Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The conference was held in the semi-circular mess room, at a table which was plentifully scattered with glasses, cups and ashtrays.

Surgenor had noticed two main types of reaction to Aesop’s announcement—some crew members had become intensely animated, alert-eyed and talkative; others had withdrawn to varying degrees, tending to remain silent and to show a broody interest in their own fingernails or in the design of personal artifacts such as cigarette lighters. Christine Holmes was in the latter group, looking ill and tragic. Billy Narvik, having accepted tranquillization, was smiling bemusedly as he stroked his beard. The two other new men—pale, reticent youngsters called John Rizno and Wilbur Desanko—stared about them in mute accusation as though trying to find a human culprit for their misfortune.

Surgenor, who had been tacitly assigned the role of chairman, tapped the long table with his empty whisky glass. “It occurs to me,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “that we ought to make sure we’re all on the same wavelength. Is there anybody here who thinks Aesop could be wrong? Is there anybody who thinks there is a way of getting back home?”

Several men made restless movements.

“Aesop isn’t infallible,” Burt Schilling said, glancing at those nearest him. “I mean, the fact that we’re here proves it.”

Surgenor nodded. “Valid point.”

“I’d like to put it a little more strongly than that,” Theo Mossbake added. “It seems to me that our so-called Captain Aesop can be downright dumb, and I just don’t think we have to accept everything he says like it’s the word of God or something.” His voice grew louder. “All right, so one of his new memory units was faulty and he made a jump into unknown space, outside our galaxy. Why in hell didn’t he stop there? Why didn’t he just look around, spot our own galaxy, and jump back into it?”

“That’s what he tried to do,” Al Gillespie said irritably. “Aesop has already explained that the beta-space gravitation flux was too high. It was like a strong current carrying us out to sea. From what he said, we could have travelled a lot farther than…whatever it was…thirty million light-years.”

“At least we can still see the Local Group,” Surgenor said without thinking, and was immediately sorry he had spoken.

“That’s great. That’s a big consolation to all of us,” Schilling said. “When we start getting hungry we can take turns around the telescope admiring the Local Group. Waving to our friends.”

“This is a conference,” Surgenor told him. “Save the sarcasm and self-pity for your own room. Okay?”

“No, it isn’t okay.” Schilling stared resentfully at Surgenor, a vein pulsing in his throat. “Who do you think you are, anyway?” He began to rise to his feet, and Surgenor felt a pang of shameful joy at the prospect of discharging his own tensions so simply and so naturally, merely by clubbing another human being with his fist.

Mossbake caught Schilling’s upper arm and pulled him down into his seat. “My training was mostly in the hotel business…I was doing the minimum two-year stint with the CS to raise some capital…so I don’t know much about beta-space physics,” Mossbank said. “But I understand the analogy that Al used, the one about a current taking us out to sea. What I’d like to know is—can’t we tack against the current? Is there no way of zigzagging back the way we came?”

Gillespie leaned forward. “In a ship specially designed and equipped for that sort of thing it might be possible. But Aesop reckons there would be upwards of two hundred beta-space jumps involved, providing we didn’t hit a region where conditions were worse—and our fuel capsules are good for thirty at the outside. There’s the time factor, as well. Without any beta-space charts to help him, Aesop would have to do a major four-pi survey before each jump, and a job like that can take up to four days. Multiply it out and you get a journey time of over two years—and we’ve got food for a month.”

“I see,” Mossbake said quietly. “It’s funny I didn’t think of food—with my catering experience, too. Does that mean we just…starve?”

The twelve seated at the table changed their attitude slightly, as though they had been joined by an invisible thirteenth presence, and Surgenor decided the time had come, once again, for him to go into his act. In two decades of survey work he had almost perfected the Surgenor image of the big rock-steady man, experienced, imperturbable, slow to anger, possessing reserves of every kind of strength. In a way, he sometimes stood in for the ship itself, presenting—as had already happened within the hour—a human target for the frustration which other crewmen would like to have vented on Aesop. It was a part he had once enjoyed playing, in the days when it had still been possible to deceive himself, but of late it had grown onerous and he had a yearning to retire from the stage…

“Starve?” Surgenor looked at Mossbake in a kind of humorous surprise. “You can starve if that’s what you really want to do, but there’s a galaxy out there with a lot of planets in it, and a lot of untouched food on those planets—and I’m going to eat my way through one of them. Or a good part of it, anyway.”

“You’re not worried about not getting back home?”

