Alternating Currents (14 page)

It was a duty that Nancy hated, though, important or not. She thanked her lucky stars that most of the time she was in a trance state and not able to observe, for instance, what the distortions of hyperspace were doing to her own personal appearance. But it was finicking, wearing work, even in a trance state. Some of it was bound to seep through to the conscious level, however distorted, and she had been having dreams about hyperspace courses, fixes and triangulation points.

Julia came back with the tea and Nancy Eklund said, ‘I’m sorry to be always complaining. Heaven knows it’s no worse than we had a right to expect. We knew this was dangerous when we signed up for it.’

‘But we didn’t know we’d sweat ourselves to death, Nancy! We didn’t expect this eternal should-I-light-the-lights, should-I-boil-some-coffee. Honestly, I don’t mind dying half as much as I mind being nibbled to death by one little annoyance after another!’ She glanced speculatively at the other girl, and in a different tone said,’ I guess you’re pretty tired -’

Nancy Eklund sat up and stared at her. ‘Julia! You can’t want me to go on with that horrible story.’

‘Not if you don’t feel up to it,’ her bunkmate said humbly. ‘But it passes the time - if you aren’t too hoarse.’

‘Well, no.’ Nancy took a sip of tea. ‘I was receiving, not putting out,’ she said professionally. ‘I suppose if you
really
want -’

‘Index!’ said Julia triumphantly, not waiting for her to change her mind. As Nancy Eklund, at the cue word, slumped into the trance state, Julia caught the cup of tea before it spilled. ‘Fiction!’ she said, and went on to give the author’s name, the title and the chapter of the mystery she had been ‘reading’. She settled back happily as the Library took up the story again.

It wasn’t, Julia told herself, as if it really mattered. After all, there wasn’t anything for Nancy or anyone else to do, until the geniuses in navigation and computation had figured out where they were. And that would probably take days.

But she was wrong. In the wardroom, Commander Broderick was brooding over a bowl of coffee, half watching a bridge game, when Ciccarelli walked in. He looked tired; he didn’t even wait for anyone to ask; he volunteered, ‘Yeah, yeah, we have a position. It isn’t good.’

‘Pretty far?’ one of the card players asked wistfully.

Ciccarelli nodded, unsmiling. ‘Pretty far. We got our fix by triangulating on extra-galactic nebulae, which will give you an idea. I make -’ he glanced at them under his eyebrows - ’better than fifteen thousand light-years from Sol.’

Ensign Lorch picked up the cards and began to deal them automatically; there wasn’t anything much else to do. But his mind was not very completely on bridge.

Fifteen thousand light-years from Sol.

In hyperspace, he thought, it might have been a voyage only of minutes. Outside of the three dimensions in which humans live their normal lives, distances are a matter of cosmic whim. Aldebaran and Betelgeuse, in hyperspace, may almost touch; Luna and the Earth may be infinities apart.

Lorch, staring unseeing at his cards, licked his lips. They had cruised around in hyperspace for a few hours of actual ‘jump’ time before the meteorite had struck. And they had found themselves perhaps a thousand light-years from Earth, perhaps less. They had backtracked moment for moment, as well as they could figure, the same course - and their new position was a dozen times as far.

That was the nature of hyperspace. Line A-B in Newton’s universe might be more than line A-B in Riemann’s, or it might be less, but it was never the same. And the distances, Lorch thought cloudily, might not even be commutative; A-B plus B-C might not be, probably was not, the same as B-C plus A-B. That was why the Atlas, with his infinite stored checkpoints and positions, had a place on the bridge...

‘Bid, for God’s sake,’ someone was saying impatiently.

Lorch shook himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, focusing on his cards. ‘Say, isn’t it getting hot ?’

Nobody answered.

They wouldn’t, thought Commander Broderick, lowering into his bowl of cold coffee. Hot? Sure it’s getting hot. Not starvation, not thirst, not suffocation - heat. That was the spaceman’s enemy, that was what would kill them all. Every time one of the crew drew a breath, carbon in his body oxidized and gave off heat. Every time the rocket jets blasted, heat seeped from the tubes into the frame of the ship. Every time the diesels that drove the nucleophoretic generators coughed and spun, or the cooks fried an egg, or a spaceman lit a cigarette, there was heat.

