Farmer in the Sky (8 page)

“A mass-conversion ship has plenty of power to do just that. At one hundred per cent efficiency, it would use up about one per cent of her mass as energy and another one per cent as reaction mass. That's what the
Star Rover
is going to do when it is finished.”

One of the younger kids was waving his hand. “Mister Chief Engineer?”

“Yes, son?”

“Suppose it goes on a few weeks longer and
passes
the speed of light?”

Mr. Ortega shook his head. “It can't.”

“Why not, sir?”

“Eh, how far have you gone in mathematics, sonny?”

“Just through grammer school calculus,” the kid answered.

'Tm afraid there is no use in trying to explain it, then. Just take it from me that the big brains are sure it can't be done.”

I had worried about that very point more than once. Why
can't
you go faster than light? I know all that old double-talk about how the Einstein equations show that a speed faster than light is a meaningless quantity, like the weight of a song or the color of a sound, because it involves the square root of minus one—but all of that is just theory and if the course we had in history of science means anything at all, it means that scientists change their theories about as often as a snake changes his skin. I stuck up my hand.

“Okay,” he says. “You with the cowlick. Speak up.”

“Mr. Ortega, admitting that you can't pass the speed of light, what would happen if the
Star Rover
got up close to the speed of light—and then the Captain suddenly stepped the drive up to about six g and held it there?”

“Why, it would— No, let's put it this way—” He broke off and grinned; it made him look real young. “See here, kid, don't ask me questions like that. I'm an engineer with hairy ears, not a mathematical physicist.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Truthfully, I don't know what would happen, but I would sure give a pretty to find out. Maybe we would find out what the square root of minus one looks like— from the inside.”

He went on briskly, “Let's go on about the
Mayflower.
You probably know that when the original
Star Rover
failed to come back, the
Mayflower
was designed to be the
Star Rover II,
but the design was obsolete before they ever started putting her together. So they shifted the name over to the new intersteller ship, the
Star Rover III,
renamed this one the
Mayflower
and grabbed her for the colonial service.

“You kids should consider how lucky you are. Up to now, emigrants to Ganymede have had to spend two years and nine months in space, just to get there. You're making it in two months.”

“Couldn't we go faster?” somebody wanted to know.

“We could,” he told us. “But we don't need to and it runs up the astrogation and control difficulties. In these new ships the power plant has gotten 'way ahead of the instrumentation. Be patient; your grandchildren will make the trip in a week, blasting at one g all the way. There'll be so many ships they'll have to have traffic cops and maybe we can come close to shipping out as many people as there are extras bom each year.

“Enough about that,” he went on. “Who here can tell me what 'E equals M C squared' means?”

I could have answered but I had already spoken up once and it doesn't do to get a reputation for apple polishing. Finally one of the older kids said, “It means that mass can be converted into energy.”

“Right!” Mr. Ortega agreed. “The first real demonstration of that was the atom bomb they set off 'way back in 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. That was a special case; they still didn't know how to control it; all they could do was to make one whale of a big bang. Then came the uranium power plants, but that still didn't amount to much because it was a very special case and only a microscopic percentage of the mass was converted into energy. It wasn't until Kilgore's energy transformation equations—don't worry about them; you'll study them when you are older if you are interested—it wasn't until Kilgore showed how it could be done that we had any idea of
how
to do what Dr. Einstein's energy-mass equation said, clear back in 1905.

“And we still didn't know how to control it. If we were going to turn mass into energy, we needed more mass with which to surround the reaction, a very special sort of mass that would not turn into energy when we didn't want it to and would hold the reaction where we wanted it. Ordinary metal wouldn't do; one might as well use soft butter.

“But the Kilgore equations showed how to do that, too, when they were read correctly. Now has anyone here any notion of how much energy you get when you convert a chunk of mass into raw energy?”

Nobody knew. “It's all in that one equation,” he said, “good old Doc Einstein's 'E equals M C squared.' It comes out that one gram of mass gives nine times ten to the twentieth power ergs.” He wrote it down for us: 1 gm. = 9 x l0
²⁰
ergs.

