Dark as Day

11 ABOARD THE OSL ACHILLES

Welcome aboard the OSL Achilles.” The blond-haired man in the white uniform stared dubiously at Janeed, and then at the two bags. “Is that all you have?”

“I’m afraid it is. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Weil, no. But some of the others…” He gestured to a huge heap of luggage. “Most people try and bring the contents of the family home, including the cat. It’s my job to talk them out of it.”

“I never had a family home, so it was easy.” Janeed examined his silver badge, which offered the cryptic message F. O., marr p. They were already in Earth-synchronous orbit, and her light-headed feeling was due to more than the micro-gravity environment. Normally she would never have added, to a total stranger, “Is that all you do, handle luggage? And what does your badge mean?”

He seemed more amused than affronted, and looked hard at Janeed for the first time. “No, it’s not all I do. My name is Paul Marr, and I’m second in command. First officer, sort of a spare captain — I suppose it’s in case we lose one.”

“You mean you’re the first mate.”

“If you want to put it in the old-fashioned Earth way, I guess I am.” Janeed and Sebastian were the last to board, so there was no pressure to keep them moving along. Paul Marr glanced at Sebastian, who was staring enraptured out of the port at the full globe of cloudy Earth, far below, and added, “The first mate. You sound like you’ve been to sea yourself.”

“For more than a dozen years.”

“Really? You don’t look old enough.”

“Easily old enough. Thank fresh air and early nights if I look younger than I am. It wasn’t on a real ship, though. I worked in the South Atlantic on a Global Minerals’ mining platform.”

“Even so, it’s a lot more than I’ve ever done. It must be wonderful down there on Earth: the sea breezes, the tides, the storms.”

“Not just those. Don’t forget the pirates, the grog, the lash, the treasure, keel-hauling and hanging from the yard-arm.” Janeed’s strange sense of freedom — of liberation — would not go away. It was like waking on a spring holiday morning when she was six, with the whole day and the whole world waiting. Perhaps it was unfair to dump her exhilaration on Paul Marr, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was laughing, and it was with her, not at her.

“Get yourself settled in on Ganymede,” he said, “then you must take another trip on the Achilles. We’ll go down to Earth, just the two of us, and you can show me everything.”

Was it a come-on, after less than two minutes in each other’s company? It certainly sounded that way. Janeed decided, to her own amazement, that she wouldn’t mind if it were. Paul Marr was part of the mystery, shaking off the surly bonds of Earth and heading into the unknown.

But Marr was staring at Sebastian, who had suddenly swung away from the port.

“I’m sorry.” The first officer was looking at Sebastian, although he seemed to be talking to Jan. “The gentleman there. I assumed that you two were brother and sister. But the manifest shows different last names.”

“We’re together, but we’re not related.” At Paul Marr’s frown, Jan added, “We grew up together, ever since we were a few years old.”

Paul Marr said, “Good” — which so far as Jan was concerned could mean absolutely anything — and then, to Sebastian, “I’ve been curious to meet you, Mr. Birch. You are the reason that the Achilles will be detouring to Mars, instead of taking a straight run to the Jovian system.”

Sebastian said nothing. It was Jan who had to ask, “Why? What’s on Mars that involves Sebastian?”

“Not what. Who. We’ll be picking up a Dr. Valnia Bloom there, who has been recruiting for her science section. She wants to talk to both of you and give Mr. Birch another set of tests on the way out to Jupiter.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got me. But it will offer you the chance to see a bit more of the System. Of course, you won’t have an opportunity to go down to the surface of Mars. We’ll just do an orbital rendezvous.”

“Good.” Sebastian spoke to Paul Marr for the first time. “I’ll see cloud patterns.”

“You’ll certainly be able to do that. Are you interested in the clouds on Mars?”

“Not very.” Sebastian turned back to the observation port, leaving Paul Marr to stare quizzically at Jan. His expression said, Is he normal? Jan didn’t want to think too closely about that. She loved Sebastian more than anyone else in the universe, but even she couldn’t deny that he was strange.

