Murasaki, page 3
(Washington liked to think of them as that) that the captain had never even hinted at. But they were a real problem. Washington was not at all sure he wanted to carry them out. And the captaincy itself wasn’t nearly as good as he had thought it would be. What was a captain now, in these soft times? Nothing! The kind of things a captain had to do were mostly just plain boring—absurd, petty things like checking the leaders of the planet parties to make sure everybody was keeping up his steroids and calcium intake; riding herd on Boulat Kots-vili to ensure that all the women were using their fertility blockers; nagging the supply chiefs in every downside party so no one would forget to keep their reserve supplies up—and not run out of medicines, say, or food supplements. Horatio Hornblower had it easy. And worst of all, from Captain Washington’s point of view, people argued with him!
It had been a lot different with Horatio Homblower.
When the first Hornblower gave an order, everybody jumped to do it. They had to. He could hang them from the yardarm if they didn’t. The only thing Homblower had to worry about was making sure he gave the right order, and that was easy enough to do (in Darryl Washington’s opinion) if only everybody else around would just shut up and obey.
For Washington himself, it was different. What he was forced to do was to give only the orders that people would be willing to obey ... and what was the fun of that?
To be sure, there were a lot of ways in which Captain Darryl Washington’s situation was a good deal more inter-esting than that of the mythical Captain Horatio Horn-blower. Crew, for instance. A sailing-ship captain like Homblower was lucky if a quarter of his crew could read or write, while the people under Washington’s –command–included specialists in linguistics, petrology, archaeology (with a minor in theology), plant chemistry, sociology, zo-ology, and a dozen other—ologies and—isticses.
(They hadn’t all been expert in all those things at launch time—but it isn’t hard to earn double doctorates in eleven years of monotony.) Washington didn’t think of that. Wouldn’t have considered it much of a break if he had, because all it meant was that they had a lot more ammunition to use in challenging his decisions.
Washington glowered around the control room, as though quelling a rebellious crew. Of course, they weren’t there. Boulat and Nicole were caring for the sick man, Kammer was doing, whatever he did when he wasn’t in view—Captain Blow-Your-Horn didn’t much care; it was just good to have him out of sight. Still the captain, in his own control room, felt the inaudible sound of them snick-ering at him.
There was, a better place to be, where no one ever questioned his authority. Captain Washington set all the controls on automatic, unstrapped himself, and, wheezing with the effort of pulling his monstrously fat body through the corridors, went there.
The chamber that Darryl Washington had comman-deered for his private office wasn’t large, but it was a great luxury. When he locked the door, he was a real captain. Supreme in his own domain, it was the kind of luxury no one on the spacer ship had been able to possess for all the subjective eleven years of their flight.
Once it had been storage space. Storage space was what most of the interior cubage of the ship was: room to hold the huge quantity of things that were necessary for exploring the new planets. like the two scouting planes, four of the six wire-wheeled surface buggies, the food ma-chines, the camping equipment, two or three lander loads of trade goods to win friends among the natives. Those things were all gone now, painfully ferried down to the surface of Genji. Their storage space was empty. The ship now had surplus room. Anyone of the crew remaining on the ship who wanted it could appropriate a compartment of his own, and put a door on it, and lock it.
Naturally, everyone had immediately done so. Every-one had dreamed for years of the joy of possessing a per-sonal place to scratch or pick one’s nose or break wind in private. Washington, as captain, had asserted his right to first pick, of course. The only real difference was that Dar-ryl Washington still used the locks... for that was the kind of person Captain Blow-Your-Horn was.
The first thing the captain had done with his “office” was to fit it with a duplicate of the ship’s communications terminals. Everything, that paaed in or out of the ship ap-peared on those private monitors. He kept his own log on them, encoded so that no one else could read it. He could even use the system to monitor almost every compartment in the ship itself. He did so, often, especially when his wife was aboard and out of his immediate presence.
Captain Blow-Your-Horn had not mentioned this to any of his crew. He was aware that some of them would object to his prying into their privacy. Of course, he didn’t agree. In his mind, it was simply the kind of advantage that it was proper for a ship’s captain to have—how else could you make sure everybody was obeying orders?
