Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Surgenor was not a superstitious man, nor did he believe in luck—good or bad—but his years in the Cartographical Service had convinced him of the reality of what he called jackpot trips. These were missions on which the law of averages caught up with the Sarafand and its crew members. On a jackpot trip, blind chance—like a worker who has gone to sleep on the job and is belatedly trying to make up a quota—would cram all the incidents and mishaps which had been notably absent from a dozen previous sorties.

As defined by Surgenor, a jackpot trip could not be predicted in advance, but during the preparations for Survey 837/LM/4002a his instincts were curiously aroused.

The first trigger stimulus was the discovery that part of Aesop’s memory, in a section of the astrogation data bank, had unaccountably decayed and needed to be replaced. A team of specialists from a newly registered contractor, Starfinders Incorporated, carried out the necessary substitutions and tests in only two days. The Service’s own maintenance organization would have taken three times as long to perform an operation of similar scope, and Surgenor, who distrusted commercially motivated celerity in matters which concerned his own wellbeing, made his views known throughout the sector transit station.

“All it proves is that our maintenance people spend a lot of time playing cards,” Marc Lamereux assured him. “It’s the same with any big Government outfit—contractors always work faster because they have to be more efficient to show a profit.”

“I still don’t like it.” Surgenor traced a design on the foggy prism of his lager glass and stared bleakly along the swimming pool where several men were playing ball. He had been living at the transit hotel on Delos for ten days and, as usual, was becoming restless.

“There was nothing to the job anyway,” Lamereux said with a peaceful expression on his dark countenance. “Pull out a few equipment trays and shove in replacements. Two hours should be enough, let alone two days.”

“Listen to the intrepid astronaut,” Surgenor gibed, taking refuge in childishness. “I seem to remember that you’re the character who once signed a complaint about the texture of some beefburgers.”

“It was a knitted steak—and I could easily have choked to death that time.” Lamereux scowled, but only momentarily. “Anyway, I’ve made up my mind to stop fretting about crew safety.”

“You’ve got religion.”

“No—my transfer.” Lamereux produced a printed green slip from his pocket. “I’ve hooked that public relations job I’ve been trying for back on Earth. Shipping home tomorrow.”

“Congratulations.” Surgenor suddenly realized that ever since Lamereux had joined him at the pool ten minutes earlier he had been trying to engineer a suitably dramatic opening for his announcement. “Hey, Marc! That’s great! I hate to see you go after all our time together, but I know you’re ready for a change.”

“Thanks, Dave.” Lamereux sipped his own lager. “Five years, it’s been. Five years on the edge of the Bubble. It’s been a long time—but that’s what helped me get the job.”

Five years is a long time in this job, Surgenor thought. And I’ve been riding on the edge of the Bubble for almost twenty years. The continued expansion of the spherical volume of space which men had explored and charted was placing an ever-increasing strain on the Cartographical Service’s resources. That was why the survey missions were getting longer, and why men like him—who lacked the sense to retire—were being allowed to grow old in harness. It was also why the big ships were being kept in service long past their designed lifetimes. The trouble was that plug-in components were available for the ships, but not for their crews, and that he—Dave Surgenor—was bound to be wearing out and becoming obsolete every bit as fast as Captain Aesop.

“…some realism into the recruiting campaigns,” Lamereux was saying. “It won’t matter about pulling in less bodies if we can pare down the drop-out rate.”

“That’s right—you make sure you tell ’em what’s what when you get back there.” Surgenor decided to try elevating his spirits. “I take it, young Marc, that you’ll be throwing a party tonight.”

Lamereux nodded. “It’s all arranged. Old Beresford says we can have the roof garden bar all to ourselves.”

“He must be in a good mood, for once.” Surgenor frowned, remembering the sector administrator’s lack of co-operation on similar occasions in the past. “Has he finally won a prize for his crochet work?”

Lamereux looked maliciously amused. “He thinks it’ll be a good opportunity for you and the others to meet Christine.”

“Christine?”

“Christine Holmes. My replacement in Module One.”

“A woman?”

“With a name like Christine, that’s a fairly safe bet. Anyway, what of it? We’ve had women crew members before this.”

“I know, but…’ Surgenor left the sentence unfinished, not wanting to give extra substance to his feelings by putting them into words. It was rare to find a woman among the Cartographical Service field crews. This was partly because of the physical demands—every crew member had, for example, to be able to change a survey module’s wheels under any conditions—but Surgenor suspected the principal reason for their scarcity was that they saw no point in the work. He knew that a great majority of the planet maps he helped to construct would never be put to any practical use; but at the same time he understood that the maps had to be made, that the information had to be gathered and banked—even though he found it difficult to say exactly why. Most women, Surgenor believed, had little patience with this vague allegiance to the scientific ethos, and when working with them found himself tending towards a disastrous uncertainty about his whole way of life.

On this morning, however, his main concern was with the way in which random factors affecting Survey 837/LM/4002a had begun to combine. There had been no trouble with Aesop’s memory of how to steer the ship through the gravitation currents of beta-space; the too-quick, too-effortless correction of the fault; the unexpected departure of Marc Lamereux; and now the discovery that Marc’s place would be taken by a woman.

Surgenor was doing his best to be clear-headed and rational, but no amount of effort could purge his mind of the notion that he was about to begin the jackpot trip to end all jackpot trips.

The farewell party for Marc Lamereux started early and finished late, but in spite of consuming a large amount of alcohol Surgenor failed to get properly into the swing of it. He had made the tactical blunder of allowing himself to get high during the lunchtime drinks session by the pool, then had slept in the afternoon, with the result that the rest of the day was pretty much of a let-down as far as intoxication was concerned.

“It’s like post-coital triste, except that it goes on and on,” he complained to Al Gillespie as they sat together at the bar. “It must be a lesser-known law of nature—you can only get high once a day.”

