Orphans of the Sky Read online

  But what was a second astrogator, anyhow?

  The letters faded from Joe-Jim's board, a red dot appeared on the left-hand edge and remained. Joe-Jim did something with his right hand; his board reported: ACCELERATION—ZERO, then MAIN DRIVE. The last two words blinked several times, then were replaced with NO REPORT. These words faded out, and a bright green dot appeared near the right-hand edge.

  "Get ready," said Joe, looking toward Hugh; "the light is going out."

  "You're not going to turn out the light?" protested Hugh.

  "No—you are. Take a look by your left hand. See those little white lights?"

  Hugh did so, and found, shining up through the surface of the chair arm, eight bright little beads of light arranged in two squares, one above the other.

  "Each one controls the light of one quadrant," explained Joe. "Cover them with your hand to turn out the light. Go ahead—do it."

  Reluctantly, but fascinated, Hugh did as he was directed. He placed a palm over the tiny lights, and waited. The silvery sphere turned to dull lead, faded still more, leaving them in darkness complete save for the slight glow from the instrument panels. Hugh felt nervous but exhilarated. He withdrew his palm; the sphere remained dark, the eight little lights had turned blue.

  "Now,"said Joe, I'm going to show you the stars!"

  In the darkness, Joe-Jim's right hand slid over another pattern of eight lights.

  Creation.

  Faithfully reproduced, shining as steady and serene from the walls of the stellarium as did their originals from the black deeps of space, the mirrored stars looked down on him. Light after jeweled light, scattered in careless bountiful splendor across the simulacrum sky, the countless suns lay before him—before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe.

  "Oooooh!" It was an involuntary sound, caused by his indrawn breath. He clutched the chair arms hard enough to break fingernails, but he was not aware of it. Nor was he afraid at the moment; there was room in his being for but one emotion. Life within the Ship, alternately harsh and workaday, had placed no strain on his innate capacity to experience beauty; for the first time in his life he knew the intolerable ecstasy of beauty unalloyed. It shook him and hurt him, like the first trembling intensity of sex.

  It was some time before Hugh sufficiently recovered from the shock and the ensuing intense preoccupation to be able to notice Jim's sardonic laugh, Joe's dry chuckle. "Had enough?" inquired Joe. Without waiting for a reply, Joe-Jim turned the lights back on, using the duplicate controls mounted in the left arm of his chair.

  Hugh sighed. His chest ached and his heart pounded. He realized suddenly that he had been holding his breath the entire time that the lights had been turned out. "Well, smart boy," asked Jim, "are you convinced?"

  Hugh sighed again, not knowing why. With the lights back on, he felt safe and snug again, but was possessed of a deep sense of personal loss. He knew, subconsciously, that, having seen the stars, he would never be happy again. The dull ache in his breast, the vague inchoate yearning for his lost heritage of open sky and stars, was never to be silenced, even though he was yet too ignorant to be aware of it at the top of his mind. "What was it?" he asked in a hushed voice.

  "That's it," answered Joe. "That's the world. That's the universe. That's what I've been trying to tell you about."

  Hugh tried furiously to force his inexperienced mind to comprehend. "That's what you mean by Outside?" he asked. "All those beautiful little lights?"

  "Sure," said Joe, "only they aren't little. They're a long way off, you see—maybe thousands of miles."

  What?"

  "Sure, sure," Joe persisted. "There's lots of room out there. Space. It's big. Why, some of those stars may be as big as the Ship—maybe bigger."

  Hugh's face was a pitiful study in overstrained imagination. "Bigger than the Ship?" he repeated. "But— but—"

  Jim tossed his head impatiently and said to Joe, "Wha' d' I tell you? You're wasting our time on this lunk. He hasn't got the capacity—"

  "Easy, Jim," Joe answered mildly; "don't expect him to run before he can crawl. It took us a long time. I seem to remember that you were a little slow to believe your own eyes."

  "That's a lie," said Jim nastily. "You were the one that had to be convinced."

  "O.K., O.K.," Joe conceded, "let it ride. But it was a long time before we both had it all straight."

