Starman's Quest

Chapter Two

Alan dumped his breakfast dishes into the hopper and walked briskly out of the mess hall. His destination was the Central Control Room, that long and broad chamber that was the nerve-center of the ship’s activities just as the Common Recreation Room was the center of off-duty socializing for the Crew.

He found the big board where the assignments for the day were chalked, and searched down the long lists for his own name.

“You’re working with me today, Alan,” a quiet voice said.

He turned at the sound of the voice and saw the short, wiry figure of Dan Kelleher, the cargo chief. He frowned. “I guess we’ll be crating from now till tonight without a stop,” he said unhappily.

Kelleher shook his head. “Wrong. There’s really not very much work. But it’s going to be cold going. All those chunks of dinosaur meat in the preserving hold are going to get packed up. It won’t be fun.”

Alan agreed.

He scanned the board, looking down the rows for the list of cargo crew. Sure enough, there was his name: Donnell, Alan, chalked in under the big double C. As an Unspecialized Crewman he was shifted from post to post, filling in wherever he was needed.

“I figure it’ll take four hours to get the whole batch crated,” Kelleher said. “You can take some time off now, if you want to. You’ll be working to make up for it soon enough.”

“I won’t debate the point. Suppose I report to you at 0900?”

“Suits me.”

“In case you need me before then, I’ll be in my cabin. Just ring me.”

Once back in his cabin, a square cubicle in the beehive of single men’s rooms in the big ship’s fore section, Alan unslung his pack and took out the dog-eared book he knew so well. He riffled through its pages. The Cavour Theory, it said in worn gold letters on the spine. He had read the volume end-to-end at least a hundred times.

“I still can’t see why you’re so wild on Cavour,” Rat grumbled, looking up from his doll-sized sleeping-cradle in the corner of Alan’s cabin. “If you ever do manage to solve Cavour’s equations you’re just going to put yourself and your family right out of business. Hand me my nibbling-stick, like a good fellow.”

Alan gave Rat the much-gnawed stick of Jovian oak which the Bellatrician used to keep his tiny teeth sharp.

“You don’t understand,” Alan said. “If we can solve Cavour’s work and develop the hyperdrive, we won’t be handicapped by the Fitzgerald Contraction. What difference does it make in the long run if the Valhalla becomes obsolete? We can always convert it to the new drive. The way I see it, if we could only work out the secret of Cavour’s hyperspace drive, we’d—”

“I’ve heard it all before,” Rat said, with a note of boredom in his reedy voice. “Why, with hyperspace drive you’d be able to flit all over the galaxy without suffering the time-lag you experience with regular drive. And then you’d accomplish your pet dream of going everywhere and seeing everything. Ah! Look at the eyes light up! Look at the radiant expression! You get starry-eyed every time you start talking about the hyperdrive!”

Alan opened the book to a dog-eared page. “I know it can be done eventually. I’m sure of it. I’m even sure Cavour himself actually succeeded in building a hyperspace vessel.”

“Sure,” Rat said drily, switching his long tail from side to side. “Sure he built one. That explains his strange disappearance. Went out like a snuffed candle, soon as he turned on his drive. Okay, go ahead and build one—if you can. But don’t bother booking passage for me.”

“You mean you’d stay behind if I built a hyperspace ship?”

“Sure I would.” There was no hesitation in Rat’s voice. “I like this particular space-time continuum very much. I don’t care at all to wind up seventeen dimensions north of here with no way back.”

“You’re just an old stick-in-the mud.” Alan glanced at his wristchron. It read 0852. “Time for me to get to work. Kelleher and I are packing frozen dinosaur today. Want to come along?”

Rat wiggled the tip of his nose in a negative gesture. “Thanks all the same, but the idea doesn’t appeal. It’s nice and warm here. Run along, boy; I’m sleepy.” He curled up in his cradle, wrapped his tail firmly around his body, and closed his eyes.

There was a line waiting at the entrance to the freezer section, and Alan took his place on it. One by one they climbed into the spacesuits which the boy in charge provided, and entered the airlock.

