The Rolling Stones (6 page)

“Probably. Almost certainly. But a skipper’s orders as to how he wants his ship gotten ready for space are not subject to change by a dockyard mechanic—which is what you both rate at the moment. Understand me?”

“Okay, so we should have waited. Tomorrow we’ll open her up, you’ll see that we were right and we’ll close it up again.”

“Wrong. Tomorrow you will go out, open it up, and bring the old gaskets back to me. Then you will both stay right here at home until the new gaskets arrive. You can spend the time contemplating the notion that orders are meant to be carried out.”

Castor said, “Now just a minute, Dad! You’ll put us days behind.”

Pollux added, “Not to mention the hours of work you are making us waste already.”

Castor: “You can’t expect us to get the ship ready if you insist on jiggling our elbows!”

Pollux: “And don’t forget the money we’re saving you.”

Castor: “Right! It’s not costing you a square shilling!”

Pollux: “And yet you pull this ‘regulation skipper’ act on us.”

Castor: “Discouraging! That’s what it is!”

“
Pipe down!
” Without waiting for them to comply he stood up and grasped each of them by the scruff of his jacket. Luna’s one-sixth gravity permitted him to straight-arm them both; he held them high up off the floor and wide apart. They struggled helplessly, unable to reach anything.

“Listen to me,” he ordered. “Up to now I hadn’t quite decided whether to let you two wild men go along or not. But now my mind’s made up.”

There was a short silence from the two, then Pollux said mournfully, “You mean we don’t go?”

“I mean you do go. You need a taste of strict ship’s discipline a durn sight more than you need to go to school; these modern schools aren’t tough enough for the likes of you. I mean to run a taut ship—prompt, cheerful obedience, on the bounce! Or I throw the book at you. Understand me? Castor?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Pollux?”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“See that you remember it. Pull a fast-talk like that on me when we’re in space and I’ll stuff you down each other’s throat.” He cracked their heads together smartly and threw them away.

The next day, on the way back from the field with the old gaskets, the twins stopped for a few minutes at the city library. They spent the four days they had to wait boning up on space law. They found it rather sobering reading, particularly the part which asserted that a commanding officer in space, acting independently, may and must maintain his authority against any who might attempt to usurp or dispute it. Some of the cited cases were quite grisly. They read of a freighter captain who, in his capacity as chief magistrate, had caused a mutineer to be shoved out an airlock, there to rupture his lungs in the vacuum of space, drown in his own blood.

Pollux made a face. “Grandpa,” he inquired, “how would you like to be spaced?”

“No future in it. Thin stuff, vacuum. Low vitamin content.”

“Maybe we had better be careful not to irritate Dad. This ‘captain’ pose has gone to his head.”

“It’s no pose. Once we raise ship it’s legal as church on Sunday. But Dad won’t space us, no matter what we do.”

“Don’t count on it. Dad is a very tough hombre when he forgets that he’s a loving father.”

“Junior, you worry too much.”

“So? When you feel the pressure drop remember what I said.”

It had been early agreed that the ship could not stay the
Cherub.
There had been no such agreement on what the new name should be. After several noisy arguments Dr. Stone, who herself had no special preference, suggested that they place a box on the dining table into which proposed names might be placed without debate. For one week the slips accumulated; then the box was opened.

Dr. Stone wrote them down:

“One would think,” Roger grumbled, “that with all the self-declared big brains there are around this table someone would show some originality. Almost every name on the list can be found in the Big Register—half of them for ships still in commission. I move we strike out those tired, second-hand, used-before names and consider only fresh ones.”

Hazel looked at him suspiciously. “What ones will that leave?”

“Well—”

“You’ve looked them up, haven’t you? I thought I caught you sneaking a look at the slips before breakfast.”

“Mother, your allegation is immaterial, irrelevant, and unworthy of you.”

“But true. Okay; let’s have a vote. Or does someone want to make a campaign speech?”

Dr. Stone rapped on the table with her thimble. “We’ll vote. I’ve still got a medical association meeting to get to tonight.” As chairman she ruled that any name receiving less than two votes in the first round would be eliminated. Secret ballot was used; when Meade canvassed the vote, seven names had gotten one vote each, none had received two.

Roger Stone pushed back his chair. “Agreement from this family is too much to expect. I’m going to bed. Tomorrow morning I’m going to register her as the R.S.
Deadlock.
”

“Daddy, you wouldn’t!” Meade protested.

“Just watch me. The R.S.
Hair Shirt
might be better. Or the R.S.
Madhouse.
”

“Not bad,” agreed Hazel. “It sounds like us. Never a dull moment.”

“I, for one,” retorted her son, “could stand a little decent monotony.”

“Rubbish! We thrive on trouble. Do you want to get covered with moss?”

“What’s ‘moss,’ Grandma Hazel?” Lowell demanded.

“Huh? It’s…well, it’s what rolling stones don’t gather.”

Roger snapped his fingers. “Hazel, you’ve just named the ship.”

“Eh? Come again.”

“The
Rolling Stones.
No, the
Rolling Stone.
”

Dr. Stone glanced up. “I like that, Roger.”

“Meade?”

“Sounds good, Daddy.”

“Hazel?”

“This is one of your brighter days, son.”

“Stripped of the implied insult, I take it that means yes.”

“I don’t like it,” objected Pollux. “Castor and I plan to gather quite a bit of moss.”

