by Rick Cook
Captain Peter Jenkins sucked lukewarm food out of a plastic pouch. Then he took the package away from his lips and looked at it disgustedly. The label said it was “turkey dinner with dressing and gravy.” The contents were the consistency of thick mush with little bits of stuff in it. Some of the bits were crunchy. That meant they were celery. Some of them were rubbery. That meant they were turkey. Overall it tasted of salt, sage and artificial turkey stock.
Jenkins made a face and put the package down on his console. The opening had sealed itself automatically as soon as he stopped sucking and the pouch stuck lightly to any surface it touched.
It could be worse, he thought, wrinkling his nose. It could be ham and lima beans.
One of the privileges of being captain was you got first pick of the food packs in the closet-size duty galley aft of the bridge. Of course, being the captain, you were also usually the last to get off the bridge to choose.
Four thousand feet of starship, a catering staff of nearly fifty and the captain still eats slop.
He knew fatigue was getting to him. He and DeRosa had both been on the bridge for nearly twenty hours. Now their long watch was coming to a close. The ship was in orbit about the star, the systems had been checked and minor damage either repaired or worked around until it could be repaired. There were just a few things left to set in motion before both of them would turn their stations over to other officers. With the next watch the real work of the expedition would begin.
He punched up engineering and Ludenemeyer’s face appeared.
“Final status?”
The engineering chief shrugged. “About the same. Pretty good and getting better.”
“How soon can we begin deploying the gravitational telescope?” Jenkins asked.
“It’s not a telescope,” Ludenemeyer said. “According to the astronomers it’s an array. A telescope produces images.”
“How long, Mr. Ludenemeyer?”
“Probably next wake cycle. There’ll be an engineering meeting in a little under an hour and I can tell you more then.”
“As soon as you know.” He caught himself. “No, make that as soon as I come back on. I don’t need to know badly enough to be woken up.”
He made to sign off and then he paused. “And what the hell are you doing still on duty, Mr. Ludenemeyer? You started before I did.”
Ludenemeyer shrugged, a little embarrassed. “You know how it is, Captain. Besides, I sent my seconds to get something to eat in the cafeteria. I’ll go off as soon as they get back.”
“Lucky stiffs,” Jenkins said. “I’m still on zero-G rations.”
“It could be worse,” the engineer told him. “We’re on them too. All we’ve got left down here is ham and lima beans.”
Mike Clancy and three others from the engineering section squeezed into an unoccupied table in the cafeteria. Barry Kirchoff followed them through the line and sat down with them. The others made no comment, but they moved over to give him room.
There weren’t many people in the cafeteria, Kirchoff saw. A couple of tables away a mixed group of crew, technicians, scientists and vacuum jacks was talking noisily. He noticed it included the Japanese guy who always dressed funny and the foxy little blonde astronomer. They were all eating lightly, he saw.
In contrast, the engineers had loaded their plates and Clancy was holding forth.
“You know what I hate about being spun down on this tub? You can’t get anything decent to eat.” He gestured at the pile of sandwiches. “Damn galley shuts down.” He tore the wrapper off one of the sandwiches and stuffed half of it into his mouth. “Now when we were running from the Moon to L5, last night out we’d always have spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti in zero-G?” Kirchoff blurted out.
“Sure,” Clancy drawled. “ ’Course you’ve got to learn to suck down an entire strand in one breath. You can’t cut it up and eat it with a fork like an officer and a gentleman.”
From Clancy’s grin and the way the others were smiling, Kirchoff realized he had been caught in another space crew joke. He smiled weakly to show he was a good sport and went back to eating.
Damn, he thought. Space crews were the ultimate insiders. They lived in each other’s pockets for months at a time and they had made a whole subculture out of it. He had been catapulted from the Academy directly into the engineering department and he simply didn’t have the background.
Clancy had launched into a complicated aneC.Dote involving a catcher ship at L5 and several people whose nicknames apparently meant something to everyone else at the table. Kirchoff kept his head down and tried to concentrate on his food.
Two technicians came in and sat down at the table next to the engineers. They had practically nothing on their trays and they moved slowly and carefully, with the gait of men who expect that their bodies will betray them at any second.
“God, another day to go. I hope that bastard’s enjoying this,” said one of the technicians loudly enough to be overheard at the next table.
“And which bastard did you have in mind?” Mike Clancy said very quietly.
The technician was too miserable to take the hint. “The captain. I hope he’s happy now that half the people on board are puking their guts out.”
“Part of the price of space travel,” Kirchoff said mildly.
“Bull!” the technician said. “You can jump without spinning down. Other ships do it all the time. But our captain’s got to show how important he is. So he makes everyone else miserable.”
Clancy shifted in his seat, but Kirchoff leaned over and grabbed his wrist. Their eyes locked and then the older man settled back.
“Have you ever seen a man who’s been decompressed?” Clancy asked evenly. “The way his eyes bug out and bleed? The frozen black froth where he’s tried to breathe vacuum and his lungs burst? The way the veins ruptured under the skin and his body blows up like a balloon, the way his guts push out his asshole?”
