Friday (45 page)

A spaceship—a hyperspaceship—is a terribly interesting place. Of course it takes very, very advanced knowledge of wave mechanics and multidimensional geometry to understand what pushes the ship, education that I don’t have and probably never will (although I would like to back up and study for it, even now). Rockets—no problem; Newton told us how. Antigrav—a mystery until Dr. Forward came along and explained it; now it’s everywhere. But how does a ship massing about a hundred thousand tonnes (so the Captain told me) manage to speed up to almost eighteen hundred times the speed of light?—without spilling the soup or waking anyone.

I don’t know. This ship has the biggest Shipstones I’ve ever seen…but Tim Flaherty (he’s second assistant engineer) tells me that they are charged down only at the middle of each jump, then they finish the voyage having used only “parasitic” power (ship’s heat, cooking, ship’s auxiliary services, etc.).

That sounds to me like a violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. I was brought up to bathe regularly and to believe that There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch; I told him so. He grew just a touch impatient and assured me that it was indeed the Law of Conservation of Energy that caused it to work out that way—it worked just like a funicular; you got back what you put in.

I don’t know. There aren’t any cables out there; it can’t be a funicular. But it
does
work.

The navigation of this ship is even more confusing. Only they don’t call it navigation; they don’t even call it astrogation; they call it “cosmonautics.” Now somebody is pulling Friday’s leg because the engineer officers told me that the officers on the bridge (it’s not a bridge) who practice cosmonautics are cosmetic officers because they are there just for appearances; the computer does all the work—and Mr. Lopez the second officer says that the ship has to have engineering officers because the union requires it but the computer does it all.

Not knowing the math for either one is like going to a lecture and not knowing the language.

I have learned one thing: Back in Las Vegas I thought that every Grand Tour was Earth, Proxima, Outpost, Fiddler’s Green, Forest, Botany Bay, Halcyon, Midway, The Realm, and back to Earth because that’s how the recruiting posters read. Wrong. Each voyage is tailored. Usually all nine planets are touched but the only fixed feature in the sequence is that Earth is at one end and The Realm, almost a hundred light-years away (98.7 +), is at the other. The seven way stations can be picked up either going out or coming back. However, there is a rule that controls how they are fitted in: Going out the distance from Earth must be greater at each stop, coming back the distance must decrease. This is not nearly as complex as it sounds; it simply means the ship does not double back—just the way you would plan a shopping trip of many stops.

But this leaves lots of flexibility. The nine stars, the suns of these planets, are lined up fairly close to a straight line. See the sketch with the Centaur and the Wolf. Looking from Earth, all those stars, as you can see, are either at the front end of the Centaur or close by in the Wolf. (I know the Wolf doesn’t look too well but the Centaur has been clobbering him for thousands of years. Besides, I’ve never seen a wolf—a four-legged wolf, that is—and it’s the best I can do. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a Centaur, either.)

That’s the way those stars cluster in Earth’s night sky. You have to be about as far south as Florida or Hong Kong to see them at all, and even then, with bare eyes you will see only Alpha Centauri.

But Alpha Centauri (Rigil Kentaurus) really shines out, third brightest star in Earth’s sky. Three stars it is, actually, a brilliant one that is the twin brother of Sol, one not as bright that it is paired with, and a distant, dim, small companion that swings around both of them about a fifteenth of a light-year away. Years ago Alpha Centauri was known as Proxima. Then somebody bothered to measure the distance to this inconsequential third cousin and found that it was a hair closer, so the title of Proxima or “Nearest” was moved to this useless chunk of real estate. Then, when we set up a colony on the third planet of Alpha Centauri A (the twin of Sol), the colonists called their planet Proxima.

Eventually the astronomers who tried to shift the title to the dim companion were all dead and the colonists got their way. Just as well, because that dim star, while a hair closer today, will soon be farther away—just hold your breath a few millennia. Being “ballistically linked” it averages the same distance from Earth as the other two in the triplet.

Look at the second sketch, the one with “right ascension” across the top and “light-years” down the side.

I must be the only person out of the hundreds in this ship who did not know that our first stop on this voyage would
not
be Proxima. Mr. Lopez (who was showing me the bridge) looked at me as if I were a retarded child who had just made another unfortunate slip. (But that did not matter because he is not interested in my brain.) I didn’t dare explain to him that I had been snatched aboard at the last moment; it would have blown my cover. However, Miss Rich Bitch is not required to be bright.

