Back | Next
Contents

Chapter Six

LET me ask you, Brother Kopal." They had reached another part of the ship that Jeff had never seen, a long descending corridor running right around the circumference of the inner hull as it spiraled aft. Russo had not come with them, and the helical tunnel was not much wider than Mercy Hooglich. As she led the way she spoke to Jeff over her shoulder. "Back on Earth, you got servants, right? Cook, cleaner, valet, butler, an' all."

"Yes." Was she criticizing him? He had no say in who worked at Kopal Manor, the servants were just there. Anyway, he didn't feel that they really worked for him. He was always uncomfortable when he had to ask anyone to do anything.

"So where they live, Brother Kopal?"

"In the house, like the rest of us."

"An' which part of house?"

"Downstairs. In the basement levels."

"So. It same here. Same in all navy. Jinners—us—us live down on lower levels, near the engines."

"But why? You seem to run the whole ship."

"Why you think?" She turned her head. "Wouldn't wan' people, would yer, like me an' ol' Russo—dirty people from Pool—rubbin' 'gainst them cap'ns 'n' admirals."

She was confirming what Jeff already suspected. She was from the Pool, Earth's great mass of unemployed and unemployables. Her speech was unlike that of the few Pool people he had met, but it was even less like anyone's in the Kopal and Lazenby circle of acquaintance. How had someone from the uneducated Pool made it into the prestigious Space Navy?

That was something to ponder over as they moved into a new section of the ship, where the broad midsection curved from its maximum width and began to narrow toward the rear. Jeff had examined the Aurora profile when he approached to board. It had the form of a swollen fish, enormously bloated in the middle to a near sphere. On the top, secured to the hull, was the little pinnace that could serve either as a space runabout or an emergency lifeboat. At the bow, where Captain Dufferin had his control room, the ship narrowed to a thin spike twenty meters long. The transparent bubble of an observation nacelle sat out at the very end, accessible only through the narrowest of crawlways. Jeff or Russo might wriggle out along it, Hooglich never. Aft—where they were heading—lay the engine room, and beyond that the fluted tail fins of the Diabelli fusion drive.

Jeff knew a good deal about the Omnivore engines of the drive. But he had never actually seen them. He had the shakes at the prospect—not the unpleasant tremor that accompanied family events, but something curiously pleasurable.

"And here we are, Brother Kopal." They had reached a little control panel beside a circular plate in the floor. Hooglich tapped in a four-digit sequence. "Now we hafta wait. Take a few seconds to cycle."

The plate began steadily turning around its center.

"How did you know my name was Kopal?" Jeff asked. "I mean, you knew it before anybody said it."

She laughed, a full-throated guffaw that set her whole body jiggling. "Through the Vine—the grapevine, that is. The navy's the worst place in the universe to keep a secret. You find gossip tagged onto the end of almost every official communication. Before you came here there was talk for days. A Kopal and a Lazenby were joining the navy less than a week apart. The Lazenby goes to Central Command, no surprise there—but the Kopal ships out on a BorCom dumpship like the Aurora, with a captain who's known to resent all Kopals because he's not one. That makes no sense. No one seems to know what's going on—and that includes me."

She stared at him expectantly. Jeff stared right back at her. He knew exactly why he was on the Aurora rather than in Central Command, but he didn't want to talk about it. Instead, he said, "What happened? Your speech is different. I can understand you easily now, and I couldn't before."

She gave him a grin, with more and whiter teeth than a human head should hold. "Well, I guess you jus' be gettin' smarter. Or mebbe you think it 'cause we way aft, none of yer hi-ups officer comes this way. Wouldn't do, eh, 'f us dumb folk from the Pool start talkin' the top-chat line, like ol' Cap'n Duf'rin. Bes' talk like this-aways, see, makes navy peoples feel good."

"Now you're faking it again. But you were willing to talk normally to me just now. How do you know I won't go and tell the captain that you can talk perfectly standard navy talk when you choose?"

"Maybe you'll do that. Be my guest, tell him anything you like. Do you think that would be a good idea, though?"

It took less than a second to decide. "No, it wouldn't."

