Farmer in the Sky (7 page)

We looked at each other but nobody said anything. He pulled out a list and called our names. Edwards didn't answer, of course, and he left, taking Noisy's ration with him.

Then Noisy showed up and saw us eating and wanted to know where his lunch was. We told him; he said, “For the love of Mike! Why didn't you guys save it for me? A fine bunch you turned out to be.” And he left again.

He came back shortly, looking mad. A ship's aide followed him and strapped him down.

We had about reached the teeth-picking stage when the screen on the ceiling lit up again and there was the Moon. It looked as if we were headed right toward it and coming up fast. I began to wonder if Captain Harkness had dropped a decimal point.

I lay back on my couch and watched it grow. After a while it looked worse. When it had grown until it filled the screen and more and it seemed as if we couldn't possibly miss, I saw that the mountains were moving past on the screen from right to left. I breathed a sigh of relief; maybe the Old Man knew what he was doing after all.

A voice came over the speaker: “We are now passing the Moon and tacking slightly in so doing. Our relative speed at point of closest approach is more than fifty miles per second, producing a somewhat spectacular effect.”

I'll say it was spectacular! We zipped across the face of the Moon in about half a minute, then it faded behind us. I suppose they simply kept a TV camera trained on it, but it looked as if we had dived in, turned sharply, and raced out again. Only you don't make sharp turns at
that
speed.

About two hours later they stopped gunning her. I had fallen asleep and I dreamed I was making a parachute jump and the chute failed to open. I woke up with a yell, weightless, with my stomach dropping out of me again. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.

The loudspeaker said: “End of acceleration. Spin will be placed on the ship at once.”

But it did not happen all at once; it happened very slowly. We drifted toward one wall and slid down it toward the outer wall of the ship. That made what had been the outer wall the floor; we stood on it— and the side with the bunks on it was now a wall and the side with the TV screen on it, which had been the ceiling, was now the opposite wall. Gradually we got heavier.

Noisy was still strapped to his couch; the ship's aide had moved the buckles so that he could not reach them himself. Now he was up against the wall, hanging on the straps like a papoose. He began to yell for us to help him down.

He was not in any danger and he could not have been too uncomfortable, for we weren't up to a full gravity, not by a whole lot. It turned out later that the Captain had brought the spin up to one-third g and held it there, because Ganymede has one-third g. So there wasn't any urgent need to turn Noisy loose.

Nor was there any rush to do so. We were still discussing it and some of the fellows were making comical remarks which Noisy did not appreciate when the same ship's aide came in, unstrapped Noisy, and told all of us to follow him.

That's how I happened to attend Captain's mast.

“Captain's mast” is a sort of court, like when in ancient times the lord of the countryside would sit and dispense the high and middle justice. We followed the aide, whose name was Dr. Archibald, to Captain Harkness's cabin. There were a lot of other people waiting there in the passage outside the cabin. Presently Captain Harkness came out and Noisy was the first case.

We were all witnesses but the Captain didn't question but a few of us; I wasn't questioned. Dr. Archibald told about finding Noisy wandering around the ship while we were under acceleration and the Captain asked Noisy if he had heard the order to stay at his bunk?

Noisy beat around the bush a good deal and tried to spread the blame on all of us, but when the Captain pinned him down he had to admit that he had heard the order.

Captain Harkness said, “Son, you are an undisciplined lunk. I don't know what sort of trouble you'll run into as a colonist, but so far as my ship is concerned, you've had it.”

He mused for a moment, than added, “You say you did this because you were hungry?”

Noisy said yes, he hadn't had anything since breakfast and he still hadn't had his lunch.

“Ten days bread and water,” said the Captain. “Next case.”

Noisy looked as if he couldn't believe his ears.

The next case was the same thing, but a woman-one of those large, impressive ones who run things. She had had a row with her ship's aide and had stomped off to tell the Captain about it personally— while we were under acceleration.

Captain Harkness soon cut through the fog. “Madam,” he said, with icy dignity, “by your bull-headed stupidity you have endangered the lives of all of us. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

She started a tirade about how “rude” the aide had been to her and how she never heard of anything so preposterous in her
life
as
this kangaroo court, and so forth, and so forth. The Captain cut her short.

“Have you ever washed dishes?” he asked.

“Why, no!”

“Well, you are going to wash dishes—for the next four hundred million miles.”

I looked up dad after they let us go. It was like finding a needle in a haystack but I kept asking and presently I found him. Molly and he had a room to themselves. Peggy was there and I thought she was rooming with them, which annoyed me some, until I saw that there were only two couches and realized that Peggy must be in a dormitory. It turned out that all the kids over eight were in dormitories.

Dad was busy unclamping their couches and moving them to what was the floor, now that the ship was spinning. He stopped when I came in and we sat around and talked. I told him about Captain's mast. He nodded. “We saw it in the screen. I didn't notice your shining face, however.”

I said I hadn't been called on.

“Why not?” Peggy wanted to know.

“How should I know?” I thought about mast for a bit and said, “Say, George, the skipper of a ship in space is just about the last of the absolute monarchs, isn't he?”

Dad considered it and said, “Mmm . . . no, he's a constitutional monarch. But he's a monarch all right.”

“You mean we have to bow down to him and say 'Your Majesty?” Peggy wanted to know.

Molly said, “I don't think that would be advisable, Peg.”

“Why not? I think it would be fun.”

Molly smiled. “Well, let me know how you make out. I suspect that he will just turn you over his knee and paddle you.”

“Oh, he wouldn't dare! I'd scream.”

