Survey Ship

CHAPTER SIX

Later that day they passed through the orbit of Mars; the planet itself was far off on the other side of the sun, and they did not see it. The course they had set was far off the plane of the ecliptic; Peake double-checked it, with morbid care. At their present acceleration, coming too close to the asteroids could be fatal; even the smallest planetesimal, encountered unexpectedly, could strike through a vulnerable section of the ship and create difficulties — if not disaster. Peake turned round, checking on the location of the pressure suits which were stored near the sphincter lock of the module — as they were in EVERY module, without exception — wondering if there would really be time to get into them if they were holed by a miniature asteroid. Maybe. If it wasn’t too big. If it didn’t instantaneously destroy the module, crew and all. Had any of the Survey Ships met this fate? He knew they would be monitored, on long-distance telescopes, at least to the orbit of Jupiter, and perhaps beyond. But once past the orbit of Pluto, they were out of range of any Earth-monitoring, until they reached the colonies… he turned to Moira, bent over the controls of her light-sails, and as if she could feel his glance, she raised her head and given him an uneasy smile.

He remembered that Moira was psychic; was she picking up on his fears? But after a moment he forgot it again, for she was bending over the machinery, crooning, it seemed, to the controls. They were all familiar with Moira’s habit of talking to machinery, it was as much a part of their background as his own skill with the violin, or Zora’s voice, or Teague’s freckles.

Behind him Ravi said, and he was looking at Moira too, “She talks to them — the sails, I mean — like a mother to her starving baby.”

Peake’s mouth twitched. “She comes from one of the rich countries. Probably never saw starving babies,” he said, but the picture was in his mind, clear, from his third or fourth year; he had come from one of the last enclaves on Earth where famine was still recurrent, and he had lived through one of them. So, he remembered, had Ravi.

“Why were we the lucky ones, I wonder?” he said to Ravi. “I was four years old, I remember, the baby died, seven babies in our village died, others never were the same…”

They had spoken of this before. Not often. Ravi, his mind filled with pictures of dark faces anxiously bent over dying children, said grimly, “I remember. The answer they give us at the Academy, that we were survivor types, brilliant enough to pass Academy tests, that never satisfied me somehow. We lived. So many died, and then we were taken out and pampered, given everything — how could we possibly have deserved it?” Ravi looked out at the panorama of the stars. He said, not really to Peake at all, “I can’t believe it was the will of God that we should live and they should die, that God would be concerned with anything that small, and oh, God, it looks so much smaller out here . . ” and he stared as if he could somehow wrench an answer from the unyielding, endless points of light out there.

Peake said, lapsing into a dialect long forgotten, “We paying for it, man. With out lives. With losing everybody.”

Ravi thought, What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul… and he thought, our souls have been taken from us by the Academy training, and I am being sent where I have no chance to find mine… and he remembered that a scant few hours ago he had been blocking all of this out by frantic sex with Moira. Somehow he would have to retrace his steps, think about what and who he was… what had Moira, and sex, to do with this struggle in his mind? Or were he and Moira both a part of a Cosmic whole, all part of God… he had read something of Tantra, where the sexual partner was loved and worshipped in the place of God. The idea, and the juxtaposition of the two ideas, confused and annoyed him. He had been brought up to be very casual and guilt-free about sex, and now he wondered if this was simply a part of the altogether soulless and atheistic Academy training.

Peake, at least, had not known casual sex, but a deep and intense love. Perhaps Peake, at least, knew what it was to love and revere a partner as if that partner were a part of God. Like many strongly heterosexual men, Ravi found it difficult to understand the impulse which had brought Peake and Jimson together. He began, with a mental shyness strange to him, to think about it. No one who had watched them together could doubt that it was a stronger impulse than most of the easy and casual heterosexuality in the Academy. It showed most strongly when they were playing together, violin and piano; whatever was between them, perhaps they had been able to achieve that ideal of finding God in one another, without even the physical lure of opposite sexes.

I envy them, he thought, surprised at himself.