“Doesn't look like much, does it?” he said. “Now try it this way:” He wrote down

900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.

“Read it off. Nine hundred thousand million billion ergs. It still doesn't mean much, does it? Figures like that are impossible to comprehend. The nuclear physicists keep a barrel of zeroes around handy the way a carpenter does a keg of nails.

“I’ll try once more,” he went on. “A pound of mass, any old mass, say a pound of feathers, when converted into energy equals
fifteen billion
horsepower-hours. Does that give anyone a notion of why the
Mayflower
was assembled out in an orbit and will never ever land anywhere?”

“Too hot,” somebody said.

“'Too hot' is an understatement. If the
Mayftower
had blasted off from Mojave space port the whole Los Angeles Borough of the City of Southern California would have been reduced to a puddle of lava and people would have been killed by radiation and heat from Bay City to Baja California. And that will give you an idea of why the shielding runs right through the ship between here and the power plant, with no way at all to get at the torch.”

We had the misfortune to have Noisy Edwards along, simply because he was from the same bunk room. Now he spoke up and said, “Suppose you have to make a repair?”

“There is nothing to go wrong,” explained Mr. Ortega. “The power plant has no moving parts of any sort”

Noisy wasn't satisfied. “But suppose something did go wrong, how would you fix it if you can't get at it?”

Noisy has an irritating manner at best; Mr. Ortega sounded a little impatient when he answered. “Believe me, son, even if you could get at it, you wouldn't want to. No indeed!”

“Humph!” said Noisy. “All I've got to say is, if there isn't any way to make a repair when a repair is needed, what's the use in sending engineer officers along?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Mr. Ortega turned red, but all he said was, “Why, to answer foolish questions from youngsters like yourself, I suppose.” He turned to the rest of us. “Any more questions?”

Naturally nobody wanted to ask any then. He added, “I think that's enough for one session. School's out.”

I told Dad about it later. He looked grim and said, “I'm afraid Chief Engineer Ortega didn't tell you the whole truth.”

“Huh?”

“In the first place there is plenty for him to do in taking care of the
auxiliary machinery on this side of the shield. But it is possible to get at the torch, if necessary.”

“Huh? How?”

“There are certain adjustments which could conceivably have to be made in extreme emergency. In which case it would be Mr. Ortega's proud privilege to climb into a space suit, go outside and back aft, and make them.”

“You mean——”

“I
mean that the assistant chief engineer would succeed to the position of chief a few minutes later. Chief engineers are very carefully chosen, Bill, and not just for their technical knowledge.”

It made me feel chilly inside; I didn't like to think about it.

Making a trip in a space ship is about the dullest way to spend time in the world, once the excitement wears off. There's no scenery, nothing to do, and no room to do it in. There were nearly six thousand of us crowded into the Mayflower and that doesn't leave room to swing a cat.

Take “B” deck—there were two thousand passengers sleeping in it. It was 150 feet across—fore and aft, mat is—and not quite 500 feet around, cylinder fashion. That gives about forty square feet per passenger, on the average, but a lot was soaked up in stairs, passageways, walls, and such. It worked out that each one had about room enough for his bunk and about that much left over to stand on when he wasn't sleeping.

You can't give a rodeo in that kind of space; you can't even get up a game of ring-around-the-rosy.

“A” deck was larger and “C” deck was smaller, being nearer the axis, but they averaged out the same. The council set up a staggered system to get the best use out of the galley and the mess rooms and to keep us from falling over each other in the 'freshers. “A” deck was on Greenwich time; “B” deck was left on zone plus-eight time, or Pacific West Coast time; and “C” deck drew zone minus-eight time, Philippine time.

That would have put us on different days, of course, but the day was always figured officially on Greenwich time; the dodge was just to ease the pressure on eating facilities.

That was really all we had to worry about. You would wake up early, not tired but bored, and wait for breakfast Once breakfast was over, the idea was to kill time until lunch. All afternoon you could look forward to the terrific excitement of having dinner.