I wasn't so sure. I remembered those four hundred million miles of dirty dishes. I decided that, if the Captain said “Frog,” I'd hop.

If Captain Harkness was a monarch, he didn't seem anxious to rule; the first thing he had us do was to hold an election and set up a ship's council. After that we hardly laid eyes on him.

Everybody over eighteen could vote. The rest of us got to vote, too; we were told to setup a junior council—not that it was ever good for anything.

But the senior council, the
real
council, ran the ship from then on. It even acted as a court and the Captain never handed out punishments again. Dad told me that the Captain reviewed everything that the council did, that he
had
to, to make it legal—but I never heard of him overruling their decisions.

And you know what the first thing was that that council did—after setting up meal hours and simple things like that? They decided we had to go to school!

The junior council promptly held a meeting and passed a resolution against it, but it didn't mean anything. We had school, just the same.

Peggy was on the junior council. I asked her why she didn't resign if she wasn't going to do anything. I was just teasing—as a matter of fact she put up quite a battle for us.

School wasn't so bad, though. There is very h'ttle to do in space and when you've seen one star you've seen 'em all. And the first thing we had in school was a tour of the ship, which was all right.

We went in groups of twenty and it took all day–”day” by ship's time, I mean. The
Mayflower
was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side—top shaped. The point of the cone was her jet—although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her “torch.”

If you count the torch end as her stern, then the round end, her bow, was where the control room was located; around it were the Captain's cabin and the staterooms of the officers. The torch and the whole power plant space were cut off from the rest of the ship by a radiation shield that ran right through the ship. From the shield forward to the control room was a big cargo space. It was a cylinder more than a hundred feet in diameter and was split up into holds. We were carrying all sorts of things out to the colony —earth moving machinery, concentrated soil cultures, instruments, I don't know what all.

Wrapped around this central cylinder were the decks for living, “A” deck just inside the skin of the ship, “B” deck under it, and “C” deck just inside that, with “D” deck's ceiling being the outer wall of the cargo space. “D” deck was the mess rooms and galley and recreation rooms and sick bay and such; the three outer decks were bunk rooms and staterooms. “A” deck had steps in it every ten or fifteen feet because it was fitted into the outer curve of the ship; this made the ceilings in it of various heights. The furthest forward and furthest aft on “A” deck were only about six feet between floor and ceiling and some of the smaller kids lived in them, while at the greatest width of the ship the ceilings in “A” deck must have been twelve or thirteen feet high.

From inside the ship it was hard to see how it all fitted together. Not only was it all chopped up, but the artificial gravity we had from spinning the ship made directions confusing—anywhere you stood on a deck it seemed level, but it curved sharply up behind you and in front of you. But you never came to the curved part; if you walked forward it was still level. If you walked far enough you looped the loop and came back to where you started, having walked clear around the ship.

I never would have figured it out if Mr. Ortega hadn't drawn a sketch for us.

Mr. Ortega told us that the ship was spinning three and six-tenths revolutions per minute or two hundred and sixteen complete turns an hour, which was enough to give “B” deck a centrifugal force of one-third g. “B” deck was seventy-five feet out from the axis of the
Mayflower; “A”
deck where I lived was further out and you weighed maybe a tenth more there, while “C” deck caught about a tenth less. “D” deck was quite a lot less and you could make yourself dizzy if you stood up suddenly in the mess room.

The control room was right on the axis; you could float in it even when the ship was spinning—or so they told me; I never was allowed inside.

Spinning the ship had another odd effect: all around us was “down.” I mean to say that the only place you could put a view port was in the floor plates of “A” deck and that's where they were, four of them—big ones, each in its own compartment.

Mr. Ortega took us into one of these view galleries. The view port was a big round quartz plate in the floor, with a guard rail around it.

The first ones into the room went up to the guard rail and then backed away from it quick and two of the girls squealed. I pushed forward and got to the rail and looked down , . . and I was staring straight into the very bottom of the universe, a million trillion miles away and all of it
down.

I didn't shy away—George says I'm more acrobat than acrophobe—but I did sort of grip the railing. Nobody wants to fall that far. The quartz was surface-treated so that it didn't give off reflections and it looked as if there were nothing at all between you and Kingdom Come.

The stars were reeling across the hole from the ship spinning, which made it worse. The Big Dipper came swinging in from the left, passed almost under me, and slid away to the right—and a few seconds later it was back again. I said, “This is where I came in,” and gave up my place so that someone else could have a look, but nobody seemed anxious to.

Then we went through the hydroponics plant, but there wasn't anything fancy about that—just enough plants growing to replace the oxygen we used up breathing. Eel grass, it was mostly, but there was a vegetable garden as well. I wondered how they had gotten it going before they had the passengers aboard? Mr. Ortega pointed to a CO
₂
fitting in the wall. “We had to subsidize them, of course.”

I guess I should have known it; it was simple arithmetic.

The Chief led us back into one of the mess rooms, we sat down, and he told us about the power plant.

He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships: first was the chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn't very different from the big German war rockets used in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are too young to have seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever built. They had to be big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket to reach the Moon was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the
Mayflower
—yet
its pay load was less than a ton.

“It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten smaller instead of bigger. The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement; steps were no longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the
Daedalus
could take off from Earth without even a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars. But such ships still had the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat up reaction mass and push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for the same purpose.

“The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the
Mayflower,
and it may be the final development—a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of approaching the speed of light. Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty minutes which brought us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had
held
that drive for a trifle less than a year, we would approach the speed of light.