Roscoe nodded and looked away.
“That’s a possibility every time you depart after a visit. And not just with your grandfather, but with everyone you leave, for however short a time. It can be hard to say goodbye, but you can’t live your whole life being afraid of seeing someone for the last time.
“You have many gifts, Roscoe. You have to master them. But most of all, you have to live the life you choose for yourself. Your talents can take you anywhere you want—they can open the Universe for you to examine. And the Space Institute on Earth is the finest school for space studies in all of Terra.”
“Better than New Alex Tech?” Roscoe said mischievously.
His father laughed. “I’ll deny saying it—and who’d believe the word of a Lyceum man anyway? But yes. And simply visiting Earth will be an education in itself.
“Now, let’s get back to the house, Scooter. Your mother will skin both of us alive if we make everyone wait much longer.”
Laughing, the two of them raced up the hill and through the woods. As always, the son won the race; but these days, he won even when his father tried his best. When Roscoe returned to the party his good spirits had returned. And he didn’t even wince when the guests, taking his father’s lead, all began using the hated nickname of his boyhood.
Cook had one final task to complete before leaving the ship. The weight of memories held him down, and Cook sat silently for several minutes. Then, he made his last entry into the ship’s log.
cc: 142-8355.7
FILE: Log
ACCESS: Command.
SECURITY: Standard
OPERATIONAL STATUS: Normal
LOCATION: SB 114, Ishtar Command
Having received orders on cc:142-8100 effecting transfer to new assignment, I hereby relinquish command to Lt Cmdr LaRue.
Capt R Cook
He copied his last entry into his personal diary and placed the disk into his duffel bag. Quietly, Cook gathered his belongings and took the private elevator to the hangar deck, where a single security guard stood watch over the mooring lock. Misty-eyed and alone, he left the ship.
***~~~***
Chapter 10
“CAPTAIN COOK? He was here a minute ago, sir. Why don’t you check Engineering? He was complaining about the mess down there before I lost sight of him.”
“Thank you—uh— ”
“Atkins, sir. Crewman Technician Atkins.”
“Carry on, Mr. Atkins.”
“Aye, sir.”
Slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder, Jeremy Ashton started back toward the elevator once again. He was hungry and tired, and his temper was worn to threadbare. The news that there would be no ship of his own waiting for him at trip’s end had not sent him off in the best frame of mind. He was still in a foul mood when he caught the IshCom shuttle from Looking Glass. En route, an ion storm put them five days behind schedule. Finding nobody to meet him at the spaceport, and nobody in the captain’s office when he finally did manage to find his new assignment, seemed a fitting climax to a voyage that had seen an endless succession of last straws. To be left stalking a phantom the width and breadth of the ship had not helped his disposition.
Out the door and into the hallway he stormed, his load growing heavier by the minute. Protocol demanded that he report to the commanding officer before settling into his quarters, but the captain was proving as elusive as a desert mirage. Jeremy was starting to wonder if the skipper of this ship might not be a mass hallucination. Everybody claimed to have just seen him, but no matter where Jeremy turned, the captain had already left. Perhaps this was some Eastern Fleet desk jockey’s idea of a joke: assign a crew to a starship and see how long it takes them to realize that they don’t have a commander. Or maybe it was a loonie CentCom psychologist’s attempt to measure the human animal’s capacity for mass self-delusion.
Whatever the explanation, Jeremy was out of patience. He stopped near the portside artery to collect his bearings. Crewmen passed on all sides, some leading freight dollies loaded with equipment crates, others bulling past as he stood, barely pausing for a hurried “’Scuse me, sir” before vanishing out of earshot and beyond the range of a tongue-lashing.
Jeremy felt lost and disoriented. The ship’s halls and walkways were more disjointed than on his old tracking station. They ran this way and that with scarcely a reason, and the circular arch of the radial corridors made getting around seem a hopeless quest. The lack of hallway markings only added to his confusion. Engineering was two levels down, he tried to remember. Or was it three?
