"I know what you mean," I said. "Not everyone would."
"One thing," Ellen observed, "she probably does realize. She knows about the baby."
I pressed my foot urgently against hers.
"I suppose she knows," Ellen went on reflectively, "that if it's a monster, her whole future and Bill's and Lotrin's collapses. And not only collapses, but into a rather nasty little puddle. Yes, she probably knows that. I don't think she's really faced it, but who could? Certainly not me. I'll stay in TC and be asked to do the impossible and get shot at and maybe beaten up occasionally. But I'm glad I'm a few years too old to be asked to be a First Lady."
Shirley came right into the room. It had been a good touch on Ellen's part to drop these hints about our normal employment. Since neither of us had done anything of the sort before, it would convince Shirley that Ellen didn't know she was there.
Shirley was white, but strictly under control.
"So you're taking me to Lotrin" she said clearly, "to do something you wouldn't do yourself?"
Ellen turned and met her gaze. She didn't look startled that Shirley had heard her; it would have been out of character, anyway.
"That's right, Shirley," she said quietly.
I really thought there was going to be a scene. It was all between Ellen and Shirley. It was Ellen whom Shirley worshiped, not me. I could see Shirley deciding that Ellen was false and everything was, too, and you couldn't trust anyone or anything. I saw her being ashamed of all the times she had cried before Ellen, who all the while had been thinking she was mad and a fool to be doing what she was doing.
Then Shirley whirled and went out.
"Better go after her, hadn't you?" I said.
"I've gone after her often enough."
"But she may…"
"She may do what?"
"Anything. Kill herself."
"If she's going to kill herself, she'd better do it now, not when she's reached Lotrin and has actually been installed."
I was silent, thinking. Shirley wouldn't kill herself, of course. Girls as delicately balanced as that would never be chosen as First Ladies. She would have much worse things to face than Ellen's defection.
I knew why Ellen had spoken as she had. Ellen was no part of Shirley's life on Lotrin. If Shirley was pinning a lot on Ellen and Ellen's opinion of her and First Ladies in general, the sooner it was unpinned, the better. So Ellen tore it off.
Besides, of course, Ellen was fed up playing nursemaid.
"Just for curiosity," I said, "when were you shot at in the line of duty?"
"On Maple, fool. Don't you remember?"
"Oh, that. But the shot was meant for me."
"A lot of difference that would have made to me if it killed me."
"And when were you last beaten up?"
"Nostral. When you were looking for the house."
I didn't pursue that. On that occasion, Ellen certainly ran into my arms as she had never done before or since, and had stayed in bed for days afterward alleging nervous exhaustion. The thing about Ellen is that if she was nearly beaten up, she would talk about it at every opportunity, with all the details of what did happen and what might have happened, but if she was beaten up, she would shut up like a clam.
I filed away the conclusion that she had probably had a tough time on Nostral, and I hadn't known about it before—it had happened two years ago—meant nothing. Not when you know the first thing about Ellen.
I came back to what I thought was safer ground: "A few years too old?"
"I'm twenty-five," Ellen remarked calmly.
It wasn't impossible, though that meant she was only eighteen when I first met her. Just unlikely. So I left it at that. It was unlike Ellen to give away even that much. Twenty years hence, I could say that according to her own figures she was now forty-five.
But this isn't the story of Ellen. Not directly, at any rate.
We hardly saw Shirley when we were changing over to the Sardonia. Ellen's attitude was that she had seen Shirley through the first part, and it was my turn now. She might have to take over again just before we reached Lotrin and clear up the mess I had made, but meantime she was going to have a rest from Shirley Judson.
That's Ellen.
If anything was to be done about Shirley, I would have to do it. I waited until the ship was well clear of the Moon and then went to look for Shirley, whom we had only seen at mealtimes.
The Sardonia was nosing about, stopping and darting like a fish. Passengers weren't supposed to walk about at this stage. They were told to lie down or at least sit down. For the effect of the ship's motion was that, one moment, "down" was the floor, the next the left-hand wall, then the wall in front, then the wall behind. Of course it was never a full gravity; if you liked to take a chance, you could drop lightly on your feet on floor, walls and ceiling. The beds all swiveled with the changes in equilibrium.
Apparently Shirley was taking her chance with the gravity, because she wasn't in her cabin.
There was no room for social life on the Sardonia. The only place that held a fair number of people was the dining room, and, as the ship carried four hundred people, the dining room was on shift duty twenty-four hours a day. So, if Shirley wasn't in her own room, she was in someone else's.
I considered the matter. Shirley had had a shock. Tom from the life she had grown used to in twenty-one years, she had set up Ellen as her model and guide. Ellen had allowed this until we were irrevocably on our way, then abdicated. What she had said was nothing; she could have won back Shirley's adoration any time she cared, but she hadn't bothered.
What would Shirley do? She would feel nothing mattered. Nobody cared. She might as well enjoy herself—show Ellen she didn't care, either. In the limited field offered by the Sardonia, there was only one thing she could do.
