Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “Way down there,” the girl said. “It would be a lot more sociable if everyone were quartered together.”

  “In a warship, the men must be near their duty,” Daw explained awkwardly. “And everything has to be decentralized so that if we’re blown apart, all the parts can fight. The module you and your husband are in has more of the ship’s, central processor than any of the others, but even that is scattered all over.”

  “And their ship—the ship out there—is modular too.”

  “Yes,” Daw said. He remembered his conversation with Wad. “Ours is a hollow cylinder, theirs a filled rectangle. Our modules are different sizes and shapes depending on function; theirs are uniform. You’re the empathist—the intercultural psychologist—what do those things tell you?”

  “I have been thinking about it,” Helen Youngmeadow said, “but I’d like to think some more before I talk, and I’m anxious to fly. Can’t we go now?”

  “You’re sure—?”

  “I’ve had all the training.” She relaxed her boots’ grip on the steel world beneath her, kicked out, for an instant floated above him, then was gone. Backpack rockets made a scarcely visible flame, and it was several seconds before he could pick out the spark of her progress. He followed, knowing that all around them, invisible and distant by hundreds of miles, the other boarding parties he had dispatched were making for the ship ahead as well.

  “I’m an empathist, as you said,” the girl’s voice continued. “Gladiator is a warship, but my husband and I are here to take the side of the enemy.”

  “That doesn’t bother me.”

  “Because by taking their side we help you. We give you someone who thinks like them and reacts to their needs. In a way we’re traitors.”

  “This is exploration; if we had come just to fight you wouldn’t even be on board.”

  “Because the Navy’s afraid we might blow our own vessel up, or induce the crew to mutiny. We humans have such a high empathy coefficient—some of us.”

  “When you and I reach that ship,” Daw said wryly, “we’ll be the underdogs. Perhaps then you’ll empathize with the Navy.”

  “That’s the danger—if I do that I won’t be doing my job.”

  He chuckled.

  “Listen, Captain Daw. If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth? Straight?”

  “If you’ll let me catch up to you, and assuming it’s not classified.”

  “All right, I’ve cut my jets. I’m—”

  “I see you, and I’ve been ranging you on suit radar. It’s just that with more mass to accelerate I can’t match you for speed when you’re flat out.” Ahead of them something had been transformed from a winking star to a tiny scrap of diamond lace. Three thousand miles yet, Daw estimated, and checked his radar for confirmation. Five thousand. That ship was big. He said aloud, “What’s the question?”

  “Why did you let me come? I want to, and I’m terribly grateful, but while I was going up to the bridge I was sure you’d say no. I was thinking of ways to go without your permission—crazy things like that.”

  For the second time Daw lied.

  * * *

  He held her in space, his hand on her arm, telling her it was a safety precaution. The scrap of lace grew to an immense net and at last acquired a third dimension, so that it was seen as thousands of cubes of void, tubes outlining the edges, spherical modules at the intersections.

  “Right angles,” Helen Youngmeadow said. “I never knew right angles could be so lovely.” Then, a moment later, “This is more beautiful than ours.”

  Daw felt something he tried to choke down. “More regular, certainly,” he admitted. “Less individualized.”

  “Do you still think it’s abandoned?”

  “Until they show me otherwise. The question is, which one of these things should we enter?”

  “If we can enter.”

  “We can. Mrs. Youngmeadow, you empathize with these people, even though you’ve never seen anything of theirs except this ship. Where would you put the command module?”

  It was a challenge, and she sensed it. “Where would you put it, Captain? As a sailor and a military man?”

  “On a corner,” Daw said promptly.

  “You’re right.” He saw her helmet swivel as she looked at him. “But how did you know? Are you trained in empathies too?”

  “No. But you agree? I thought you were going to say in the center.”

  “That’s what I thought you were going to say—but it has to be wrong. The entire ship is a structure of empty cubes, with the edges and corners having the only importance. An outer corner would be the corner of corners—did you feel that?”

  “No, but I saw that observation from an interior module would be blocked in every direction, and even on an outside plane the rest of the ship would blot out a hundred and eighty degrees. A corner module has two hundred and seventy degrees of clear field.”

  They explored the surface of the nearest corner module (Daw estimated its diameter at sixty thousand feet, which would give it a surface area of over three hundred and fifty square miles) until they found a hatch, with what appeared to be a turning bar on the side opposite the hinge.

  “How do you know it’s not locked?” the girl asked as Daw braced himself to heave at the bar.

  “Nobody’s worried about burglars out here. But anyone’s going to worry about having a crew member outside who has to get in fast.” He pulled. The bar moved a fraction of an inch and the hatch a barely visible distance. “I’ll give you some more data to empathize on,” Daw said. “Whoever built this thing is damn strong.”

  The girl grasped the other end of the bar, and together they turned it until the hatch stood wide open. Light poured from it into the limitless night of space, and Helen Youngmeadow said softly, “They left everything turned on,” and a moment afterward, “No airlock.”

  “No, they don’t mind vacuum.” Daw was already climbing into the module. There were no floors and no interior partitions; windowed solids that might have been instruments lined the hull wall; machines the size of buildings, braced with guying cables thousands of feet long, dotted the vast central space.

  “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 ne
ver 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 the 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 re-wire 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 lab or a 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 Youngmeadow’s wife waked in every man, and the shame Moke felt at desiring the wife of so likable a shipmate as Youngmeadow.

  “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 an 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 f
irst 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.”