“Come on.” She took Sebastian’s arm. He seemed fixated on Earth again. “You’ll have time to look at that later. Now we have to go to our quarters and settle in.” She picked up the bags, handed one to Sebastian, and moved along the entry umbilical that led through to the ship’s interior.

At the hatch an odd feeling in the back of her neck convinced her that she was being stared at. She turned. Paul Marr had not moved. He gave her a nod and a little smile, and said, “Enjoy the Achilles. We’re proud of her. I hope I’ll see more of you on the flight out.”

Marr had sounded sincere enough, but for the next four days Jan did not see him at all. It was not for lack of trying on her part. The Achilla was a substantial vessel, a fat ovoid forty meters long and thirty across its round mid-section. The engines that propelled the ship toward Mars at a steady third of a gee were housed in the rear, together with the ship’s instrumentation and control room, all behind a bulkhead that said NO PASSENGERS BEYOND THIS POINT in large red letters. Jan decided that Paul Marr must be hiding there, because he was certainly not in any other part of the ship. While Sebastian stared first at the starscape beyond the observation port — “Boring,” he said, after half an hour — and then drowsed in his bunk or gazed vacantly at the cabin ceiling, Jan explored the whole vessel.

There were seventy-one other passengers, bound for the Jovian system as final destination. Jan and Sebastian were the only ones who would head farther out, after the indoctrination sessions on Ganymede. She spoke with a fair number of fellow travelers, but found little in common with most of them. They had worked indoor office jobs on Earth, and they expected to work indoor office jobs somewhere on Ganymede or possibly Callisto. Jan’s life on the high seas of Earth meant nothing to them, though she did swap sea stories with one former sailor. Her own ignorance of what the future might hold in the Saturn system ruled that out as a subject for conversation.

The captain of the OSL Achilles joined the passengers every day for dinner in the ship’s formal dining room, and different groups took it in turn to sit at his table. When Jan’s turn came, along with Sebastian and three others, she made polite general conversation for awhile, and then — ingenuously, she hoped — said, “Your first officer was very kind and helpful when we came aboard. But I haven’t seen him since.”

Captain Eric Kondo squinted across the table at Jan. She had the feeling that he was reading her ID badge. “I’m sure that you will, Ms. Jannex,” he said, “as soon as we reach Mars. The first officer has been very busy, overhauling the Omnivores for inspection when we reach Mars orbit.”

“Omnivores?” The man seated next to Captain Kondo was tall and thin-boned, as though he had already lived all his life in a low-gee setting. “What are they, some kind of pet animals?”

The captain — short, serious, and very dignified — looked at his neighbor in horror. “Pets, sir? Not in space, sir. I know that back on Earth in the old days the sailors carried goats and guinea pigs and turtles for fresh meat, but we are prohibited. No pets allowed, orders of the Outer Systems Line. Mr. Marr and the engineer are overhauling the Diabelli Omnivores — our main engines, that keep pushing us along so comfortably. If you sit quiet and remain still, you will hear and feel them.”

Jan already had. Lying in her bunk the first two nights out, she had detected a faint vibration.

“But if you do feel them,” Captain Kondo went on, “it means that they are not at maximum efficiency. A perfectly efficient engine would make no noise at all, and would not vibrate. That’s what the crew are working on now. Before we get to Mars, all that work has to be over and done with. Then you will have the first officer here at dinner, and less of my dull company.”

He said it with a smile, as though he didn’t believe that anyone might possibly find him boring; but Jan had the feeling that he was looking at her particularly when he mentioned the first officer.

On the seventh day, the OSL Achilles was nearing Mars orbit rendezvous when a knock came on the door of Jan’s cramped little stateroom, far forward near the bows of the ship.

She was curled up on the bed dressed only in briefs and a tank top, but expecting it could only be Sebastian she called, “It’s open. Come in.”

