could she?
Ching patted her shoulder, said, “If you need any help, Moira, I’m here.”
Ching watched Moira for a few moments before going to her own console, but Moira’s thin freckled fingers seemed perfectly steady on the control sails and she could see, out the great window, the movement of the torn sails as they began to reel inward. She said, “Shall I check any deviation from course, Ravi?”
He nodded, frowning, taut. He said, “Deviation or no deviation, we are not on the course that I set. Peake, did you change anything when you were on duty?”
Peake shook his head. “No, not at all.”
“That’s foolish,” Ching said, frowning at her console,
“if it’s the course you fed into the Navigation controls and then into the computer, it’s the course we’re on. There could have been some small deviation from course when we were struck — I’m going to check that right now—”
“But if we were struck hard enough to knock us that far off course, there would be a great deal more damage,” said Ravi, and his voice was stubborn,
Ching frowned at the smooth, luminous figures that came up on the readout. “Did you alter the course at all after Peake formally laid it in? When you do, you ought to enter it formally into the log, and let us know. Because there is a deviation here, more than the sail damage could possibly account for, and I don’t see any course changes recorded.”
Ravi shook his head vehemently. “1 didn’t,” he said. “When I first took over from Peake I saw a small deviation from the course he had set, and I corrected for that deviation, so that we’re back on the original course, or should have been. But according to this—” he waved an unsteady hand at the readouts, “we’re not anywhere near where we ought to be. We’re some hundreds of thousands of kilometers closer to the plane of the ecliptic than we ought to be, though I wouldn’t have thought we were close enough to hit the fringes of the asteroid belt.”
Ching touched her console for a position reading, and stared, disbelieving; painstakingly went through the sequence again.
“That’s not where we are,” she said positively.
“It certainly isn’t where we’re supposed to be,” Ravi agreed. “Even by dead reckoning I can make it closer than that, if we’re still aiming at the T-5 cluster as we agreed. Jupiter isn’t where it ought to be, compared to our position. Just look.”
He pointed. They could all see the great planet, but only Teague, regarding it with an astronomer’s interest, paid any attention. Ravi’s fingers raced on his own console, and at last he said formally, “Please read out your figures, Ching, because that’s not at all what I make it.”
Ching read out her answer from the console, and at Ravi’s frown she touched buttons to re-set and re- calculate position and course. This time they could all see the differences.
“But that’s not what I got the first time,” Peake said, “and that’s what I put into the course calculator. Why is it different?”
“Now wait just a minute,” Ching said, “if that’s what you put into the calculator, that’s what you got out of it. A computer gives only one answer to the same question. That’s why they have them. The whole point of a mathematical calculator — and that’s what you’re doing with the computer right now — is to eliminate human errors in arithmetic. It’s not like the story they told us in kindergarten, about the little boy who was asked if he had checked his homework—”
“Sure. J checked it three times. Here are the three answers,” Ravi quoted, with the contempt of the person to whom mathematics is a natural language, making more sense than any other language; who could no more add a set of figures wrongly, or use the wrong equation, than the natural grammarian could split an infinitive. “But just the same, that’s what I make it, and that’s what the computer makes it, and there isn’t any congruence between them. Peake got something else—”
“And I tell you again,” Ching said, really angry now, “that computers don’t make mistakes. Only the people programming them make mistakes. And in this case I didn’t make any mistakes, because you saw me enter the figures exactly as you gave them to me.”
“Ching, there’s no need to get angry with me,” Ravi said, “I’m not attacking your competence, or your personal integrity, or anything of that sort. Computers may not make mistakes, but they do have mechanical failures, don’t they? And programmers do make mistakes, and you didn’t program this one entirely by yourself, did you?”
She shook her head. “Most of the information in the library was put in storage at Lunar Dome,” she said, and clenched her fists, fighting a surge of anger and fear. Somewhere outside herself she knew that Ravi was not attacking her, that it was irrational to feel so threatened. Yet she did feel that it was her own integrity that had been questioned, not that of the computer.
I can’t trust my own body. I can’t trust the computer. Is there anything left that I can trust?
Defiantly, she pressed the console again for re-set and re-calculate. This time they could all see it; a third set of figures like neither Ravi’s nor her own, flower in liquid-crystal numerics across the console. Fighting panic, Ching erased the figures and this time, painstakingly, she entered the relevant figures for the known position of the T-5 cluster, the position of Colony Six, and the elapsed time since departing from the Space Station. Her fingers pressed hard against her mouth as she watched the fourth set of figures flowing across the readout screen.
“What does it mean?” Fontana asked. “Does it mean we’re on the wrong course? Or did whatever hit us damage the computer?”
“No,” Ching said, and her voice was shaking too, “there’s no damage to the computer module; I’m as sure as that as — as I can be of anything. But there’s something wrong with it. I’m not sure yet just what it is. What I am sure of is that it’s giving us wrong answers. Lots of wrong answers. Everyone here is getting different information out of it.”
Silence; and six stricken faces on the Bridge. None of them had to put it into words. Every one of them knew that without accurate information from the computer, they were all hopelessly lost, adrift among the stars without accurate data enough to know where they were going, or even where they were.
It was Fontana who first put the question in all their minds:
“Can it be fixed?”
Ching struggled against her growing fears — fear that she would lose control, somehow do or say the wrong thing. She said, slowly and precisely, “A computer is a machine; we can do everything the computer does, only not quite so quickly or so well. And once I can find what is wrong with it — mechanical damage, a mistake in the original programming, once we know precisely what is wrong, it can be repaired. Repaired, that is, if the damage is mechanical; re-programmed, if it’s a case of human error. We are particularly fortunate to have Ravi with us, because he can be used to check the accuracy of the computer. That’s not the problem. The problem is—” and she swallowed hard, trying to steady the shameful terror in her voice, “that all during the time we’re trying to find out what’s wrong, and trying to fix it, we’re still accelerating at a steady one gee — that means nine point eight meters per second per second — piled on to whatever velocity we’ve attained in the past two-and-a-half days. And every second we use to get it fixed, we’re going further and further off course! An error of a thousandth of a degree in course might not make any difference at all on the surface of the Earth; because there’s only twenty-four thousand miles you can go, and you’re right back where you started. But out there — “Ching made a numb gesture at the infinity of stars beyond the observation window, and clutched at her seat, feeling as sick and dizzy as if the gravity had somehow gone off and she was falling endlessly through space, ”out there, a thousandth of a degree here can get us millions of kilometers, light-years off course at the other end…. We may never reach the T-5 cluster at all, we may never reach anyplace humans have gone before! We don’t know if Peake ever laid in the right course at all, or where we’re going, or where we’ve been… it’s probably too late to get back on the right course, even if we could find out, now, what course we should have taken from just outside the Space Station! We’re going out into the unknown whether we want to or not — and we don’t know where!”
CHAPTER NINE