“It’s four to three, even if you get Buster to go along with you and your accomplice. Overruled. The
Rolling Stone
it is.”

Despite their great sizes and tremendous power spaceships are surprisingly simple machines. Every technology goes through three stages: first, a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom.

In transportation, the ox cart and the rowboat represent the first stage of technology.

The second stage might well be represented by the automobiles of the middle twentieth century just before the opening of interplanetary travel. These unbelievable museum pieces were for their time fast, sleek and powerful—but inside their skins were assembled a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery. The prime mover for such a juggernaut might have rested in one’s lap; the rest of the mad assembly consisted of afterthoughts intended to correct the uncorrectable, to repair the original basic mistake in design—for automobiles and even the early aeroplanes were “powered” (if one may call it that) by “reciprocating engines.”

A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a “water jacket” or “cooling system,” then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.

What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name “reciprocating”) and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.

The prime mover was used only to accelerate and to overcome “friction”—a concept then in much wider engineering use. To decelerate, stop, or turn the heroic human operator used
his own muscle power
, multiplied precariously through a series of levers.

Despite the name “automobile” these vehicles had no autocontrol circuits; control, such as it was, was exercised second by second for hours on end by a human being peering out through a small pane of dirty silica glass, and judging unassisted and often disastrously his own motion and those of other objects. In almost all cases the operator had no notion of the kinetic energy stored in his missile and could not have written the basic equation. Newton’s Laws of Motion were to him mysteries as profound as the meaning of the universe.

Nevertheless millions of these mechanical jokes swarmed over our home planet, dodging each other by inches or failing to dodge. None of them ever worked right; by their nature they could not work right; and they were constantly getting out of order. Their operators were usually mightily pleased when they worked at all. When they did not, which was every few hundred miles (
hundred
, not hundred thousand), they hired a member of a social class of arcane specialists to make inadequate and always expensive temporary repairs.

Despite their mad shortcomings, these “automobiles” were the most characteristic form of wealth and the most cherished possessions of their time. Three whole generations were slaves to them.

The
Rolling Stone
was of the third stage of technology. Her power plant was nearly 100% efficient, and, save for her gyroscopes, she contained almost no moving parts—the power plant used no moving parts at all; a rocket engine is the simplest of all possible heat engines. Castor and Pollux might have found themselves baffled by the legendary Model-T Ford automobile, but the
Rolling Stone
was not nearly that complex, she was merely much larger. Many of the fittings they had to handle were very massive, but the Moon’s one-sixth gravity was an enormous advantage; only occasionally did they have to resort to handling equipment.

Having to wear a vacuum suit while doing mechanic’s work was a handicap but they were not conscious of it. They had worn space suits whenever they were outside the pressurized underground city since before they could remember; they worked in them and wore them without thinking about them, as their grandfather had worn overalls. They conducted the entire overhaul without pressurizing the ship because it was such a nuisance to have to be forever cycling an airlock, dressing and undressing, whenever they wanted anything outside the ship.

An IBM company representative from the city installed the new ballistic computer and ran it in, but after he had gone the boys took it apart and checked it throughout themselves, being darkly suspicious of any up-check given by a manufacturer’s employee. The ballistic computer of a space ship has to be right; without perfect performance from it a ship is a mad robot, certain to crash and kill its passengers. The new computer was of the standard “I-tell-you-three-times” variety, a triple brain each third of which was capable of solving the whole problem; if one triplet failed, the other two would outvote it and cut it off from action, permitting thereby at least one perfect landing and a chance to correct the failure.

The twins made personally sure that the multiple brain was sane in all its three lobes, then, to their disgust, their father and grandmother checked everything that they had done.

The last casting had been x-rayed, the last metallurgical report had been received from the space port laboratories, the last piece of tubing had been reinstalled and pressure tested; it was time to move the
Rolling Stone
from Dan Ekizian’s lot to the port, where a technician of the Atomic Energy Commission—a grease monkey with a Ph.D.—would install and seal the radioactive bricks which fired her “boiler.” There, too, she would take on supplies and reactive mass, stabilized monatomic hydrogen; in a pinch the
Rolling Stone
could eat anything, but she performed best on “single-H.”

The night before the ship was to be towed to the space port the twins tackled their father on a subject dear to their hearts—money. Castor made an indirect approach. “See here, Dad, we want to talk with you seriously.”

“So? Wait till I phone my lawyer.”

“Aw, Dad! Look, we just want to know whether or not you’ve made up your mind where we are going?”

“Eh? What do you care? I’ve already promised you that it will be some place new to you. We won’t go to Earth, nor to Venus, not this trip.”

“Yes, but
where
?”

“I may just close my eyes, set up a prob on the computer by touch, and see what happens. If the prediction takes us close to any rock bigger than the ship, we’ll scoot off and have a look at it. That’s the way to enjoy traveling.”

Pollux said, “But, Dad, you can’t load a ship if you don’t know where it’s going.”

Castor glared at him; Roger Stone stared at him. “Oh,” he said slowly, “I begin to see. But don’t worry about it. As skipper, it is my responsibility to see that we have whatever we need aboard before we blast.”

Dr. Stone said quietly, “Don’t tease them, Roger.”

“I’m not teasing.”

“You’re managing to tease me, Daddy,” Meade said suddenly. “Let’s settle it. I vote for Mars.”