Worlds Apart w-2

by Joe Haldeman

  I honestly think I know more about Newhome than either of the Policy candidates. But neither track has ever elected a Coordinator under forty, and I don’t suppose the tradition will be challenged aboard ship. I’m not sure I’m ready for it anyhow.

  Whoever wins, I’ll have to be working closely with him for the next four years. I hope it’s Staedtler, rather than Purcell. I had Purcell for economics in tenth form, and we didn’t get along. He remembers, too; he brought it up jokingly when I contacted him about becoming a colonist.

  Even if he loses, though, he’ll have another crack at it in two years, when we choose Coordinators-elect. I’d better start getting used to the idea.

  The Engineering Coordinator will undoubtedly be Eliot Smith. No problem there; he’s an old friend. Bruno Givens is running against him pro forma, but he says if elected, he’ll convert to Devonism and stay home to raise a large family.

  Our own expanded family is working out better than I’d expected. I had feared that we would become two more or less independent couples. But I’ve actually grown closer to Daniel, rather than losing him to Evy. John and Evy did have adjustment problems, but we worked them out with the aid of a marriage counselor and sex therapist.

  It’s good to have another woman around. Makes it harder for John and Daniel to gang up on me. And there are things I can talk to Evy about that would bore or confuse a husband; it’s like getting a full-grown younger sister.

  (My own sister Joyce won’t be aboard Newhome. At twelve, she’s not allowed to make such a decision for herself, and Mother thinks the whole project is insane. Joyce admits it would scare her, too, but would like to go if Mother did.)

  Evy won’t be moving into Newhome with the rest of us; she has to wait until her internship is over at the hospital. Geriatric nursing, a useful choice.

  Last night I packed everything I’ll be taking. Aside from clothes and toilet articles, it all fits into one small plastic bag. The diary I kept on Earth, the shamrock Jeff gave me, three precious bamboo reeds, and a jar of Russian caviar that I hope is still good.

  2

  Yesterday Sandra Berrigan had a long talk with me about the waning possibility of my staying on track in New New. The Board tells her I’d make Grade 18 in a couple of years if I stayed. I could begin setting up an Earth Liaison program, waiting for the situation to improve.

  It was only then I realized how thoroughly I’ve lost heart, or how thoroughly I’ve transferred my hopes for the future onto Janus. Another tragedy like New York would be too much for me. And there are sure to be setbacks, even disasters. I’ll be content to watch from afar.

  Three times I went to Earth, and each time I left the planet on a wave of chaos and death. Maybe Daniel is right about my being a nexus, or a nemesis. At any rate, I don’t want any more of it. If Newhome offers only a lifetime of glorified housekeeping, then so be it. I’ve had more than a lifetime’s worth of adventure.

  I’m commuting now, spending two or three days a week in New New. Mine is one of the few jobs that requires personal contacts both places. Both Dan and John are permanently aboard Newhome.

  I didn’t wind up in the Uchūden part of the ship after all. I’m spending most of my time with John, and there aren’t any low-gravity living quarters in the Japanese structure. John’s quarters are quite roomy, more than twice as big as he had in New New, since he requested a combination of living space and office. I have my own small place for work, but almost never sleep there. Quarter gee is like a soothing drug.

  (If I were smart I’d spend more time in high gravity, since I’m getting almost no exercise. I’ve gained five kilos since we got back from Earth, and all of it’s gone straight to my bottom. I’m going to wind up looking like Mother.)

  S-1 is halfway back now. Eight months to go.

  3

  What a terrible week. To put added stress on the ship’s systems, to test them, they slowly increased its rate of spin, finally doubling it. My work area is normally at a comfortable three-quarter gee. At one and a half gees it was like walking around with a plump ten-year-old grafted onto your shoulders.

  The low-gee areas near the axis of Newhome became very crowded. Nobody stayed in the main area after their work shift was over. So our “upstairs” rooms and corridors were full of people talking, playing games, trying to sleep. Two doors down from John’s place is the quarter-gee recreation room. Even the swimming pool there was shoul-der-to-shoulder.

  I scratched twice on John’s door and let myself in quietly. Dan and Evy were sharing the place for the duration, and I never knew who might be off shift and trying to sleep. John was alone, though, lying in bed but not asleep. He had the computer’s tapboard on his lap, and the wall screen was full of numbers.

  “Busy? I can come back later.”

  “Just amusing myself.” He made room for me on the narrow bed, and I sank into it with relief. “So how are things in the lower depths?” he asked.

  “God. Let’s say it doesn’t get any easier with practice.”

  He nodded. The strain of being trapped in a half-gee world showed in his lined face and slump. “I’ll get some respite tomorrow. Got attached to an engine inspection team; we’ll have six or seven hours in zerogee.”

  “Don’t suppose they need a demographics analyst?”

  “No more than they need me, actually. Pays to have friends. Has anything fallen apart yet?”

  “Nothing mechanical. You hear about the goats?” He shook his head. “It’s like what happened when we landed at Kennedy. They can’t handle the extra gravity; we’ve got an epidemic of broken legs. More than half our stock, before the vet could get them sedated.”