And then he began to think about Peake; the one of them who had known that kind of love, and the one of them who, because of what he was, was alone, with no chance of finding that kind of partnering again.

He will be alone, all during this voyage, and after having known a kind of love none of us has equaled.

Peake was one of them, and it occurred to Ravi, suddenly, to wonder if he could endure to see Peake completely alone all during this voyage. Did he and Teague have some kind of responsibility, since all of them were close as in — Moira had said it — one of these arranged marriages, to lessen Peake’s loneliness?

I am his friend; his partner, even, in navigating the Ship. Could I, if he needed me, be his lover too? The thought scared Ravi a little, and he turned and looked surreptitiously at Peake, who was studying the vast view beyond the lenticular window.

“Doesn’t it make you dizzy?” he asked.

Peake shook his head. “No,” he said, “I like it.”

Moira raised her head from studying the sails (a taut and twitching triangular corner against the stars], and said with a flick of sarcasm, “I am sure the Universe is happy at your approval.”

Peake was too dark to display a blush, but he lowered his head with a sheepish grin, and Ravi felt a sudden deep tenderness. He knew, suddenly, that he loved Peake too, and whatever happened, he wasn’t going to let him suffer in the years to come.

But he knew, too, that he was going to go on having sex with Moira just as long as she was in the mood!

During the next twenty-four hours, the crew explored the last comers of the Ship that they had not seen; the modules controlling the light-drives and the sails, the converter mechanisms which worked to recycle and re-molecularize materials into food, clothing and the other materials they needed for life abroad; although only Teague, in a special radiation suit, went into the main converter area. Moira explored the light-drives which she had helped to assemble, remaining there so long that Fontana became a little frightened and went in after her. Ching refused to allow anyone else inside the computer center under any conditions; she wore anti-static clothing, and stayed in only a few minutes.

“Just long enough to get the general layout in my mind, in case anything should go wrong — and let’s hope it won’t — and I have to go in and actually do something to the hardware,” she said, coming out and shucking the anti-static suit, “and I’m not giving any conducted tours. Some time in the next year or two, if anybody would like to learn what I know about computers, I’d be delighted to have a second-in-command-of-computers, or a backup technician. But not until I’m absolutely sure I know every inch of the thing myself!” She stretched, cramped — the interior of the computer module was somewhat smaller than she was, although she was not very large. “Not you, Peake — you’d never fit in there. You’d feel like that old torture — the box where you can neither sit, stand, nor lie down! I’m tempted to go and work out the kinks in the gym — none of us has been in there yet!”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Peake agreed. “Moira’s fussing around the sails again, but when she finishes, we can all go.”

They had to pass through two of the free-fall corridors to get to the module tagged as a gymnasium. Teague, who went through just behind them, noticed that Ching’s clinging to the crawl bar was a little less desperate, that for the last few seconds she actually let go and floated. So his efforts hadn’t been entirely wasted, after all.

“How do you want me to set the DeMags?” he asked Peake, who was immediately behind them.

“Full gravity,” Peake said, “at least for the first hour. One hour workout at full gravity, plus a four-hour sleep period at full gravity, will keep muscles and internal organs in tone. After that, if you want to experiment with low-gravity acrobatics, that’s up to you. But as the medical officer, I make it a professional recommendation with all necessary force — no less than one hour of full-gravity exercise per crew member per twenty-four hour ship’s day!”

“My, how solemn,” Moira laughed, coming in behind him. “We ought to have chosen you for captain, Peake, you have the right accent and the proper authoritarian manner!”

“I’m a doctor,” he replied. “This isn’t an opinion, this is a medical necessity. Just a simple fact. Ignore it at your body’s peril.”

“Gravity set,” Teague said, and went to an anchored rowing machine, where he sat down and began to pull against it with his powerful muscles. Fontana, standing at one edge of the cubical module, looked appreciatively at his bare shoulders, then began a slow jog around the room. After a few seconds, in spite of the fact that she was an extremely healthy young woman, she felt her heart pounding, let herself collapse for a moment to the floor.

