Time For The Stars

XIII IRRELEVANT RELATIONS

Beyond Beta Hydri: I ought to bring this up to date, or else throw it away. I hardly ever have time to write now, since we are so short handed. Whatever it was we picked up on Constance—or, possibly, caught from improperly fumigated stores—has left us with more than enough to do, especially in my department. There are only six left now to handle all the traffic, Unc, myself, Mei-Ling, Anna, Gloria, and Sam. Dusty lived through it but he is out of touch, apparently permanently. His brother had no kids for a secondary team and they just slipped apart on the last peak and never matched in again.

I am dependent on my great-niece Kathleen and on Molly, her mother. Pat and I can still talk, but only with their help; if we try it alone, it's like trying to make yourself understood in a machine shop. You know the other fellow is saying something but the more you strain the less you hear. Pat is fifty-four, now that we have peaked on this leg; we just don't have anything in common. Since Maude's death he isn't interested in anything but business—and I am not interested in that.

Unc is the only one who doesn't feel his original telepartner slipping away. Celestine is forty-two now; they are coming together instead of separating. I still call her "Sugar Pie," just to hear her chuckle. It is hard to realize that she is twice my age; she ought to have braids and a missing front tooth.

All in all, we lost thirty-two people in the Plague. I had it and got well. Doe Devereaux didn't get well and neither did Prudence nor Rupe. We have to fill in and act as if the others had never been with us. Mei-Ling's baby died and for a while we thought we were going to lose Mei-Ling, but now she takes her watch and does her work and even laughs.

I guess the one we all miss the most is Mama O'Toole.

What else of importance has happened? Well, what can happen in a ship? Nothing. Beta Hydri was a washout. Not only nothing resembling an Earth-type planet, but no oceans

—no water oceans, I mean; it was a choice for fuel between ammonia and methane, and the Chief Engineer and the Captain had long worried conferences before they settled for ammonia. Theoretically the Elsie will burn anything; give her mass-converter something to chew on and the old "e equals mc²" gets to work; the torch spits the mass out as radiation at the speed of light and neutrons at almost the speed of light. But while the converter does not care, all of the torch's auxiliary equipment is built to handle fluid, preferably water.

We had a choice between ammonia, already liquid, and an outer planet that was mostly ice, but ice not much warmer than absolute zero. So they crossed their fingers, put her down in an ocean of ammonia, and filled up the old girl's tanks. The planet we named Inferno and then called it nastier names. We had to sit there four days at two gravities and it was cold, even with the ship's air heaters going full blast.

The Beta Hydri system is one I am not going back to; creatures with other metabolisms can have it and welcome. The only one who was pleased was Harry Gates, because the planetary arrangements followed Bode's Law. I wouldn't care if they had been in Vee formation.

The only other thing that sticks in my mind was (of all things!) political trouble. Our last peak started just as that war broke out between the Afro-European Federation and Estados Unidos de Sud. It shouldn't have meant anything to us—it did not, to most of us, or at least we kept our sympathies to ourselves. But Mr. Roch, our Chief Engineer, is from the Federation and his first assistant was born in Buenos Aires. When Buenos Aires got it, probably including some of Mr. Regato's relatives, he blamed his boss personally. Silly, but what can you expect?

After that, the Captain gave orders that he would check Earthside news before it was printed and he reminded us of the special restrictions on communicators in re security of communications. I think I would have been bright enough to submit that dispatch to the Captain before printing it, but I can't be sure. We'd had always had free press in the Elsie.

The only thing that got us out of that mess was that we peaked right after. When we came out of peak, fourteen years had passed and the latest political line-up had Argentina friends with her former enemies and on the outs with the rest of South America. After a while Mr. Roch and Mr. Regato were back playing chess together, just as if the Captain had never had to restrict them to keep them from each other's throats.

Everything that happens back on Earth is a little unreal to me, even though we continue to get the news when we are not at peak. You get your mind adjusted to a new situation; the Elsie goes through a peak... years have passed and everything has changed. They are calling the Planetary League the "United System" now and they say that the new constitution makes war impossible.

It's still the Planetary League to me—and it was supposed to make war impossible, too. I wonder what they changed besides the names?

Half of the news I don't understand. Kathleen tells me that her class has pooled their eveners to buy a Fardie for their school as a graduation present and that they are going to outswing it for the first time at the commencement exercises—then she had to hurry away because she had been co-opted in charge. That was just last watch. Now what is a "Fardie" and what was wrong with it where it was?

The technical news that reaches us I don't understand, either, but at least I know why and usually somebody aboard does understand it. The relativists are excited about stuff coming in which is so technical that it has to be retransmitted and confirmed before it is released—this with Janet Meers standing behind you and trying to snatch spools out of the recorder. Mr. O'Toole gets excited too, only the way he shows it is for the end of his nose to get pink. Dr. Babcock never shows excitement, but he missed coming in for meals two days running after I copied a monograph called "Sumner on Certain Aspects of Irrelevance." At the end of that time I sent one back to LRF which Dr. Babcock had written. It was just as crammed with indigestible mathematics, but I gathered that Dr. Babcock was politely calling Professor Sumner a fool.