The two technicians shifted uncomfortably and turned even paler.
“And you ever smelled someone like that when you bring ’em back inside and the body warms up? The shit and the blood and all the other juices that get squeezed out of the body in vacuum.”
One of the technicians jumped up from the table and made a dash for the door, bouncing along as he barely kept contact with the floor.
“Now you think about that,” Clancy went on inexorably, his eyes locked on the complainer. “You think about how it would feel if we hit a piece of ice or rock out here because we couldn’t maneuver fast enough and you lost all this nice warm air. You think about it and you tell me if it’s worth trying to keep spin on when we jump.”
The engineer shrugged. “Now me, I don’t care. When we jump I’m back in the ass end of this thing in a pressure suit babysitting the torch. Anything goes wrong, I’m either fine or I’ll never know what hit me. You’re the one who would be sticking your finger down your throat trying to hold your lungs in place.”
The technician muttered something incomprehensible, got up from the table and followed his friend out.
“Assholes,” Clancy said conversationally and went back to his aneC.Dote.
Sharon Dolan turned back to her table and started eating again. Nearly everyone in the cafeteria had heard the argument and it had obviously struck a cord. What had been a casual mix at her own table had suddenly separated as completely as oil and water under gravity. Although everyone was trying to ignore it, a gap had opened between the crew and the scientists and technicians.
The argument, even the whole question of spinning down, were just symptoms, Sharon admitted. The problem was there really was a gap between the crew and the passengers and it was getting bigger every day.
Part of it was that very few of the passengers had ever been in space before they shuttled up to join the Maxwell. The vacuum jacks who were along to rig and maintain the arrays had, of course, but almost none of the astronomers had. Ironically, only a few astronomers had ever been off Earth. The
huge instruments floating in space or anchored to the airless surface of the Moon were mostly run by remote control to meet the needs of scientists at institutes and universities around the globe. Space sickness was something every crewman had learned to handle long ago. To most of the scientists and technicians it was a whole new level of discomfort.
Worse, the scientists and technicians didn’t understand the limits and problems of space living that the crew and vacuum jacks took for granted. To them the rules and precautions seemed unreasonable and the crew seemed arrogant bullies. To the crew the passengers seemed like dangerous ignoramuses.
Conversation had picked up again around the table; a strained, artificial chatter as the group tried to recapture the mood of a few minutes ago.
It wasn’t just being in space, Sharon thought. The crew and the passengers had totally different styles. The crew was much more hierarchically oriented. They were used to commanding and being commanded, to orders generated at the top and passed down a chain of command. Even the vacuum jacks, that band of happy anarchists, was used to working that way. It was hard for them to understand the more consensual, collegial style of decision making the scientists and technicians were used to.
Over at the other table the crewmen had gathered up their trays and headed for the door. The scientists and technicians at the nearby tables seemed to stiffen and flinch away as they passed with the easy gliding steps of people used to zero-gravity.
Put it all together and it spelled friction, Sharon realized. If someone doesn’t do something, we’re going to have real trouble before this is over.
Clancy caught up with Kirchoff in the corridor outside the cafeteria and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Thanks, kid,” he said quietly. “Ludenemeyer wouldn’t have liked it if I gave that shit what he really deserved.”
Kirchoff flushed. “I think what you did was much more effective than hitting him,” he said. “Maybe he learned something.”
The older engineer looked him up and down. “You know if you weren’t such a puke you’d be all right.” Then Clancy moved off down the corridor in easy bounds, leaving Kirchoff to wonder if he’d been insulted and complimented.
Iron Alice was already on the bridge when Captain Peter Jenkins came back on watch the next morning.
“What’s the word on the gravity array?” he asked as soon as he had formally taken command of the bridge.
“We’re about ready,” DeRosa told him, still standing next to his console. “Ludenemeyer says we can spin up in another eight hours. Formal report’s waiting for you.”
The captain punched it up on his screen and studied it. “After we deploy the array, then.” He had hoped they could spin up first, but the schedule lines on the report chart showed that would mean delaying the deployment.
“Anything else I should know?”
The second-in-command shrugged. “Not really.”
Jenkins looked around to make sure no one else was close. Then he leaned over to her. “I understand Mike Clancy nearly decked someone in the cafeteria last night.”
Iron Alice shrugged. “Just a little discussion.”
“I’d appreciate it if there weren’t any more of those little discussions.”
“Ludenemeyer’s already talked to him about it.” She dropped her voice even more. “But if something doesn’t shake some sense into our passengers, we’re going to have real trouble sometime soon.”
“I intend to talk to Aubrey as soon as we’re spun up,” Jenkins said. “He’s the expert on conflict resolution.”
“I just hope it does some good. Some of those people need a real attitude adjustment and we’re all sealed in here like flies in a bottle for eight more months.” She shook her head. “Jesus.”
“Just as long as it doesn’t turn into scorpions in a bottle,” Jenkins told her. “Don’t worry. Things will get better when we get down to work.” I hope, he added to himself.
