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Chapter 12

So there we were, bowling along under full sail, running the easting down. In some ways the Erikson drive was a vast improvement over the Mannschenn drive. There was not that continuous high whine of the ever-precessing gyroscopes, there was not that uneasy feeling of déjà vu that is a side effect of the Mannschenn drive's temporal precession field. Too, we could look out of the control room and see a reasonable picture of the Universe as it is and not, in the case of the Galactic lens, something like a Klein bottle fabricated by a drunken glass blower.

Flying Cloud was an easy ship, once the course had been set, once she was running free before the photon gale. She was an easy ship—as a ship, as an assemblage of steel and plastic and fissioning uranium. But a ship is more than the metals and chemicals that have gone into her construction. In the final analysis it is the crew that make the ship—and Flying Cloud was not happy.

It was the strong element of sexual jealousy that was the trouble. I did my best to keep my own yardarm clear, but I could observe—and feel jealous myself. It was obvious that Sandra was captain's lady. It was obvious, too, that both Martha Wayne and Peggy Simmons had aspired to that position and that both were jealous. And Doc Jenkins couldn't hide the fact, for all his cynicism, that he would have welcomed a roll in the hay with Martha. The only one who was really amused by it all was Smethwick. He drifted into the Control Room during my watch and said, "Ours is a happy ship, ours is."

"Are you snooping?" I demanded sharply. "If you are, Claude, I'll see to it, personally, that you're booted out of the service."

He looked hurt. "No, I'm not snooping. Apart from the regulations, it's a thing I wouldn't dream of doing. But even you must be sensitive to the atmosphere, and you're not a telepath."

"Yes," I agreed. "I am sensitive." I offered him a cigarette, took and lit one myself. "But what's new? Anything?"

"The flap seems to have died down on Lorn," he told me. "We're a fait accompli. Old Grimes got Livitski—he's the new Port Forlorn Psionic Radio Officer—to push a message through to wish us well and to tell us that he has everything under control at his end."

"Have you informed the master?" I asked.

"He's in his quarters." he said. "I don't think that he wants to be disturbed."

"Like that," I said.

"Like that," he said.

"Oh," I said.

We sat in silence—there was still enough acceleration to enable us to do so without using seat belts—smoking. I looked out of the transparency at the blackness, towards the faint, far spark that was the Grollor sun. Claude looked at nothing. I heard the sound of feet on the control room deck, turned and saw that the faint noise had been made by Peggy Simmons. She said, "I'm sorry. I . . . I thought that you were alone, Peter . . ."

"Don't let me interfere with love's young dream," grinned Smethwick, getting to his feet.

"You've a dirty mind!" flared the girl.

"If it is dirty," he told her nastily, "it's from the overflow from other people's minds. But I'll go away and leave you to it."

"I'm on watch," I said virtuously. "And, in any case, Peggy has probably come here to report some mechanical malfunction. Or something."

"Yes," she said.

She dropped into the chair that had been vacated by the telepath, accepted a cigarette from my pack. I waited until Claude was gone and then asked, "What's the trouble, Peggy?"

"Nothing," she said. "Nothing mechanical, that is. Although I should check some of the wiring where the shell splinters pierced the inner sheathing."

"Then why don't you?" I asked.

"Because," she told me, "for the first few days in space one has more important things to worry about. There's the file, and the auxiliary machinery, and . . ."

"Surely the wiring is part of the auxiliary machinery," I pointed out.

"Not this wiring. It's the power supply to the trimming and reefing gear—and we won't be using that for a while, not until we make landfall."

"Planetfall," I corrected.

"Ralph says landfall," she told me.

"He would," I said. "He must have brought at least a couple of trunks full of books about windjammers—fact, fiction and poetry—away with him. Mind you, some of it is good." I quoted:

 
"I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her by . . ."

I gestured widely towards the Grollor sun, the distant spark that, thanks to the Doppler effect, was shining with a steely glitter instead of its normal ruddiness. I said, "There's his star to steer by." I thumped the arm of my chair. "And here's his tall ship."

"And so he has everything he wants," she said.

"Everything." I decided to be blunt. "He's got his tall ship, and he's got his star to steer by, and he's got his woman."