Janet Meers tried to explain it to me, but all that I got out of it was that the concept of simultaneity was forcing a complete new look at physics.

"Up to now," she told me, "we've concentrated on the relative aspects of the space-time continuum. But what you m-r people do is irrelevant to space-time. Without time there is no space; without space there can be no time. Without space-time there can be no conservation of energy-mass. Heavens, there's nothing. It has driven some of the old-timers out of their minds. But now we are beginning to see how you people may possibly fit into physics—the new physics, I mean; it's all changed."

I had had enough trouble with the old-style physics; having to learn a new one made my head ache just to think about it. "What use is it?" I asked.

She looked shocked. "Physics doesn't have to have any use. It just is."

"Well, I don't know. The old physics was useful. Take the torch that drives us, for example—"

"Oh, that! That's not physics, that's just engineering"—as if I had mentioned something faintly scandalous.

I will never understand Janet and perhaps it is just as well that she promised to "be a sister to me." She said that she did not mind my being younger than she was, but that she did not think she could look up to a man who could not solve a fourth-degree function in his head. "... and a wife should always look up to her husband, don't you think?"

We were making the boosts at 1.5 gravity now. What with slippage, it cuts each up-boost and each down-boost to about four months, S-time, even though the jumps are longer, During boost I weigh 220 pounds and I've started wearing arch supports, but 50% extra weight is all right and is probably good for us, since it is too easy not to get enough exercise aboard ship.

The LRF has stopped using the drug stuff to help communications at peak, which would have pleased Dr. Devereaux since he disapproved of it so. Now your telepartner patches in with the help of hypnosis and suggestion alone, or you don't patch. Kathleen managed to cross the last peak with me that way, but I can see that we are going to lose communication teams all through the fleet, especially those who have not managed to set up tertiary telepartners. I don't knew where my own team would be without Kathleen. In the soup, I guess. As it is, the Ni ñ a and the Henry Hudson are each down to two teams and the other four ships still in contact with Earth are not much better off. We are probably in the best shape, although we don't get much fleet news since Miss Gamma fell out of step with her sisters—or lost them, as the case may be; the Santa Maria is listed as "missing" but the Marco Polo is simply carried as "out of contact" as she was approaching peak when last heard from and won't be out of it for several Greenwich years.

We are headed now for a little G-type star so dim from Earth that it doesn't rate a name, nor even a Greek-letter constellation designation, but just a catalog number. From Earth it lies in Phoenix, between Hydrus the Sea Serpent and Cetus the Whale. ("Hydrus," not "Hydra"—Hydra is six R.A. hours over and farther north.) Unc called it a "Whistle Stop" so that is what we dubbed it, because you can't reel off a Palomar Catalog number each time you speak of where you are going. No doubt it will get an impressive name if it turns out to have a planet half as good as Connie. Incidentally, Connie will he colonized in spite of the epidemic we may have picked up there; the first shiploads are on their way. Whatever the bug was that bit us (and it very possibly may have come from Earth), it is no worse than half a dozen other diseases men have had and have fought back at and licked. At least, that is the official view and the pioneer ships are going on the assumption that they will probably catch it and have to conquer it.

Personally, I figure that one way of dying is as dangerous as another; when you're dead, you're dead—even if you die from "nothing serious." And the Plague, bad as it was, didn't kill me.

"Whistle Stop" wasn't worth a stop. We're on our way to Beta Ceti, sixty-three light-years from Earth.

I wish Dusty were still hooked up to transmit pictures; I would like one of my great-grandniece Vicky. I know what she looks like—carroty red hair, freckles across her nose, green eyes, a big mouth and braces on her teeth. At present she is sporting a black eye as well, picked up at school when somebody called her a freak and she resented it—I would love to have seen that fight! Oh, I know what she looks like but I'd like a picture anyhow.

It is funny how our family has run to girls. No, when I add it up, counting all descendants of my sisters as well as my brother, it comes out about even. But Maude and Pat had two girls and no boys, and I went away and did not get married, so the Bartlett name has died out,

I certainly would like to have a picture of Vicky. I know she is homely, but I'll bet she is cute, too—the kind of tomboy who always has scabs on her knees because she won't play the ladylike games. She generally hangs around for a while after we are through transmitting and we talk. Probably she is just being polite, for she obviously thinks of me as being as old as her great-grandfather Bartlett even though her mother has told her that I am not. I suppose it depends on where you sit. I ought to be in my last year in college now, but she knows that I am Pat's twin.

If she wants to put a long white beard on me, that is all right with me, for the sake of her company. She was in a hurry this morning but nice about it. "Will you excuse me, please, Uncle Tom? I've got to go study for a quiz in algebra."

("Realio trulio?") I said.

"Realio trulio, cross my heart. I'd like to stay."

("Run along, Freckle Face. Say hello to the folks.")

" Bye! I'll call you a little early tomorrow."

She really is a nice child.