  Hoyland paid little attention to the exchange between the two brothers. It was a usual thing; his attention was centered on matters decidedly not usual. "Joe," he asked, "what became of the Ship while we were looking at the stars? Did we stare right through it?"

  "Not exactly," Joe told him. "You weren't looking directly at the stars at all, but at a kind of picture of them. It's like—Well, they do it with mirrors, sort of. I've got a book that tells about it."

  "But you can see 'em directly," volunteered Jim, his momentary pique forgotten. "There's a compartment forward of here—"

  "Oh, yes," put in Joe, "it slipped my mind. The Captain's veranda. 'S got one all of glass; you can look right out."

  "The Captain's veranda? But—"

  "Not this Captain. He's never been near the place. That's the name over the door of the compartment."

  "What's a Veranda'?"

  "Blessed if I know. It's just the name of the place."

  "Will you take me up there?"

  Joe appeared to be about to agree, but Jim cut in. "Some other time. I want to get back—I'm hungry."

  They passed back through the tube, woke up Bobo, and made the long trip back down.

  It was long before Hugh could persuade Joe-Jim to take him exploring again, but the time intervening was well spent. Joe-Jim turned him loose on the largest collection of books that Hugh had ever seen. Some of them were copies of books Hugh had seen before, but even these he read with new meanings. He read incessantly, his mind soaking up new ideas, stumbling over them, struggling, striving to grasp them. He begrudged sleep, he forgot to eat until his breath grew sour and compelling pain in his midriff forced him to pay attention to his body. Hunger satisfied, he would be back at it until his head ached and his eyes refused to focus.

  Joe-Jim's demands for service were few. Although Hugh was never off duty, Joe-Jim did not mind his reading as long as he was within earshot and ready to jump when called. Playing checkers with one of the pair when the other did not care to play was the service which used up the most time, and even this was not a total loss, for, if the player were Joe, he could almost always be diverted into a discussion of the Ship, its history, its machinery and equipment, the sort of people who had built it and first manned it—and their history, back on Earth, Earth the incredible, that strange place where people had lived on the outside instead of the inside.

  Hugh wondered why they did not fall off.

  He took the matter up with Joe and at last gained some notion of gravitation. He never really understood it emotionally—it was too wildly improbable— but as an intellectual concept he was able to accept it and use it, much later, in his first vague glimmerings of the science of ballistics and the art of astrogation and ship maneuvering. And it led in time to his wondering about weight in the Ship, a matter that had never bothered him before. The lower the level the greater the weight had been to his mind simply the order of nature, and nothing to wonder at. He was familiar with centrifugal force as it applied to slingshots. To apply it also to the whole Ship, to think of the Ship as spinning like a slingshot and thereby causing weight, was too much of a hurdle—he never really believed it.

  Joe-Jim took him back once more to the Control Room and showed him what little Joe-Jim knew about the manipulation of the controls and the reading of the astrogation instruments.

  The long-forgotten engineer-designers employed by the Jordan Foundation had been instructed to design a ship that would not—could not—wear out, even though the Trip were protracted beyond the expected sixty years.
They build it better than they knew. In planning the main drive engines and the auxiliary machinery, largely automatic, which would make the Ship habitable, and in designing the controls necessary to handle all machinery not entirely automatic, the very idea of moving parts had been rejected. The engines and auxiliary equipment worked on a level below mechanical motion, on a level of pure force, as electrical transformers do. Instead of push buttons, levers, cams, and shafts, the controls and the machinery they served were planned in terms of balance between static fields, bias of electronic flow, circuits broken or closed by a hand placed over a light.

  On this level of action, friction lost its meaning, wear and erosion took no toll. Had all hands been killed in the mutiny, the Ship would still have plunged on through space, still lighted, its air still fresh and moist, its engines ready and waiting. As it was, though elevators and conveyor belts fell into disrepair, disuse, and finally into the oblivion of forgotten function, the essential machinery of the Ship continued its automatic service to its ignorant human freight, or waited, quiet and ready, for someone bright enough to puzzle out its key.

