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Chapter Eight

With 130 people packed into quarters that would have been cramped for half that number it was inevitable that the passengers would get on each other's nerves. Kevin was surprised at just how few fights developed. There were plenty of quarrels and screaming matches, but not many blows. The worst part of it was the almost complete lack of privacy aboard Wayfarer.

For the first weeks this was no great problem for Kevin: there was too much to do. He had tapes to study, Norsedal's war-games, extravehicular activity practice under supervision of the crew, maintenance duties and other ship's work that was rotated among the passengers—and just plain getting used to living in zero-gravity.

He spent hours playing with liquids: squirt a dollop of colored water from a syringe, and it immediately became a sphere like a miniature planet. Inject an air bubble into it with a syringe and it assumed a new shape. Blow on it gently to get it rotating and it became a donut of water hanging in space.

There were rivers of stars to see outside any viewport. He had to learn the constellations all over again; there were just too many stars to let him recognize the old familiar patterns as seen from Earth, so many stars that in a darkened room you could almost read by starlight. But during EVA practice, perched above the ship's telescope tower with nothing ahead or above, he felt as if he were suspended motionless in space, a part of the universe. Kevin was always sad when his time was up and another passenger took his place. He eagerly looked forward to his practice sessions outside the ship, and wondered whether, when he reached the Belt and he would be outside for many hours at a time, he would ever get used to the wonder and grandeur of space. He hoped he would not.

As weeks went by, though, he found the lack of privacy becoming more irritating. There were 30 women among the 120 passengers aboard Wayfarer. Half of those were married and most of the remainder had formed quasi-permanent attachments. None of this bothered Kevin, since Ellen MacMillan remained at large and seemed to enjoy his company; but he could never be alone with her, and that was annoying.

Eventually the problem solved itself: they were assigned to environment systems maintenance during the same shift. Dismantling and cleaning sewer pipes wasn't his idea of a romantic setting, but it did have the advantage that no one else was interested in being in the same compartment while they worked. Felipe Carnel, the ship's Chief Engineer, was happy enough to leave the work to qualified passengers once he'd checked them out; and Ellen was as competent and conscientious as he.

The work was not demanding, merely messy and difficult; they had plenty of time to talk. For some reason Ellen seemed genuinely interested in Kevin and kept drawing him out. She was easy to talk to, and he found himself telling her about his early life, about school, and why he had come to space. Although he was usually somewhat shy with girls it was easy to be friends with Ellen.

"I think I've told you everything there is to know about me," he said finally. "And I don't know anything about you. You never talk about yourself—"

"Nothing to talk about." She squinted up at him and made a face. During the week they'd worked together they'd developed a system of signals. This one meant that she had sweat in her eyes and filth on her hands.

Kevin took a clean tissue and wiped her face. "Thanks." She went back to reaming out the plastic pipe.

"Come on," Kevin said. "You've made me do all the talking."

"There really isn't anything to tell," Ellen said. "I don't have any relatives. I was raised in an orphanage—"

"I didn't think they still had those," Kevin said. "Foster parents and—"

Ellen shuddered. "I was through several of those foster homes. Horrible way to live. Kevin, did you ever hear of the Futurian Foundation?"

"No."

"I guess not too many have. It's an organization that's interested in where—" She laughed. "It sounds silly if you're not a part of it."

"No, please. Tell me."

"Well, we're trying to look at where mankind is going," Ellen said defiantly. "Governments look ahead as far as the next election. The big corporations can look a little farther, sometimes as far as ten years. And nobody worries about what's going to happen after that. Nobody except us. We try to look hundreds, even thousands of years ahead."

"And you're a member of that—"

"Sort of. They raised me. When I was fifteen they bought me from the foster parents I was with.

"Bought you? Sounds like slavery."

She shrugged, a tiny wriggling motion; they had all learned new gestures for use in zero-gravity. She shifted her location, wedging one foot under a pipe clamp so that she could use both hands for the job she was doing.

"In a way it is," she said. "The state pays the foster parents to raise orphans. It's profitable work. They're paid by the number of kids in their home, so the foster parents don't want to let anyone go. The social welfare people don't want to let you go either—if they don't have orphans to take care of, they can't justify their jobs. So the Futurians had to pay off the foster parents, some lawyers, and two social workers. I'm glad they did."