I considered some more. If Shirley was going to throw herself at some man's head, the likelihood was that it would be someone on the same meal shift, someone she had at least seen and talked to. I picked Glen Mavor. Mavor was a shy youngster going out to Civnet to settle. Civnet, right on the outposts of Terran settlement, wasn't near the First Lady stage yet.
I sought out Mavor. I tapped on his door, but walked right in. I was right. Shirley was there, lounging against a wall. Mavor was sitting on the bed. When I came in, the place was crowded.
"Hallo, Shirley," I said. "I thought you might be here."
The ship made one of its sudden darts and Shirley and I somersaulted and landed on the ceiling, Shirley in a swirl of legs and skirt. She laughed. Mavor didn't have to move, because the bed kept its equilibrium.
I saw the situation. Shirley was unconcerned, happy in a reckless way. Mavor was interested, excited, but very nervous. He might not know the intracacies of the situation, but he knew he was going to a world which wouldn't see a woman for a long time, and that Shirley was ready and willing to offer consolation in advance.
This wasn't the Shirley Judson we had met in the garden. This Shirley was more vital, and about twenty times as attractive, because now she was trying to be attractive.
Innocence is an attitude of mind, not mere absence of experience. Shirley now, arms behind her and head thrown back against the wall, was far from innocent. Nothing much had happened to her experience, but a lot to her attitude of mind. She had chosen a thin canary-yellow blouse for two obvious reasons, and her scarlet skirt hugged her waist and hips and then flared carelessly, its work done.
Shirley couldn't go around like that for long looking for trouble without finding it. Something had to be done.
"Mavor," I said quietly, "I'm going to tell you a secret."
Mavor, a good-looking young fellow, glanced at Shirley, but she only smiled and surveyed her ankles. He turned back to me.
"I don't know if I want to hear any secrets," he said.
"This one you hear all the same. And you keep it. It doesn't really matter now whether you keep it or not, but it would be more convenient if everyone on the ship didn't know
it just yet. Shirley, you see, is the First Lady of Lotrin."
I knew I had been right to tell him when I saw his expression.
"I only mention it," I said casually, "because when people are playing with dynamite, they at least ought to know it's dynamite. Coming, Shirley?"
There was another upheaval. This time Shirley landed on top of Mavor, her arms round his neck. It might have been an accident, but it was no accident when she pulled his face to hers and kissed him. That wasn't for Mavor's benefit at all, but for mine.
She disentangled herself at her leisure and followed me. I took her to her own room.
"Why did you tell him that?" she asked. She didn't mind; she was just curious.
"To keep him out of your way," I said grimly. "He won't touch you with a grappling pole now. He's scared."
"Why?"
"You don't know much about TC, do you? It carries a lot of guns of different calibers. No one twists TC's tail for fun."
"You mean Terran Control would victimize Glen?"
"What for?"
It was a good question. It upset even the new, more confident Shirley. "I mean if…"
"If what?" I demanded.
"Why shouldn't I have a good time while I can, before I get to my prison?"
"Nothing against having a good time. Unless the form it takes might have an adverse effect on the future."
"I don't care about the future. There may be no future."
We had reached her room. I passed it, pushed her inside and followed her in. We sat on the bed, where we could watch the gyrations of the walls with indifference.
"What's the ship doing?" she abruptly wanted to know.
"Looking for the rails," I told her. I didn't want to talk about the ship, but I was ready to play along with Shirley to a certain extent.
"The rails?"
"Sure. You know space travel is composed of two very different parts. Hoisting yourself free of a planet and then of a satellite of some kind, and then maneuvering about clumsily like this. The other part is as slick and wonderful as this is primitive and slow. At this rate, you'd take twenty thousand years to reach Aldebaran, let alone Lotrin."
"But it only takes a few weeks!"
"That's what I'm telling you," I said patiently. "It's slick and wonderful. There aren't really any rails, of course, but it's something like that. We're looking for a field that starts about here and stretches all the way to Aldebaran. A beam. The Catterick Field, they call it. We've passed through it several times already—why we keep nosing about like this is that we have to be fair and square in the middle of it, and it's pretty tight. Only a few miles across."
"The ship isn't a mile wide."
"No. But if there was the slightest error, how many million miles would be needed to show it up? Ever hear of inertia, Shirley?"
"That's laziness."
"You can put it that way. The laziness of matter. When it's still, matter can't be bothered to move, and it's a devil of a job to make it. And, when it's moving, it can't be bothered to make any effort to stop, and you have the same job all over again stopping it.
"Now the Sardonia's engines generate enough power to take us to Lotrin in a few weeks without the Catterick Field—only the ship wouldn't go with the engines at that acceleration. It would disintegrate. And at a fraction of that speed, we'd all be crushed to pulp. Just now, no acceleration of more than ten feet a second is being put on."
For demonstration purposes, I caught her by the waist, raised her against about a third Earth gravity and pushed her into the center of the room just as the ship shot one way and then another.
"And that can be quite hectic," I remarked, as Shirley bounced and somersaulted to the opposite wall.
She had dressed for this sort of thing, I observed, with canary lingerie which was meant to make an interesting flurry as her legs thrashed about. I caught her unceremoniously by the waistband and hauled her back on the bed beside me.
