Survey Ship

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was a clamoring, deafening cacophony; and twelve years of reflex training and safety drills took over, without need for conscious thought. Peake found himself struggling into a pressure suit, his helmet latched shut, even before Teague managed to move toward the dial that would cut off the sound. Moira, even as she clamped her helmet, looked reflexively toward the bin where her cello was stored. In the moment before the helmet cut off sound, and before she got the sound in the suit hooked on, Fontana heard Teague slam the control that closed bulkheads all over the ship, confining airloss to the module which had actually suffered injury.

But only after Teague had closed off the deafening clamor, and all helmets were latched shut, the sound system opening their voices once again to each other, did anyone speak to put into words what had happened.

“A meteor,” Moira said, in shock. “We’re struck, we’re holed! But how could that be? We were so carefully programmed to be outside the asteroid belt—”

“We are,” Ravi said, “but we wouldn’t have to be anywhere near the asteroid belt. There are stray bits of flotsam everywhere in the universe; and a piece no larger than a grain of sand, hitting at our velocity — which, I now venture to remind you, is more thousands of kilometers per second than I like to think about — could do very substantial damage to any module it hit.“ Only then did he think to ask, ”Is everybody alive and all right?”

One by one, with wavering voices, they confirmed presence and well-being. Moira was thinking, in shock, So that’s what I was scared about, that’s why I screamed be/ore it hit us. She let herself slide down toward the floor. “I’m all right,” she said sharply, to Peake’s concerned question, “just a — a little shaky.”

“Whatever it was—” Teague heard his own voice wobbling as if it belonged to someone else and he had no connection with it, “it’s not in here; the air is all right and the module’s integrity isn’t breached.” He heard the technical language with dismay; he’d intended to say, this particular cabin is still in one piece. Strange, how reflexes superseded thought. He checked the tell-tales again and confirmed. “Air level in here, normal. Helmets can be unlatched for the moment. DeMags, as far as I can tell, intact, gravity normal.”

Whatever had struck them, then, it was somewhere else in the clustered modules of the Ship, and the first order of business was to find out where, and how badly.

Peake said, “I don’t suppose there’s any possibility that it’s a false alarm, like the DeMags in the gym going off — something that triggered the alarm system?”

“I wish I thought so,” said Teague, but Moira, rising to her feet, said, “Not a chance. Listen, I’ve got to get to the Bridge—”

“You think the trouble’s on the Bridge?” Fontana asked, wondering if Moira’s psychism was still operative.

“I don’t know,” she said, “But — the sails — they’re spread out to surround every one of the modules — “ Teague checked her firmly, with a gesture, as she headed toward the sphincter lock. ”Nobody’s going anywhere, Moira, until we’ve checked the integrity of the Life-Support system and I’m in charge of that.” He wriggled through, pushed along the free-fall corridor between the main cabin and the living quarters. The cubicles stood open around the clothing-unit, a careless drip floating around the room in Moira’s cubicle, a discarded nightgown floating in Ching’s. But the air levels were normal, the gravity came on when he flipped the stud on the DeMag and evidently the living quarters were safe. He looked grimly at the pressure suits hanging flaccid by the doors of each cubicle, identical with the one he was wearing. He had never really understood why pressure suits had to be duplicated in each module. Now he knew. Any module that was holed gave you a margin, perhaps, of eight or ten seconds to get into a pressure suit. No time to fetch one from another self-contained module!

But why had they been holed at all, this far from the asteroid belt? Space debris was so thinly scattered, elsewhere, that the chances of a direct collision should logically be extremely minute.

Well, even the longest odds sometimes made a hit — in this case, an extremely direct hit. He didn’t think for a moment that the alarms had been set off by any such elusive short in the wiring circuits as had set off the DeMags. No such luck. The chances against such a collision were, literally, astronomical. Yet there was the Ship and there was the fragment that had struck them, in the same place at the same time. And the results — sirens, bells, alarms, and damage somewhere. But so far, all six of the crew were intact; and mechanical damage could be located and repaired. Somehow.