"Quite right. For one thing, Captain Dufferin probably wouldn't believe you. And if somehow you did manage to persuade him—it wouldn't be easy, he has a head like Stedman plate—he'd hate you for bringing him bad news. It's the old story: Shoot the messenger."

"If you're willing to talk to me, why did you make such a big deal at the beginning of my being a Kopal?"

"Because you are one. Because it is a big deal. Anything involving a Kopal makes waves through the whole Space Navy. That's simple fact. Lazenbys are important, too, but Kopals are it. That's not the only data point, though. You see, I put a lot of faith in my instincts. I also trust Russo's big sniffer. After we took a good first look at you and saw you staring at the control panel, Russo gave me a wink and whispered 'Jinner!' I agree. You're a Kopal, no doubt about that; but you're a jinner, too, if ever I saw one. That's one strange combination. Did you ever take machines apart?"

Jeff nodded. He began to describe his work to restore the old aircar in the barn—"Manuals are for sissies," Hooglich said at one point—but he couldn't take his eyes off the circular plate. It was turning, slowly, slowly. At last it stopped and began to rise clear of the floor without any visible support. His voice faded.

Mercy Hooglich moved forward. "Come on. I can see we'll get no sense out of you 'til after this." She led the way down a turning staircase beneath the plate, remarking as she went, "There's an elevator, pretty useful if you're climbing up forward and the drive's on high setting. But we're only at one-sixth G, and you'll see more this way."

Jeff followed her and found himself in a tall cylindrical chamber about ten meters high. Ladders ran around the walls, and a walkway—vertical, now that the drive was on—ran along the middle of the room. Set in a hexagonal pattern between the walkway and external wall were half a dozen innocent-looking blue cylinders, each one about four meters long and no more than a meter across.

"Is it all right if I—" Jeff paused, his hand reached out halfway to one.

Hooglich nodded. "Go right ahead. Touch if you want. But you won't feel anything."

Jeff placed his fingertips on the side of one of the pale blue tubes. The surface was cool to the touch, and he felt—or imagined—a slight vibration there. It was hard to believe, but under his hand sat the burning heart of a Diabelli Omnivore. The drive was on, and the fusion reactions must be taking place within a few inches of his fingers.

"Hydrogen fusion at the moment," Hooglich said. The fat woman was observing Jeff closely. Most people in the Diabelli chamber were blue-funk nervous, even if they tried to hide it. They knew they were within feet of temperatures as hot as the inside of a star. This visitor appeared enthralled. "Hydrogen is easy to find, most places you go. But if we don't have hydrogen we can live off the land. The Omnivores use anything lighter than iron as fusion fuel." She patted the bulbous cylinder affectionately. "Nothing heavier than iron, though. You see, Brother—"

"I know. Iron is where the binding energy per nucleon reaches a maximum. If you fuse anything heavier than iron, it takes energy instead of giving it."

"Hmm." She stood staring at him, her head cocked to one side. "Where'd you pick that up? Not in navy training, that's for sure."

"I've had free access to query links as long as I remember."

"Maybe you have. But most people don't access science stuff, even when it's available. Anyway, the Omnivores can operate in five different modes, depending on what's available." She tapped a point near the top end of the cylinder. "Fusion takes place right here, inside this section. Sometime when the drive is off, if you like I'll pull an Omnivore head and let you see what it's like inside. Interested?"

"Sure!"

"I thought you'd say that. And here, see"—she was descending farther, to a ring of complicated displays and switches—"we have the indicators and controls. The drive can be turned on and off here, by individual Omnivore units if we want to."

"But I thought the control room for the drive was up front, on the bridge with Captain Dufferin. In fact, I saw it there."

"I'm sure you did. But commands given there all come here prior to execution. They can be overridden from here, too. Of course, that would only be done in an emergency."

"What sort of emergency?"

"That's a good question." She pursed her lips. "I don't know—until it happens. Let's put it this way: Do you feel comfortable knowing that Squeaky Dufferin is making the decisions for all of us? He has the worst reputation in the whole fleet, you know—and that includes officers in CenCom, Sol-Com, and BorCom. He can't make up his mind, can't fly a ship, and can't keep control of himself. Why they put him in charge of a tricky assignment like this, I'll never know."