"Imagine what it would be like if the acceleration were ten miles a second," I went on. "Or a thousand miles. Or ten thousand."
"I can't," she said truthfully.
"Obviously, if you're going to travel hundreds of light-years at a time, you've got to do something about inertia. Suppose there were no inertia on Earth. That's impossible actually, because the field only operates in a vacuum. But if it wasn't, and gravity and air resistance remained the same, you could run at top speed from a standing start. If you wanted to turn and go back, you'd do it in one stride."
"Nonsense," said Shirley, "you would strain a muscle or something."
"No. That's inertia. If you're running at fifteen miles an hour and try to make your muscles stop you dead, certainly you'll tear something. But if there's no inertia, you could turn with one toe and be running the other way. Gravity and air resistance would not matter much. It's inertia you've got to counter."
Shirley was tired of the whole subject and showed it. I went on grimly: "When we're firmly in the center of this field, which is maintained from the Moon, by the way, we'll start off with the Catterick Field energized. Then there won't be any gravity. No inertia. Only a trickle let through so that we can still walk about, not a millionth of the real force. The ship will be able to start and stop in a split second. It won't do more than a few hundred miles an hour at first, because we may still not be properly on the rails. When the captain's satisfied we are, we'll be off at the speed of light. Then bigger and bigger multiples of that till we reach Aldebaran. Then dead stop. We—"
"I'm going to have a shower," Shirley announced. "You mean you want me to leave?"
"Stay if you like, as long as you don't go on gabbing about the Cat-whatever-it-is Field."
The shower was a minute cubicle in the opposite wall. There was no sink; if you wanted to wash, you had to take a whole shower.
I might have told Shirley that I had seen and read and done a lot more than she had, and that if she really wanted to shock or upset me, she would have to go much further than she was ready to do—go around shooting people, for instance, or tampering with the engines, or trying to climb out into space.
But that might give her ideas, and anyway she wanted me to protest. So I hoisted myself up and made for the door, knowing she didn't really want to be left alone, with Glen Mavor almost certainly crossed off from now on. "See you later," I said.
Shirley's reckless phase fizzled out. Glen Mavor was crossed off and she wasn't really sorry. She was fundamentally level-headed. She started speaking to Ellen again instead of ignoring her when we ate. Ellen took her tentative advances as she had taken her resentment, calmly and without reference to the past. But the old adoration was gone. It was me Shirley addressed most of her attention to, not Ellen.
Time passes quickly when every day is the same, even more quickly when there is no day. We all slept about twelve hours out of twenty-four. Sustained exercise was almost impossible, and Ellen again had her usual worry about putting on weight. She did the usual thing about it—shut me out of the cabin and exercised grimly, deliberately, systematically. She wouldn't let anyone see her swinging her arms and pedaling on her back. Shirley was politely shown out, too, once or twice.
"She saw me doing that sort of thing often enough," Shirley objected once. "Is she made differently from other women, or what?"
This was a far cry from her earlier worship of Ellen, which I thought was not a bad thing.
"Oh, no," I said.
"She couldn't have knock knees or a pot belly or anything?"
"Nothing like that. She'll sunbathe in a swimsuit in the right surroundings, but only when she can be perfect. Ellen is the one perfect thing in a lot of imperfect worlds."
"Do you think she's perfect?"
"What I think doesn't count. I meant can you imagine seeing Ellen touching her toes and swinging over to try to do it backward? You may know she's doing it, but can you imagine seeing it?"
She couldn't.
Shirley and I were thus thrown in each other's company a l
ot. But we discovered a certain similarity in temperament with regard to passing time together which Ellen would never have understood. We would lounge comfortably in Shirley's room reading or considering life or even dozing, without saying a word. We each had company, but we didn't have to talk.
And then Shirley finished that phase, too. I was reading a novel when she put her head between me and the book and kissed me.
It may sound like a confession, but that really did startle me. Because when she did that, a lot of other things slipped into place.
She had wanted to know, when we were just on our way, whether I loved Ellen. Whether we were married. She had quarreled with Ellen. She had let me stop an affair with Glen Mavor, and hadn't seemed to care. She had tried to upset me, put me off stroke. She became catty about Ellen. She spent nearly all her waking hours in my company.
Just when my brain was about to take over once more, it was sent reeling again by the realization that Shirley wasn't any more ready for this clinch than I was.
That's what they mean when they talk about love as a little-understood though prevalent disease. I had no possible reason or excuse for falling for Shirley, I hadn't meant to do it, it had never occurred to me that I could do it. And here we were. With Shirley in my arms, I wasn't going to move or think, if I could help it, because, once the moment ended, I was going to have to face a lot of things I didn't want to face. Shirley probably felt exactly the same. So we clung and felt our hearts beating together and tried to stop time.
We succeeded no better than anyone ever has. I felt I was hurting Shirley and released my grip slightly. In turn, she took one arm from my neck and dropped it to my side. So, a little at a time, we broke it up.
Another Part of the Galaxy Page 12