Comfortably strapped in, Darryl Washington first turned his monitor to outgoing transmissions, just to make sure that Boulat Kotsvili had been, doing his other job as ship’s data-transmitter. He had been, of course. He might now be trying to patch up the sick Murghad Fasbar, but the transmitter was still on automatic, busily pumping data back to the spacer habitats around Sol. Just at that moment it was shots of the carpet whales that were being trans-mitted—probably taken by Fasbar himself, before he had ruined his lungs. Washington didn’t watch for long. No one did any more; it was too boring. To make the long trip back to Sol, the data bits that made up any message had to be transmitted slowly and repetitively, with redundancies and parity checks. It took more than an hour to transmit a minute’s worth of recording, and then what showed up on those twenty-year-distant screens would be only a single frame, drawing itself dot by dot and line by line—and do-ing it three times, because each frame was transmitted thrice, as seen through the red, cyan, and green filters. That was the only way that the pictures could be reconstituted in full color back on the TV screens of Earth, Mars, and the Spacer habitats in orbit.
There was no reason to watch it. Washington knew of something more important to do, and was about to do it when the intercom sounded. It was his wife. “Murqhad’s really sick,” she reported.
“Boulat says, most of his alveoli are crushed and he may have to try transplants. I told him he shouldn’t go out in that soupy air without a suit, but he wanted to try to talk to the carpet whales direct.”
“So it’s all his own fault,” Washington said briefly, dismissing Murqhad Fasbar and studying his wife.
She looked both tired and muscular. They all took steroids, of course, before venturing onto Genji; but the effort of deal-ing with Genji’s high gravity had put muscles on her mus-cles. He said importantly,
“I’ve got other things on my mind right now.”
“The Japanese?”
Washington nodded peevishly. They didn’t finish their ship for three years after we launched. How did they get here so fast?”
Nicole’s face on the screen looked patient—it was a way she often looked at her husband. “Boulat says they probably just went faster. They come from Earth, you know. They start out with a one-gee environment, so they could just put on more thrust—maybe work up to a gee and a half, so they’d be ready for Genji. Why didn’t we think of that?”
“It would’ve killed us!” he snapped, nettled at the criticism. He believed it was true. The spacers weren’t used to high gravity, even with steroids.
“It might’ve killed you,” she said, pointedly gazing at his flesh. His first (and only) landing on Genji nearly had, with all that blubber to lug around. “We did increase the thrust gradually; otherwise we couldn’t have landed in the first place. We just could’ve done more. Why didn’t you think of that, Darry?”
“I didn’t set the flight plan! Captain Markorian did that!”
“But—” she began, and then, gazing at him, stopped. She changed the subject. “Question is, what do we do now? I’ve been talking to Boulat, and he thinks we ought to do Chujo.”
“Chujo!” he barked, nettled—how dare his crew think about future plans behind his back?
“It makes sense, Darry. We’ve already sent back a load of stuff on Genji, but we never touched Chujo at all.”
He glared at her. “Because Chujo’s a waste of time! Genji has sapients. They’re what people are interested in, not plants and maybe some creepy-crawlies like on Chujo.”
“But we ought to at least look—”
–We have looked,” Washington informed his wife. “All those scans.” He was on firm ground there, he was sure. They had their own robot satellite, still orbiting Chujo and sending back data, though none of it was very inter-esting. Scenery? Chujo had plenty of scenery, if that was what you were interested in: mountains, brackish seas, dried riverbeds, the “ring of fire” all around its globe where moonside and starside met; well, what about it?
To be sure, there was definitely some evidence of life. The “fuzzy” logic of the ship’s computers had teased a few portraits out of the quick snapshots of the scans. The ones they called “trolls”: tall, two-legged, toothed—and clawed, too, because one of the frames had shown a troll ripping the guts out of one of the long-legged things, like skinny kangaroos, they’d named the “high-jumpers.” Well, how would you like to meet up with a troll in some dark Chujoan alley?
“There used to be something better there,” she re-minded him.
Washington glared at her silently for a moment. It was true enough. The scans had produced pictures to suggest it, and for that matter even the original automated Japanese probe had found signs that there had once been perhaps something almost like a civilization on the paired planet. At least, there might have been things that could once have been buildings.
“We couldn’t do everything at once,” he barked, feel-ing the challenge to his authority. Everybody had agreed that Genji was the priority target! Genji was where the real action was, with its himatids and carpet whales and all kinds of smart, or semismart, fauna.
She sighed. “We’ll talk it over later, hon,” she con-ceded. “First I’m going to take a shower.”