Take a hot poker, Broderick suggested meditatively to himself. You can watch it glow red and lose heat that way - that is radiation. You can wave it in the air and let the breeze carry the heat away - that is convection. Or you can quench it in a bucket of oil - and that is conduction. And those are the only ways there are, in Newton’s space or Riemann’s, of taking heat from one body and giving it to another. And in vacuum, the latter two did not operate, for lack of matter to operate with.

Radiation, thought Broderick, radiation would work. A pity we’re not red hot.

If they had been at a temperature of a thousand degrees, they would have cooled quite rapidly. But at a temperature of perhaps 20
^º
Centigrade, average through
Terra II’s
hull, radiation was minute. The loss through radiation was more, much more, than made up through internal heat sources, and so the heat of the ship, hour by hour, climbed.

It had been a long time, Broderick remembered, since he had heard the hiss of expanding air. That was how one coped with heat. From the pressurized parts of the ship, valve off air, the expansion cools, the cooling takes heat from the rest of the ship. Replace the air from the high-pressure tanks, and there’s more than enough air in the tanks for any imaginable hyperspace voyage, since none can conceivably last more than a few weeks - and that’s that.

‘Sir,’ a voice said, and Broderick realized that the voice had said it before. It was a messenger, saluting respectfully.

‘What is it?’ he growled.

‘Surgeon Mate Conboy,’ the messenger recited crisply, ‘asks if you can step down to the sick-bay. Lieutenant Groden is cutting up.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Broderick, and waved the messenger away. Groden, he thought, what’s the use of worrying about Groden ? He’ll cook as well as any of us, on this handsomely adventurous hyperspace cruise that cannot conceivably last more than a few weeks.

‘You trumped my trick!’ howled Ensign Lorch’s partner as the surgeon was leaving. Lorch blinked and stared.

‘Sorry,’ he said automatically, then bent and looked closer. ‘I’ve only got two cards,’ he said. ‘Why does the dummy still have five?’

~ * ~

Recorder Mate Eklund took it as a joke. She looked at herself in the mirror and told her friend Julia, ‘I think it’s quite nice. I don’t see why we don’t do it all the time.’

‘You’ve got the figure for it,’ Julia said glumly, comparing her own dumpy silhouette with the other girl’s. These issue bathing suits weren’t particularly flattering either, she told herself resentfully, knowing in her heart that the fabric had never been loomed to flatter her figure the way it did Nancy Eklund’s. ‘Bathing suits,’ she said irritatedly. ‘Oh, why did I ever sign on for this ?’

Recorder Mate Eklund patted her arm and jauntily stepped out into the corridor. The male members of the crew were wearing trunks by now, too. She felt more as though she were at some rather crowded beach than aboard
Terra II.
Except that it was so
hot.

Not only had the uniform of the day been changed to the bare minimum, but there had been other changes in the ship’s routine. No more spinning the ship for gravity, for instance. The magnetic-soled shoes were issued for everyone now, because spinning the ship took rocket power, and rocket power meant more heat that they couldn’t get rid of. The magnet shoes were all right, but it did take a certain amount of concentration to remember heel-and-toe-and-lean, heel-and-toe-and-lean, in a sort of bent-over half trot like the one that Groucho Marx had once, long before Nancy’s time, made famous.

She loped crouching into the captain’s quarters, saluted and took her place. It
was
getting a little wearisome, she thought detachedly. Everything anybody said, it seemed, they wanted recorded in her brain, and nobody ever seemed to take a breath without demanding some part of the stored knowledge recited back to him. Still, when she was recording she was, in effect, asleep; she woke up slightly refreshed, though there were some confusing dreams.

She wondered absently, for a moment, just what she
did
know, in the part of her mind where the records were kept, the part that was available only to outsiders on presentation of the cue words, and never to her.

But by then the other officers had arrived, and the captain snapped,
‘Records’,
and she slumped back. Not quite all the way back - just enough so that the natural tensions in the great muscles of the back and thighs reached a point of equilibrium -and, in the non-gravity of the still ship, her sleeping body, moored by the magnets at the feet, floated like Mahomet’s Tomb above the chair.