  Genius had gone into the building of the Ship. Far too huge to be assembled on Earth, it had been put together piece by piece in its own orbit out beyond the Moon. There it had swung for fifteen silent years while the problems presented by the decision to make its machinery foolproof and enduring had been formulated and solved. A whole new field of submolar action had been conceived in the process, struggled with, and conquered.

  So— When Hugh placed an untutored, questing hand over the first of a row of lights marked ACCELERATION, POSITIVE, he got an immediate response, though not in terms of acceleration. A red light at the top of the chief pilot's board blinked rapidly and the annunciator panel glowed with a message: MAIN ENGINES—NOT MANNED.

  "What does that mean?" he asked Joe-Jim.

  "There's no telling," said Jim. "We've done the same thing in the main engine room," added Joe. "There, when you try it, it says 'Control Room Not Manned.'"

  Hugh thought a moment. "What would happen," he persisted, "if all the control stations had somebody at 'em at once, and then I did that?"

  "Can't say," said Joe. "Never been able to try it."

  Hugh said nothing. A resolve which had been growing, formless, in his mind was now crystallizing into decision. He was busy with it.

  He waited until he found Joe-Jim in a mellow mood, both of him, before broaching his idea. They were in the Captain's veranda at the time Hugh decided the moment was ripe. Joe-Jim rested gently in the Captain's easy chair, his belly full of food, and gazed out through the heavy glass of the view port at the serene stars. Hugh floated beside him. The spinning of the Ship caused the stars to appear to move in stately circles.

  Presently he said, "Joe-Jim—"

  "Eh? What's that, youngster?" It was Joe who had replied.

  "It's pretty swell, isn't it?"

  "What is?"

  "All that. The stars." Hugh indicated the view through the port with a sweep of his arm, then caught at the chair to stop his own backspin.

  "Yeah, it sure is. Makes you feel good." Surprisingly, it was Jim who offered this.

  Hugh knew the time was right. He waited a moment, then said, "Why don't we finish the job?"

  Two heads turned simultaneously, Joe leaning out a little to see past Jim. "What job?"

  "The Trip. Why don't we start up the main drive and go on with it? Somewhere out there," he said hurriedly to finish before he was interrupted, "there are planets like Earth—or so the First Crew thought. Let's go find them."

  Jim looked at him, then laughed. Joe shook his head.

  "Kid," he said, "you don't know what you are talking about. You're as balmy as Bobo. No," he went on, "that's all over and done with. Forget it."

  "Why is it over and done with, Joe?"

  "Well, because— It's too big a job. It takes a crew that understands what it's all about, trained to operate the Ship."

  "Does it take so many? You have shown me only about a dozen places, all told, for men actually to be at the controls. Couldn't a dozen men run the Ship— if they knew what you know," he added slyly.

  Jim chuckled. "He's got you, Joe. He's right."

  Joe brushed it aside. "You overrate our knowledge. Maybe we could operate the Ship, but we wouldn't get anywhere. We don't know where we are. The Ship has been drifting for I don't know how many generations. We don't know where we're headed, or how fast we're going."

  "But look," Hugh pleaded, "there are instruments. You showed them to me. Couldn't we learn how to use them? Couldn't you figure them out, Joe, if you really wanted to?"

  "Oh, I suppose so," Jim agreed.

  "Don't boast, Jim," said Joe.

  "I'm not boasting," snapped Jim. "If a thing'll work, I can figure it out."

  "Humph!" said Joe.

  The matter rested in delicate balance. Hugh had got them disagreeing among themselves—which was what he wanted—with the less tractable of the pair on his side. Now, to consolidate his gain—

  "I had an idea," he said quickly, "to get you men to work with, Jim, if you were able to train them."

  "What's your idea?" demanded Jim suspiciously.

  "Well, you remember what I told you about a bunch of the younger scientists—"

  "Those fools!"

  "Yes, yes, sure—but they don't know what you know. In their way they were trying to be reasonable. Now, if I could go back down and tell them what you've taught me, I could get you enough men to work with."