And at last Washington had the chance to do what he had been setting out to do.
He had sealed orders,
Before he opened Markorian’s old file there was some-thing else he wanted to look at. They weren’t really sealed, because they had come over the radio from cis-Mercury, and they weren’t really orders.
But he took them seriously. He slipped his own record capsule into the machine and set the program to his private decode mode. Naturally, no one’s private messages .were private if they were transmitted in the clear.
He played once again the last message he had received from his father.
It was interesting that, on the screen, the old man didn’t look any older, but it wasn’t surprising. The message had taken almost as long to get to Murasaki as the ship had. Though the captain had received it only a few days earlier, it was a voice across the decades, twenty years out of date. When Roy Washington stepped up to the TV cam-eras and sent it, the ship was still less than halfway through the acceleration phase of its journey. Johnny Marlcorian was still alive then—and still captain. Aaron Kammer was still hale and healthy....
And Nicole was just getting ready to divorce him and many Kammer.
The captain bit his lip and glared at the screen, where his father was beaming in pride. “I’m glad things are going so well for you, Darryl. If your mother had lived she’d certainly be thrilled to see you making something out of yourself at last. Nicole’s parents were on the screen last night, and the three of us drank a toast to you two love birds.” Then he frowned. “There’s something funny, though. They heard the same rumors we did about coming back early instead of staying for the full ten years. I think it has something to do with the Japs—they’re launching any day now, I hear. Well, this is expensive, so I’ll just say that we all think of you, and miss you ... and give that pretty bride of yours a kiss from your father.”
Frowning, Washington switched to Markorian’s pri-vate log and scrolled to the entry he wanted:
“My private instructions are that if the Japanese get their ship going ahead of schedule we are to turn around and come back as soon as they get to Murasaki. This is an economic necessity, because the first samples returned will be the most valuable—”
He let it run, but he wasn’t listening any more. He was thinking about the damn Japanese. What should he do?
He knew what the real Captain Hornblower would have done when an enemy ship hove in sight. He would have tacked right up to the other ship, opened the gun ports and dismasted it, and then probably led a party to board the enemy vessel, cutlass in hand. Of course, you didn’t do that kind of thing with spaceships. Even if you had gun ports to open, or guns of any kind. Even if you had the sort of loyal, brave crew that would follow you through the gates of hell, instead of this bunch of cripples and com-plainers...
“Oh, hell,” he said out loud. He wondered what his father would think if he could see him at that moment. Probably that his son was doing the sloppy, inept kind of job both his parents had always expected from him.
It was simply unfair. They’d spent eleven years, one month, and twenty-two days in transit, trying to find some-thing to do. Now they’d spent more than a year trying to do a tenth of one percent of the things they ought to do—all short on sleep, cutting corners every which way....
And now this!
Still frowning, Washington reached to turn off the ma-chine—and clumsily missed the switch. His fingers hit cen-timeters below the keyboard.
That was the first he realized that there was a slow buildup of thrust. The ship was easing out of Low Genji Orbit. It was moving somewhere else.
By the time Washington reached the control room both Kammer and Boulat Kotsvili were there before him, hang-ing on the captain’s net. He knew before he got there who would be usurping his place, and of course he was right. “God damn it, Nicole!” he exploded: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Shut up, Darry,” she said patiently. “I started to set up the course for Chujo for you because that was the ob-vious next step for us to take. Then I saw that we were in a good launch window, and I thought we’d better not miss it.”
That isn’t your job! That’s up to the captain!” he shouted, but they were only looking at him patiently, Kam-mer sleepy-eyed, Kotsvili with a thermosonde dangling around his neck—Nicole, of course, with that offhand tol-erance that drove him crazy. “Well, it isn’t,” he finished.
Nicole didn’t even respond. She only said, “Every-body knows we’ve got to land on Chujo.”
“Chujo’s worthless,” her husband said obstinately.
“Chujo’s a whole planet,” she reminded him. “There are buildings there.”
“There are rocks there. They don’t look like buildings to me. Worthless!”
She was losing her patience. “And how do we know it’s worthless until we send somebody down to look at it? Back home they expect us to get there before anyone else, don’t they? That’s what being first means, so we’ve got to go there. The only thing we have to decide is who does the landing.”
“Me, for one,” Aaron Kammer said at once.
Everybody looked at him in surprise. Then they looked back at each other as though he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t go,” Kotsvili said reluctantly. “I’ve got to take care of Murqhad.”