“No. I would prefer to go back—it would be crazy to pretend anything else—but if I can’t make it back I’m going to go on living somewhere else. It’s a hell of a sight better than being…’ Surgenor broke off as Billy Narvik, who was at the opposite end of the table, gave a sudden bark of laughter.

“I’m sorry,” Narvik said, still grinning with drugged benevolence, as he saw that he had become the focus of attention. “I apologize for interrupting the proceedings, but you guys are so funny.”

“In what way?” Mike Targett said, speaking for the first time.

“This conference…You’re sitting around—all so serious—counting up fuel capsules and cans of beans, and nobody has even mentioned the one really important commodity, the only one that matters a damn.”

“What is it?”

“Her!” Narvik pointed at Christine Holmes, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “The only female we’ve got.”

Surgenor tapped the table with his glass. “I don’t think you’re in any condition to take part in this meeting, Billy—and we’re talking about survival.”

“What do you think I’m talking about, for God’s sake?” Narvik looked about him with calm eyes. “Survival of the species! We have one female, and—I’m sorry if this offends any sensibilities—but it seems to me that we have to decide how to make the best use of her.”

Sig Carlen got to his feet and moved to a position behind Narvik’s chair, shoulder muscles spread. “Are we agreed that friend Narvik should lie down in his room for a while?”

“That won’t change anything,” Narvik said pleasantly. “This is a whole new ball game, folks, and the sooner we lay down the rules the better it’ll be for everybody.”

Surgenor nodded to Carlen, who slipped his hands under Narvik’s arms and began lifting him out of his chair. Narvik resisted only passively, by slumping like a drunk.

“Leave him alone,” Schilling cut in. “He’s talking sense, isn’t he? If we have to make a new start in this galaxy we’ll have to face up to certain facts and get used to new ways of thinking, and I for one…’

“You for one,” Carlen interrupted, “might have to get used to new ways of eating—without your teeth, for example.”

Schilling responded by baring his teeth and pinching one between forefinger and thumb. “I’ve got good teeth, Sig. I don’t think you could even loosen them.”

“I’ll be helping him,” Victor Voysey said, his freckled face sombre. “And I use an axle wrench.”

“You can take your…’

“That’s enough!” Surgenor made no attempt to hide his anger. “Narvik was right when he said this is a whole new ball game, and here is one of the ground rules—Chris Holmes is to be a fully private, autonomous individual. We can’t exist any other way.”

“We won’t exist at all, before long, unless we’re realistic about breeding,” Schilling said doggedly.

Surgenor stared at him in open dislike. “Could it be that you consider yourself prime breeding stock?”

“Better’n you, big Dave. At least I’m still…’

“Gentlemen!” Christine Holmes got to her feet amid an abrupt silence and looked around the table, her strong-jawed face white with strain, then gave a shaky laugh. “Did I say gentlemen? I’m sorry—I’ll start again. Bastards. If you bastards don’t mind I’d like to show you something which has a bearing on the discussion—and you’d better look at it carefully, because this is the only chance you’re going to get.”

She gripped her clothing with both hands, pulling the uniform blouse upwards and the top of her slacks downwards to expose a flat abdomen which was puckered with surgical scars. Surgenor looked at her dark-shadowed eyes and felt that in the past twenty years he had been nowhere, had learned very little.

“There’s nothing in there shipmates. No works, no bits and pieces—they’ve all been taken away,” Christine said. “Can everybody see?”

“There’s no need for this,” Schilling muttered, turning his gaze away.

“Ah, but there is! You’re the one who was talking about facing up to the facts—and this is a fact, sonny.” Christine forced her voice into normal conversational tones, and even managed to smile as she rearranged her clothing and sat down.

She interlaced her fingers and glanced around the table. “I hope I haven’t shocked any of free-thinking pioneers, but I thought it best to prove that you can class me as one of the boys. It makes things simpler, doesn’t it?”

“Very much simpler,” Surgenor said at once, anxious to drive the episode into the past. “Perhaps now we can get on with the business of agreeing the instructions we’re going to give Aesop.”

“I didn’t even know we could instruct Aesop,” Carlen said, releasing the now-quiescent Narvik and returning to his seat.

“Our present situation is way outside his terms of reference, so this is where we need the flexible human response the union execs keep talking about.”

“We wouldn’t need it if we weren’t here in the first place.”

