Starburst

9

THERE WAS NOT ACTUALLY A HYDROPONICS "ROOM" ON the Constitution. There were hydroponics trays and hydroponics clusters. The designers of the ship had meant them to be fitted into crannies and alcoves all over the ves­sel, but the occupants had redesigned the designers' work here, as in much else. Plants were still in unlikely places, but the fourth "level" (it wasn't really level, anymore) above the plasma shields was now stuffed with growing things. An orangerie, a hothouse, a place that smelled of vines and damp.

Everybody liked it. They liked it too much to suit Eve Barstow, who was spending more and more of her time there. The plants did not particularly need tending, because they grew well by themselves with the automatic trickle-drips and drains that fed them; even the experiments could get along quite well without Eve, because Flo Jackman did most of that. But it was a nice place. It was a place for Eve Barstow to be, and there weren't many like that on the ship. Thinning seedlings, picking ripening fruit, loosening the soil (or the sort-of soil, partly quartz pebbles, partly what you didn't really want to think about)—that was a form of solitaire for Eve, a self-imposed task to conceal the fact that she had very few real ones.

It was astonishing to Eve to find how quickly she had grasped hard subjects when she had nothing to do but study them. But it was distressing to find how far beyond the hardest of them some of the other people on the ship had gone. She could rely on the fact that the plants would not surpass her. And they smelled good, and there was a jungly, exotic feel in the hothouse air. With Flo's concurrence and no one's objection, she had encouraged the tomato vines to curl across the gaps between the stacks of trays, and the beans to climb along hooks set in the wall. It made the tending and the picking a little harder, but it created a wild prettiness among all the steel and plastic. She was put out by the fact that the others liked it, too, and so she was not left undisturbed very much of the time. But sometimes, sometimes it was all hers. Apart from wishing she were somewhere else ... or wishing her husband would try a little harder to communicate ... or wishing she were as tall as Ann Becklund or as well-breasted as Dot Letski ... or wishing she would get laid a little more often or could get to a garage sale now and then . . . apart from wishing, being in the hydroponics room was her favorite thing to do.

Like a watermelon seed from someone's lips, she was, she felt, being squeezed out. She thought she recognized the signs. When Eve was younger she had served her term in the counterculture— nothing bad, none of the hardest stuff. Just a time to rebel and fool around. She had observed or experienced almost every known form of interpersonal relationship, from quickies to the communes. For a time she had been enthralled by the notion of plural marriage. Three or four husbands, a batch of sharing wives—what a nice thing! How marvelous to have tenderness there for you whenever you wanted it, and how more marvelous still to be allowed to go off by yourself when you chose, without depriving someone else. But she had observed that something always went wrong. In the sturdiest of the four-way. six-way, multiple-way marriages she had seen, sooner or later one of the equal partners stopped being equal. The group expelled the individual. Within the shared joy was individual misery.

The crew of the Constitution had not begun the practice of multiple mating, or at any rate had not institutionalized it. But Eve could feel the forces pressing against her. The balanced atom had been ionized, and one electron, named Eve Barstow, had been flung out. She circled the nucleus wistfully, at no great distance, but she could no longer join the dance.

Since Eve was a sensible person she knew that the case was not as bad as she pictured it to herself. Of course there were problems! There had to be. This was certainly a stressful situation, and the shrinks had briefed them thoroughly. They had dinned into each of the voyagers that, however relaxed any of them might seem on the surface, there would be fear and anger and hysteria bubbling underneath. Of course, they hadn't explained just how great the stress would be. Because how could they have known?

And Eve was not wholly neglected. Shef still played chess with her, although he was as likely as not to be both reading and carrying on a conversation with someone else at the same time. Her husband, every now and then, remembered to invite her to bed. And there was Ann Becklund. Ann was also a sensible person, and even kind. Sometimes kind—actually, most of the time she was kind, when she wasn't fighting back some internal shit-storm of her own. They talked together. Sometimes about the ship; sometimes girl talk, what kinds of kids they would like to have if ever there were any chance of having any, what they remembered of their different, but similar, youths.

