access, this room was the most intriguing. He ran a fingertip along a row of books; their pages were black with age and the gilt on their spines had all but worn away. He traced letters one by one: E…n…c…y…c… Who, or what, was an 'Encyclopaedia'? He daydreamed briefly about picking up a volume, letting it fall open…
Again that almost sexual hunger for knowledge swept through him.
Now his eye was caught by a machine, a thing of jewelled cogs and gears about the size of his cupped hands. At its center was set a bright silver sphere; nine painted orbs were suspended on wires around the sphere. It was beautiful, but what the hell was it?
He glanced about. The office was empty. He couldn't resist it.
He picked up the device, relishing the feel of the machined metal base—
'Don't drop it, will you?»
He started. The intricate device juggled through the air, painfully slowly; he grabbed it and returned it to its shelf.
He turned. Silhouetted in the doorway was Jaen, her broad, freckled face creased into a grin. After a few seconds he smiled back. 'Thanks a lot,' he said.
The apprentice walked toward him. 'You should be glad it's only me. Anybody else and you'd be off the Raft by now.'
He shrugged, watching her approach with mild pleasure. Jaen was the senior apprentice of Cipse, the Chief Navigator; only a few hundred shifts older than Rees, she was one of the few inhabitants of the labs to show him anything other than contempt. She even seemed to forget he was a mine rat, sometimes . . , Jaen was a broad, stocky girl; her gait was confident but ungainly. Uncomfortably Rees found himself comparing her with Sheen. He was growing fond of Jaen; he believed she could become a good friend.
But her body didn't pull at his with the intensity of the mine girl's.
Jaen stood beside him and ran a casual fingertip over the little device. 'Poor old Rees,' she mocked. 'I bet you don't even know what this is, do you?'
He shrugged. 'You know I don't.'
'It's called an orrery.' She spelt the word for him. 'It's a model of the Solar System.'
'The what?'
Jaen sighed, then she pointed at the silver orb at the heart of the orrery. 'That's a star. And these things are balls of — iron, I suppose, orbiting around it. They're called planets. Mankind — the folk on the Raft, at least — originally came from one of these planets. The fourth, I think. Or maybe the third.»
Rees scratched his chin. 'Really? There can't have been too many of them.'
'Why not?'
'No room. If the planet was any size the gees would be too high. The star kernel back home is only fifty yards wide — and it's mostly air — and it has a surface gravity of five gee.'
'Yeah? Well, this planet was a lot bigger. It was—' She extended her hands. 'Miles wide. And the gravity wasn't crushing. Things were different.'
'How?'
'…I'm not sure. But the surface gravity was probably only, I don't know, three or four gee.'
He thought that over. 'In that case, what's a gee? I mean, why is a gee the size it is — no larger and no smaller?'
Jaen had been about to say something else; now she frowned in exasperation. 'Rees, I haven't the faintest idea. By the Bones, you ask stupid questions. I'm almost tempted not to tell you the most interesting thing about the orrery.'
'What?'
'That the System was huge. The orbit of the planet took about a thousand shifts… and the star at the center was a million miles wide!'
He thought that over. 'Garbage,' he said.
She laughed. 'What do you know?'
'A star like that is impossible. It would just implode.'
'You know it all.' She grinned at him. 'I just hope you're as clever at lugging supplies in from the Rim. Come on; Grye has given us a list of stuff to collect.'
'OK.'
Carrying his cleaning equipment he followed her broad back from Hollerbach's office. He glanced back once at the orrery, sitting gleaming in the shadows of its shelf.
A million miles ? Ridiculous, of course.
But what if…?
They sat side by side on the bus; the machine's huge tires made the journey soothingly smooth.
Rees surveyed the mottled plates of the Raft, the people hurrying by on tasks and errands of whose nature even now he was uncertain. His fellow passengers sat patiently through the journey, some of them reading. Rees found these casual displays of literacy somehow startling.
He found himself sighing.
'What's the matter with you?'
He grinned ruefully at Jaen. 'Sorry. It's just… I've been here such a short time, and I seem to have learned so little.'
She frowned. 'I thought you were getting some kind of crammer classes from Cipse and Grye.'
'Not really,' he admitted. 'I guess I can see their point of view. I wouldn't want to waste time on a stowaway who is liable to be dumped back home within a few shifts.'
She scratched her nose. 'That might be the reason. But the two of them have never been shy of parading their knowledge in front of me. Rees, you ask damn hard questions. I suspect they're a little afraid of you.'
'That's crazy—'
'Let's face it, most of those old buggers don't know all that much. Hollerbach does, I think; and one or two others. But the rest just follow the ancient printouts and hope for the best. Look at the way they patch up the ancient instruments with wood and bits of string… They'd be lost if anything really unexpected happened — or if anyone asked them a question from a strange angle.'
Rees thought that over and reflected how far his view of the Scientists had shifted since his arrival here. Now he saw that they were frail humans like himself, struggling to do their best in a world growing shabbier. 'Anyway,' he said, 'it doesn't make a lot of difference. Every time I open my eyes I see questions that don't get answered. For instance, on every page of Cipse's numbers books is written 'IBM.' What does that mean?'
She laughed. 'You've got me there. Maybe it's something to do with the way those books were produced. They come from the Ship, you know.'
His interest quickened. 'The Ship? You know, I've heard so many stories about that I've no idea what's true.'
'My understanding is that there really was a Ship, It was broken up to form the basis of the Raft itself.'
He pondered that. 'And the original Crew printed those books?'
She hesitated, obviously near the limits of her knowledge. 'They were produced a few generations later. The first Crew had kept their understanding in some kind of machine.'
'What machine?'
'… I don't know. Maybe a talking machine, like the buses. The thing was more than a recording device, though. It could do calculations and computations.'
'How?'
'Rees,' she said heavily, 'if I knew that I'd build one. OK? Anyway, with the passing of time the machine began to fail, and the crew were afraid they wouldn't be able to continue their computations. So, before it expired, the machine printed out everything it knew. And that includes an ancient type of table called 'logarithms' to help us do calculations. That's what Cipse was lugging in
to the Bridge. Maybe you'll learn how to use logarithms, some day.'
'Yeah. Maybe.'
The bus rolled out of the thicket of cables; Rees found himself squinting in the harsh light of the star poised above the Raft.
Jaen was saying, 'You understand Cipse's job, do you?'
