Farmer in the Sky (6 page)

“Aye aye, Skipper.” The other chap swam over to his couch and started turning switches. He left his sandwich hanging in the air while he did so.

I looked around. The control room was circular and the end we came in was bigger than the other end; it was practically up in the nose of the ship and the sides sloped in. There were two couches, one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot, flat against the wall that separated the control room from the passenger compartments. Most of the space between the couches was taken up by the computer.

The couches were fancier than the ones the passengers had; they were shaped to the body and they lifted the knees and the head and back, like a hospital bed, and there were arm rests to support their hands over the ship's controls. An instrument board arched over each couch at the middle, where the man in the couch could see the dials and stuff even when his head was pushed back into the cushions by high
g.

The TV screen lighted up and we could see Earth; it filled most of the screen. “That's 'View Aft',” the copilot said, “from a TV camera in the tail. We've got 'em pointing in all directions. Now we'll try 'View Forward'.” He did, but it didn't amount to anything, just a few tiny little dots that might have been stars. Hank said you could see more stars out a port.

“You don't use it to look at stars,” he answered. “When you need to take a star sight, you use the coelostats. Like this.” He lay back on the couch and reached behind his head, pulling an eye piece arrangement over his face until the rubber guard fitted over one eye without lifting his head off the couch. “Coelostat” is just a trick name for a telescope with a periscope built into it. He didn't offer to let us look through it, so I looked back at the instrument board. It had a couple of radar presentations, much like you'll find in any atmosphere ship, even in a copter, and a lot of other instruments, most of which I didn't understand, though some of them were pretty obvious, like approach rate and throat temperature and mass ratio and ejection speed and such.

“Watch this,” said the co-pilot. He did something at his controls; one of the tiny blips on the TV screen lit up very brightly, blinked a few times, then died away. “That was Supra-New-York; I triggered her radar beacon. You are not seeing it by television; it's radar brought on to the same screen.” He fiddled with the controls again and another light blinked, two longs and a short. “That's where they're building the
Star Rover.”

“Where's the
Mayflower?”
Hank asked.

“Want to see where you're going, eh?” He touched his controls again; another light came on, way off to one side, flashing in groups of three.

I said it didn't look much like we were going there. The Captain spoke up. “We're taking the long way round, past the fair grounds. That's enough, Sam. Lock your board.”

We all went back where the Captain was still eating. “You an Eagle Scout?” he asked me. I said yes and Hank said he was too.

“How old were you when you made it?” he wanted to know. I said I had been thirteen, so Hank said twelve, whereupon the Captain claimed he had made it at eleven. Personally I didn't believe either one of them.

The Captain said so now we were going out to Ganymede; he envied both of us. The co-pilot said what was there to envy about that?

The Captain said, “Sam, you've got no romance in your soul. You'll live and die running a ferry boat.”

“Maybe so,” the co-pilot answered, “but I sleep home a lot of nights.”

The Captain said pilots should not marry. “Take me,” he said, “I always wanted to be a deep-space man. I was all set for it, too, when I was captured by pirates and missed my chance. By the time I had the chance again, I was married.”

“You and your pirates,” said the co-pilot.

I kept my face straight. Adults always think anybody younger will swallow anything; I try not to disillusion them.

“Well, all that's as may be,” said the Captain. “You two young gentlemen run along now. Mr. Mayes and I have got to fake up a few figures, or we'll be landing this bucket in South Brooklyn.”

So we thanked him and left.

I found Dad and Molly and the Brat in the deck aft of my own. Dad said, “Where have you been, Bill? I've been looking all over the ship for you.”

I told them, “Up in the control room with the Captain.”

Dad looked surprised and the Brat made a face at me and said, “Smarty, you have not. Nobody can go up there.”

I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea.

Molly said, “Hush, Peggy.”

I said, “You can just ask Hank. He was with me. We—” I looked around but Hank was gone. So I told them what had happened, all but the part about pirates.

When I finished the Brat said, “I want to go into the control room, too.”

Dad said he didn't think it could be arranged. The Brat said, “Why not? Bill went.”

Molly said hush again. “Bill is a boy and older than you are.” The Brat said it wasn't fair.

I guess she had something there—but things hardly ever are. Dad went on, “You should feel flattered, Bill, being entertained by the famous Captain DeLongPre.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe you are too young to remember it. He let himself be sealed into one of the robot freighters used to jump thorium ore from the lunar mines—and busted up a ring of hijackers, a gang the newscasters called the 'Ore Pirates.'“

I didn't say anything.

I wanted to see the
Mayflower
from space, but they made us strap down before I could locate it. I got a pretty good view of Supra-New-York though; the
Mayflower
was in the 24-hour orbit the space station rides in and we were closing almost directly on it when the word came to strap down.

Captain DeLongPre was quite some pilot. He didn't fiddle around with jockeying his ship into the new groove; he gave one long blast on the jet, the right time, the right amount, and the right direction. As it says in the physics book, “every one-plane correction-of-orbit problem which can be solved at all, can be solved with a single application of acceleration”—provided the pilot is good enough.

He was good enough. When we went weightless again, I looked over my shoulder out a port and there was the
Mayflower,
with the Sun gleaming on her, large as life and not very far away. There was the softest sort of a correction bump and the loudspeaker sang out, “Contact completed. You may unstrap.”

I did and went to the port from which we could see the
Mayflower.
It was easy to see why she could never land; she had no airfoils of any sort, not even fins, and she was the wrong shape—almost spherical except that one side came out to a conical point.

She looked much too small—then I realized that a little bulge that was sticking out past her edge at one point was actually the bow of the
Icarus,
unloading on the far side. Then suddenly she was enormous and the little flies on her were men in space suits.