For transporting perishable goods—such as the dinosaur meat brought back from the colony on Alpha C IV to satisfy the heavy demand for that odd-tasting delicacy on Earth—the Valhalla used the most efficient freezing system of all: a compartment which opened out into the vacuum of space. The meat was packed in huge open receptacles which were flooded just before blastoff; before the meat had any chance to spoil, the lock was opened, the air fled into space and the compartment’s heat radiated outward. The water froze solid, preserving the meat. It was just as efficient as building elaborate refrigeration coils, and a good deal simpler.

The job now was to hew the frozen meat out of the receptacles and get it packed in manageable crates for shipping. The job was a difficult one. It called for more muscle than brain.

As soon as all members of the cargo crew were in the airlock, Kelleher swung the hatch closed and threw the lever that opened the other door into the freezer section. Photonic relays clicked; the metal door swung lightly out and they headed through it after Kelleher gave the go-ahead.

Alan and the others set grimly about their work, chopping away at the ice. They fell to vigorously. After a while, they started to get somewhere. Alan grappled with a huge leg of meat while two fellow starmen helped him ease it into a crate. Their hammers pounded down as they nailed the crate together, but not a sound could be heard in the airless vault.

After what seemed to be three or four centuries to Alan, but which was actually only two hours, the job was done. Somehow Alan got himself to the recreation room; he sank down gratefully on a webfoam pneumochair.

He snapped on a spool of light music and stretched back, completely exhausted. I don’t ever want to see or taste a dinosaur steak again, he thought. Not ever.

He watched the figures of his crewmates dashing through the ship, each going about some last-minute job that had to be handled before the ship touched down. In a way he was glad he had drawn the assignment he had: it was difficult, gruelingly heavy labor, carried out under nasty circumstances—it was never fun to spend any length of time doing manual labor inside a spacesuit, because the sweat-swabbers and the air-conditioners in the suit were generally always one step behind on the job—but at least the work came to a definite end. Once all the meat was packed, the job was done.

The same couldn’t be said for the unfortunates who swabbed the floors, scraped out the jets, realigned the drive mechanism, or did any other tidying work. Their jobs were never done; they always suffered from the nagging thought that just a little more work might bring the inspection rating up a decimal or two.

Every starship had to undergo a rigorous inspection whenever it touched down on Earth. The Valhalla probably wouldn’t have any difficulties, since it had been gone only nine years Earthtime. But ships making longer voyages often had troubles with the inspectors. Procedure which passed inspection on a ship bound out for Rigel or one of the other far stars might have become a violation in the hundreds of years that would have passed before its return.

Alan wondered if the Valhalla would run into any inspection problems. The schedule called for departure for Procyon in six days, and the ship would as usual be carrying a party of colonists.

The schedule was pretty much of a sacred thing. But Alan had not forgotten his brother Steve. If he only had a few days to get out there and maybe find him—

Well, I’ll see, he thought. He relaxed.

But relaxation was brief. A familiar high-pitched voice cut suddenly into his consciousness. Oh, oh, he thought. Here comes trouble.

“How come you’ve cut jets, spaceman?”

Alan opened one eye and stared balefully at the skinny figure of Judy Collier. “I’ve finished my job, that’s how come. And I’ve been trying to get a little rest. Any objections?”

She held up her hands and looked around the big recreation room nervously. “Okay, don’t shoot. Where’s that animal of yours?”

“Rat? Don’t worry about him. He’s in my cabin, chewing his nibbling-stick. I can assure you it tastes a lot better to him than your bony ankles.” Alan yawned deliberately. “Now how about letting me rest?”

She looked wounded. “If you want it that way. I just thought I’d tell you about the doings in the Enclave when we land. There’s been a change in the regulations since the last time we were here. But you wouldn’t be interested, of course.” She started to mince away.

“Hey, wait a minute!” Judy’s father was the Valhalla’s Chief Signal Officer, and she generally had news from a planet they were landing on a lot quicker than anyone else. “What’s this all about?”