“Damn starships ought to come with maps,” he said. He turned the corner toward the main elevators and immediately saw the ceiling twisting and falling away from his face. The next thing he knew, his spinning head was fighting to clear itself. He was sprawled on his back and looking up at the ceiling panel, his bag on the deck floor near the wall. Scattered on the floor was a host of program trays for the main computers, in the middle of which was a young man shaking his head and raising himself on his elbows to survey the damage.
“Loller of a whack,” said the other man, shaking his head to collect his wits. Jeremy couldn’t quite place the accent. Its owner wore old, ragged sneakers and dark blue fatigues without rank markings, obviously a tyro ensign or an eager beaver desk jockey lieutenant out to earn his line badge before curling up behind a desk for the rest of his life.
Jeremy was up in a flash. “What sort of maniac dashes round corners without a hail of warning?” he snapped.
Still muttering, he limped to his bag, angrily kicking the trays to the side with his foot as he walked. “I suppose you have good reasons for running around this ship like a rut-mad bull.”
“Nope,” came the terse reply. “Just too dumb to know any better.”
Two redshirts, quickly coming to help, ignored Jeremy and dashed to assist the young officer to his feet. He waved them away with a laugh and rose under his own power. Suddenly, the young man didn’t look as young as before. His eyes blazed with curiosity about this testy newcomer, and a crisply confident manner instantly transformed an otherwise disheveled appearance into a commanding bearing. Jeremy had the distinct sensation that he had just flushed his own career out the sanitation airlock.
“I’ll just bet you’re Commander Ashton.” The air of finality to his voice seemed to admit no discussion of the matter, but Jeremy’s throat was too dry to utter a sound.
“Come on—help me deliver this crap and I’ll give you the ten-credit tour. Then you can roll up your sleeves and help us start putting some order into this mess we have for a ship.”
“And you’re— ”
“That’s right. I’m Captain Cook. Welcome aboard.”
Moments later, an amused Roscoe Cook was still waiting for his open-mouthed first officer to extend a hand to meet his own.
“…and then,” continued Cook, leaning back in the oversized chair behind his cluttered office desk, feet propped up and hands locked behind his head, “by the simple inertial force of spending all that money for all those weapons, both sides lost track of the whole point to the competition, and sped past the point at which each was safe. Aside from their relative technological advancement, you know, it was a bit like the good old days of the Peloponesian Wars, in which Athens and Sparta....”
Jeremy did not know quite what to make of Captain Cook. The chronometer read 775 Hours. The captain had been talking non-stop for the last hour, and it had been ages since they’d stopped talking about the ship. Cook’s office was cluttered with boxes and half-open crates, and the remnants of several days’ worth of galley leftovers. His desk was buried under mounds of papers and folders, except for a small clearing to one side where he propped his feet.
“...and they kept piling weapon on top of weapon, until finally one economy collapsed under its own weight. Kind of like the beached whales of Old Earth, caught short in the tide. But in the end it was all for the best. Probably quite lucky, for us, you know. If they’d kept it up, we might n
ot be here today. And it’s one of the grandest ironies of history: the technological spill-off from that arms race was what led to gravitronic physics in the first place, a hundred years later. But think of the dislocation and upheaval it caused at the time! It’s as if New Babylon and Demeter....”
But for all the clutter, and despite a maddening eagerness to turn the most meaningless small talk into a graduate school seminar, Jeremy found Cook’s intellect intimidating and mind the sharpest he’d ever encountered. In the back of his mind, he seemed to remember hearing something about a hotshot cruiser commander named Cook, though for the moment the specifics escaped him. The young captain made Jeremy fidget in his chair like a dull schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. And he found the most arresting feature about the captain to be his eyes—alert, demanding, yet filled with a wry humor that Jeremy could never quite follow. Even clad like a common laborer, the captain seemed to fill the entire room, though he obscured more than he revealed about the inner workings of his own personality.
