Birthright

well in fact as in principle, and incorporated it into their plans.

Now the trip would be made not in generations, but in years: eleven of them, to be exact. A three-year survey of the new galaxy would follow, and the crew would be home to report their findings a quarter century after they left.

Then the plan had to be modified once again. There would be no crew, and possibly no flight at all. The requisite engines were so huge, so unstable, so incapable of working at anything other than achieving an undreamed-of speed, that excess weight simply could not be accommodated. Man found himself back at the dawn of the Space Age in that respect: He had the firepower to reach Andromeda in years rather than eons, but the firepower couldn't accommodate an extra ton beyond its own weight. Science grappled with the problem, and there was no doubt that it would eventually be solved. But the Director had no interest in eventualities; his idea of a fitting footnote in the history books would be the attainment of an Andromeda colony within his lifetime. Which was where Bartol came in. A lot of people wondered what a biologist was doing on the Andromeda Project, but the fact of the matter was that, for all practical purposes, hewas the Project. Miniaturization of controls and compression of air and foodstuffs had gone about as far as they could go, and they still took up a hundredfold more room than was available. Even a Deepsleep chamber took too much room and power, and while the supplies required for a “frozen” pilot were greatly diminished, they were still too much for the ships to hold. Then one of the bright boys in the lab suggested that the Project look into utilization of the Hunks, and since Bartol was the leading Hunk authority around, he was commandeered and put to work forthwith. Nobody, not even Bartol, knew exactly what made the Hunks tick. They were as weirdly constituted a race of beings as had ever been discovered, and Psychology had taken more than four centuries to finally declare that they were sentient. The average Hunk looked like a large, green, slimy amoeba. It possessed no sensory organs that had yet been detected, though it was obviously able to sense the presence of others. It moved by the most awkward and inefficient crawling mechanism yet devised by Nature, and seemed to have no discernible top or bottom. But it did possess one thing that made it invaluable: a body chemistry that inhaled a carbon dioxide compound, exhaled an oxygen-nitrogen compound, ingested the constituents of human waste, and excreted the constituents of human nourishment. In brief, it could be hooked up to a human pilot in a totally symbiotic relationship. Obviously neither life form would exhale or excrete quite as much as it inhaled or ingested, but the difference was slight enough so that the ship could carry the extra amounts that were necessary. It was the only possible means of salvaging the Andromeda Project in the foreseeable future, and both the Floating Kingdom and the Project scientists were quick to embrace it. The pilots were another matter altogether. Softly and infrequently at first, then ever more vocally and incessantly, they objected to the symbiotic relationship.

They object, said Psychology, to the concept of living off another's creature's leavings, of eating its excrement and breathing what it exhales.