“I’m not getting involved in that one.” Surgenor kept his eyes away from Christine as he spoke. “Now, we have to agree that we stay in this galaxy—which seems as good as any of the billions of others out there. We have to instruct Aesop to check out the region for suitable, planet-bearing suns. Then we have to decide on a food rationing system to extend our supplies.” Jotting notes on a memo pad, Surgenor droned his way through a short list of proposals, trying to make them sound commonplace, hoping that what they had done to Christine would be equally reduced and made unmemorable.

The sub-committee appointed to select a destination sun consisted of Surgenor, Al Gillespie and Mike Targett. Surgenor was mildly surprised at how easy it had been to get the sort of group he wanted, and guessed that the incipient faction headed by Burt Schilling were glad to get away from the table until the ripples of the Christine Holmes incident would have had time to fade.

Equipping themselves with notepads and pencils, the trio moved into the observation room and sat down amid a plenum of stars. The distribution of suns around the Sarafand was so uniform, and their brightness so intense, that the three men appeared to be perched on a dangerous gallery spanning an abyss.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” Gillespie commented. “There must be a thousand or more suns within a radius of ten light-years. You could almost find planetary systems with a pair of field glasses.”

“Slight exaggeration,” Targett said, “but I see what you mean. It’s about time we had some luck.”

“Luck?” Surgenor cleared his throat. “Hear these words, Aesop. Did you have any control over our point of emergence in this galaxy?”

“Yes, David. This globular cluster was a conspicuous object, even in beta-space. I had enough residual control to ensure that the ship emerged near its centre.” Aesop’s pervasive voice seemed to emanate from space itself.

“You knew we’d be looking for a planet to settle on?”

“That was the logical assumption.”

“I see.” Surgenor glanced significantly at his two companions. “Aesop, we now require from you a complete survey of the cluster with the object of locating the suns most likely to have Earth-type planets. Results in print-out form. Four copies. How long will that take?”

“Approximately five hours.”

“That is satisfactory.” It suddenly came to Surgenor that he was exhausted, that there was nothing he could usefully do in the next five hours, and that he could no longer put off the first moment when he would find himself alone in his room, isolated, thirty million light-years from Earth. The alternative was to have another drink, but he had no wish to start using alcohol as a crutch—especially as the supply would run out in a few weeks.

“I suppose we’d better get some rest,” he said to Gillespie and Targett, glancing at his watch. “We can meet here at…’

“I have carried out a preliminary spectroscopic survey of the cluster,” Aesop cut in unexpectedly. “The emission lines prove that the stellar matter has the same composition as is found in the home galaxy, but in every case the lines are shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum.”

Without knowing why, Surgenor felt a spasm of alarm. “That doesn’t reduce the possibility of finding suitable planets, does it?”

“No.” Aesop’s reply was comforting, but made his intervention more puzzling.

Surgenor frowned at Targett, who was known to have some formal grounding in astronomy. “What made Aesop tell us that?”

“Blue shift?” Targett looked as puzzled as Surgenor felt. “I guess it means that all the stars in this cluster are moving towards us. Not towards us—towards a common centre which we happen to be near.”

“So what?”

Targett raised his shoulders, looking blank. “It’s unusual, that’s all. You usually find that everything is expanding.”

“Aesop, we note what you say about the shifting of spectral lines,” Surgenor said. “It means that this cluster is imploding, right?”

“That is correct. The velocity of the stars near the central region is upwards of one hundred and fifty kilometres a second, and it gets higher towards the edge of the cluster. I informed you about the phenomenon because it has no known parallel in the Milky Way system.”

Surgenor developed an uneasy feeling that something important was being left unsaid, and yet he knew that—regardless of how many subtleties had been built into Aesop’s ‘personality’—his designers had never intended him to exhibit coyness.

“All right,” he said, “so we’re in an imploding cluster, and that’s a new kind of phenomenon in our experience—but if our previous experience is limited to the Milky Way system aren’t we bound to get a few surprises in other parts of the universe?”

“The viewpoint you express is philosophically valid,” Aesop replied. “However, the truly surprising thing about this star cluster is not its configuration in space, but in time.”

“Aesop, I don’t understand that. Make it simpler.”

The stars in the cluster have a mean separation of one-point-two light-years. They are moving towards the centre at a rate of about one hundred and fifty kilometres a second. We are already at or near the centre of the cluster, but we can detect no stellar collisions or central mass. The implication is that we have reached our present position less than one hundred and fifty Earth years before the first collision—but astronomical timescales are such that this implication should be rejected.”

“You mean it’s impossible?”