Kevin looked puzzled. Ellen laughed. "Nothing mysterious about it. They have a testing program to catch the right people young and get them thinking about the future instead of themselves. That's all there is to it. I've been brought up to be satisfied with enough to live on, not to want anything more except my work—so I've got everything I want."

"And you think that's not interesting?" Kevin said. "You seem to have found the secret of the ages."

She laughed again. It was a pleasant sound, even muted as it was by the low air pressure. "We don't keep all our recruits, you know. Most of the kids we bring up go off to normal lives. Only a few of us join the Fellowship."

"But you did?" She nodded. "I suppose that's like a priesthood," Kevin said.

His voice had betrayed his thoughts, and she laughed again. "Not really. We're not celibate, you know! Although sometimes you act as if you think I am—"

"Hey, wait a minute, that's not fair," Kevin protested.

She was laughing again. "The way conditions are on this ship we both might as well be monks—either that or adopt the attitude of monkeys in a zoo, and I'm afraid I haven't got to that point yet. There. That's done. You tighten up the connections while I clean up." She looked down at her hands. "Yuk."

Kevin pushed away from the bulkhead and expertly floated over to the pipe assembly. He was proud of his hard-won ability to work in null-gravity conditions. He got one foot wedged into the pipe retainer and braced the other against a wire channel, leaving both hands free, and applied a big wrench to the pipes. The fittings turned hard, and everything took at least twice as long to do in zero-gravity as it would have on Earth. Finally he had it done. "You can turn on the pressure."

The system worked again, with no leaks, and Kevin nodded in satisfaction.

"Now. We're alone, and this is done, and—" He reached for her. She didn't resist.

"I think we'd better stop," she said, after a while.

"Why?"

"Because this isn't a very private place, and I am not a monkey in a zoo. The Leones may not mind putting on demonstrations for the other passengers, but I do—"

"Nobody ever comes here."

"Yes they do." She pushed away from him and caught a look at her reflection in one of the big Plexiglas algae tanks. "I'm a mess. Ugly—"

"You're not."

"Thank you. But I am. So are you, for that matter. Our faces are all swollen up, our lips are chapped, and we're getting pimples."

"All true but all irrelevant," Kevin said. "We knew that would happen before we signed up for a long trick in zero-gravity."

"But I didn't think I'd look this awful."

"You look all right to me." He did a double somersault from his bulkhead and landed just next to her. He grinned and reached for her again.

"Kevin, please . . ." Finally, she pushed away again. "Please. That's enough."

"Not for me—"

"Not for me either, but it's still all we're going to do," she said. "And don't look like a hurt little boy. Kevin, I like you. That's just the trouble. If we—this wouldn't be just a shipboard romance. Kevin, I can't afford emotional involvements. We've both got too much to do when we get to Ceres."

"So we have work to do. There's more to life than work—"

"Sometimes. Kevin, once we get to Ceres we may never see each other again. It's not fair to either of us to—to get too attached to each other."

"I'll take my chances."

"You say that now because I'm the only girl available. You wouldn't if—if you knew what you'd be getting into. I'm not somebody you ought to know, Kevin. I shouldn't have teased you. I'm sorry. I get lonely too, and I forgot that we'll never just be two people—"

"What?" Kevin frowned. There was a strange expression on Ellen's face, a strange look in her eyes, and he didn't understand.

"There's so much you can't know," Ellen said. "Kevin, we're friends. Let's leave it at that." She turned away to stare at pressure and flow gauges. "I think we've got this working again, and I've got some writing to do." She left the compartment hurriedly.

Kevin wanted to follow her, but she moved too quickly, and there were people in the corridors outside. He came back to stare into the algae tanks.

Tropical fish swam through the thick plant growth, They had adjusted to lack of gravity and oriented themselves as if the light source were "up." They no longer seemed confused—but Kevin was, and he didn't like it.

"She said she liked me," he muttered to the fish. "And it's a long way to Ceres." He could comfort himself with that. It was a long way to Ceres . . .