“Well, the sooner we get these arrays deployed, the sooner we’ll know. Any word from Ludenemeyer and the others yet?”
“Any minute, I imagine,” the captain told her.
Iron Alice nodded and returned to her pilot’s chair. The leathery woman might be pushing sixty, but she was still far and away the best pilot on the ship for anything that didn’t take lightning reflexes. A thousand-meter-long starship doesn’t do anything at lightning speed and for this job Jenkins wanted the best he had.
There were only two people in the Telescope Shack. That was one more than necessary, but Dr. Pete Carlotti wanted to be there for the first quick-and-dirty scan.
Not that there would be much to see. The great arrays that made up the Maxwell’s real observing power were still stowed in the holds aft of Spin. The only instruments available now were finder scopes, a battery of twenty-four-inch optical instruments and small radio, IR and UV arrays mounted on the ship’s hull. Compared to the tools of modern astronomy they were only toys.
The real astronomical work wouldn’t start until the riggers and vacuum jacks had deployed the big arrays and the technicians had calibrated them. For now the view wasn’t much better than it was from the giant telescopes in the Earth system.
Of course any of the astronomers who wanted to could tap into the data and images flowing back from the instruments on the terminals in their quarters or the public areas of the ship. A few probably had out of curiosity. But no one was going to go to work until the big equipment was broken out. The only astronomer doing anything productive right now was the junior staff member directing the system from the cabin in Spin still called the Telescope Shack.
Carlotti was there because he wanted to be. He felt it was somehow right that as the head of the Maxwell’s astronomy group he should be where the action was when the ship broke out into the new system. Typically, he was completely oblivious to the effect his presence and nervous energy was having on his subordinate.
Already the subordinate had completed his first quick scan of the neighborhood. Within the limits of their drive, they were where they were supposed to be. Now several of the instruments were trained inward, to check out the sun they were orbiting.
“Dr. Carlotti, what do you make of this?”
Peter Carlotti was small, dark and intense, with a big beak of a nose and a thinning thatch of dark hair. He called up the display on his workstation and scowled at the information coming up on the screen. He was unusual among astronomers in that he had actually spent considerable time in space. That deep-space experience was one of the reasons he had been chosen to head up the astronomical team on the Maxwell.
“Millimeter wavelength. And strong,” he said to his subordinate. “That star is doing some damned odd things.” He watched the data a minute more and his scowl deepened.
“I think we’d better let the rest of the team in on this. Call the heads of the astronomy departments and tell them well have an additional agenda item at the First Look meeting.” He glanced at his watch. “When is that meeting, anyhow?”
“A little more than four hours from now.” His subordinate popped up a schedule window. “That will be just after spin’s scheduled to be restored.”
“Good. Maybe everyone’s stomach will have settled down by then. Make sure everyone is notified.”
The subordinate snorted, but very softly. His job was to direct the instruments, not to set up a meeting. Carlotti could do that just as easily from the other console and he wasn’t supposed to be on duty.
“Even the deep-sky people and the theoreticians?” his subordinate asked. The distinction between stellar and deep-space astronomers and the larger gap between observing astronomers and theoreticians was centuries old, but it was still as true as it had been when telescopes were tied to the Earth.
“Especially the theoreticians,” Carlotti grinned. “They’re going to go nuts.”
“What about the crew? Should I alert them?”
“No reason. We won’t need a maneuver right away and I imagine they’re
all busy doing whatever it is they do on this thing.” He paused. “Oh yes, make sure Dr. Dolan’s notified. This could have some very interesting implications for planetary formations and surfaces.”
He was almost rubbing his hands with excitement as he watched the data pour onto his screen.
The gravitational detection array was four cylinders, each about the size of one of the Maxwell’s shuttles. The tanks were filled with liquid helium and carefully shielded from the star even at this distance. In each tank were carefully sized masses of metal with sensors that measured the size of the masses very, very precisely. Gravity waves moving through the cylinders changed the size of the masses and the changes were measured.
In operation, the cylinders were placed at the vertices of a tetrahedron spaced an exact distance apart and held in position by sensitive maneuvering units. From the six baselines so constructed—and a mass of highly sophisticated processing equipment on both the array and the Maxwell—the strength and direction of gravity waves could be determined.
That information would be integrated with the data from the various optical and radio telescopes the ship carried and the data painstakingly reduced both by workers on the ship and later back on Earth.
The array was finicky beyond belief and the gravitational map it produced was coarse and crude, but it was the best humanity had. The map would aid future expeditions as they moved further out in the galaxy.
When the Maxwell left the system, the array would be left in place and operating. At intervals, a ship would visit the system to collect the data the array produced.
Jenkins had barely settled into his command couch when Ludenemeyer’s face flashed up on his screen.
“We’re ready to deploy, sir.”
“Then deploy, Mr. Ludenemeyer.” He touched another stud. “Pilot, you have the conn.”
With that Jenkins became an observer. Ludenemeyer and DeRosa would handle the deployment as they had practiced it so many times on the ship’s simulators. He was superfluous unless something went really wrong.