Time for the Stars

  I objected that I would never need to know how to cook high cuisine.

  “What’s that got to do with it? Learning isn’t a means to an end; it is an end in itself. Look at Uncle Alf. He’s as happy as a boy with a new slingshot. Anyhow, if you don’t sign up for a stiff course, old Doc Devereaux will find some way to keep you busy, even if it is counting rivets. Why do you think the Captain made him chairman of the board of education?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Well, think about it. The greatest menace in space is going coffin crazy. You are shut up for a long time in a small space and these is nothing outside but some mighty thin vacuum…no street lights, no bowling alleys. Inside are the same old faces and you start hating them. So a smart captain makes sure you have something to keep you interested and tired—and ours is the smartest you’ll find or he wouldn’t be on this trip.”

  I began to realize that a lot of arrangements in the Elsie were simply to see that we stayed healthy and reasonably happy. Not just school, but other things. Take the number we had aboard, for example—almost two hundred. Uncle Steve told me that the Elsie could function as a ship with about ten: a captain, three control officers, three engineer officers, one communicator, one farmer, and a cook. Shucks, you could cut that to five: two control officers (one in command), two torch watchstanders, and a farmer-cook.

  Then why two hundred?

  In the first place there was room enough. The Elsie and the other ships had been rebuilt from the enormous freighters the LRF use to haul supplies out to Pluto and core material back to Earth. In the second place they needed a big scientific staff to investigate the planets we hoped to find. In the third place some were spare parts, like Reserve Captain Urqhardt and, well, me myself. Some of us would die or get killed; the ship had to go on.

  But the real point, as I found out, is that no small, isolated social group can be stable. They even have a mathematics for it, with empirical formulas and symbols for “lateral pressures” and “exchange valences” and “exogamic relief.” (That last simply means that the young men of a small village should find wives outside the village.)

  Or look at it this way. Suppose you had a one-man space ship which could cruise alone for several years. Only a man who was already nutty a certain way could run it—otherwise he would soon go squirrelly some other way and start tearing the controls off the panels. Make it a two-man ship: even if you used a couple as fond of each other as Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the trip even Juliet would start showing black-widow blood.

  Three is as bad or worse, particularly if they gang up two against one. Big numbers are much safer. Even with only two hundred people there are exactly nineteen thousand nine hundred ways to pair them off, either as friends or enemies, so you see that the social possibilities shoot up rapidly when you increase the numbers. A bigger group means more chances to find friends and more ways to avoid people you don’t like. This is terribly important aboard ship.

  Besides elective courses we had required ones called “ship’s training”—by which the Captain meant that every body had to learn at least one job he had not signed up for. I stood two watches down in the damping room, whereupon Chief Engineer Roch stated in writing that he did not think that I would ever make a torcher as I seemed to have an innate lack of talent for nuclear physics. As a matter of fact it made me nervous to be that close to an atomic power plant and to realize the unleashed hell that was going on a few feet away from me.

  I did not make out much better as a farmer, either. I spent two weeks in the air-conditioning plant and the only thing I did right was to feed the chickens. When they caught me cross-pollinating the wrong way some squash plants which were special pets of Mrs. O’Toole, she let me go, more in sorrow than in anger. “Tom,” she said, “what do you do well?”

  I thought about it. “Uh, I can wash bottles…and I used to raise hamsters.”

  So she sent me over to the research department and I washed beakers in the chem lab and fed the experimental animals. The beakers were unbreakable. They wouldn’t let me touch the electron microscope. It wasn’t bad—I could have been assigned to the laundry.

  Out of the 19,900 combinations possible in the Elsie, Dusty Rhodes and I were one of the wrong ones. I hadn’t signed up for the life sketching class because he was teaching it; the little wart really was a fine draftsman. I know, I’m pretty good at it myself and I would have liked to have been in that class. What was worse, he had an offensively high I.Q., genius plus, much higher than mine, and he could argue rings around me. Along with that he had the manners of a pig and the social graces of a skunk—a bad go, any way you looked at it.

  “Please” and “Thank you” weren’t in his vocabulary. He never made his bed unless someone in authority stood over him, and I was likely as not to come in and find him lying on mine, wrinkling it and getting the cover dirty. He never hung up his clothes, he always left our wash basin filthy, and his best mood was complete silence.

  Besides that, he didn’t bathe often enough. Aboard ship that is a crime.

  First I was nice to him, then I bawled him out, then I threatened him. Finally I told him that the next thing of his I found on my bed was going straight into the mass converter. He just sneered and the next day I found his camera on my bed and his dirty socks on my pillow.

  I tossed the socks into the wash basin, which he had left filled with dirty water, and locked his camera in my wardrobe, intending to let him stew before I gave it back.

  He didn’t squawk. Presently I found his camera gone from my wardrobe, in spite of the fact that it was locked with a combination which Messrs. Yale & Towne had light-heartedly described as “Invulnerable.” My clean shirts were gone, too…that is, they weren’t clean; somebody had carefully dirtied every one of them.

  I had not complained about him. It had become a point of pride to work it out myself; the idea that I could not cope with somebody half my size and years my junior did not appeal to me.