Peake went and bent over her. “Trouble, Fontana?” He felt for her pulse and frowned.

“Tell me, did you sleep at full gravity last sleep period?”

Fontana felt the color rising in her cheeks, and looked quickly, guiltily at Teague. They had kept the DeMag units just high enough to keep them from drifting apart as they made love; afterward they had slept in zero gravity, floating. She shook her head.

“Now you see why you have to,” Peake said soberly. “It doesn’t take the heart very long to adapt to zero-gravity, and the heart’s like any other muscle, it gets lazy when it isn’t working; the muscles in the human body were made to operate at one gee. You’ll need to work out twice as long today, and don’t try that again.”

She stared at him rebelliously, but the thumping of her heart had frightened her. Could they really lose fitness so swiftly outside the familiar gravity of Earth? “All right,” she said soberly, “I’ll remember, Peake.”

Peake nodded and went off to jog around the edge of the room, setting himself a hard, unrelenting pace. At one side, Ching was clinging to a ballet barre, doing smooth, fluid knee bends — Peake rummaged in a packrat memory for the word, plies. During a lifetime of physical training, all of them had had introductory ballet exercises for fitness, and some of the women still used them as a training routine. Ravi was running too, on a treadmill. Peake ran on, feeling the pounding of his bare feet against the floor, enjoying the slow acceleration of his heartbeat. He was, he assessed himself mentally, in excellent condition. He intended to stay that way, though he supposed the novelty of doing exercises in the little gym module might wear off fairly soon.

As he ran around the small arena, recurrently, he passed Teague at the rowing machine, and about the fourth time he realized that he, too, was looking at the red-haired youngster’s superb muscled physique. Not, especially, with desire; just, he became aware that he was noticing Teague, and it dismayed him, ha hadn’t looked at anyone that way in years. Not since he and Jimson — he cut off that thought in midair, knowing Fontana had been right; looking back was pointless, simply a way to torture himself.

No harm in looking, he told himself grimly as he pounded around the track. Especially when that’s all it can ever come to. Teague and Ravi are both woman-chasers. Which is just as well because neither of them is my type, or ever could be.

He had never thought about anyone that way — not, anyhow, after adolescence — except Jimson.

But why not? Why was I different? He had read the theory that homosexuality or heterosexuality is firmly established by the age of two or three. When the practice is free of social stigma, as in the Academy, at least one out of every five or six men will be homosexual; and there had been four or five besides himself in their class. All but himself and Jimson had experimented with women, too; they had simply been too wrapped up in one another.

I don’t know how I feel about women. I never bothered to find out. And then Peake, running, realized that this kind of thought was the sort of thing which hard exercise was intended to exorcise; wholly preoccupied with the body, awareness and morbid introspection left the mind. He sped up his running to sprint level, and thought dropped away; he was simply enjoying the feel of his body, his feet drumming the track, his heart pounding, the feel of sweat bursting from his body.

When it happened it was not the way he had always thought it would be if such a thing happened. First he felt his feet slip slightly, as if the floor had suddenly become tacky and his bare feet lost their traction. Then, since he was moving too swiftly to check himself, he felt himself slip loose and plummet, free of gravity,

toward the far wall. Inertia, he thought, an object keeps travelling in the same direction unless something happens to stop it…he twisted as hard as he could to roll up in a ball, struck hard with one shoulder and slid along — no longer down — the wall. He looked around. Ching was floating, clinging with one hand to the ballet barre, looking suprised and panicky; the force of her kick had flung her into the air with nothing to bring her down again. Fontana, Ravi, and Moira were floating in midair, while Teague, still in the rowing machine, was staring in dismay as it wobbled under him.

Moira, with the skill of the free-fall-trained athlete, was already aware of what had happened, and making sturdy swimming motions down toward the DeMag unit.

“The gravity went off,” she announced, superfluously. “You didn’t set it properly, Teague.”