Ensign Lorch felt the captain’s eyes on him and hastily looked away from the Library. Good-looking kid, though, he thought; this strip-down business had its advantages. Too bad the other women in the crew weren’t more like her.

~ * ~

The meeting lasted an hour by the chronometer, as had each meeting of each of the previous eleven days. And it accomplished as much as its eleven predecessors.

‘Summing up, then,’ the captain said savagely. ‘One, we can’t jump home because we don’t know the way; two, we can’t jet home through normal space because we don’t have the fuel or air; three, we can’t stay where we are because we’ll roast. Is that it ?’

The Exec said, ’That’s it, sir. We might set down on another planet, though.’

‘A planet nearby?’ The captain thought that over. ‘What about it Ciccarelli ?’

The navigator shrugged. ‘If we can find one, sir. I’d say the chances were poor. We’ve got very little in the way of fuel reserve. Every jump uses up a little, and - well, if we come out of a jump within, let’s say, a tenth of a light-year of a habitable planet, pretty nearly at relative rest to it, we might be able to make it. We’ve got maybe one chance in a thousand of that.’

Commander Broderick said, ‘Sir, this is just a wild notion, but suppose we did one of those things they’re always doing in the movies, you know? Freeze the whole ship’s crew in suspended animation. I believe I could manage something like that out of the medical supplies, if we could only bring the temperature low enough -’

‘That’s just what we
can’t
do,’ said the captain.

‘Yes, sir,’ Broderick agreed. ‘But if we did that, we could valve off a lot of air - maybe enough to cool the ship. Nobody would be breathing, you see. And we could rig up some sort of alarm for when we got there. Wouldn’t matter if it was years - even centuries; there would be a vacuum, and no specimen deterioration - I mean, nothing happening to us.’

Ciccarelli said mulishly, ‘Impossible. It’s the question of relative rest again. We haven’t got enough fuel to mess around. Suppose we found Sol, and pointed right for it. By the time we got there, where would it be and how fast would it be going, in what direction? Maybe you can tell. I can’t.’

Broderick crouched disconsolately back into his sick-bay, and the enlisted man he’d left behind looked up in relief. ‘It’s Groden, sir,’ he said at once. ‘He’s been acting up.’

Ensign Lorch, behind Broderick, hesitated in the doorway. ‘Acting up?’ demanded Broderick.

‘Yes, sir. I gave him another needle, but it didn’t take effect. I guess it was delirium, sir. Took three ampoules -’

The voices trailed off as they went inside. Lorch made himself comfortable - not an easy job in non-gravity, that is if you were a commissioned officer and concerned about smart appearance.

The two medics were gone for a long time, and when Commander Broderick came out again he looked worried. ‘Sorry, Lorch,’ he apologized. He felt the pressure-pot of coffee on the little stove and made a face. ‘Want some ?’

Lorch shook his head. ‘Too much trouble to drink.’

‘Don’t blame you.’ But Broderick carefully coaxed a couple of ounces of the stuff into a transparent plastic bulb, teased sugar and cream in after it, spun the bulb with his thumb over the opening to stir it, took a sip. ‘I don’t like it,’ he brooded over his coffee. ‘Groden’s working up real damage, the kind I can’t handle.’

Lorch asked curiously, ‘What kind is that?’

‘Inside his head. I had to tell him that his sight was gone, unless we can get to an eye bank within ten days. The optic nerves, Lorch - you can patch in an eye, but once the nerve has degenerated you can’t replace it. And he took it hard.’

‘Yelled and cut up ?’

‘Worse than that,’ said Broderick. ‘He didn’t say a word. Now, I
know
that man’s in pain; the scars around his eyes are pretty bad. I gave him a couple of pills to knock out the nerve centres, but Conboy found them under his pillow. He wouldn’t take them, and he wouldn’t make a sound - until he fell asleep, and then he damn near woke up the ship. Conboy must have given him fifty ampoules by now - too much of the stuff. But we can’t have him screaming. He’s punishing himself, Lorch.’