One of them shot something at us and a line came snaking across. Before the knob on the end of it quite reached us there was a bright purple brush discharge from the end of it and every hair on my head stood straight up and my skin prickled. A couple of the women in the compartment squealed and I heard Miss Andrews soothing them down and telling them that it was just the electrical potential adjusting between the two ships. If she had told them it was a bolt of lightning she would have been just as correct, but I don't suppose that would have soothed them.

I wasn't scared; any kid who had fooled around with radio or any sort of electronics would have expected it.

The knob on the line clunked against the side of the ship and after a bit the little line was followed by a heavier line and then they warped us together, slowly. The
Mayflower
came up until she filled the port.

After a bit my ears popped and the loudspeaker said, “All hands—prepare to disembark.”

Miss Andrews made us wait quite a while, then it was our deck's turn and we pulled ourselves along to the deck we had come in by. Mrs. Tarbutton didn't come along; she and her husband were having some sort of a discussion with Miss Andrews.

We went right straight out of our ship, through a jointed steel drum about ten feet long, and into the
Mayflower.

Do you know the worst thing about spaceships? They smell bad.

Even the
Mayflower
smelled bad and she was brand new. She smelled of oil and welding and solvents and dirty, sweaty smells of all the workmen who had lived in her so long. Then we came, three shiploads of us, most of us pretty whiff with that bad odor people get when they're scared or very nervous. My stomach still wasn't happy and it almost got me.

The worst of it is that there can't be very good 'freshers in a ship; a bath is a luxury. After the ship got organized we were issued tickets for two baths a week, but how far does that go, especially when a bath means two gallons of water to sponge yourself off with?

If you felt you just
had
to have a bath, you could ask around and maybe buy a ticket from somebody who was willing to skip one. There was one boy in my bunk room who sold his tickets for four weeks running until we all got sick of it and gave him an unscheduled bath with a very stiff brush. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

And you couldn't burn your clothes either; you had to
wash
them.

When we first got into the
Mayflower
it took them maybe half an hour to get us all sorted out and into our acceleration couches. The people from the
Daedalus
and the
Icarus
were supposed to be stowed away by the time we got there, but they weren't and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam when everybody is floating, and you don't know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an ordinary one.

There weren't any stewardesses to get us straight, either; there were emigrants instead, with signs on their chests reading SHIP'S AIDE–but a lot of them needed aid themselves; they were just as lost as anybody else. It was like amateur theatricals where the ushers don't know how to find the reserved seats.

By the time I was in the bunk room I was assigned to and strapped down there were bells ringing all over the place and loudspeakers shouting: “Prepare for acceleration! Ten minutes!”

Then we waited.

It seemed more like half an hour. Presently the count-off started. I said to myself, William, if the blast-off from Earth was rugged, this is going to knock the teeth right out of your head. I knew what we were going to build up to—better than ninety-three miles per second. That's a third of a million miles an hour! Frankly I was scared.

The seconds ticked away; there was a soft push that forced me down against the cushions—and that was all. I just lay there; the ceiling was the ceiling again and the floor was under me, but I didn't feel extra heavy, I felt fine.

I decided that was just the first step; the next one would be a dilly.

Up overhead in the bunk room was a display screen; it lighted up and I was looking into the face of a man with four collar stripes; he was younger than Captain DeLongPre. He smiled and said, “This is your Captain speaking, friends—Captain Harkness. The ship will remain at one gravity for a little more than four hours.I think it is time to serve lunch, don't you?”

He grinned again and I realized that my stomach wasn't bothering me at all—except that I was terribly hungry. I guess he knew that all of us ground hogs would be starving to death as soon as we were back to normal weight. He went on:

“We'll try to serve you just as quickly as possible. It is all right for you to unstrap now, sit up, and relax, but I must ask you to be very careful about one thing:

“This ship is precisely balanced so that the thrust of our drive passes exactly through our center of gravity. If that were not so, we would tend to spin instead of moving in a straight line—and we might fetch up in the heart of the Sun instead of at Ganymede.

“None of us wants to become an impromptu barbecue, so I will ask each of you not to move unnecessarily from the neighborhood of your couch. The ship has an automatic compensator for a limited amount of movement, but we must not overload it—so get permission from your ship's aide before moving as much as six inches from your present positions.”

He grinned again and it was suddenly a most unpleasant grin. “Any one violating this rule will be strapped down by force—and the Captain will assign punishment to fit the crime after we are no longer under drive.”

There wasn't any ship's aide in our compartment; all we could do was wait. I got acquainted with the boys in the bunkroom, some older, some younger. There was a big, sandy-haired boy about seventeen, by the name of Edwards—”Noisy” Edwards. He got tired of waiting.

I didn't blame him; it seemed like hours went past and still nothing to eat. I thought we had been forgotten.

Edwards had been hanging around the door, peering out. Finally he said, “This is ridiculous! We can't sit here all day. I'm for finding out what's the hold up. Who's with me?”

One of the fellows objected, “The Captain said to sit tight.”

“What if he did? And what can he do if we don't? We aren't part of the crew.”

I pointed out that the Captain had authority over the whole ship, but he brushed me off. “Tommyrot! We got a right to know what's going on—and a right to be fed. Who's coming along?”

Another boy said, “You're looking for trouble, Noisy.”

Edwards stopped; I think he was worried by the remark but he couldn't back down. Finally he said, “Look, we're supposed to have a ship's aide and we haven't got one. You guys elect me ship's aide and I'll go bring back chow. How's that?”

Nobody objected out loud. Noisy said, “Okay, here I go.”

He couldn't have been gone more than a few seconds when a ship's aide showed up carrying a big box of packaged rations. He dealt them out and had one left over. Then he counted the bunks. “Weren't there twenty boys in here?” he asked.