The ship usually stops at Proxima both going and coming. Mr. Lopez explained that this time they had little cargo and only a few passengers for Proxima, not enough to pay for the stop. So that cargo and those passengers were put off until the
Maxwell
warps next month; this trip the
Forward
will call at Proxima on the way home, with cargo and, possibly, passengers from the other seven ports. Mr. Lopez explained (and I did not understand) that traveling many light-years in space costs almost nothing—mostly rations for passengers—but stopping at a planet is terribly expensive, so any stop has to be worthwhile on the balance sheet.

So here is where we are going this trip (see second sketch again): first to Outpost, then to Botany Bay, then to The Realm, on to Midway, Halcyon, Forest, Fiddler’s Green, Proxima (at last!), and on home to Earth.

I’m not unhappy about it—quite the contrary! I will get rid of this “most valuable cargo in the galaxy” less than a month after warping away from Stationary Station—then the whole long trip home will be a real tourist trip. Fun! No responsibilities. Lots of time to look over these colonies squired around by eager young officers who smell good and are always polite. If Friday (or Miss Rich Bitch) can’t have fun with that setup, it is time to cremate me; I’m dead.

Now see the third sketch, declination across the top, light-years down the side. This one makes the routing seem quite reasonable—but if you look back at the second sketch, you will see that the leg from Botany Bay to Outpost, which seems on the third sketch to skim the photosphere of Forest’s sun, in fact misses it by many light-years. Picturing this voyage actually calls for three dimensions. You can take the data from the sketches and from the table below and punch it into your terminal and pull out a three-dimensional hologram; it all makes sense seen that way. There is one on the bridge, frozen so that you can examine it in detail. Mr. Lopez, who made these sketches (all but Joe Centaur and the sad wolf) warned me that a flat plot simply could not portray three-dimensional cosmonautics. But it helps to think of these three sketches as plan view, side view, and front elevation, as in visualizing a house from its plans; that is exactly analogous.

When Mr. Lopez gave me a printout of this table, he warned me that the data are of about grammar-school accuracy. If you aim a telescope by these coordinates, you will find the right star, but for science and for cosmonautics you need more decimal places, and then correct for “epoch”—a fancy way of saying you must bring the data up to date because each star moves. Outpost’s sun moves the least; it just about keeps up with the traffic in our part of the galaxy. But the star of Fiddler’s Green (Nu[2] Lupi) has a vector of 138 kilometers per second—enough that Fiddler’s Green will have moved more than 1.5 billion kilometers between two visits five months apart by the
Forward
. This can be worrisome—according to Mr. Lopez it can worry a skipper right out of his job because whether or not a trip shows a profit depends on how closely a master can bring his ship out of hyperspace to a port planet without hitting something (such as a star!). Like driving an APV blindfolded!

But I will never pilot a hyperspaceship and Captain van Kooten has a solid, reliable look to him. I asked him about it at dinner that night. He nodded. “Ve find it. Only once haf ve had to send some of de boys down in a landing boat to buy someting at a bakery and read de signs.”

I didn’t know whether he expected me to laugh or to pretend to believe him, so I asked what they bought at the bakery. He turned to the lady on his left and pretended not to hear me. (The bakeshop in the ship makes the best pastry I have ever tasted and should be padlocked.)

Captain van Kooten is a gentle, fatherly man—yet I have no trouble visualizing him with a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other, holding off a mob of mutinous cutthroats. He makes the ship feel safe.

Shizuko is not the only guard placed on me. I think I have identified four more and I am wondering if I have them all. Almost certainly not, as I have sometimes looked around and not spotted any of them—yet the drill seems to be to have someone near me at all times.

Paranoid? It sounds like it but I’m not. I am a professional who has stayed alive through always noticing anything offbeat. This ship has six hundred and thirty-two first-class passengers, some sixty-odd uniformed officers, crew also in uniforms, and the cruise director’s staff of hosts and hostesses and dancing partners and entertainers and such. The latter dress like passengers but they are young and they smile and they make it their business to see to it that the passengers are happy.

The passengers: In this ship a first-class passenger under age seventy is a rarity—me, for example. We have two teen-age girls, one teen-age boy, two young women, and a wealthy couple on their honeymoon. All others in first class are candidates for a geriatrics home. They are very old, very rich, and extremely self-centered—save for a bare handful who have managed to grow old without turning sour.