A week later they were both transferred to other ship's duties, not together. Kevin saw her quite often, but never alone.

Kevin's new assignment was on the bridge. His partner was Wiley Ralston, and Kevin found himself telling his friend about his problems with Ellen.

Ralston laughed. "Persistence, old buddy. Persistence and propinquity. Girls aren't any different from guys. They get horny too. Give it time."

"There doesn't seem to be a lot else to do," Kevin said.

"Yeah. Well, you'll have more of 'em to go after when we get to the Belt. Not a lot more, maybe, but more than just one. . . ."

True enough, Kevin thought. But he wasn't sure that was what he wanted. He wasn't sure what love was, or whether he believed in it, but he kept wishing Ellen were around so he could tell her things he'd just thought of, and he made excuses to go find her.

Eventually they were back in the farms and alone; and this time when he kissed her she didn't run away. A long time later, when they could speak again, she said, very seriously, "Kevin, we don't talk about love or the future. We're together while we're on the ship. Nothing permanent; nothing lasts after we reach the Belt."

"Sure," he said; but he didn't believe her.

Kevin and Wiley Ralston had been assigned to the bridge again when the halfway course correction came. Captain Greiner was very casual about it. First he slaved the computer to the high-gain antenna, then took position and velocity readings from both Earth and Ceres. Finally he pointed the main telescope to the bright star Vega.

The ship's computer digested the information for a minute. Then it flashed ready lights.

"And this does it," Greiner said. He threw switches giving control of the ship to the computer.

A recorded voice sounded. "Now hear this. Stand by for thirty seconds of very low gravity. Low thrust for thirty seconds, commencing in one minute. Fifty-nine, Fifty-eight . . ."

"Almost as if the ship didn't need me at all," Captain Greiner said. "If it weren't for the maintenance, it wouldn't."

"But you can operate without the computer, while it can't work without you," Kevin said.

Greiner laughed. "Not hardly. Everything's got to be too precise. If we had plenty of fuel, sure, I could navigate by hand calculations; but not the way we're cutting it."

"So even out here the machine replaces man," Wiley Ralston said. "Well, the damned machines can't do everything for us. Some things still need people. Though I wonder just how long—"

Kevin looked at him quizzically. Wiley grinned. "Just so long as they need us a few more years," Ralston said. "Long enough to get rich. Then they can run the whole damned universe by computer."

The countdown ended, and they felt weight again. Not very much weight, about one percent of Earth's gravity; but it felt strange to have a permanent "up" and "down" again. Kevin had found that he could orient himself to think of any direction "above" his head as "up" in zero-gravity; since he was facing forward, he suddenly found himself lying on his back instead of standing. He found later that everyone in the ship had had the same problem.

"Ceres has gravity," Jacob Norsedal said after dinner. "Let's see, about forty centimeters a second—four percent Earth gravity."

"Just enough so you can't jump off," Ellen said.

"A lot more than that." Norsedal said. His voice was apologetic but firm. He was apologetic for disagreeing; but he was never uncertain about his facts. He took his belt calculator, the small one he always carried, and punched in numbers. "You couldn't jump more than about 125 feet straight up," he said. "Of course, you'd take a while coming down." Click-click. "Not so long, thirteen seconds. Half a minute for the round trip, up and back down again. Of course I've left out the mass of your suit and tanks. I could run it with those—"

"Never mind," Ellen laughed. She, like everyone in the ship, had found that if you asked Norsedal a question you often learned more than you wanted to know. "It's going to take getting used to all over again," she said. "Having things fall instead of just drifting around the way they do here. And I've gotten used to sleeping in zero-gravity."

They sat at the entrance to Kevin and Jacob's stateroom. One of the inevitable tumbling contests was going through the central well of the ship. Bill Dykes, the miner Kevin had met on the airplane to Baja, spun past doing somersaults and counting loudly. "Ninety-seven!" he announced with a grin as he went past. He was still centered in the opening, and it looked likely that he'd get all the way to the stern bulkhead. That was no longer unusual; the contest had been won weeks before, and now the passengers were trying to set a record for the number of somersaults before touching walls or decks.