Paul Marr entered, wearing a smile that vanished instantly when he guessed from her clothing that she had been expecting someone else. “I’m sorry. I should have said who I was.”

“It’s all right.” Jan pulled a bed-cover over her bare legs. “My fault. I thought it was Sebastian, and we’re pretty informal with each other. You get that way if you took baths together when you were kids.”

She noticed something odd about his appearance. He was dressed in a newly-pressed white uniform, but his hands were dirty and his nails grimy, as though no amount of scrubbing could get them clean. She went on, “I would ask you to sit down, but there’s not room in here to swing a cat.”

“No pets allowed. Orders of the Outer System Line.” He didn’t smile when he said it, but Jan felt certain that he had been told about her dinner two nights earlier with Captain Kondo. Her conviction was confirmed when he said, “We finished work on the Omnivores just a couple of hours ago.

They’re as clean and beautiful and efficient now as they ever will be. I wondered if you’d like to go aft with me and take a look at them before we power down and settle into Mars orbit.”

“Dressed like this?”

“Dressed any way you like.” He hesitated, then added, “You look pretty good to me. But I’ll wait outside.”

Which left Jan with a small problem. She wanted to be at her best, but she had brought with her exactly one stylish dress. She had been holding it in reserve, waiting for a night when Paul Marr finally appeared for dinner. She didn’t want to waste it on a tour of the ship’s engine room, and anyway it didn’t feel right for that. Engines, if they were anything like the methane power drives on the Global Minerals’ platform, made you dirty if you so much as glanced at them.

She scanned her minimal wardrobe and settled for a dark green top and cut-offs, with flat-heeled pumps. At their first meeting she had noticed that Paul Marr was no taller than she was. She didn’t care, and hoped that he didn’t. You would think that by now no one would worry about a woman’s height, but she knew for a fact that some men did, just as they worried about age differences. She suspected that Paul was at least five years younger than she was.

At the last moment she changed into high-heeled open-toed sandals. If he had old-fashioned hang-ups on height or age, she might as well find out about them now.

He was leaning against the wall of the narrow corridor when she emerged. His scan of her, from toes to head — five centimeters taller than him — produced a delighted smile. “So far as I was concerned,” he said, “you could have gone as you were. But I must say you look better now. In fact, you look just terrific.”

So did he. Jan wondered what she might be getting herself into. The strange feeling of exhilaration had not left her. To depart Earth was to enter a zone of space and time where anything was possible.

He didn’t take her arm, nor did she expect him to. This was a member of the crew, suitably polite and formal with a passenger. But he did walk very close, guiding her along the spiraling corridor that wound its way aft. Since the ship was decelerating into Mars orbit, the way aft was all “downhill.”

At the rear bulkhead they paused. Jan pointed to the sign.

Paul shrugged. “You wouldn’t want it to welcome just anybody, when the ship’s control room is back here. The sign ought to add, ‘Unless accompanied by a ship’s officer.’ That’s me.” He slid the hatch open and waved her through.

Since the area also contained the living quarters of crew members, who spent far more time aboard than any passenger, Jan expected the rooms to be bigger and better furnished than her own cramped area. Just the opposite seemed to be the case. Rather than the bright blues and yellows she had become accustomed to, the walls aft were painted in dingy khaki and a hideous lurid green. The passages were even narrower than the spiral that had brought them here, more like tunnels for rats than corridors for human beings.

“A couple of reasons for that,” Paul said in answer to her question. “First, the crew are at home in any acceleration from free-fall to two-gees — that’s emergency only, by the way. We’re used to wriggling our way along, and wider corridors wouldn’t make that any easier. Also, you are seeing the worst part, the way back to the engines. The captain’s quarters are big and pretty plushy, off to the left. Mine don’t match up to his, but they’re comfortable. Maybe you’d like to take a look at them sometime.”

That sounded like another hint, and not a particularly subtle one. Jan glanced at Paul Marr, but his eyes stated straight ahead as he added, “Not today, though, we don’t have enough time.”