  “I sincerely hope they don’t move them up here. It’s aromatic enough already.”

  “Moosie wasn’t sure. You know, the assistant vet?”

  “Oh, I know Moosie. She comes up to the Light Head. Used to. I try to keep out of her trajectory.”

  “Oh, she’s all right. Just big…what’s on the screen?”

  “Power equivalences. This experiment in protracted discomfort. You know what Monday-morning quarter-backing is?”

  “Cricket term?”

  “Never mind. Just figuring out what the total energy waste is going to be, spinning up and spinning down. Enough to run the ship’s life support systems for five months. For a largely irrelevant test.”

  “I don’t know. We’ve already found out that goats can’t cavort on heavy planets.”

  “The stresses that are actually going to vary are longitudinal and pitchwise, not radial. Be a more logical, and economical, test to accelerate full-blast for a day, then flip and come back. But nobody listens to Dr. Ogelby.”

  “You’re the expert, though. Isn’t strength of materials what the test is all about?”

  “Well, yes and no. I’m the expert in the sense that a nutritionist would be the expert in a kitchen. They don’t let him dictate the menu.” He turned off the machine. “Even though that would be best for all concerned.”

  Suddenly there was a deep shuddering sound, like a huge bell rung once in the distance. “Shit,” John said, and sat up suddenly. “Something popped. Try the door.”

  I stepped over to the door and palmed the button; it opened normally. There was real pandemonium two doors down. I closed it on the noise.

  “No nearby pressure drop, then.” John had tapped in a sequence that gave him a spread-out diagram of the ship, titled DAMAGE CONTROL. “Nothing yet.” After about a minute, a large area on the outermost shell, about ten levels’ worth, began blinking red. Red letters alongside the diagram blinked “PP O2 < 40 mm Hg.”

  “Christ. How much less than forty millimeters? I wonder if anyone’s alive in there.”

  “That’s all housing,” I said, “but there can’t be many people there, at two gees. Everyone’s up here.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Should we call someone, find out what’s happening?”

  “No. They’ll call here soon enough.” He tu
rned on the general information channel, where an anonymous voice was telling everyone not to panic; just stay put, we’ll soon know what the problem is. After a minute Jules Hammond came on and calmly told everyone to move away from the outermost two shells, either into the interior or up to Uchū…den. Then there was another noise, not as loud. (It was almost worth the disaster to see old Hammond actually flinch.) John put the map back on and we saw that the damaged area had expanded on both sides, to cover fourteen levels. The red letters now said “PP 02 = 0,” hard vacuum.

  “It’s like a seam splitting,” John said. “I wonder how far it can go.”

  “Are we in any danger?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t tell. Theoretically not. But the-oretically this shouldn’t be happening.”

  Eliot Smith’s image appeared on the screen. “This is going to everyone Grade Fifteen and above. Look, we don’t know what’s happening yet. Appears to have stopped. We have an inspection team going out, and we’re spinning down as fast as possible. The damaged areas are Shell One, Levels Twelve to Twenty-six. We think most of the levels were vacant, but anybody who was in there is dead unless they were near a suit.

  “That’s all I or anybody else knows. Don’t tie things up by calling my office or anyplace else for information. I’ll be back in touch as soon as there’s news.”

  I started to get the shakes. I’d been in Shell One all morning, as close to the damaged area as Level Thirty. John held me for a while and then fed me some wine. Dan and Evy both called to make sure I was safe.

  Eventually they found forty-eight desiccated bodies in the blown-out area, and one woman lost both legs below the knee, cut off by the emergency doors as she scrambled for safety. Nine more casualties turned up after roll call, their bodies evidently wafted into space through the rent that suddenly appeared in the floor.

  It was sabotage. Two people had gone in a week before Spin-up, cordoned off an area, pulled up the floor plates, and systematically cut through a score of foamsteel girders. They had the proper uniforms and had covered themselves by putting a phony work order in the computer, but nobody had bothered to check. They were radical Devonites who had come aboard under false identities. They left a note explaining what they had done and why, intimating that they had done more, and then committed suicide by electrocution during sex. (Simultaneous orgasm is a sacrament to Devonites, but that sounds like too much of a good thing.)

  The repairs would only take a few days, but the sabotage slowed us down by a lot more than that. Every centimeter of the ship had to be inspected for more sabotage, which would take some weeks. More than two thousand people decided they wanted to go back to New New. I had five months to come up with replacements, and I suspected it would be a little harder to find people this time around.

  The whole ship was at zerogee while repairs were going on. It was bothersome but interesting. The only places equipped with Velcro carpets were the two small shells nearest the hub, so everyplace else you had to sort of bounce off the walls. I got pretty good at it after a couple of days, but then I’d had a lot more practice than most people, not only in New New’s recreation area but also during the long isolation periods. Some people never got used to it, always winding up stranded in the middle of a corridor. Hundreds had to be evacuated because they couldn’t stop vomiting. We cleaned up constantly, but the ship had a definite gastric odor for weeks.

  Work was a little hard at first because sitting is an unnatural posture in zerogee, and the chair in front of my console is permanently welded in place. I was holding on to the chair with one hand and typing with the other, a slow process. Finally I improvised a seat belt by sacrificing two head bands, and my problems became more properly abstract.

