their general system?”

  “To begin with,” Daw said slowly, “I’d like to know what the last numbers in the main registers were.”

  Polk whistled, tinny-sounding over the headphones.

  “What good would that be?” Helen Youngmeadow asked. “Anyway, wouldn’t they just print it—” She remembered how much of Gladiator’s output came over CRTs and audio, and broke off in midsentence.

  Polk said, “Nobody prints much in space, Mrs. Young-meadow. Printing—well, it eats up a lot of paper, and paper’s heavy. It looks to me like they use a system a lot like ours. See this?” He passed a spacegloved hand across the center of one facet of the cabinet, but the girl could see no difference between the area he indicated and the surrounding smooth grey metal. To look more closely she dove across the emptiness much as Daw had a moment before.

  “This was one of their terminals,” Polk continued. “There are probably thousands scattered all through the ship. And they seem to have been used about the same way ours are, with turnoff after a set period to conserve the phosphors; they go bad if you excite them for too long.”

  “I’ve noticed that on Gladiator,” the girl said. “If something’s written on the screen—when I’m reading, for example—and I don’t instruct it to bring up the next page, it fades out after a while. Is that what you mean? It seems remarkable that people as different as these should handle the problem the same way.”

  Daw said, “Not any more remarkable than that both of us use wires—or handles like the one that opened the hatch outside. Look inside that box, though, at the back of that panel and you’ll find something that is remarkable. Show her, Polk.”

  The cyberneticist unlatched the section he had indicated. It swung out smoothly, and the girl saw the display tubes behind it, tubes so flat that each was hardly more than a sheet of glass with a socket at the base. “Vacuum tubes?” she said. “Like a television? Even I know what those are.”

  Daw grunted. “Vacuum tubes in a vacuum.”

  “That’s right. They shouldn’t need anything around them out here, should they?”

  “They don’t, out here. This ship, or at least parts of it, goes into atmospheres at times. Even though the crew doesn’t seem to care whether there’s one in here or not.”

  “Captain,” Helen Youngmeadow said suddenly, “where is my husband?”

  * * * *

  Hours later Moke’s voice (unexpectedly loud and near because Moke had the kind of voice that transmitted well through the phones’ medium-range frequencies) asked a similar question: “You find Youngmeadow yet, Skipper?”

  “We don’t know that he’s lost.”

  “You didn’t find him, huh?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “You really think he’s alive and just not answering?”

  “It could be,” Daw said. He did not have to remind Moke, as he had Helen Youngmeadow, that there was no danger of running out of oxygen in a modern space suit—each suit being a system as self-sufficient as a planet and its sun; energy from the suit’s tiny pile scavenging every molecule of water and whisper of carbon dioxide and making new, fresh food, freshwater, clean air that could be used again, so that once in the suit the occupant might live in plenty until time itself destroyed him. (He had not mentioned that even death would not end the life encysted in that steady protection, since the needs of the bacteria striking in at
the now defenseless corpse from the skin, out from the intestines, would be sensed, still, by the faithful, empty suit; and served.)

  Daw thought of Youngmeadow dead somewhere in this strange vessel, still secure in his suit, his corpse bloating and stinking while the suit hummed on; and found, startled, that the thought was pleasant—which was absurd, he hardly knew Youngmeadow, and certainly had nothing against the man.

  “His wife still out looking for him?” Moke asked.

  Daw nodded, though Moke could not see him. “Yes,” he said. “So are the other parties. I’ve got a couple of men with Mrs. Youngmeadow to make sure she comes back all right.”