The captain said harshly, “Let me see the course.” Silently Nicole displayed it for him on the screen, with all the bums and vector changes. Washington glowered at it. “It’s all right,” he grumbled, “but, really, I don’t think—”
Kotsvili spoke right over him. “It’s a two-day trip to get to low Chujo,” he pointed out. “Then we’ll send the lander down, couple of hours each way; say six or eight hours on the surface to look around—”
“More than that,” Nicole objected. “I want to spend at least one whole Chujo daylight there. Maybe more.”
Her husband looked affronted_ The Chujo day, like the Genjian, lasted forty-seven hours with a forty-seven-hour night following.
“That’s practically a week we’ll be away from Low Genji Orbit!” he complained.
Kotsvili added, “What if the people on Genji need something? And you’ve got the lander tied up?”
What the people on Genji might want was not what had been on the captain’s mind; it was what his wife had said.
“So you think you ought to go,” he said meditatively, searching for a reason to forbid it.
,
“I am going, yes,” she told him.
“But not alone,” Aaron Kammer said firmly.
They all looked at him again. “Oh, Airy,” Nicole said without patience, “what if you get sick down there?”
He didn’t argue the question. He just said, “I’m going. I have a right to that much.”
“A right,” the captain sneered. What did a ship’s crew need with rights? But he could see that Kotsvili was nodding agreement, and then even Nicole, after a moment’s reflection, said:
“Maybe you’re the best choice to go with me at that, Airy, only your health—”
“I just had a transfusion,” Kammer reminded her. “I’ll be okay for a while, no matter what.”
The captain glowered at them indecisively. It offended him that no one had bothered with even the formality of asking him to approve the mission. They would go ahead anyhow, of course, whatever he said. He knew that. But they should at least ask.
He stood up, unbuckling his harness. He reminded himself that he still had some rights of his own.
“You’ve got one daylight and that’s all,” he said, listening with pleasure to the commanding tone of his voice. “Then I take the ship back to Genji orbit.”
“But what if we need more time?” Kammer objected. “You don’t have it. That’s final. Now come to bed, Nicole,” he ordered his wife, triumphantly.
The landing on Chujo was uneventful. That didn’t keep most of the people involved from having high emo-tional reactions. Captain Blow-Your-Horn glowered at the dwindling flare of rocket exhaust as though he wanted to kill. In the lander Aaron Kammer was grinning with pleas-ure as he guided, the ship in He wasn’t the best choice for pilot, of course—hadn’t had anything like the practice his ex-wife had.
It had been a lot different with Horatio Homblower.
When the first Hornblower gave an order, everybody jumped to do it. They had to. He could hang them from the yardarm if they didn’t. The only thing Homblower had to worry about was making sure he gave the right order, and that was easy enough to do (in Darryl Washington’s opinion) if only everybody else around would just shut up and obey.
For Washington himself, it was different. What he was forced to do was to give only the orders that people would be willing to obey ... and what was the fun of that?
To be sure, there were a lot of ways in which Captain Darryl Washington’s situation was a good deal more inter-esting than that of the mythical Captain Horatio Horn-blower. Crew, for instance. A sailing-ship captain like Homblower was lucky if a quarter of his crew could read or write, while the people under Washington’s –command–included specialists in linguistics, petrology, archaeology (with a minor in theology), plant chemistry, sociology, zo-ology, and a dozen other—ologies and—isticses.
(They hadn’t all been expert in all those things at launch time—but it isn’t hard to earn double doctorates in eleven years of monotony.) Washington didn’t think of that. Wouldn’t have considered it much of a break if he had, because all it meant was that they had a lot more ammunition to use in challenging his decisions.
Washington glowered around the control room, as though quelling a rebellious crew. Of course, they weren’t there. Boulat and Nicole were caring for the sick man, Kammer was doing, whatever he did when he wasn’t in view—Captain Blow-Your-Horn didn’t much care; it was just good to have him out of sight. Still the captain, in his own control room, felt the inaudible sound of them snick-ering at him.
There was, a better place to be, where no one ever questioned his authority. Captain Washington set all the controls on automatic, unstrapped himself, and, wheezing with the effort of pulling his monstrously fat body through the corridors, went there.