“It is not impossible,” Aesop replied blandly. “But on an astronomical timescale the period of one hundred and fifty years is vanishingly small. I have insufficient data about local conditions to be able to calculate the probabilities, but it is extremely unlikely that we should have arrived here at this stage in the cluster’s evolution. Either the cluster should be very much larger and more diffuse, or there should be a central mass.”

Surgenor stared at the crowded, fiercely glowing sky. “Then…what’s your explanation?”

“I have no explanation, David. I am merely advising you of the facts.”

“In that case we have to assume that we arrived here at an interesting time,” Surgenor said. “The improbable is bound to happen every now and…’

“Aesop,” Targett said urgently, “we’re not on the edge of a black hole, are we?”

“No. A black hole is easily detectable, both in normal-space and in beta-space, and I would have made certain to avoid it. In fact, I am unable to detect even a moderate gravity generator in the region—which makes the condensation of the cluster harder to explain.”

“Mmm You said the stars nearer the outside of the cluster are moving faster, Aesop. Is their speed proportionate to the distance from the centre?”

“A random sample indicates that is the case.”

“That’s strange,” Targett said thoughtfully. “It’s almost as if…’ His voice faded away as he examined the surrounding star fields with renewed interest.

“What were you going to say?” Gillespie prompted.

“Nothing. I get crazy ideas sometimes.”

“We’re not getting anywhere with this discussion.” Surgenor looked at his watch, which had been adjusted to ship time. “I suggest we break it up for a while and meet here again at seven. We might have our heads cleared by that time, and there’ll be Aesop’s report to work on.”

The others nodded their assent and they moved back into the brightly lit normality of the mess room, away from the psychological pressures of the alien sky. Surgenor went up the main companionway to the next deck and entered the bow-shaped corridor of the sleeping quarters. For the sake of administrative convenience, the crew were assigned rooms in accordance with the numbers of their survey modules, and, as the occupant of the left-hand seat in Module Five, Surgenor lived in the ninth.

He was passing the first room, where for the past five years he had been accustomed to stop for jawing sessions with Marc Lamereux, when it occurred to him that he owed Christine Holmes an apology. The door was closed, but its do-not-disturb bezel was dark, making it impossible to tell if she was inside at that moment. He hesitated, then tapped the plastic panel and heard an indistinct reply which sounded like an invitation to enter. Surgenor turned the handle, opened the door and was greeted by a flurry of movement and startled swearing. Christine, naked to the waist, was sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms crossed over her breasts.

“Sorry!” Surgenor closed the door and waited in the corridor, beginning to wish he had gone straight to his room.

“What’s the idea?” Christine had pulled on her uniform blouse when she opened the door. “What do you want?”

Surgenor tried to smile. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“What do you want?” she repeated impatiently, ignoring his suggestion.

“Well…I was going to apologize.”

“What for?”

“For what happened at the meeting. And I guess I haven’t helped much, either.”

“I don’t need any help. Turkeys like Narvik and Schilling don’t bother me.”

“I dare say they don’t, but that’s not the point.”

“Isn’t it?” She sighed and he caught the tang of tobacco smoke on her breath. “All right—you’ve apologized, and that makes everybody feel better. Now, do you mind if I get some rest?” She closed the door and there came the sound of the lock being operated more firmly than was necessary. The do-not-disturb bezel began to glow.

Surgenor thoughtfully stroked his jaw as he continued along the corridor to his own room. When Christine Holmes was angry, as she undoubtedly still was, she could be as tough and abrasive as any man, but in the moment of being taken unawares she had reacted in a classically feminine manner. The ancient defensive gesture, the screening of the breasts from strange eyes, seemed to indicate sexuality, to show that in spite of everything she regarded herself as essentially female. Surgenor tried to imagine the Christine he knew—big-boned, sallow-complexioned, hard-handed, smoking, ready to take on a male world on its own terms—as the person she might once have been before life had started wielding the big stick, but he was unable to come up with a different picture. Recognizing the futility of the exercise, he put her out of his mind as he entered his own room. Kicking off his boots, he lay down on the bed and allowed himself to think about being stranded thirty million light-years from home. Was it any worse than being stranded one light-year from home? Rationally—no; but there was more to life than rationality. He did not exist as a pure intellect, and the coldness of the intergalactic gulf had seeped into his bones, into his guts, and he could feel it laying waste to his spirit, and he was unable to see how he would ever again be able to laugh, or sleep easily, or renew himself at the fountains of human friendship.