He wriggled back through the air-corridor, in free-fall, letting go, pushing off, re-entering the main cabin where the others waited.

“Living quarters intact,” he reported, not mentioning the water-source someone had left dripping; it was no time to fuss about trifles, but it could be messy if the DeMags were off, and he made a mental note to speak to Moira about it. But not till the present crisis was over.

“I’ll explore the Bridge next—”

“No,” Moira said sharply, “I’m coming to the Bridge. We might as well all come along and see what’s happened. I might be needed. Don’t argue, Teague, you know I’m right.”

It wasn’t worth arguing about. And perhaps they should all stay together until they knew exactly what was happening. He opened the bulkhead leading into the other free-fall corridor, and checked. There was no rush which would have indicated vacuum, open to space, on the other side; no explosive decompression in here, anyway. Nevertheless, he ordered helmets latched before they all followed him into the corridor. Gravity was normal here too — meaning that there wasn’t any. He pushed himself off down the corridor, the others following one by one; only Ching clung to the crawl bar, inching along, and for once they all waited for her without comment.

Peake was thinking about the hundreds of little blinking lights lining the control panels on the Bridge, reflected in the great lenticular window on the universe. In his mind was a terrifying picture of that window shattered and open to space, of the little lights extinguished, of themselves falling, falling, accelerating forever into the nowhere of the stars… his whole body felt clenched, taut, and when he thrust the pressure-suit against the sphincter lock into the Bridge module, he could feel the fresh spurt of adrenalin like a cramp in his calves, a tingle in hands and feet. He was the first into the Bridge module, and it was like a wave of sickness, the sickness of pure relief, as he saw the window undamaged, the blinking lights of the controls unchanged except for the great red wavering glow of the ALERT tell-tales.

“Bridge module undamaged,” he said, tersely. “Air normal.”’

“My shift,” Ravi said, unlatching his helmet and slipping into the seat. Ching said, “1 can check the telltales from here. Life Support control module un-breached. Air levels normal. Drive mechanism module, unbreached: air levels minimal, controls undamaged.”

Ravi said, frowning at the course readouts, “This isn’t the course I set,”

Teague, checking the readouts a fraction of a second behind Ching, said, “Oh-oh. Here it is. Gym; red light for explosive decompression. Whatever it is went straight through the gym; someone will have to go and find out what hit us, and how much damage there is.” He looked at Moira with a sudden gasp of wild surmise. She had known.

“Could hardly be better,” Peake said. “Nothing much in there except empty space—”

“There’s space in there now, anyway,” Ravi said, “hard vacuum.”

“Well, if something had to hit us, that’s the place where it would do least damage,” Peake said. “If it had hit the living quarters, we could have lost a lot; or the main cabin, holed, could have wiped out the musical instruments, anyhow. And if it had hit the computer module — I don’t even want to think about that!” They were all breathing harder now, with the relaxation of tension and fear. The crisis was over; the damage was manageable,

“Someone will have to go in, in a pressure suit, repair the damage, reseal it, but there’s no hurry,” Peake said. “We do have to get some exercise, meanwhile, but if we have to, we can set the DeMags to two gravities in the living quarters and do isometrics.”

Moira was not listening to him. She cried out, as if in agony. “Oh, no!” It felt as if the damage were in her own body, as she saw the great translucent sail wheeling across the stars outside the cabin. Where it had been firm, pressured tautly to the source of the light, now it streamed in tatters, trailing away behind the module and out of sight. It was a physical pain, seeing the proud sail dragging out in shreds and wisps of disintegrating film; she could almost feel the impact, the slicing pain…. She stared at the sail remnants, in dismay, and began to cry.

“Of all the damn silly things to cry over!” Teague said impatiently. “We have spare sails, and if we didn’t, we could synthesize them!”

“It’s not that,” Moira said, sniffing. “But — they were so beautiful, and — and look at them—”

“Let her alone, Teague,” Fontana said. “It’s the strain. It’s all right to cry, Moira, you can cry if you want to.”