The chamber that Darryl Washington had comman-deered for his private office wasn’t large, but it was a great luxury. When he locked the door, he was a real captain. Supreme in his own domain, it was the kind of luxury no one on the spacer ship had been able to possess for all the subjective eleven years of their flight.
Once it had been storage space. Storage space was what most of the interior cubage of the ship was: room to hold the huge quantity of things that were necessary for exploring the new planets. like the two scouting planes, four of the six wire-wheeled surface buggies, the food ma-chines, the camping equipment, two or three lander loads of trade goods to win friends among the natives. Those things were all gone now, painfully ferried down to the surface of Genji. Their storage space was empty. The ship now had surplus room. Anyone of the crew remaining on the ship who wanted it could appropriate a compartment of his own, and put a door on it, and lock it.
Naturally, everyone had immediately done so. Every-one had dreamed for years of the joy of possessing a per-sonal place to scratch or pick one’s nose or break wind in private. Washington, as captain, had asserted his right to first pick, of course. The only real difference was that Dar-ryl Washington still used the locks... for that was the kind of person Captain Blow-Your-Horn was.
The first thing the captain had done with his “office” was to fit it with a duplicate of the ship’s communications terminals. Everything, that paaed in or out of the ship ap-peared on those private monitors. He kept his own log on them, encoded so that no one else could read it. He could even use the system to monitor almost every compartment in the ship itself. He did so, often, especially when his wife was aboard and out of his immediate presence.
Captain Blow-Your-Horn had not mentioned this to any of his crew. He was aware that some of them would object to his prying into their privacy. Of course, he didn’t agree. In his mind, it was simply the kind of advantage that it was proper for a ship’s captain to have—how else could you make sure everybody was obeying orders?
Comfortably strapped in, Darryl Washington first turned his monitor to outgoing transmissions, just to make sure that Boulat Kotsvili had been, doing his other job as ship’s data-transmitter. He had been, of course. He might now be trying to patch up the sick Murghad Fasbar, but the transmitter was still on automatic, busily pumping data back to the spacer habitats around Sol. Just at that moment it was shots of the carpet whales that were being trans-mitted—probably taken by Fasbar himself, before he had ruined his lungs. Washington didn’t watch for long. No one did any more; it was too boring. To make the long trip back to Sol, the data bits that made up any message had to be transmitted slowly and repetitively, with redundancies and parity checks. It took more than an hour to transmit a minute’s worth of recording, and then what showed up on those twenty-year-distant screens would be only a single frame, drawing itself dot by dot and line by line—and do-ing it three times, because each frame was transmitted thrice, as seen through the red, cyan, and green filters. That was the only way that the pictures could be reconstituted in full color back on the TV screens of Earth, Mars, and the Spacer habitats in orbit.
There was no reason to watch it. Washington knew of something more important to do, and was about to do it when the intercom sounded. It was his wife. “Murqhad’s really sick,” she reported.
“Boulat says, most of his alveoli are crushed and he may have to try transplants. I told him he shouldn’t go out in that soupy air without a suit, but he wanted to try to talk to the carpet whales direct.”
“So it’s all his own fault,” Washington said briefly, dismissing Murqhad Fasbar and studying his wife.
She looked both tired and muscular. They all took steroids, of course, before venturing onto Genji; but the effort of deal-ing with Genji’s high gravity had put muscles on her mus-cles. He said importantly,
“I’ve got other things on my mind right now.”
“The Japanese?”
Washington nodded peevishly. They didn’t finish their ship for three years after we launched. How did they get here so fast?”
Nicole’s face on the screen looked patient—it was a way she often looked at her husband. “Boulat says they probably just went faster. They come from Earth, you know. They start out with a one-gee environment, so they could just put on more thrust—maybe work up to a gee and a half, so they’d be ready for Genji. Why didn’t we think of that?”
“It would’ve killed us!” he snapped, nettled at the criticism. He believed it was true. The spacers weren’t used to high gravity, even with steroids.
“It might’ve killed you,” she said, pointedly gazing at his flesh. His first (and only) landing on Genji nearly had, with all that blubber to lug around. “We did increase the thrust gradually; otherwise we couldn’t have landed in the first place. We just could’ve done more. Why didn’t you think of that, Darry?”
“I didn’t set the flight plan! Captain Markorian did that!”
“But—” she began, and then, gazing at him, stopped. She changed the subject. “Question is, what do we do now? I’ve been talking to Boulat, and he thinks we ought to do Chujo.”