“Well, Mr. Ashton—what do you think?”
Jeremy’s heart froze in his chest. So much of the captain’s monologue had gone over his head that he’d allowed his mind to wander. The barest trace of a smirk danced across Cook’s lips, but he pretended not to notice his first officer’s discomfiture.
“Come now, Jeremy—we must pick a name for the ship someday, and I’d rather let the crew start calling her by name as soon as we can. `The Ship’ sounds too groundtoadish for my tastes.
“So, what are some good names?”
* * *
“We are going home?”
Zatar smiled broadly and nodded. Seated on the floor, he sat on his favorite pillow, the deep purple one with the velvet lining. As G’ela jumped and clapped her hands, Blendisi raced from the room, eager to summon the others. Zatar and Munshi exchanged amused glances. G’ela was always so excitable, but all of them would feel like dancing before too long. Soon, the whole group was crowding into the gathering room, chattering like a herd of nebbini, asking a dozen questions at once.
“When are we—”
“...how much space....”
“Does G’Rishela know— ”
“Do we have....”
“—leaving?”
“May we write home to—”
“How soon—”
“— time to pack?”
At last Zatar rose to his feet through the crushing crowd and signaled silence. The jabbering continued for several moments, but gradually faded until all were quiet at last. Those who could find seats took them. Zatar looked to see his pillow taken by a grinning Ml’lusha, who sought to placate him by a coquettish arch of her smooth, soft neck. Zatar sniffed archly and remained standing.
“As you may have heard, the breakthroughs of the last several weeks have now reached an impasse. The Terrans have agreed in principle to a moratorium on settlements in the disputed region, but neither the duration, nor the interim limits on scientific research in the area have been agreed upon. And after the hard progress of the recent past, tempers were beginning to flare anew.
“Then, from the depths of nowhere, came a solution. The Terrans suggested adjourning the talks to permit both sides to gain perspective, and our Crutchtan friends proposed resuming on Gr’Shuna.”
“Of course the biggest surprise was that both sides agreed at once,” Munshi added, “without exchanging a single snarl.”
“As for when,” Zatar continued, in the grand manner of a senior procurator of the High Council, “that depends upon how quickly we can pack, and how much regret we are willing to leave behind.
“For myself,” he added, his eyes twinkling, “I would gladly leave my belongings behind, if we could leave today.”
“Meaning?” asked a voice from back near the entrance archway.
“Meaning that our ship is on its way, and we can leave when it arrives, as long as takes you less than a month to get ready.”
Zatar laughed aloud as the room quickly emptied. The females of his species had endless fun at his gender’s expense, and satirists had long immortalized the failings of men: the lack of energy when there was work to do, the endless naps, the stoic flatulence, the constant obsession with mating. But in their own way, Zatar thought, women were every bit as amusing. They did everything in flocks; and it took them forever to pack.
* * *
Jeremy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. For the twentieth time in the last ten minutes, his mind had gone blank. He knew that anything he said was going to sound stupid. Better to say nothing, he thought.
“Well?”
Jeremy panicked, his resolve to stay safely silent vanishing in a crisis of self-doubt. “How about Valiant?” he blurted without thinking. Instantly, he knew he had marked himself forever a fool in the captain’s eyes: the Valiant was Commander Cosmo’s ship on the old Cosmic Avengers adventure series. His spine prickled with embarrassment, and he struggled to keep his outward composure.
Cook sighed wearily. This exercise was proving to be a major disappointment, he thought. They were no closer to christening the ship than when they’d started, and all they’d done was waste time that could have been spent helping make the ship starworthy. For the twentieth time in the last ten minutes, he consulted the computer console next to his desk.
“Six merchant ships are named Valiant,” he said. “Three haulers, a freighter, and two trading schooners—not to mention the thousand or so pleasure boats.
“Let’s give it another go.”
“Ramsey.”
“Here.”