Enough time for what? His expression remained serious, and that was fine. The last thing she wanted was a leer or a sly wink.

They had reached the hatch leading down to the engine room. Paul said, “Don’t touch anything unless I tell you that it’s all right,” and slid through onto a tight spiral staircase of open metal rungs.

Jan followed him down, glad that she had chosen cut-offs but with second thoughts about the heels on her sandals. She didn’t know what she had expected to find — flaming rockets, or a ball of nuclear fire? — but the reality was not impressive. The engine room contained no people, and no furnishings of any kind. She and Paul Marr stood on a small flat platform, less than two meters across, in the middle of the room. On each side, arranged in a hexagon and within touching distance, stood six upright bulbous blue cylinders.

“Here we are,” said Paul. “The famous Diabelli Omnivores. Fusion drives that have transformed travel around the whole system.”

“Those things?” Jan asked.

“These things.” Paul patted one of the blue cylinders. “I’m sorry if you’re not impressed.”

“Maybe if they were working I would be.” And then Jan realized her error. Since the ship was decelerating, the drive must be on, and these engines had to be working.

Instead of replying, Paul took her wrist in his hand. His fingers were soft and smooth, not like someone who had spent the past week fiddling with engines. He moved her hand until it lay palm-down on the surface of one of the blue cylinders. “Feel anything?”

She did. The cylinder transmitted a gentle throb to her flat palm, a thrum-thrum-thrum so faint that it felt like the tingle of a weak electric discharge.

“Tuned as well as we could do them,” Paul said. “Ninety-nine point nine-eight efficiency. One hundred percent isn’t possible, even in theory.”

“What’s going on inside? If they’re called Omnivores, they ought to be eating something.”

“It’s probably not the best name for them.” Paul patted the bulbous cylinder, then left his hand to lie alongside Jan’s. “If you were inside — which thank heaven you can’t ever be — you’d find that nuclear fusion is taking place right here, inside this section. At the moment we are fusing hydrogen to helium to power the drive. We can do that with an internal temperature as low as ten million degrees. But if we ever ran short of hydrogen we could fuse helium to make carbon, or anything all the way up to iron. That’s why these are called Omnivores, because they can fuse lots of different elements. But most fusion reactions need at least a hundred million degrees before they start to produce useful net power. We try to avoid it, because the higher temperatures are harder on the engines.”

Jan pressed her hand down on the cylinder. It was quite cool, but her fingers were just a few centimeters from a roaring fusion furnace. Paul might speak casually of “as low as ten million degrees,” but that sounded more than enough to her.

Paul was watching closely. “Scary?”

“No, not at all. Kind of exciting.” It was, too. So much pent-up power, vibrating under her fingers and responding to human control — it gave her a definite lift, an odd kind of turn-on.

“I hoped you would like it.” Paul again patted the blue cylinder. “I think of this as a kind of test of people. A visit to the engine room produces one of two reactions. Some are terrified at being close to so much raw power — they don’t seem to realize that if the engines ever did blow, they’d be no safer at the other end of the ship than they are standing here. Other people are stirred by what they see as the power that humans have gained over nature. We are doing things inside the Diabellis that once took place only in the middle of stars. I find that impressive and exciting.” He turned away from the Omnivore cylinder. “Let me know if you’d like to come here again. Meanwhile, we’d better be getting back forward. Mars orbit rendezvous in an hour or two. Dr. Bloom will be sitting there itching to get at you.”

“I think she wants Sebastian more than she wants me.”

“Even so, it doesn’t sound like much fun for either of you. But I hope you enjoyed this visit.”

“Very much.”

That was quite true, and it left in Jan’s mind one question: Why had Paul Marr singled her out, from all the passengers, for the guided tour? Or maybe there was a second question, too: Had Paul Marr singled her out, or was she one on a list of a dozen?

Jan preferred not to ask. Something told her that she would find out in due course. And if she did, and the answer proved to be that he was interested in Jan alone, there was one other question that she still had to ask herself.