  Joe cut in. "Take a good look at us, Hugh. What do you see?"

  "Why—why—I see you—Joe-Jim."

  "You see a mutie," corrected Joe, his voice edged with sarcasm. "We're a mutie. Get that? Your scientists won't work with us."

  "No, no," protested Hugh, "that's not true. I'm not talking about peasants. Peasants wouldn't understand, but these are scientists, and the smartest of the lot. They'll understand. All you need to do is to arrange safe conduct for them through mutie country. You can do that, can't you?" he added, instinctively shifting the point of the argument to firmer ground.

  "Why, sure," said Jim.

  "Forget it," said Joe.

  "Well, O.K.," Hugh agreed, sensing that Joe really

  was annoyed at his persistence, "but it would be fun—" He withdrew some distance from the brothers.

  He could hear Joe-Jim continuing the discussion with himself in low tones. He pretended to ignore it. Joe-Jim had this essential defect in his joint nature: being a committee, rather than a single individual, he was hardly fitted to be a man of action, since all decisions were necessarily the result of discussion and compromise.

  Several moments later Hugh heard Joe's voice raised. "All right, all right—have it your own way!" He then called out, "Hugh! Come here!"

  Hugh kicked himself away from an adjacent bulk-head and shot over to the immediate vicinity of Joe-Jim, arresting his flight with both hands against the framework of the Captain s chair.

  "We've decided," said Joe without preliminaries, "to let you go back down to the high-weight and try to peddle your goods. But you're a fool," he added sourly.

  Bobo escorted Hugh down through the dangers of the levels frequented by muties and left him in the uninhabited zone above high-weight. "Thanks, Bobo," Hugh said in parting. "Good eating." The dwarf grinned, ducked his head, and sped away, swarming up the ladder they had just descended.

  Hugh turned and started down, touching his knife as he did so. It was good to feel it against him again. Not that it was his original knife. That had been Bobo's prize when he was captured, and Bobo had been unable to return it, having inadvertently left it sticking in a big one that got away. But the replacement Joe-Jim had given him was well balanced and quite satisfactory.

  Bobo had conducted him, at Hugh's request and by Joe-Jim's order, down to the area directly over the auxiliary Converter used by the scientists. He wanted to find Bill Ertz, Assistant Chief Engineer and leader of the bloc of
younger scientists, and he did not want to have to answer too many questions before he found him.

  Hugh dropped quickly down the remaining levels and found himself in a main passageway which he recognized. Good! A turn to the left, a couple of hundred yards' walk, and he found himself at the door of the compartment which housed the Converter. A guard lounged in front of it. Hugh started to push on past, was stopped. "Where do you think you're going?"

  "I want to find Bill Ertz."

  "You mean the Chief Engineer? Well, he's not here.

  "Chief? What's happened to the old one?" Hoyland regretted the remark at once—but it was already out.

  "Huh? The old Chief? Why, he's made the Trip long since." The guard looked at him suspiciously. "What's wrong with you?"

  "Nothing," denied Hugh. "Just a slip."

  "Funny sort of a slip. Well, you'll find Chief Ertz around his office probably."

  "Thanks. Good eating."

  "Good eating."

  Hugh was admitted to see Ertz after a short wait. Ertz looked up from his desk as Hugh came in. "Well," he said, "so you're back, and not dead after all. This is a surprise. We had written you off, you know, as making the Trip."

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Well, sit down and tell me about it—I've a little time to spare at the moment. Do you know, though, I wouldn't have recognized you. You've changed a lot—all that gray hair. I imagine you had some pretty tough times."

  Gray hair? Was his hair gray? And Ertz had changed a lot, too, Hugh now noticed. He was paunchy and the lines in his face had set. Good Jordan! How long had he been gone?

  Ertz drummed on his desk top, and pursed his lips. "It makes a problem—your coming back like this. I'm afraid I can't just assign you to your old job; Mort Tyler has that. But we'll find a place for you, suitable to your rank."