  But I looked at the mess he had made of my clothes and I said to myself, “Thomas Paine, you had better admit that you are licked and holler for help—else your only chance will be to plead justifiable homicide.”

  But I did not have to complain. The Captain sent for me; Dusty had complained about me instead.

  “Bartlett, young Rhodes tells me you are picking on him. What’s the situation from your point of view?”

  I started to swell up and explode. Then I let out my breath and tried to calm down; the Captain really wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so, sir, though it is true that we have not been getting along.”

  “Have you laid hands on him?”

  “Uh… I haven’t smacked him, sir. I’ve jerked him off my bed more than once—and I wasn’t gentle about it.”

  He sighed. “Maybe you should have smacked him. Out of my sight, of course. Well, tell me about it. Try to tell it straight—and complete.”

  So I told him. It sounded trivial and I began to be ashamed of myself…the Captain had more important things to worry about than whether or not I had to scrub out a hand basin before I could wash my face. But he listened.

  Instead of commenting, maybe telling me that I should be able to handle a younger kid better, the Captain changed the subject.

  “Bartlett, you saw that illustration Dusty had in the ship’s paper this morning?”

  “Yes, sir. A real beauty,” I admitted. It was a picture of the big earthquake in Santiago, which had happened after we left Earth.

  “Mmm…we have to allow you special-talent people a little leeway. Young Dusty is along because he was the only m-r available who could receive and transmit pictures.”

  “Uh, is that important, sir?”

  “It could be. We won’t know until we need it. But it could be crucially important. Otherwise I would never have permitted a spoiled brat to come aboard this ship.” He frowned. “However, Dr. Devereaux is of the opinion that Dusty is not a pathological case.”

/>   “Uh, I never said he was, sir.”

  “Listen, please. He says that the boy has an unbalanced personality—a brain that would do credit to a grown man but with greatly retarded social development. His attitudes and evaluations would suit a boy of five, combined with this clever brain. Furthermore Dr. Devereaux says that he will force the childish part of Dusty’s personality to grow up, or he’ll turn in his sheepskin.”

  “So? I mean, ‘Yes, sir?’”

  “So you should have smacked him. The only thing wrong with that boy is that his parents should have walloped him, instead of telling him how bright he was.” He sighed again. “Now I’ve got to do it. Dr. Devereaux tells me I’m the appropriate father image.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “‘Yes, sir,’ my aching head. This isn’t a ship; it’s a confounded nursery. Are you having any other troubles?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I wondered. Dusty also complained that the regular communicators call you people ‘freaks.’” He eyed me.

  I didn’t answer. I felt sheepish about it.

  “In any case, they won’t again. I once saw a crewman try to knife another one, just because the other persisted in calling him ‘skin head.’ My people are going to behave like ladies and gentlemen or I’ll bang some heads together.” He frowned. “I’m moving Dusty into the room across from my cabin. If Dusty will leave you alone, you let him alone. If he won’t…well, use your judgment, bearing in mind that you are responsible for your actions—but remember that I don’t expect any man to be a doormat. That’s all. Good-by.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  RELATIVITY

  I had been in the Elsie a week when it was decided to operate on Pat. Pat told me they were going to do it, but he did not talk about it much. His attitude was the old iron-man, as if he meant to eat peanuts and read comics while they were chopping on him. I think he was scared stiff… I would have been.

  Not that I would have understood if I had known the details; I’m no neural surgeon, nor any sort; removing a splinter is about my speed.

  But it meant we would be off the watch list for a while, so I told Commander Frick. He already knew from messages passed between the ship and LRF; he told me to drop off the watch list the day before my brother was operated and to consider myself available for extra duty during his convalescence. It did not make any difference to him; not only were there other telepairs but we were still radio-linked to Earth.

  Two weeks after we started spacing and the day before Pat was to be cut on I was sitting in my room, wondering whether to go to the communications office and offer my valuable services in cleaning waste baskets and microfilming files or just sit tight until somebody sent for me.

  I had decided on the latter, remembering Uncle Steve’s advice never to volunteer, and was letting down my bunk, when the squawker boomed: “T. P. Bartlett, special communicator, report to the Relativist!”

  I hooked my bunk up while wandering if there was an Eye-Spy concealed in my room—taking down my bunk during working hours seemed always to result in my being paged. Dr. Babcock was not in the control room and they chased me out, but not before I took a quick look around—the control room was off limits to anyone who did not work there. I found him down in the computation room across from the communications office, where I would have looked in the first place if I hadn’t wanted to see the control room.

  I said, “T. P. Bartlett, communicator tenth grade, reporting to the Relativist as ordered.”

  Dr. Babcock swung around in his chair and looked at me. He was a big raw-boned man, all hands and feet, and looked more like a lumberjack than a mathematical physicist. I think he played it up—you know, elbows on the table and bad grammar on purpose. Uncle Steve said Babcock had more honorary degrees than most people had socks.

  He stared at me and laughed. “Where did you get that fake military manner, son? Siddown. You’re Bartlett?”