"But," she said, "I could give him so much more."

"Peggy," I admonished, "don't kid yourself. You're attractive, and you're capable—but Sandra is rather more than attractive. And she's a good cook. Take my advice: just forget any school-girlish ideas you may have of becoming the captain's lady. Make this voyage—after all, you've no option now—and then get the hell out . . ."

"And marry and raise a family," she concluded. "But I don't want to, Peter. I don't want to. I don't want to be the wife of some grubby little clerk or mechanic and spend all my remaining days on Lorn."

"All right," I said, "if that's the way you feel about it. But this is an order, Peggy. Lay off Ralph. We're probably in enough trouble already without having triangles added to our worries."

She took a cigarette from my pack, lit it and put it to her mouth. She stared at the eddying wisps of smoke. She said, "That poetry you quoted. Tall ships and stars. That's what Ralph really wants, isn't it?"

"Tall ships and stars and the trimmings," I said.

"Never mind the trimmings," she told me. "And when it comes to trimmings, I can out-trim Sandra."

"Peggy," I said, "you can't. You're not . . . experienced."

Her face lit up briefly with a flash of humor. "And whose fault is that?" she asked. Then, soberly, "But I can give him real trimmings. Any woman can sprawl in bed, arms and legs wide open—but I'm the woman who can make Ralph, and his ship, go down in history."

"Judging by the flap when we shoved off," I said, "they already have."

She said, "Correct me if I'm wrong—but the Erikson drive, as it stands, will never be a commercial success. It takes far too long for a cargo, even a non-perishable cargo for which there's no mad rush, to be carted from point A to point B. And there's the problem of manning, too. As far as this ship was concerned, Uncle Andy was able to assemble a bunch of misfits with no close ties for the job, people who wouldn't give a damn if the round voyage lasted a couple of objective centuries. But it mightn't be so easy to find another crew for another lightjammer. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said, after a pause.

She went on, "I'm new to space, but I've read plenty. I'm no physicist, but I have a rough idea of the modus operandi of the various interstellar drives. And, so far, there's been no faster-than-light drive."

"What!" I exclaimed.

"No, there hasn't. I'm right, Peter. The basic idea of the Ehrenhaft drive was that of a magnetic particle trying to be in two places at the same time in a magnetic field or current, the ship being the particle. But, as far as I can gather, space was warped so that she could do just that. I couldn't follow the math, but I got the general drift of it. And then, of course, there's the Mannschenn drive—but there the apparent FTL speeds are achieved by tinkering with time."

"Hmm," I grunted. "Hmm."

"Getting away from machinery," she said, "and back to personalities, Ralph loves his ship. I'm sure that if he had to make a choice between Sandra and Flying Cloud it wouldn't be Flying Cloud left in the lurch. But . . . but what do you think he'd feel about a woman who made him the captain of the first real FTL starwagon?"

I said, "You'd better see Doc on your way aft. He stocks quite a good line in sedative mixtures."

She said, "You're laughing at me."

"I'm not," I assured her. "But, Peggy, even I, and I'm no physicist, can tell you that's it quite impossible to exceed the speed of light. As you have already pointed out, we can cheat, but that's all. And in this ship we can't even cheat. We can no more outrun light than a windjammer could outrun the wind that was her motive power." I pointed to a dial on the panel before me. "That's our log. It works by Doppler effect. At the moment our speed is Lume 0.345 and a few odd decimals. It's building up all the time, and fast. By the end of the watch it should be about Lume 0.6 . . ."

She said, "A fantastic acceleration."

"Isn't it? By rights we should be spread over the deck plates like strawberry jam. But, thanks to the antigravity, this is almost an inertialess drive. Anyhow, thanks to our utterly weightless condition, we may achieve Lume 0.9 recurring. But that's as high as we can possibly get."

"I see," she said doubtfully. Then she added, "But . . ." She shrugged and said, "Oh, never mind."

She got up to leave.

"Thanks for dropping in." I said.

"And thanks for the fatherly advice," she said.

"Think nothing of it," I told her generously.

"I shan't," she said, with what I belatedly realized was deliberate ambiguity.

And then she was gone.

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Framed