“A new quarantine regulation. They passed it two years ago when a ship back from Altair landed and the crew turned out to be loaded with some sort of weird disease. We have to stay isolated even from the other starmen in the Enclave until we’ve all had medical checkups.”

“Do they require every ship landing to go through this?”

“Yep. Nuisance, isn’t it? So the word has come from your father that since we can’t go round visiting until we’ve been checked, the Crew’s going to have a dance tonight when we touch down.”

“A dance?”

“You heard me. He thought it might be a nice idea—just to keep our spirits up until the quarantine’s lifted. That nasty Roger Bond has invited me,” she added, with a raised eyebrow that was supposed to be sophisticated-looking.

“What’s wrong with Roger? I just spent a whole afternoon crating dinosaur meat with him.”

“Oh, he’s—well—he just doesn’t do anything to me.”

I’d like to do something to you, Alan thought. Something lingering, with boiling oil in it.

“Did you accept?” he asked, just to be polite.

“Of course not! Not yet, that is. I just thought I might get some more interesting offers, that’s all,” she said archly.

Oh, I see the game, Alan thought. She’s looking for an invitation. He stretched way back and slowly let his eyes droop closed. “I wish you luck,” he said.

She gaped at him. “Oh—you’re horrible!”

“I know,” he admitted coolly. “I’m actually a Neptunian mudworm, completely devoid of emotions. I’m here in disguise to destroy the Earth, and if you reveal my secret I’ll eat you alive.”

She ignored his sally and shook her head. “But why do I always have to go to dances with Roger Bond?” she asked plaintively. “Oh, well. Never mind,” she said, and turned away.

He watched her as she crossed the recreation room floor and stepped through the exit sphincter. She was just a silly girl, of course, but she had pointed up a very real problem of starship life when she asked, “Why do I always have to go to dances with Roger Bond?”

The Valhalla was practically a self-contained universe. The Crew was permanent; no one ever left, unless it was to jump ship the way Steve had—and Steve was the only Crewman in the Valhalla’s history to do that. And no one new ever came aboard, except in the case of the infrequent changes of personnel. Judy Collier herself was one of the newest members of the Crew, and her family had come aboard five ship years ago, because a replacement signal officer had been needed.

Otherwise, things remained the same. Two or three dozen families, a few hundred people, living together year in and year out. No wonder Judy Collier always had to go to dances with Roger Bond. The actual range of eligibles was terribly limited.

That was why Steve had gone over the hill. What was it he had said? I feel the walls of the ship holding me in like the bars of a cell. Out there was Earth, population approximately eight billion or so. And up here is the Valhalla, current population precisely 176.

He knew all 176 of them like members of his own family—which they were, in a sense. There was nothing mysterious about anyone, nothing new.

And that was what Steve had wanted: something new. So he had jumped ship. Well, Alan thought, development of a hyperdrive would change the whole setup, if—if—

He hardly found the quarantine to his liking either. The starmen had only a brief stay on Earth, with just the shortest opportunity to go down to the Enclave, mingle with starmen from other ships, see a new face, trade news of the starways. It was almost criminal to deprive them of even a few hours of it.

Well, a dance was the second best thing. But it was a pretty distant second, he thought, as he pushed himself up out of the pneumochair.

He looked across the recreation room. Speak of the devil, he thought. There was Roger Bond now, stretched out and resting too under a radiotherm lamp. Alan walked over to him.

“Heard the sad news, Rog?”

“About the quarantine? Yeah.” Roger glanced at his wristchron. “Guess I’d better start getting spruced up for the dance,” he said, getting to his feet. He was a short, good-looking, dark-haired boy a year younger than Alan.

“Going with anyone special?”

Roger shook his head. “Who, special? Who, I ask you? I’m going to take skinny Judy Collier, I guess. There’s not much choice, is there?”

“No,” Alan agreed sadly, “Not much choice at all.”

Together they left the recreation room. Alan felt a strange sort of hopeless boredom spreading over him, as if he had entered a gray fog. It worried him.

“See you tonight,” Roger said.

“I suppose so,” Alan returned dully. He was frowning.