But there was a poison in the air. Ann stopped talking, or annoyedly allowed Eve to talk t© her once in a while. She threw the toe bones over and over, her lips tightening, whispering to herself and clamming up when Eve came near her.

There was a lot of whispering going on in which Eve was not included. And a lot of silences. And a lot of absences. Eve's own husband was spending more and more of his time up in the lookout bubble, peering through the spotter scope or sometimes just with the unaided eye. What was he watching? As far as Eve could see, nothing. It was astonishing to her how interesting nothing was to her husband.

The trip was turning sour in Eve's mouth. But she did not know how sour, or what the spreading sickness was, until Jerry Letski woke her out of a sound sleep. She had curled up on a nest of blankets under the broccoli trays, dreaming of multiple fornications with unbelievably handsome men, and her name was called. Ski spotted her and came racing and flying between the carrots and the mint patch. "Come on, for Christ's sake, there's a meeting. Where've you been?" He caught her by the arm, his gentle, triangular face working with fury. At her? she wondered. No, not at her. But it was not until she got to the common room that she understood to whom the rage belonged, and how terribly it changed everything.

They were all there, and all upset. They showed it in their own individual ways, Dot Letski with her knees folded and eyes closed, communing with who knew what; Shef cursing to himself as he punched out programs on his calculator and fumed at the results. He had been letting his hair grow, Eve saw; it made him look gaunt and wild.

But they all looked wild. Flo Jackman grabbed her by the shoulder as she came in and pushed her face into Eve's. "Well? Shall we do it?" she shouted, spraying Eve's cheek.

Eve pulled away, as much frightened by the intensity in the group as thrilled by the experience of someone asking her advice or consent to anything, for the first time in weeks. "Shall we do what?" she asked, and then they all began talking at once—Shef without looking up, Dot without opening her eyes, even Will Becklund, in his rustly, hoarse whisper, from whatever corner he was hiding in. Ann cast the bones at Eve's feet and cried, "Don't you see? We're screwed!"

Eve gazed at the bones, but the hexagram she could not read. Nor did she have time to try to figure it out because Flo was shouting in her ear. "Dot can write a grammar," she shouted, "in which the whole planet Earth stops rotating. Ski says—"

"Ski says it's too big an investment of our resources," Letski yelled, from Eve's other side. "No way! Now Shef says—"

Shef turned from his calculator to take up his part: "Shef says we go back and beat the piss out of them."

"We can't do that," Eve objected, startled out of her mute confusion.

"Almost! Maybe not quite. We're blowing seven fifty centimeters per second squared against the relativistic mass increase; we can decelerate to zero, turn around, build up to point zero four c, coast, and still have enough to decelerate and maneuver. Of course the time's bad, thirty-three years. On the other hand—-"

"And then what?" Letski shouted. "Go back and live among them again?"

And then everyone stopped talking for a moment, considering what it would be like to return to the familiar life of Earth. Shef started to speak, scratched his stubbly beard, shook his head, and subsided. Ann gathered up her toe bones,' stared at them, then shook her blond head wildly and threw them against the wall. "Any way you look at it," she said, "we're screwed."

"We might as well just keep on going," said Letski, and, one by one, the others began to nod. All but Eve.

"I don't understand!" she cried. "Has something happened I don't know about?"

Ann stared at her, combing her long hair through her fingers. "I thought you knew," she said.

"Knew what? Please! What's it all about?"

Ann's expression softened. "I forgot you haven't been involved," she said apologetically. "It's confirmed. We've all double-checked it. It's been in the hexagrams for weeks, Shef worked it out from a personality analysis of Knefhausen, Jim verified it by direct observation. There's no planet around Alpha Centauri. We have no place to go!"