I have to admit that making us go to school was a good plan; it meant that two and a half hours every morning and every afternoon was taken care of. Some of the grown ups complained that the mess rooms and all the spare space was always crowded with classes, but what did they expect us to do? Go hang on sky hooks? We used up less space in class than if we had been under foot.

Still, it was a mighty odd sort of school. There were some study machines in the cargo but we couldn't get at them and there wouldn't have been enough to go around. Each class consisted of about two dozen kids and some adult who knew something about something. (You'd be surprised how many adults don't know anything about anything!) The grown up would talk about what he knew best and the kids would listen, then we would ask questions and he would ask questions. No real examinations, no experiments, no demonstrations, no stereos.

Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.

Things got so dull that it was hardly worth while to keep up my diary, even if I had been able to get microfilm, which I wasn't.

Dad and I played an occasional game of cribbage in the evening—somehow Dad had managed to squeeze the board and a pack of cards into his weight allowance. Then he got too busy with technical planning he was doing for the council and didn't have time. Molly suggested that I teach her to play, so I did.

After that I taught Peggy to play and she pegged a pretty sharp game, for a girl. It worried me a little that I wasn't being loyal to Anne in getting chummy with Peg and her mother, but I decided that Anne would want me to do just what I did. Anne was always friendly with everybody.

It still left me with time on my hands. What with only one-third gravity and no exercise I couldn't sleep more than six hours a night. The lights were out eight hours but they didn't make us go to bed, not after the trouble they had with it the first week. I used to fool around the corridors after lights out, usually with Hank Jones, until we both would get sleepy. We talked a lot. Hank turned out not to be such a bad guy as long as you kept him trimmed down to size.

I still had my Scout suit with me and kept it folded up in my bunk. Hank came in one morning while I was making up my bunk and noticed it. “See here, William,” he said, “why do you hang on to that? Let the dead past bury its dead.”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “Maybe there will be Scouting on Ganymede.”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Why not? There is Scouting on the Moon.”

“Proves nothing,” he answered.

But it got us to talking about it and Hank got a brilliant idea. Why not start up Scouting right now, in the
Mayflower?

We called a meeting. Peggy spread the word around for us, through the junior council, and we set it for fifteen-thirty that same afternoon, right after school. Fifteen-thirty Greenwich, or “A” deck time, that is. That made it seven-thirty in the morning for the “B” deck boys and a half hour before midnight for the fellows on “C” deck. It was the best we could do. “B” deck could hurry through breakfast and get to the meeting if they wanted to and we figured that those who were really interested from “C” would stay up for the meeting.

I played my accordion while they were drifting in because Hank's father said that you needed music to warm up a meeting before it got down to work. The call had read “all Scouts and former Scouts;” by fifteen-forty we had them packed in and spilling into the corridors, even though we had the use of the biggest mess room. Hank called them to order and I put away my accordion and acted as Scribe
pro tem,
having borrowed a wire recorder from the Communications Officer for the purpose.

Hank made a little speech. I figure him for politics when he grows up. He said that all of us had enjoyed the benefits, the comradeship, and the honorable traditions of Scouting on Earth and it seemed a shame to lose them. He said that the Scouting tradition was the tradition of the explorer and pioneer and there could be no more fitting place and time for it than in the settlement of a new planet In fact the spirit of Daniel Boone demanded that we continue as Scouts.

I didn't know he had it in him. It sounded good.

He stopped and slipped me the wink. I got up and said that I wanted to propose a resolution. Then I read it—it had been a lot longer but we cut it down. It read: “Be it resolved—we the undersigned, Scouts and former Scouts of many jurisdictions and now passengers in the good ship
Mayflower,
having as our purpose to continue the Scouting tradition and to extend the Scouting trail out to the stars, do organize ourselves as the Boy Scouts of Ganymede in accordance with the principles and purpose of Scouting and in so doing do reaffirm the Scout Law.”