"If he's so bad, why do you ship with him?"

"You think people like me and Russo have much choice? We're not like you, a Kopal, with the whole universe open. We take what we can get, and feel lucky to have it. Squeaky's the worst, but there's others nearly as bad."

"But how did you get out of the Pool? I mean, Pool people, they're—"

Jeff stopped. He had been going to say what all his family stated as self-evident truth, that Pool people were ignorant and lazy and uneducated.

"Pool people what?" Hooglich scowled. "Stupid?"

"Well . . . ."

"If you were going to say that, you'd mostly be right. The Pool's no different from anyplace else—full of dummies. But the people who run the Space Navy understand what a population bell curve is. Do you. Brother Kopal?"

She said it like a challenge. Jeff knew the answer, but he wasn't sure he could state it clearly. "It means that in a big population, you'll have lots and lots of people who are about average. Say, of average height. But if the population follows a bell curve, you'll always get a few people who are really tall or really short."

"Good enough. And a normal distribution—that's the fancy name for a bell curve—also applies to smarts. Did you know that most navy jinners come from the Pool? But you should see the tests we had to take. We struggled every step, eighteen hours a day; the tests got harder and harder and harder. You, you're a Kopal. You waltzed through, roses all the way, an' everyone applauding."

If only she knew! It was a relief when she went on, "But enough of Pool and people talk. What do you think of the drive?"

More than enough people talk. She had no idea by how narrow a margin he had scraped into the navy, or how his cousins, uncles, and aunts felt about him.

He forced his mind away from that dead-end subject. What did he think of the drive, and the whole power and control system of the Aurora?

"It's—it's—" He couldn't find a suitable word. Colossal? Sensational? Awe-inspiring?

"It's great," he finished weakly.

"When you first see it, you think that." There was a gloomier note in Mercy Hooglich's voice. "But then you look at the whole fleet, and you realize that there's been little change in the design of the Omnivores for over half a century. Oh, they're more compact and a bit more powerful. And now we have the catalyzed drive, too—you know what that is?"

Jeff didn't, but he was willing to try a guess. "Something to make the fusion reaction take place at a lower temperature? Like the catalysts you get in chemical reactions."

"You'll make a real jinner yet. When I first came into the navy, used to be that heavy element reactions wouldn't start in until the Omnivore internal temperature hit a billion degrees. Billion and a half, for fusing oxygen to silicon and iron. Now, nothing in there goes above ten million."

Jeff tried to visualize ten million degrees. He failed.

"Catalyzed fusion is nice to have," she went on. "But it hasn't made a fundamental change to space travel, the way the nodes changed it. Free-fall and high-G travel is just as uncomfortable now as it was when people first went to space. What we need is—" She stopped dead, and her face lost all its expression. "Oh my sainted Santa. The Anadem field, and the Messina Dust Cloud. I wonder. Could it be that?"

"What?"

"Nothing worth talking about." But Hooglich had been transformed from a focused and enthusiastic explainer of the Aurora's engines and control systems to a woman whose mind was clearly far away.

"Nothin' for talking about," she repeated. "Not yet, at leas'. Come on. I gotta fin' Russo 'n' talk. Mebbe he know."

It was as though her speech, ahead of her body, was already moving toward Aurora's forward section. As they approached amidships, she turned her attention for a moment back to Jeff.

"Never did tell me one thing, did you? An' I ask it right out, I 'member. So again: How come you on the Aurora?"

This time there was no escaping. Jeff started to tell the whole sorry story, about the Kopal and Lazenby families, and how Myron and Myra fitted the model for bravery and competence, while he didn't. He was getting to the final disastrous riding event when she interrupted.

"Uncle Giles—that be Giles Lazenby?"

"That's right. He's my uncle, my father's cousin."

"Not your uncle, then. Second cousin."

"I know. But I've always called him uncle."

"You close to him?"

Jeff hesitated. He saw a good deal of his uncle, but emotionally he felt as far away as you could get. He never had any idea what Uncle Giles was thinking.