“Chujo!” he barked, nettled—how dare his crew think about future plans behind his back?
“It makes sense, Darry. We’ve already sent back a load of stuff on Genji, but we never touched Chujo at all.”
He glared at her. “Because Chujo’s a waste of time! Genji has sapients. They’re what people are interested in, not plants and maybe some creepy-crawlies like on Chujo.”
“But we ought to at least look—”
–We have looked,” Washington informed his wife. “All those scans.” He was on firm ground there, he was sure. They had their own robot satellite, still orbiting Chujo and sending back data, though none of it was very inter-esting. Scenery? Chujo had plenty of scenery, if that was what you were interested in: mountains, brackish seas, dried riverbeds, the “ring of fire” all around its globe where moonside and starside met; well, what about it?
To be sure, there was definitely some evidence of life. The “fuzzy” logic of the ship’s computers had teased a few portraits out of the quick snapshots of the scans. The ones they called “trolls”: tall, two-legged, toothed—and clawed, too, because one of the frames had shown a troll ripping the guts out of one of the long-legged things, like skinny kangaroos, they’d named the “high-jumpers.” Well, how would you like to meet up with a troll in some dark Chujoan alley?
“There used to be something better there,” she re-minded him.
Washington glared at her silently for a moment. It was true enough. The scans had produced pictures to suggest it, and for that matter even the original automated Japanese probe had found signs that there had once been perhaps something almost like a civilization on the paired planet. At least, there might have been things that could once have been buildings.
“We couldn’t do everything at once,” he barked, feel-ing the challenge to his authority. Everybody had agreed that Genji was the priority target! Genji was where the real action was, with its himatids and carpet whales and all kinds of smart, or semismart, fauna.
She sighed. “We’ll talk it over later, hon,” she con-ceded. “First I’m going to take a shower.”
And at last Washington had the chance to do what he had been setting out to do.
He had sealed orders,
Before he opened Markorian’s old file there was some-thing else he wanted to look at. They weren’t really sealed, because they had come over the radio from cis-Mercury, and they weren’t really orders.
But he took them seriously. He slipped his own record capsule into the machine and set the program to his private decode mode. Naturally, no one’s private messages .were private if they were transmitted in the clear.
He played once again the last message he had received from his father.
It was interesting that, on the screen, the old man didn’t look any older, but it wasn’t surprising. The message had taken almost as long to get to Murasaki as the ship had. Though the captain had received it only a few days earlier, it was a voice across the decades, twenty years out of date. When Roy Washington stepped up to the TV cam-eras and sent it, the ship was still less than halfway through the acceleration phase of its journey. Johnny Marlcorian was still alive then—and still captain. Aaron Kammer was still hale and healthy....
And Nicole was just getting ready to divorce him and many Kammer.
The captain bit his lip and glared at the screen, where his father was beaming in pride. “I’m glad things are going so well for you, Darryl. If your mother had lived she’d certainly be thrilled to see you making something out of yourself at last. Nicole’s parents were on the screen last night, and the three of us drank a toast to you two love birds.” Then he frowned. “There’s something funny, though. They heard the same rumors we did about coming back early instead of staying for the full ten years. I think it has something to do with the Japs—they’re launching any day now, I hear. Well, this is expensive, so I’ll just say that we all think of you, and miss you ... and give that pretty bride of yours a kiss from your father.”
Frowning, Washington switched to Markorian’s pri-vate log and scrolled to the entry he wanted:
“My private instructions are that if the Japanese get their ship going ahead of schedule we are to turn around and come back as soon as they get to Murasaki. This is an economic necessity, because the first samples returned will be the most valuable—”
He let it run, but he wasn’t listening any more. He was thinking about the damn Japanese. What should he do?
He knew what the real Captain Hornblower would have done when an enemy ship hove in sight. He would have tacked right up to the other ship, opened the gun ports and dismasted it, and then probably led a party to board the enemy vessel, cutlass in hand. Of course, you didn’t do that kind of thing with spaceships. Even if you had gun ports to open, or guns of any kind. Even if you had the sort of loyal, brave crew that would follow you through the gates of hell, instead of this bunch of cripples and com-plainers...
“Oh, hell,” he said out loud. He wondered what his father would think if he could see him at that moment. Probably that his son was doing the sloppy, inept kind of job both his parents had always expected from him.
