Hidden Variables (35 page)

Six days into the trip, our journey out shared the most common feature of all long distance travel. It was boring. When McAndrew wasn't busy inside his head, staring at the wall in front of him and performing the mental acrobatics that he called theoretical physics, we talked, played and exercised. I was astonished again that a man who knew so much about so much could know nothing about some things.

"You mean to tell me," he said once, as we lay in companionable darkness, with the side port showing the eldritch and unpredictable blue sparks of atomic collision. "You mean that
Lungfish
wasn't the first space station. All the books and records show it that way."

"No, they don't. If they do, they're wrong. It's a common mistake. Like the idea back at the beginning of flight itself, that Lindbergh was the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. He was more like the hundredth." I saw McAndrew turn his head towards me. "Yes, you heard me. A couple of airships had been over before him, and a couple of other people in aircraft. He was just the first person to fly
alone
.
Lungfish
was the first truly
permanent
space station, that's all. And I'll tell you something else. Did you know that in the earliest flights, even ones that lasted for months, the crews were usually all men? Think of that for a while."

He was silent for a moment. "I don't see anything wrong with it. It would simplify some of the plumbing, maybe some other things, too."

"You don't understand, Mac. That was at a time when it was regarded as morally wrong for men to form sexual relationships with men, or women with women."

There was what I might describe as a startled silence.

"Oh," said McAndrew at last. Then, after a few moments more, "My God. How much did they have to pay them? Or was coercion used?"

"It was considered an honor to be chosen."

He didn't say any more about it; but I don't think he believed me, either. Politeness is one of the first things you learn on long trips.

We cut off the drive briefly at crossover, but there was nothing to be seen and there was still no way we could receive messages. We were crowding light speed so closely that anything from Triton Station would scarcely be catching up with us. The Institute's message was still on its way to the Ark of Massingham, and we would be there ourselves not long after it. The
Hoatzin
was behaving perfectly, with none of the problems that had almost done us in on the earlier test ships. The massive disc of dense matter at the front of the ship protected us from most of our collisions with stray dust and free hydrogen. If we didn't come back, the next ship out could follow our path exactly, tracking our swath of ionization.

During deceleration I began to search the sky beyond the
Hoatzin
every day, with an all-frequency sweep that ought to pick up signals as soon as our drive went to reduced thrust. We didn't pick up the Ark until the final day and it was no more than a point on the microwave screen for most of that. The image we finally built up on the monitor showed a lumpy, uneven ball, pierced by black shafts. Spiky antennas and angled gantries stood up like spines on its dull grey surface. I had seen the images of the Ark before it left the Solar System, and all the surface structures were new. The colonists had been busy in the seventy-seven years since they accelerated away from Ganymede orbit.

We moved in to five thousand kilometers, cut the drive, and sent a calling sequence. I don't remember a longer five seconds, waiting for their response. When it came it was an anti-climax. A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman appeared on our screen.

"Hello," she said cheerfully. "We received a message that you were on your way here. My name is Kleeman. Link in your computer and we'll dock you. There will be a few formalities before you can come inside."

I put the central computer into distributed mode and linked a navigation module through the com-net. She sounded friendly and normal but I didn't want her to have override control of all the
Hoatzin
's movements. We moved to a position about fifty kilometers away from the Ark, then Kleeman appeared again on the screen.

"I didn't realize your ship had so much mass. We'll hold there, and you can come in on a pod. All right?"

We usually called it a capsule these days, but I knew what she meant. I made McAndrew put on a suit, to his disgust, and we entered the small transfer vessel. It was just big enough for four people, with no air lock and a simple electric drive. We drifted in to the Ark, with the capsule's computer slaved through the
Hoatzin
. As we got nearer I had a better feel for size. Two kilometers is small for an asteroid, but it's awfully big compared with a human. We nosed into contact with a landing tower, like a fly landing on the side of a wasp's nest. I hoped that would prove to be a poor analogy.

We left the capsule open and went hand-over-hand down the landing tower rather than wait for an electric lift. It was impossible to believe that we were moving at almost nine thousand kilometers a second away from Earth. The stars were in the same familiar constellations, and it took a while to pick out the Sun. It was a bright star, but a good deal less bright than Sirius. I stood at the bottom of the tower for a few seconds, peering about me before entering the air lock that led to the interior of the Ark. It was a strange, alien landscape, with the few surface lights throwing black angular shadows across the uneven rock. My trips to Titan suddenly felt like local hops around the comfortable backyard of the Solar System.

"Come on, Jeanie." That was McAndrew, all brisk efficiency and already standing in the air lock. He was much keener than I to penetrate that unfamiliar world of the interior.

I took a last look at the stars, and fixed in my mind the position of the transfer capsule—an old habit that pays off once in a thousand times. Then I followed McAndrew down into the lock.

* * *

A few formalities before you can come inside
. Kleeman had a gift for understatement. We found out what she meant when we stepped in through the inner lock, to an office-cum-schoolroom equipped with a couple of impressive consoles and displays. Kleeman met us there, as pleasant and rosy-faced in the flesh as she had seemed over the com-link.

She waved us to the terminals. "This is an improved version of the equipment that was on the original ship, before it left your system. Please sit down. Before anyone can enter our main Home, they must take tests. It has been that way since Massingham first showed us how our society could be built."

We sat at the terminals, back-to-back. McAndrew was frowning at the delay. "What's the test, then?" he grumbled.

"Just watch the screen. I don't think that either of you will have any trouble."

She smiled and left us to it. I wondered what the penalty was if you failed. We were a long way from home. It seemed clear that if they had been improving this equipment after they left Ganymede, they must apply it to their own people. We were certainly the first visitors they had seen for seventy-five years. How had they been able to accept our arrival so calmly?

