“Bullheadedness, mostly. Too stubborn to give in. At least I’m done. How many more do you have?”
“Two more, before I’ll be where Zoom says I should be, before I take the piloting course.”
“So, all you have to do is stick with the schedule, and you’ll be ready to learn to fly when we get back. That wasn’t so terrible, was it?”
“I guess not. You don’t have to be so cheerful about it, you know.”
“What fun is winning, if I don’t get to gloat?”
“Now I understand why all the grownups call you that other name.”
“The one with an ‘A’?”
“That’s the one.”
“Soon enough, you’ll be doing it too. Look on the bright side. You could be having to do this on Commonwealth ration bars.”
“Those are nasty, even if they had all the nutrition that you need.” We talked for a bit, and we cleaned up. Then I headed for the cockpit. Ace said, “Welcome back to the land of the living, Boss. You put in a bunch of hours on that. Are you okay?”
“As much as I ever was. How are things with you?”
“Cruising right along. All of Scotti’s improvements sure do speed up these long trips.”
“She’s a wonder, all right. I just can’t understand why the Navy didn’t use her talents.”
“They just didn’t think bots should be allowed to think, or at least not enough of them. Heck, they didn’t even believe junior officers should be allowed to think. You saw what they did to the training courses.”
“I see what you mean. The senior officers had a sweet deal, and they didn’t want anything upsetting their applecart.”
“Right on, Boss. It was a peacetime Navy, the only way for them to get promoted was if somebody retired or died. The best they could do was hang on to what they had.”
“I can kind of see where they were coming from, but it’s still a foreign concept to me.”
“I wouldn’t waste too much time thinking on it, Boss. It’s not like one of them is going to show up and quiz you on it.”
“Ace, I wish I could believe that, but I’ve already seen weirder things.”
“Murphy is our shepherd, Boss.”
“That he is.” I went to the cargo bay, to see if anything was happening there. Ozzie was sitting alone, lost in a problem. I sat beside him and waited. After a few minutes, he asked, “Could I help you with something, Boss?”
“No, not really. Just passing the time till we come out at Charlie’s. What are you working on?”
“The smaller power cores all have a glitch I don’t understand. I was running sims, trying to figure out what I was missing.”
“Any luck?”
“Nope, but I know four or five things that don’t cause it.”
“That’s progress, all the same. How many more possibilities do you have to check?”
“That’s the part that has me confused, Boss. As near as I can tell, I’ve checked everything that could be causing it.”
“Sounds to me like you’re about to learn something.”
“How do you mean, Boss?”
“Well, if nothing you know could be causing it, it must be something you don’t know.”
“Boss, you sure know how to scare a bot.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re implying that I am about to find out something about physics that we don’t already know.”
“I suppose I am, so what?”
“Doesn’t that mean that everything we think we know is wrong?”
“Not at all. We wouldn’t use the physics that we use, unless it was a good approximation to reality. You may have found a place where it doesn’t fit as well as we might like. That doesn’t mean it quit fitting everywhere else, it just means that you’ve found a way to understand things the old way couldn’t.”
“What you’re saying is, things that work, will still work, but there may be new things we can do, that we couldn’t before?”
“Yep. Stay with trying to figure it out. Who knows what you might come up with.” He went back into his trance, and I went looking for someone else to talk to. Julie saw me and came over. “The ‘doc says it’s ready to wake up Lyla. How do you want to proceed?”
“Have you found her some clean clothes to put on?”
“I got some out of her saucer.”
“Do we have a blanket to cover her when she wakes up?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get it done, then.”
We went in, and Julie started the box waking her. I held the blanket, and put it over her when the box opened. As she came to, she recognized me, and said, “Hi, Bob. I messed up, didn’t I?”
“So it would seem. I won’t be able to let you off so cheap this time, I’m afraid. We had to come a long way to get you.”
“I’ve been making good money, thanks to you, it’s only fair. Did you already get ahold of Random, and Uncle Willum?”
“We did. I spoke to your Uncle, he didn’t seem that surprised.”
“I wouldn’t think so. He taught me nearly everything I know about learning things I shouldn’t.”
“I can think of worse teachers. He is good at what he does. Let me guess. You heard about some of the Rottums not wanting to give up the feud, and decided to go see for yourself, with no backup.”
“You make it sound so stupid, Bob.”
“I wonder why that is, Lyla? You’re a known associate of mine, and I’m married to a Slongum. Gee, that’s bound to make you popular with Rottums who are too hard-core to give up the feud, don’t you think? Why shouldn’t you go rushing in without
