yes, I could see it. But it’s a dial that has to be twisted clockwise to go on, and counter-clockwise to go off, and it’s not all that easy to turn; it could hardly have been turned off by accident. Nor can I imagine any one of us doing it without warning the others; Peake could very easily have been killed, and if he weren’t such a fine natural athlete he would have been killed. None of us is stupid enough, to say nothing of malicious enough, to do such a thing as a practical joke. So, eliminating accidental turning-off, or deliberate-without-telling-anyone — which would mean that one of us is a psychopath who didn’t care if he or she killed someone — it winds down to defect in the DeMag, or fault in the computer tie-in. Now Fontana and I checked out that DeMag unit and the control, right down to the core, and it was in perfect condition.”
Ching frowned, thinking hard. She could feel again, in her belly, the sudden nausea and fear as the gravity left her disoriented, hanging upside-down from a ballet barre which, moments before, had been stable and solid. She said, “Could there have been a short in the electrical wiring of the control dial, Teague? That would explain why it went off suddenly, and then came back again when you turned it off and then on again.”
“Maybe, but we didn’t find any trace of it,” Teague said. “Fontana thought about that, of course; it was the first thing that occurred to her. Electrical circuits do short out, of course, but all the electrical circuits aboard this ship are computer-controlled anyhow, and they’d hardly short out without some record — I mean, not the way a regular wired switch would do.”
“No question of that,” Moira said behind them, “Fontana and I checked every circuit and everything in the DeMag machinery before we went to bed, and it’s purring along as sweetly as any old pussycat. Speaking of which, I wish we could have shipped a cat or two. I like live things.”
“There are plants enough in the conservatory,” Teague said, “but there were all kinds of arguments against any pets. Starting with contamination of alien worlds, and ending with the psychological problems of becoming attached to them and suffering when they die, or inbreeding causing monsters after several generations of kittens. Not to mention that cats react very badly to free-fall; worse than any other animal. Their inner-ear channels are even more sensitive than the human ones. More so, because they can’t react to visual cues the way humans can.”
“Oh, plants — that’s not what I mean by live things,” Moira said, going to the rack where the musical instruments were kept and getting out her cello, and a little later, Fontana came in, carrying a printout of the Mass in Five Voices.
“Ching, you can have the soprano part if you’d rather, you’ve got the range — you can sing a top A, can’t you?”
“I’d really rather do the contralto part, Fontana. I like harmony. You and Peake can share the honors for the melody.”
“The mass is a little complicated. I thought we could start with something shorter. You know this, don’t you?” She hummed the opening phrases of the Ave Verum. Teague took up the bass part, surreptitiously sliding the music paper on which he had been writing into his flute case. Suddenly Moira’s cello began to drift upwards; Teague grabbed for a shower of floating papers.
“Oh, damn.’” He grabbed at handfuls of papers. Ching struggled to control sickness again, clutching at the doorframe and closing her eyes as the room reeled around her. Moira grabbed the cello, manhandled it into its case and snapped it safely inside, then purposefully forced herself down toward the DeMag unit.
“Now, damn it, this is not funny,” she said wrathfully, and Teague stared at her.
“Do you seriously believe anyone would do this to be funny, Moira? Besides, nobody was near the dial —”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “Peake is too serious about working in full gravity, and Ravi knows perfectly well how serious it would be; and the rest of us were all here watching each other. But I couldn’t even find a short in the way it’s wired in. It’s got to be the computer, Ching.”
“I don’t know why you all blame the computer,” she said crossly, her eyes still squeezed shut against compelling nausea. She would not lose her breakfast, she would NOT! “I checked every tie-in to the DeMags and the programming appears to be perfect! Most of it I did myself, and I don’t make that kind of mistakes!”
“Well, try what you did before, Teague,” Moira said, twisting the dial firmly to OFF and then to ON again. The cello case thumped over on its side; if the cello had not been in the case it would have been crushed. Ching came down with a bump and a small, smothered cry.
“It’s evidently something in the control dials, then,” Moira said, touching it gingerly as if probing a wound “I’ll take one of the dials apart and see how it’s put together and why it keeps doing that. First in the gym, then in here, and God knows where it will happen next! And it could have been really dangerous, too.” She glanced at Ching and said, “You look shaky; do you want coffee, tea, a drink — something stronger?”
Fontana said, “Brandy. Call it medicinal,” and went to the console, dialing herself a drink and a slightly stronger one for Ching. “No, drink it, Ching. I’m not a qualified doctor in the sense Peake is, but I have had medical training, and right now this is what you need.”
Slowly, Ching sipped the sharp liquid, making a face of distaste.
“Ugh, I hate that stuff!”
But even so, Fontana noticed the color coming slowly back into her face as she sipped.
Peake and Ravi came into the main cabin, and, seeing Fontana and Ching drinking, went to get themselves hot drinks. Teague said, “Cocktail hour, huh?” and got himself one, too. He scrabbled the music paper together, carefully separating his own from the printout of the madrigals Fontana had brought, and slid them into the flute case again. Then he began to pass out the parts.
“Fontana, soprano. Ching, alto. Peake, tenor. Ravi, baritone. And I’ll sing bass,” he said. “Moira, are you going to play for us? Or shall we go to the gym first and work out?”
“No!” said Moira, sharply, automatically and without thinking. Then, hearing what she had said, she began to rationalize it.
“I think we ought to — to stay out of the gym until we know what’s happened with the DeMags. It’s the easiest place to get hurt or killed, and if one of them went off suddenly, again, it might be more dangerous this time…”
Her voice trailed off again.
Ravi protested, “Look, one of the first priorities aboard ship is to keep our physical fitness. With the gym closed—”
Peake said sharply, “Moira’s psychic; have you forgotten how we found out she was psychic? We stay out of the gym until we find out what went wrong with the DeMags, and that’s an order!”
Teague raised his head and glared. “Who appointed you Captain of this ship, Peake?”
“As the medical officer in charge of physical fitness and safety—” Peake began, but Fontana swiftly interposed. She said, “We’ll check out the DeMags as soon as we can. Meanwhile, we’re all here, and it’s time for music and then for dinner, in that order. Let’s talk about it later. Arguing on an empty stomach never gets anyone anywhere.” She turned to Moira. “Give us an A, will you?”
Moira stroked a soft string on the cello. She frowned, wondering why the thought of going to the gym had evoked such immediate, unprompted panic. Was it really another of those sickening psychic flashes, coming from nowhere and infuriatingly vague? Or was it her awareness of some flaw in the DeMags, subliminal, so that she knew, subconsciously, what was wrong and wanted to keep people away from it until it came into her conscious mind and she could fix it? She scowled, damning her Wild Talent, wishing it more accessible and more easily tamed, or else non-existent. She listened as Fontana sang the opening phrase of the Ave Verum in her clear, beautifully trained soprano; heard Ching and Peake join in, Ravi and Teague joining with the bass line.
When they finished, Ravi said, “Does everyone know the Mozart setting of the Ave Verum?”
Ching replied by singing the opening line. The voices answered one another…
O dulcis….
O pie….
O Jesu, Fili Mariae…
Ravi, singing softly with his ear tuned to the other voices, particularly Peake’s clear tenor, thought how strange it was that five agnostics or atheists, and one secret mystic, without any noticeable religion, were singing this music dedicated to militant Christianity;
that the greatest of Western music had been poured out into this religion which had tried so hard to conquer the world. Maybe their only triumph had been their music, their masses and hymns, the work of Bach especially,
