knowledge of psychology, she was only seventeen years old, and no more a psychologist than Peake, with all his knowledge of surgery, was a surgeon. At seventeen they had the rudimentary knowledge of their professions, but they didn’t have the experience or knowledge which, alone, could qualify them for their chosen professions.
And there’s no way to yell for help when we find we can’t handle It.’ God, the Academy is ruthless! They know that only young people can survive long enough to do their work at interstellar distances, so they throw us out to sink or swim.’ Is that why so many crews go out and are never heard of again?
Ching still looked angry. She said, “Obviously I’m not going to give any command to take the ship anywhere over your dead body, Moira. What I need to know is whether your objection means, ‘I am unalterably opposed to going in the direction other ships have gone,’ or whether it means, ‘I am opposed to majority rule for philosophical reasons but in this particular case I am willing to work with the majority.’ I would like to say that, speaking from that philosophical position you were talking about, I don’t find majority rule very satisfactory either. Which is why I felt one person ought to have command authority to make last-ditch decisions if a consensus can’t be found.”
Moira’s flush slowly subsided. She said, “In that case, Ching, I withdraw my objections. I admit I’d like to take off in a direction humanity has never gone before. On the other hand, I don’t think they gave us this ship to satisfy our intellectual curiosity about the universe, either. I’ll agree with the others; we go in the direction of known colonies.”
Ching said, “In that case I’ll get information about navigation co-ordinates for the known colonies, and we’ll head for the most recent of them… right, Peake?”
Fontana felt they were all relieved to have avoided a real confrontation. This meant, at the constant rate of acceleration, they would not have to make any more major policy decisions for more than a year, perhaps four or five years just under the speed of light.
And if we can’t figure out a way to make them by then, we’ll deserve everything that happens to us.
Teague grinned shyly. He said, “I don’t have the exact co-ordinates in my head, but it means, I know, that we’ll be heading out past Saturn’s place in orbit. And we’ll get a good close look at it — which I always wanted. Granted the telemetered shots are pretty spectacular; but I always wanted to see it from within a million miles or so.”
Ching said absently, her fingers working on the computer console, “If we head for Colony Five, that will bring us out within two hundred thousand miles of Saturn’s rings. We could make it a little closer, but that would mean altering course to avoid coming within orbital distance of one of the moons—”
“Japetus,” Ravi said absently, looking over Ching’s shoulder.
Teague demanded, “How the hell do you do that, Ravi?”
His dark face flushed. “I’m not sure,” he said, “I never did know how I do it. It just adds up in my head.”
Ching said formally, “The co-ordinates are on the console. You can work out a course, Peake, and then, I suppose, it’s Moira’s business to cut the drives in—”
Peake looked around, hesitantly. “So that’s all there is to it? We simply — go? Just like that? Shouldn’t we — let them know, or something? As a courtesy?”
“Courtesy from whom to whom?” Moira asked. “Face it; they don’t expect to hear from us again until we bring them a habitable planet. They’ve kicked the baby birds right out of the nest.”
It’s all gone, Peake thought. All the life any of us have ever had, until this moment. And Jimson. He touched the button which cleared the huge window, letting the stars blaze into the control cabin.
“Don’t,” Moira said, turning her eyes away, “it makes me dizzy. I think we have to — to get used to it. In stages.”
“We’d better get used to it,” Peake said, savagely, “because it’s all there is. All we’ve got. Any of us. Just what’s out there. And we might as well learn to face it now as later! There’s no sense staying in the womb!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ching felt, still, that there ought to be more to it than this — some formal report to the Space Station that Survey Ship #103 was on its way, some acknowledgement, some formal leave-taking. But they had had all that when they were chosen as a crew… it was foolish to wish for more. She kept her eyes down on the steady familiar console of the Bridge computer, the numbers and letters which appeared as she touched buttons. She had done this on a similar console many times during her training, and since they had decided to take their course toward the most, recent of the colonies, even the course was one she had plotted before. It seemed almost too simple.
Since there was no other formality possible, she made her voice formal.
“Colonies one and two are in the system of Barnard’s Star, at six light-years distance. Colony Three is at Cygni 61; eleven light-years distance. Colony Four is in the Sirius double-star system, eight point eight light-years, and Colony Six is established in the T-5 cluster, nine point three light-years distance.”
“And,” said Teague, “it’s very probable that when we get to the T-5 cluster, if that’s where we are going, we will find Colonies Seven through Eleven — maybe through twenty or twenty-four — established there, with no planets left for us.”
Peake shrugged. “Then we start hunting from there, I suppose.”
Moira said, “If we leave the Solar System in that direction, that means we’ll be off the plane of the ecliptic and we’ll miss the asteroids. No way we’re maneuverable enough to get through the asteroid belt without being crashed by a minor asteroid. We could program the ship to avoid the bigger, better-known ones, the more predictable ones, but there are hundreds of thousands of them — maybe millions.”
“I have the precise number of known bodies in the computer,” Ching said, “but does anyone really care?”
“I do,” said Teague, “but it’s irrelevant right now.”
Peake looked at the readout from Ching’s computer on the panel before him. He frowned, flicking buttons on the pocket calculator at his belt, then started to lay in a course in the general direction of the T-5 cluster. It was still day-shift; Ravi sat behind him, with nothing, at the moment, to do except watch Peake’s huge, clumsy-looking hands on the buttons and switches. The fingers were so long, and so large, that they obscured the switches at times.
It was almost frightening to contemplate this kind of freedom, this kind of distance. He did not mind the vista of stars outside the transparent glass dome… although he noticed that Moira kept her eyes carefully turned away from it.
Navigating on the surface of the Earth, there were three-hundred-and-sixty directions in which you could go, and some of that was limited by features of the terrain — mountains, water, heavy undergrowth, preexisting roads. In the air you had the full three hundred sixty degrees; he’d grown used to that, flying a light plane.
But out here there were all those directions, multiplied into three dimensions… 360 to the three-sixtieth power, maybe? Up, down, and all the permutations and combinations of angles in between.
The universe is too big… thank God we have the computer… all the crowding multiplicity of stars, vastness beyond imagining… we talk glibly of light-years. But the light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth. Think of something so distant that the light takes a year, a whole year, to reach it… that’s a light-year… the simple explanation he had been given in kindergarten, their whole education aimed at making these monstrous things close and simple and familiar and comfortable….
Ravi shut his eyes, to shut out the thousand blinking lights of the bridge, and the millions of blinking stars behind it. There was just too much of it. These distances were not made by man at all, man could not envision them. The mudfish in the water hole in the outback had mapped the Great Barrier Reef… but was this arrogance, was it meant that mankind should do this?
Behind his closed eyes pictures formed, faces in a crowded Bombay slum, starving faces, packed filthy faces; but he had grown up clean and well-fed, educated almost beyond human possibility, to do a deed at the very limits of the possible. Why me, why was I chosen with these others? Why millions to starve and die and bumble along from day to’day, and the six of us to live in luxury and attain the limits of human possibility? Dare I think that the Great Architect of the Universe has chosen me? Is it any better to think that it was the work of