Hooglich read his face and cut in before he could answer. "Let me tell you somethin' 'bout Uncle Giles." Her Pool speech style disappeared again as she went on, "Everybody in the Space Navy knows of Giles Lazenby. He was never an admiral, and he's not a Kopal—though maybe he'd like to be—but he pulls terrific weight. When he was in the service, he was the head of security forces. That's a mighty powerful position. Word has it he kept—and still keeps—the dirt on everybody in the navy. They're afraid of him. What he wants, he gets. Is there any reason why he might want you in BorCom?"

"I can't think of one. Maybe to get me out of the way, so his own son, Myron, can shine?"

Mercy Hooglich shook her frazzle-mop head. "That bird won't fly. If he wants his Myron to look good, and you always do worse than Myron, Giles Lazenby would make sure you two stayed together so people could make comparisons."

"Then I don't know. Maybe Uncle Giles had nothing to do with my assignment here." But Jeff felt convinced that that was not true. He had been pretty much out of it on the night of the riding meet, but he did remember one thing: Uncle Giles in the conference room, saying, "We are proposing, and they will approve, assignment to Border Command." It seemed an odd way to put it. Surely, the navy proposed, not civilians—not even influential retired officers.

"Let it set." Hooglich waved one brawny arm, dismissing the subject and Jeff in one sweep. "We fin' out sometime. You git on forrard. I gotta gabble Russo."

He spiraled on higher in the ship, up the long narrow corridor that would take him to his own cabin. Since he had not been offered a single assignment, or a suggestion of one, after his arrival on the Aurora, he had no thought that his absence might be missed. It was a shock to enter his cabin and see a message blinking urgently on his communications panel: Report at once to the bridge.

He still had no thought of trouble as he headed forward, to where Captain Dufferin was pacing his raised dais in the middle of the control room. The captain halted as Jeff entered, and advanced to the edge of the platform so that he was high enough to peer down on his visitor.

"Ensign Kopal. What have you been doing?"

"Looking around the ship, sir. I thought I ought to know as much about it as possible, and there were parts I hadn't seen. Engineer Hooglich took me aft and showed me the engine room and drive."

"She invited you to see them?"

Jeff sensed some kind of trap, though not perhaps for him. "No, sir. I asked her to show me."

"I see." Captain Dufferin went back to pacing the raised dais, his hands clasped behind his back. "You realize, do you, that I could charge you with a failure to discharge your duties?"

His duties? He didn't know he had any duties. That was clearly the wrong thing to say. "I'm sorry, sir. I thought that I was off duty after the general meeting ended."

"An officer on my ship, Ensign, is never off duty. Even a junior officer such as yourself. Also"—the captain swung to face Jeff—"it is not appropriate that an officer socialize with the engineers. They are of a different social class. I am astonished that I need to remind you, above all, of that fact. You are, are you not, a Kopal?"

Dufferin spat out the last word.

"Yes, sir."

"Then behave accordingly."

"Yes, sir." Jeff stood at attention. The captain seemed to have lost interest. He wandered over to stare at the controls, and then up through the hemispherical bubble above the bridge.

At last Jeff cleared his throat. Dufferin swung around. "Yes, what is it?"

"I didn't know if I had been dismissed, sir."

"You have not." Dufferin gestured upward. "Since you have this burning desire to explore parts of the Aurora unknown to you, I will allow you to indulge that curiosity to the full. Proceed at once to the observation nacelle and familiarize yourself with its functions."

"Yes, sir. Should I then return here?"

"No." Dufferin again turned his back on Jeff. "We will soon be approaching the region of the Lizard Reef. You will remain in the observation nacelle and cool your heels, at least until such time as the reef has been passed."

"Yes, sir. Should I make observations?"

"That is entirely up to you. We will be at our point of closest approach to the reef in approximately seven hours. Do you have questions?"

Yes. Why are you doing this to me? "No sir."

"Then proceed. I will inform you as to when you may return. Until then, I do not want to see you or hear from you under any circumstances."

Back | Next
Framed