Gillespie shook his head in disagreement. “That’s not a lesser-known law, Dave—it’s one of the basic rules of boozing. When you start early in the day you’ve got to keep going.”

“Too late now.” Surgenor swallowed some neat whisky, which tasted warm and flat, and glanced about the discreetly lit glass-walled room in which the bar was situated. Beyond the exotic foliage of the roof garden the lights of the city curved to the horizon around a bay in which a hundred pleasure craft trailed luminous chevrons of disturbed water. Even the waves, exciting noctilucent marine creatures with their passage, seemed to be made of cool green fire, creating the impression that the sea had come to life while the land slept in darkness. And far above the canopies of artificial radiance a few first-magnitude stars shone patiently, waiting.

Surgenor, shut off from the boisterous merriment of his comrades, felt an unmanning pang of loneliness. Delos was a beautiful and hospitable world, but it was not his home; the men he called his friends, with whom he spent all his waking moments, were not really his friends. It was true that they treated him with amiable toleration and respect, but no other attitude was viable in the close confines of the ship, and were he to retire his replacement would be given exactly the same consideration.

Wilful strangers, he thought, recalling an old fragment of verse which for decades had served him as a personal creed. As used by the poet, the phrase had described men who chose never to remain long enough in any one place to become familiar with it, but it was being borne home to Surgenor that the survey crews—incomplete, flawed humans all—treated personal relationships in the same way. He, himself, was a prime example. He had chosen to live as a wilful stranger in a ship of strangers, and although he had known Marc Lamereux for five years neither man was any more than superficially perturbed at the thought of parting. And what greater indictment of his life-style could there be?

Looking back over his years with the Sarafand, Surgenor could recall a succession of men who had joined the ship, stayed around for greater or lesser periods of time, and then had gone. Some of the faces in that dwindling temporal perspective were blurred; others stood out clearly for no particular reason. Clifford Pollen, whose sketchily researched book had finally seen print, was now a successful journalist with a colonial news agency. Young Bernie Hilliard had managed to buy himself out before his two-year stint had ended and had gone into junior school teaching on Earth. There had been dozens of others, all individual and yet with one thing in common—Surgenor had been mildly contemptuous of their lack of staying power. Now it appeared that what he had seen as failings on their parts could have been virtues. Did they represent valuable lessons about life which he had stubbornly failed to absorb?

An explosion of laughter followed by an outbreak of horseplay in another part of the room disturbed Surgenor’s thoughts without altering his mood. He traded his stale drink for a fresh one and moved away from the bar to a quieter corner. The party had swollen to about fifty, the crew of the Sarafand having been joined by men from other ships and a sprinkling of transit station personnel. A number of girls were present, each of them enjoying the attentions of at least three young men, and it dawned on Surgenor that it would be good, so very good, to be able to talk to a woman on this night of sad revelation.

Unfortunately, attractive though the idea was, there was little he could do about putting it into practice. He was not going to jostle with young lusties in the hope of getting near a girl, who in any case was likely to see him as a father figure, nor was he going to leave the party to prowl in the city. It appeared there was nothing for it but to defy Gillespie’s so-called basic law of boozing and try to get into the same alcoholic orbit as some of his colleagues. He swallowed a large portion of his drink and was moving closer to the group at the piano when a door opened and the stooped figure of Harold Beresford, the sector administrator, came into the bar. Accompanying him was a tall, slim woman with cropped dark hair and wearing a one-piece suit.

Surgenor stared jealously at the couple, wondering how the fussy and cantankerous executive, famous among the survey crews for his interest in needlework, had managed to show more foresight than himself by bringing a female companion to the party. The injustice he imagined in the situation was deepening Surgenor’s gloom when he noticed a star cluster brooch on the woman’s collar, and it came to him that in all probability she was Lamereux’s replacement. Wondering if fate had decided to make special provision for him, Surgenor went straight to Beresford and shook his hand.

“David Surgenor, isn’t it?” Beresford said, peering up into Surgenor’s face. “Good! You’re just the man to show Christine around. Meet David Surgenor, Christine.”

“Call me Chris,” the woman said, grinning easily. Her handshake was firmer than Beresford’s had been and Surgenor was aware of callouses at the base of her fingers.

“I was hoping to be able to stay for an hour myself, give our friend Lamereux a good send-off and all that, but I find I have to finish a report tonight.” Beresford smiled a nervous apology, excused himself and hurried out.

“My God, did you ever see such an old woman?” Christine said, nodding in the direction of the door. She was older than Surgenor had first thought, in her mid or late thirties, and was lean rather than slim, as though her body had been honed down by years of hard work.

“You’ll soon get used to him,” Surgenor said, his romantic fantasies fading.

“I won’t have to.” She gave Surgenor an appraising glance from deep-set, dark-shadowed eyes. “I think he had reasons of his own for bringing me here tonight, but he hasn’t got them any more.”

“You managed to turn him off?”

Christine nodded. “I managed to scare the shit out of him.”

“That would do it,” Surgenor said. “That would turn him off, all right.”

“You’re damn right.” Christine craned her neck to look at the bar. “What’s a girl got to do to get a drink around here?”

Surgenor gave an admiring chuckle. “Just name it. What would you like?”

“Straight Bourbon, and make it a tall one—it looks like I’m way behind everybody else.” “Okay.” Surgenor fetched a drink to the required specification. By the time he had returned with it Christine had already joined the group at the piano and was harmonizing as though she had been with the Sarafand crew for years instead of minutes. She nodded a curt thanks to him as she took the glass, then turned back to the singers. Surgenor went back to his original seat and got to work on his own drink, telling himself he was glad there was no chance of a jackpot trip being further complicated by undue femininity on the part of the new crew member.