Before I could pursue that thought the screen was alive. I read the instructions as they appeared there, and followed them as carefully as possible. After a few minutes I got the knack of it. We had tests rather like it when I first applied to go into space. To say that we were taking an intelligence test would be an oversimplification—many other aptitudes were tested, as well as knowledge and mechanical skills. That was the only consolation I had. McAndrew must be wiping the floor with me on all the parts that called for straight brain-power, but I knew that his coordination was terrible. He could unwrap a set of interlocking, multiply-connected figures mentally and tell you how they came apart, but ask him to do the same thing with real objects and he wouldn't be able to start.

After three hours we were finished. Both screens suddenly went blank. We swung to face each other.

"What's next?" I said. He shrugged and began to look at the terminal itself. The design hadn't been used in the System for fifty years. I took a quick float around the walls—we had entered the Ark near a pole, where the effective gravity caused by its rotation was negligible. Even on the Ark's equator I estimated that we wouldn't feel more than a tenth of a gee at the most.

No signs of what I was looking for, but that didn't mean much. Microphones could be disguised in a hundred ways.

"Mac, who do you think
she
is?"

He looked up from the terminal. "Why, she's the woman assigned to . . ." He stopped. He had caught my point. When you are two light-years from Sol and you have your first visitors for seventy-five years, who leads the reception party? Not the man and woman who recycle the garbage. Kleeman ought to be somebody important on the Ark.

"I can assist your speculation," said a voice from the wall. So much for our privacy. As I expected, we had been observed throughout—no honor system on this test. "I am Kal Massingham Kleeman, the daughter of Jules Massingham, and I am senior member of Home outside the Council of Intellects. Wait there for one more moment. I will join you with good news."

She was beaming when she reappeared. Whatever they were going to do with us, it didn't seem likely they would be flinging us out into the void.

"You are both prime stock, genetically and individually," she said. "I thought that would be the case when first I saw you."

She looked down at a green card in her hand. "I notice that you both failed to answer one small part of the inquiry on your background. Captain Roker, your medical record indicates that you bore one child. But what is its sex, condition, and present status?"

I heard McAndrew suck in his breath past his teeth, while I suppressed my own shock as best I could. It was clear that the standards of privacy in the System and on the Ark had diverged widely in the past seventy-seven years.

"It is a female." I hope I kept my voice steady. "Healthy, and with no neuroses. She is in first level education on Luna."

"The father?"

"Unknown."

I shouldn't have been pleased to see that now Kleeman was shocked, but I was. She looked as distressed as I felt. After a few seconds she grabbed control of her emotions, swallowed, and nodded.

"We are not ignorant of the unplanned matings that your System permits. But hearing of such things and encountering them directly are not the same." She looked again at her green card. "McAndrew, you show no children. Is that true?"

He had taken his lead from me and managed a calm and literal reply. "No recorded children."

"Incredible." Kleeman was shaking her head. "That a man of your talents should be permitted to go so long without suitable mating . . ."

She looked at him hungrily, the way that I have seen McAndrew eye an untapped set of experimental data from out in the Halo. I could imagine how he had performed on the intellectual sections of the test.

"Come along," she said at last, still eyeing McAndrew in a curiously intense and possessive way. "I would like to show you some of Home, and arrange for you to have living quarters for your use."

"Don't you want more details of why we are here?" burst out Mac. "We've come nearly two light-years to get to the Ark."

"You have been receiving our messages of the advances that we have made?" Kleeman's manner had a vast self-confidence. "Then why should we be surprised when superior men and women from your system wish to come here? We are only surprised that it took you so long to develop a suitably efficient ship. Your vessel is new?"

"Very new." I spoke before McAndrew could get a word in. Kleeman's assumption that we were on the Ark to stay had ominous overtones. We needed to know more about the way the place functioned before we told her that we were planning only a brief visit.

"We have been developing the drive for our ship using results that parallel some of those found by your scientists," I went on. I gave Mac a look that kept him quiet for a little while longer. "When we have finished with the entry preliminaries, Professor McAndrew would very much like to meet your physicists."

She smiled serenely at him. "Of course. McAndrew, you should be part of our Council of Intellects. I do not know how high your position was back in your system, but I feel sure you have nothing as exalted—and as respected—as our Council. Well,"—she placed the two green cards she was holding in the pocket of her yellow smock—"there will be plenty of time to discuss induction to the Council when you have settled in here. The entry formalities are complete. Let me show you Home. There has never been anything like it in the whole of human history."

Over the next four hours we followed Kleeman obediently through the interior of the Ark. McAndrew was itching to locate his fellow-physicists, but he knew he was at the mercy of Kleeman's decisions. From our first meeting with others on the Ark, there was no doubt who was the boss there.

How can I describe the interior of the Ark? Imagine a free-space beehive, full of hard-working bees that had retained an element of independence of action. Everyone on the Ark of Massingham seemed industrious, cooperative, and intelligent. But they were missing a dimension, the touch of orneriness and unpredictability that you would find on Luna or on Titan. Nobody was cursing, nobody was irrational. Kleeman guided us through a clean, slightly dull Utopia.

The technology of the Ark was simpler to evaluate. Despite the immense pride with which Kleeman showed off every item of development, they were half a century behind us. The sprawling, overcrowded chaos of Earth was hard to live with, but it provided a constant pressure towards innovation. New inventions come fast when ten billion people are there to push you to new ideas. In those terms, life on the Ark was spacious and leisurely. The colony had constructed its network of interlocking tunnels to a point where it would take months to explore all the passages and corridors, but they were nowhere near exhausting their available space and resources.

"How many people would the Ark hold?" I asked McAndrew as we trailed along behind Kleeman. It would have taken only a minute or two to work it out for myself, but you get lazy when you live for a while with a born calculator.