It was simply unfair. They’d spent eleven years, one month, and twenty-two days in transit, trying to find some-thing to do. Now they’d spent more than a year trying to do a tenth of one percent of the things they ought to do—all short on sleep, cutting corners every which way....
And now this!
Still frowning, Washington reached to turn off the ma-chine—and clumsily missed the switch. His fingers hit cen-timeters below the keyboard.
That was the first he realized that there was a slow buildup of thrust. The ship was easing out of Low Genji Orbit. It was moving somewhere else.
By the time Washington reached the control room both Kammer and Boulat Kotsvili were there before him, hang-ing on the captain’s net. He knew before he got there who would be usurping his place, and of course he was right. “God damn it, Nicole!” he exploded: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Shut up, Darry,” she said patiently. “I started to set up the course for Chujo for you because that was the ob-vious next step for us to take. Then I saw that we were in a good launch window, and I thought we’d better not miss it.”
That isn’t your job! That’s up to the captain!” he shouted, but they were only looking at him patiently, Kam-mer sleepy-eyed, Kotsvili with a thermosonde dangling around his neck—Nicole, of course, with that offhand tol-erance that drove him crazy. “Well, it isn’t,” he finished.
Nicole didn’t even respond. She only said, “Every-body knows we’ve got to land on Chujo.”
“Chujo’s worthless,” her husband said obstinately.
“Chujo’s a whole planet,” she reminded him. “There are buildings there.”
“There are rocks there. They don’t look like buildings to me. Worthless!”
She was losing her patience. “And how do we know it’s worthless until we send somebody down to look at it? Back home they expect us to get there before anyone else, don’t they? That’s what being first means, so we’ve got to go there. The only thing we have to decide is who does the landing.”
“Me, for one,” Aaron Kammer said at once.
Everybody looked at him in surprise. Then they looked back at each other as though he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t go,” Kotsvili said reluctantly. “I’ve got to take care of Murqhad.”
The captain said harshly, “Let me see the course.” Silently Nicole displayed it for him on the screen, with all the bums and vector changes. Washington glowered at it. “It’s all right,” he grumbled, “but, really, I don’t think—”
Kotsvili spoke right over him. “It’s a two-day trip to get to low Chujo,” he pointed out. “Then we’ll send the lander down, couple of hours each way; say six or eight hours on the surface to look around—”
“More than that,” Nicole objected. “I want to spend at least one whole Chujo daylight there. Maybe more.”
Her husband looked affronted_ The Chujo day, like the Genjian, lasted forty-seven hours with a forty-seven-hour night following.
“That’s practically a week we’ll be away from Low Genji Orbit!” he complained.
Kotsvili added, “What if the people on Genji need something? And you’ve got the lander tied up?”
What the people on Genji might want was not what had been on the captain’s mind; it was what his wife had said.
“So you think you ought to go,” he said meditatively, searching for a reason to forbid it.
,
“I am going, yes,” she told him.
“But not alone,” Aaron Kammer said firmly.
They all looked at him again. “Oh, Airy,” Nicole said without patience, “what if you get sick down there?”
He didn’t argue the question. He just said, “I’m going. I have a right to that much.”
“A right,” the captain sneered. What did a ship’s crew need with rights? But he could see that Kotsvili was nodding agreement, and then even Nicole, after a moment’s reflection, said:
“Maybe you’re the best choice to go with me at that, Airy, only your health—”
“I just had a transfusion,” Kammer reminded her. “I’ll be okay for a while, no matter what.”
The captain glowered at them indecisively. It offended him that no one had bothered with even the formality of asking him to approve the mission. They would go ahead anyhow, of course, whatever he said. He knew that. But they should at least ask.
He stood up, unbuckling his harness. He reminded himself that he still had some rights of his own.
“You’ve got one daylight and that’s all,” he said, listening with pleasure to the commanding tone of his voice. “Then I take the ship back to Genji orbit.”
“But what if we need more time?” Kammer objected. “You don’t have it. That’s final. Now come to bed, Nicole,” he ordered his wife, triumphantly.
The landing on Chujo was uneventful. That didn’t keep most of the people involved from having high emo-tional reactions. Captain Blow-Your-Horn glowered at the dwindling flare of rocket exhaust as though he wanted to kill. In the lander Aaron Kammer was grinning with pleas-ure as he guided, the ship in He wasn’t the best choice for pilot, of course—hadn’t had anything like the practice his ex-wife had.