“Yes I did,” Teague objected, climbing out of the machine with some difficulty, “See, it’s still turned full ON — one full gravity.”

Fontana came and joined them. “Granted, I’m not quite the expert on DeMag technology that you are, Teague, I do know something about them, and a properly set DeMag doesn’t go off that way. There’s supposed to be a fail-safe device in them which lessens the gravity very slowly, to prevent just this kind of accident. Someone could have been hurt—”

Teague had already removed the panel over the unit and was peering into its interior. Fontana thought he looked very strange, as if he were swimming down toward it, his legs sticking straight up from inside the box. Moira shoved Fontana to one side and joined Teague there.

She said, “There’s nothing wrong with the unit. Are you sure you set it properly, Teague?”

“Positive,” he said, “and if I hadn’t, it couldn’t go off suddenly like that.” He withdrew his head slowly from the box. “It’s all tied into the central computer for Life Support, and when it lets go — and nothing is perfect — it’s backed up so that the changes in gravity are very, very gradual. It doesn’t matter so much when the gravity goes off — but suppose we’d all been in free-fall, doing acrobatics or something?” He pointed at Ching, still holding the barre. “Anyone who’d been in midair like that would have come down with an impact — one of us could have broken a leg, a kneecap, a shoulder — what’s the matter, Moira?” he asked, for the red-headed woman had gone white, her freckles standing out like blots.

Her smile wavered. She said, “I — I’m not sure. It’s like that other time—”

Teague looked grim. He said, “I think we treat Moira the way coal-miners used to treat their canaries —when the bird keels over, something’s wrong even if the miner doesn’t feel it yet. When Moira looks like this, we assume there’s a real emergency. Ching, if it’s something in the computer— ” remembering that free-fall bothered her, he pushed up, floating, took her hands and gently steadied her as she lowered herself toward the floor.

He said softly, for her ears alone, “It’s got to be in your mind, Ching. You’re a G-N; your inner-ear channels are by definition perfect.”

She said, shakily, “I think somehow the geneticists missed that one,” and unexpectedly, vomited messily into the air.

“Let her alone,” Peake said swiftly, “Get her down!”

Ching moaned, still retching, “There isn’t any down.!”

Peake came and took over, checking her pulse, wiping her face. The others, with varying expressions of disgust and exasperation, were dodging drifting globules of vomit. Fontana — she too, Peake recalled, was medically trained — came over to them, a dampened towel in one hand.

She wiped Ching’s face with it, gently. Ching was still retching emptily and crying, but as Fontana touched her she made a noticeable effort to control herself.

“I’m all right. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. Here, Teague, did you need help?”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the setup,” Moira said, her hands caressing the DeMag machinery. “It’s perfect, nothing wrong with it.”

Fontana said with asperity, “Maybe we all dreamed it.”

Moira’s voice was impatient. “No, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean, since there’s nothing wrong with the functioning of the DeMag, whatever it is, it’s got to be in the computer tie-in.”

“The DeMags are all programmed alike,” said Ching, holding herself down with one hand and peering into the box. “If there’s anything wrong with the way this one’s set, they’d all have been doing it. And they’re all fine.”

“Everybody hang on tight,” said Teague, “I’m going to try something.” He moved the stud on the DeMag unit all the way toward the OFF position. Then, firmly, he moved it again toward ON.

Ching felt herself slide toward the floor; the gym was, reassuringly, right side up again, and her insides settled into comfort. She made a face of disgust at her stained tunic, splattered with vomit and half-digested meat and salad.

Ravi said, “And this time it went on the way it was supposed to; slowly and gradually, so that nobody plunged down and sprained an ankle or anything.”

Teague was scowling at the switch. He said, “I’d better go and check out everything in the Life-Support module. And Ching, you check out everything in the computer tie-ins—”

“It couldn’t be the computer,” she said positively, but at Moira’s glare, she said, “All right! All right! I’ll check every linkage! But do you mind if I clean up this mess in here, and go and change my clothes first — and have a shower?”