But Ching, following Moira’s glance, felt tears in her own eyes. She knew precisely how Moira felt. She may not think I’m capable of understanding, but I do. You can trust machinery, it’s the one thing you can always trust, it’s supposed to be perfect and it is, it’s the one thing you can always be sure of being just exactly what it is supposed to be. And this — it’s like rape, a violation, something intruding into an area you thought safe, personal, protected.

She put her arm around Moira’s waist; dimly she remembered rebuffing some such gesture from Moira, some time ago — but Moira did not pull away from her, and Fontana wondered if she had ever heard Ching’s brisk voice so gentle.

“The thing to do, Moira, is to get them in, if you can do it without further damage, and try to get another sail out; we could veer off course if the sails aren’t properly trimmed for the drives. But the extent of the damage will be recorded in the computer, and any deviation from the set course; I’m going to check that, right now. Do you want some help getting the sails in, or would you rather do it yourself?”

Moira’s in shock, Fontana thought; and Ching’s doing what I ought to be doing. Who would ever have thought Ching could function as a psychologist?

Moira said, “I think I — I’d rather do it myself.” She knew it was absurd; but somehow she had the feeling that her own gentle hands on the sails would damage them less than another’s. She was still capable of being surprised at her own reaction, knowing it to be completely irrational. It’s as if Ching really understood. But how could she?

Ching patted her shoulder, said, “If you need any help, Moira, I’m here.”

Ching watched Moira for a few moments before going to her own console, but Moira’s thin freckled fingers seemed perfectly steady on the control sails and she could see, out the great window, the movement of the torn sails as they began to reel inward. She said, “Shall I check any deviation from course, Ravi?”

He nodded, frowning, taut. He said, “Deviation or no deviation, we are not on the course that I set. Peake, did you change anything when you were on duty?”

Peake shook his head. “No, not at all.”

“That’s foolish,” Ching said, frowning at her console,

“if it’s the course you fed into the Navigation controls and then into the computer, it’s the course we’re on. There could have been some small deviation from course when we were struck — I’m going to check that right now—”

“But if we were struck hard enough to knock us that far off course, there would be a great deal more damage,” said Ravi, and his voice was stubborn,

Ching frowned at the smooth, luminous figures that came up on the readout. “Did you alter the course at all after Peake formally laid it in? When you do, you ought to enter it formally into the log, and let us know. Because there is a deviation here, more than the sail damage could possibly account for, and I don’t see any course changes recorded.”

Ravi shook his head vehemently. “1 didn’t,” he said. “When I first took over from Peake I saw a small deviation from the course he had set, and I corrected for that deviation, so that we’re back on the original course, or should have been. But according to this—” he waved an unsteady hand at the readouts, “we’re not anywhere near where we ought to be. We’re some hundreds of thousands of kilometers closer to the plane of the ecliptic than we ought to be, though I wouldn’t have thought we were close enough to hit the fringes of the asteroid belt.”

Ching touched her console for a position reading, and stared, disbelieving; painstakingly went through the sequence again.

“That’s not where we are,” she said positively.

“It certainly isn’t where we’re supposed to be,” Ravi agreed. “Even by dead reckoning I can make it closer than that, if we’re still aiming at the T-5 cluster as we agreed. Jupiter isn’t where it ought to be, compared to our position. Just look.”

He pointed. They could all see the great planet, but only Teague, regarding it with an astronomer’s interest, paid any attention. Ravi’s fingers raced on his own console, and at last he said formally, “Please read out your figures, Ching, because that’s not at all what I make it.”

Ching read out her answer from the console, and at Ravi’s frown she touched buttons to re-set and re-calculate position and course. This time they could all see the differences.

“But that’s not what I got the first time,” Peake said, “and that’s what I put into the course calculator. Why is it different?”