“Steer.”
“Here.”
“Topolewski.”
“Yo.”
From atop an empty packing crate in the hangar bay, the tall, bearded greenshirt kept reading the names from the duty roster until he reached the end. As each crewman’s name was called, he stepped out of the larger group, and to the yeoman’s left.
“Zingerman.”
“Here.”
“All right, ye zoo animals,” he bellowed in a mellifluous Demetrian brogue, looking out over the assembly of new redshirts. “That ends the Low Watch assignments in Engineering, Hangar Deck, and Life Support. I know we’re spread a mite thin, but it’s the best we can do till the tyros show, so let’s do the Skipper proud. The rest of ye—High Watch starts sooner than I’d care to hear myself, so ye’d best be gettin your rest while ye can.”
“I hear the Skipper’s a tyro, too, Chief,” called a voice from the back of the room. “D’ye think we’ve a chance to get this tug moving afore the forests return to Earth?”
Yeoman Chief Gregory Connors cut short the laughter with a scowl to make the devil shake from the cold. His full beard gave his face an animal fierceness that friends knew was more bluff than bluster, but it always had the desired effect on the redshirts.
“I’ll not be hearin a word against the Captain,” he warned. “Not unless ye want me to make your life so miserable that ye’ll be beggin him for brig time. Scuttlebutt says we got us a rare’un. I hear they don’t make blueshirts better’n Cap’n Cook—as a spacer or a skipper—and until he proves me a liar I’ll bust any groundtoad’s butt that says otherwise. Ye’ll not put the Skipper in the same league as the snotnosed ensigns we’ll be gettin any day now.
“And that goes for all o’ye—like him or not, he’s the Captain. And till he marks himself a hacker’s mate, I’ll not stand for any disrespect. Am I understood?”
Conners let his harsh scowl soften. “Leastways, not while we’re still in port,” he added with the barest trace of a smile.
The crewmen mumbled a grudging assent. Lampooning the skipper was a time-honored Cozzie tradition, akin to hazing the new officers or flirting with the bluebirds, but everyone recognized the truth to what the Chief had said. As long as the ship was still in port—a “star maiden,” in CosGuard parlance—there was too much to do to allow themselves the luxury of disrespect. That could wait until they were out in space, where grumbling in th
e ranks was an honored way of life. Besides, enough of them had heard the grapevine assessment of their Skipper to give him the chance to disappoint them, before the ship’s wags focused all guns amidships.
“All right, ye twit’rin chirpie birds,” said the Chief. “Low Watch starts in less than an hour, and Chief Andersen is less of a dawdler-lover than I am. When we get permanent duty assignments, the two of us’ll be exchanging blacklists, so I suggest ye try to stay on his good side or ye’ll be the sorriest lot o’laundry drones in the Fleet. High Watch is at liberty until 250 hours, and we’ll be keepin dual shifts until notice.
“Any questions?”
A half dozen hands shot up. Conners laughed roughly, and dispatched the questioners with a wave of his large, calloused hand.
“Good. Dismissed—and I’ll see the heartier souls in the Galley.”
* * *
The two men sat in the captain’s office, alone with their thoughts. The room was silent, except for Cook’s squeaky chair. His mind raced with possibilities that his better judgment vetoed instantly. Names like Krautheimer, Kettleston, and Titsworth might confer immortality on deserving if little known scientists, philosophers, and poets, but they were unlikely to ring through the heavens without provoking snickers of scorn from their peers. And of the two hundred or so names CosGuard reserved when the first starships started coming on line—names like Aurora and Constellation, Antares and Magellan, Columbia and Majestic—by now, some hundred-ninety starships later, all the good names were gone.
Cook snorted in disgust. All his life, he’d suffered from other people’s lack of imagination. He refused to squander the one chance he’d have to name his own starship. Suddenly, he noticed what looked to be an idea glimmering across Jeremy’s face.
“Something?”
The Sirens of Space Page 10