  I sat. “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s this about you and your twin going off the duty list?”

  “Well, my brother is in a hospital, sir. They’re going to do something to his spine tomorrow.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I didn’t answer because it was so unreasonable; I wasn’t even in his department. “Frick never tells me anything, the Captain never tells me anything, now you never tell me anything. I have to bang around the galley and pick up gossip to find out what’s going on. I was planning on working you over tomorrow. You know that don’t you?”

  “Uh, no, sir.”

  “Of course you don’t, because I never tell anybody anything either. What a way to run a ship! I should have stayed in Vienna. There’s a nice town. Ever have coffee and pastries in the Ring?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Nevertheless I was going to work you and your twin over tomorrow—so now we’ll have to do it today. Tell him to stand by.”

  “Uh; what do you want him to do, Doctor? He’s already been moved to a hospital.”

  “Just tell him to stand by. I’m going to calibrate you two, that’s what. Figure out your index error.”

  “Sir?”

  “Just tell him.”

  So I called Pat. I hadn’t spoken to him since breakfast; I wondered how he was going to take it.

  But he already knew. “Yes, yes,” he said in a tired voice. “They’re setting up apparatus in my hospital room right now. Mother made such a fuss I had to send her out.”

  (“Look, Pat, if you don’t want to do this, whatever it is, I’ll tell them nothing doing. It’s an imposition.”)

  “What difference does it make?” he said irritably. “I’ve got to sweat out the next sixteen hours somehow. Anyhow, this may be the last time we work together.”

  It was the first time he had shown that it was affecting his nerve. I said hastily, (“Don’t talk that way, Pat. You’re going to get well. You’re going to walk again. Shucks, you’ll even be able to ski if you want to.”)

  “Don’t give me that Cheerful Charlie stuff. I’m getting more of it from the folks than I can use. It makes me want to throw up.”

  (“Now see here, Pat—”)

  “Stow it, stow it! Let’s get on with what they want us to do.”

  (“Well, all right.”) I spoke aloud: “He’s ready, Doctor.”

  “Half a minute. Start your camera, O’Toole.” Dr. Babcock touched something on his desk. “Commander Frick?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Frick’s voice answered.

  “We’re ready. You coming in?”

  “All set here,” I heard my boss answer. “We’ll come in.” A moment later he entered, with Anna Horoshen. In the meantime I took a look around. One whole wall of the computation room was a computer, smaller than the one at Los Alamos but not much. The blinking lights must have meant something to somebody. Sitting at right angles to it at a console was Mr. O’Toole and above the console was a big display scope; at about one-second intervals a flash of light would peak in the center of it.

  Anna nodded without speaking; I knew she must be linked. Pat said, “Tom, you’ve got a girl named Anna Horoshen aboard: Is she around?”

  (“Yes. Why?”)

  “Say hello to her for me—I knew her in Zurich. Her sister Becky is here.” He chuckled and I felt better. “Good looking babes, aren’t they? Maudie is jealous.”

  Babcock said to Frick, “Tell them to stand by. First synchronizing run, starting from their end.”

  “Tell them, Anna,”

  She nodded. I wondered why they bothered with a second telepair when they could talk through myself and Pat. I soon found out: Pat and I were too busy.

  Pat was sounding out ticks like a clock; I was told to repeat them…and every time I did another peak of light flashed on the display scope. Babcock watched it, then turned me around so that I couldn’t see and taped a microphone to my voice box. “Again.”

  Pat said, “Stand by—” and started ticking again. I did my best to tick right with him but it was the silliest performance possible. I heard Ba
bcock say quietly, “That cut out the feedback and the speed-of-sound lag. I wish there were some way to measure the synaptic rate arose closely.”

  Frick said, “Have you talked to Dev about it?”

  I went on ticking.

  “A reverse run now, young lady,” Babcock said, and slipped headphones on me. I immediately heard a ticking like the ticks Pat had been sending. “That’s a spectral metronome you’re listening to, young fellow, timed by monochrome light. It was synchronized with the one your brother is using before we left Earth. Now start ticking at him,”

  So I did. It had a hypnotic quality; it was easier to get into step and tick with it than it was to get out of step. It was impossible to ignore it. I began to get sleepy but I kept on ticking; I couldn’t stop.

  “End of run,” Babcock announced. The ticking stopped and I rubbed my ears.

  “Dr. Babcock?”

  “Huh?”

  “How can you tell one tick from another?”

  “Eh? You can’t. But O’Toole can, he’s got it all down on film. Same at the other end. Don’t worry about it; just try to stay in time.”

  This silliness continued for more than an hour, sometimes with Pat sending, sometimes myself. At last O’Toole looked up and said, “Fatigue factor is cooking our goose, Doc. The second differences are running all over the lot.”

  “Okay, that’s all,” Babcock announced. He turned to me. “You can thank your brother for me and sign off.”

  Commander Frick and Anna left. I hung around. Presently Dr. Babcock looked up from his desk and said, “You can go, bub. Thanks.”

  “Uh, Dr. Babcock?”

  “Huh? Speak up.”

  “Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”