"Damn!" Hal Leone was in Kevin's stateroom playing a stellar war-game with his wife Jeannine. The game used ballistic calculations, and Hal had managed to get his ship into an unrecoverable situation; no matter what he did, it was going to crash into a star. His wife chuckled. What made it embarrassing was that Hal was a mathematician and his wife a physician—but she always won.

Others gathered on F deck. It was almost time for another session of Norsedal's monster twelve-sided game, and the players were assembling. Someone produced a bottle of vodka vacuum-distilled from green slime. Despite its evil source it had no unusual taste at all. The bottle passed around. There was more activity in the well; a twirling contest, men and women pirouetting in midair. Then Bill Dykes came tumbling back toward the bow, followed closely by his cabinmate and partner, Carl Lundgren. They were counting loudly.

"Happy hour," Ellen said.

Suddenly another man leaped across the opening. He collided heavily with Carl Lundgren.

"Look where you're going!" Lundgren shouted.

"Shove it," the other man said. Kevin recognized him: Frank Sales, a loner with a foul temper. Sales was going out to work as a miner. He was a short, almost dwarfish man, who compensated for his small stature with a constant program of exercises. All the passengers were supposed to take their turn with the exercise machines, but Sales was the only one who took extra time on them as a matter of course.

"Goddamit, I was headed for a record," Lundgren said. "What'd you want to do that for?"

Sales grunted and turned away.

"I asked you a question!" Lundgren shouted. "Come back here."

"Hey, buddy," Bill Dykes said, grabbing Lundgren's arm, "Drop it. He ain't worth it."

Lundgren shook Dykes off. "Keep out of this, Bill. That sawed-off little bastard never looks where he's going. Who the hell does he think he is?"

"Are you talking about me?" Sales grasped a stanchion and turned back toward Lundgren. "Are you?"

"Damn right, you little creep."

"Hey—" Dykes protested, but it was too late. Sales dived toward Carl Lundgren and knocked him from his perch against the edge of F Deck. The two men became a tangle of arms and legs tumbling in the central well. Lundgren caught Sales by the hair and pulled; the result was that both tumbled out of control.

Others moved to try to separate them, but only added to the tangle. Someone began to laugh and others joined. Ellen giggled. Then Sales's hand moved to his tool belt.

"Look out, Carl, the little bastard's got a knife!" Dykes shouted.

Lundgren turned frantically toward Sales. One of the others trying to separate them grabbed at Lundgren, missed, and caused him to spin violently again. Three other passengers dove toward the fighting men, and there was another wild tangle of bodies. Then bright blood spurted out to hang in large droplets in the air. It was impossibly red, tiny red planets hanging in space.

Someone screamed, more passengers and a crewman appeared to separate the fighters. When the two were pulled apart they saw that Carl Lundgren spurted blood in rhythmic pulses from a slash across his throat.

"You've killed my partner!" Dykes roared. He started for Sales, but other passengers held him.

"He came for me!" Sales shouted. "You saw it, he ran right into me, I never meant to hurt him."

There was a babble of voices. "Get him to sick bay!" "Hold on to that murdering son of a bitch!" "Jeez, little buddy, you're going to be all right, you gotta be—" "Get a doctor!"

Jeannine Leone came out of Kevin's cabin and dove to the group holding Lundgren. Her hands worked frantically at the wound. "I can't get a grip," she said. "You, hold him against the deck. One of you hold onto my feet. Not like that! Hold me steady, I have to get pressure on this—"

Blood continued to stream into the ship. Bright crimson spheres floated toward the air intake grid. "We need weight," Jeannine shouted. "Send for the Captain—"

"I'm here," Greiner said.

"We need weight. Not much, just enough to let me do steady work. Can you give us acceleration?"

"No," Greiner said. "Can't do it."

"But he'll die—"

"I hope not, but we can't do it!" The Captain's face was grim. "If we accelerate now we won't get to Ceres at all."

Jeannine continued working, but finally she straightened and shook her head. "Too late," she said. "He's dead. I don't know if I could have done anything even if we had gravity." She turned to Bill Dykes. "I'm sorry—"

"Not your fault," the miner said. He looked at his partner's body, then at Frank Sales. "Now we got a murderer to deal with. I say we put him outside now and get it over with."

 

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