  A disproportionate number of the people who lost heart were “singles,” people with no counterparts in New New. I could eventually get most of their profiles through HI, assuming New New would cooperate and beam the information to me, but some would be lost forever. About one person in five can’t handle the process, and of those that could, some were going to die before they would get a turn on the machine.

  I didn’t know any of the people who died in the sabotage, though of course I had communicated briefly with all of them during Start-up. All but three had been down in the two-gee area for exercise; physical fitness extremists. Ironically, most of them were Reform Devonites (who, like their orthodox brothers, seem hellbent on carrying a huge set of muscles to an early grave).

  4

  With one month to go, I was suddenly deluged—more than five hundred people changed their minds and decided they’d rather go back to New New.

  “We could force them to stay,” Daniel said. All four of us were together, a fairly rare thing, picking at box lunches in John’s room. “They did sign a contract.”

  “Sure they did,” I said. No request to leave had ever been refused. Who would want to spend a century with people there against their will?

  “What is the breakdown like?” John asked. “Losing a lot of singles?”

  “Not this time. A lot of lowechelon engineers, unfortunately; maintenance people.”

  “No training problem, at least,” Daniel said.

  “Take your research cronies and make them do some useful work,” Evelyn said.

  Dan shook his head. “Some of them. We’ll spare the m/a research, anyhow. I want to live to see Epsilon.” This was something the scientists had been mum about until last week. We might be able to get considerably more speed out of the ship than its original design allowed for. The m/a drive worked out to an overall efficiency of only fifteen percent of emceesquared. But there was very little practical research on the propulsion system; nobody had ever seen a full-scale one until S-l used it for the return trip from Janus. Now, we were going to have one blasting constantly for over a year, with an army of scientists and engineers scrutinizing it—followed by unlimited time to mull over their observations.

  Some hoped we might be able to double or even quad-ruple the overall efficiency of the system. If they got it up to sixty percent, the trip would take less than half the planned-for time. I’d be an old woman when we got to Epsilon, but still alive. It was an exciting prospect.

  After lunch I got my staff together, all five of us, and we spent a pleasant hour agreeing about how hopeless the situation was. The desertions after the Devonite sabotage had left Newhome incurably under strength, by nearly a thousand people. Now we had half again that many places to fill.

  There were still plenty of volunteers in New New. But they were people who had already been passed over for one reason or another. Our delicate job was to balance their individual deficiencies against Newhome’s specific needs. We could have spent years scratching our heads over the problem. We had twenty-seven days.

  I’m not good at delegating authority. Over the past five years I had exercised nearly absolute veto power over ten thousand personnel decisions. That was impossible now. I had the computer break down the vacancies in terms of occupational specialty, and group them in six areas of congruency. Each of us took an area, and a pot of coffee, and set to racing against the calendar. I had “miscellaneous,” the largest area but probably the most interesting.

  The last month was so busy I didn’t have time for much reflection or sentimentality about leaving. On my last trip to New New I did go to say good-bye to my family, which was not a particularly emotional scene, and to Sandra, which was a little damp. Other than Sandra, all of my close friends were aboard Newhome.

  On the shuttle ride back, New New was lost in the sun’s glare, so I couldn’t have gazed wistfully at it even if I were so disposed. Newhome looked very dramatic, the black rock of its shielding glittering brighter than the stars behind it. All of the antimatter was in place, a huge transparent sphere outlined by coruscating specks of light as stray molecules wandered to their doom. Every now and then a larger particle would drift in and etch a short bright line. It was quite beautiful. Studying it kept me from looking at Earth.

&n
bsp; Year Twelve

  I hadn’t expected to be caught up in the formal celebration on Launch Day. I could admit the social necessity for it but have never had much patience for ceremony myself. Months before, I had declined to be in on the planning for it, figuring I would just be spoiling everybody else’s party, since I felt that anything more spectacular than a good-bye telegram was a waste of resources that neither we nor New New could spare.

  But it was very moving. Jules Hammond’s writers actually achieved literacy and even inched toward eloquence. Sandra also gave a fine speech, in a ceremony that involved the formal opening of the thousand-channel link between New New and ‘Home. A brilliant display of fireworks coruscated for several minutes during the countdown.

  But the most spectacular and most affecting sight, New New had reserved for the day after launch. Once we were noticeably above the plane of the ecliptic—most of us looking “down” on New New for the first time in our lives—they opened up six water jets, spaced evenly around the satellite. The water immediately froze into brilliant crystal clouds that spread out in a glittering St. Catherine’s Wheel as New New rotated. Thousands of hardwon liters squandered in a final farewell salute. That was when I cried, partly at the rare beauty.

  There was no noise when we launched, of course; just a sudden twinge of disorientation, something like what you would feel if you stepped on a surface you thought was level and it was slightly tilted. Most of us got used to it in a minute or two. Good thing, since we were going to have fourteen months of it.

  A hundredth of a gee isn’t much acceleration, but it’s enough to be annoying. Light things slide off desks. If you put a ball on the floor it will slowly roll away.