“Now wait just a minute,” Ching said, “if that’s what you put into the calculator, that’s what you got out of it. A computer gives only one answer to the same question. That’s why they have them. The whole point of a mathematical calculator — and that’s what you’re doing with the computer right now — is to eliminate human errors in arithmetic. It’s not like the story they told us in kindergarten, about the little boy who was asked if he had checked his homework—”

“Sure. J checked it three times. Here are the three answers,” Ravi quoted, with the contempt of the person to whom mathematics is a natural language, making more sense than any other language; who could no more add a set of figures wrongly, or use the wrong equation, than the natural grammarian could split an infinitive. “But just the same, that’s what I make it, and that’s what the computer makes it, and there isn’t any congruence between them. Peake got something else—”

“And I tell you again,” Ching said, really angry now, “that computers don’t make mistakes. Only the people programming them make mistakes. And in this case I didn’t make any mistakes, because you saw me enter the figures exactly as you gave them to me.”

“Ching, there’s no need to get angry with me,” Ravi said, “I’m not attacking your competence, or your personal integrity, or anything of that sort. Computers may not make mistakes, but they do have mechanical failures, don’t they? And programmers do make mistakes, and you didn’t program this one entirely by yourself, did you?”

She shook her head. “Most of the information in the library was put in storage at Lunar Dome,” she said, and clenched her fists, fighting a surge of anger and fear. Somewhere outside herself she knew that Ravi was not attacking her, that it was irrational to feel so threatened. Yet she did feel that it was her own integrity that had been questioned, not that of the computer.

I can’t trust my own body. I can’t trust the computer. Is there anything left that I can trust?

Defiantly, she pressed the console again for re-set and re-calculate. This time they could all see it; a third set of figures like neither Ravi’s nor her own, flower in liquid-crystal numerics across the console. Fighting panic, Ching erased the figures and this time, painstakingly, she entered the relevant figures for the known position of the T-5 cluster, the position of Colony Six, and the elapsed time since departing from the Space Station. Her fingers pressed hard against her mouth as she watched the fourth set of figures flowing across the readout screen.

“What does it mean?” Fontana asked. “Does it mean we’re on the wrong course? Or did whatever hit us damage the computer?”

“No,” Ching said, and her voice was shaking too, “there’s no damage to the computer module; I’m as sure as that as — as I can be of anything. But there’s something wrong with it. I’m not sure yet just what it is. What I am sure of is that it’s giving us wrong answers. Lots of wrong answers. Everyone here is getting different information out of it.”

Silence; and six stricken faces on the Bridge. None of them had to put it into words. Every one of them knew that without accurate information from the computer, they were all hopelessly lost, adrift among the stars without accurate data enough to know where they were going, or even where they were.

It was Fontana who first put the question in all their minds:

“Can it be fixed?”

Ching struggled against her growing fears — fear that she would lose control, somehow do or say the wrong thing. She said, slowly and precisely, “A computer is a machine; we can do everything the computer does, only not quite so quickly or so well. And once I can find what is wrong with it — mechanical damage, a mistake in the original programming, once we know precisely what is wrong, it can be repaired. Repaired, that is, if the damage is mechanical; re-programmed, if it’s a case of human error. We are particularly fortunate to have Ravi with us, because he can be used to check the accuracy of the computer. That’s not the problem. The problem is—” and she swallowed hard, trying to steady the shameful terror in her voice, “that all during the time we’re trying to find out what’s wrong, and trying to fix it, we’re still accelerating at a steady one gee — that means nine point eight meters per second per second — piled on to whatever velocity we’ve attained in the past two-and-a-half days. And every second we use to get it fixed, we’re going further and further off course! An error of a thousandth of a degree in course might not make any difference at all on the surface of the Earth; because there’s only twenty-four thousand miles you can go, and you’re right back where you started. But out there — “Ching made a numb gesture at the infinity of stars beyond the observation window, and clutched at her seat, feeling as sick and dizzy as if the gravity had somehow gone off and she was falling endlessly through space, ”out there, a thousandth of a degree here can get us millions of kilometers, light-years off course at the other end…. We may never reach the T-5 cluster at all, we may never reach anyplace humans have gone before! We don’t know if Peake ever laid in the right course at all, or where we’re going, or where we’ve been… it’s probably too late to get back on the right course, even if we could find out, now, what course we should have taken from just outside the Space Station! We’re going out into the unknown whether we want to or not — and we don’t know where!”