Space Cadet (19 page)

Theoretically every ration taken aboard a Patrol vessel is pre-cooked and ready for eating as soon as it is taken out of freeze and subjected to the number of seconds, plainly marked on the package, of high-frequency heating required. Actually many Patrol officers fancy themselves chefs. Mr. Brunn was one and his results justified his conceit—the
Aes Triplex
set a good table.

Matt found that Mr. Brunn expected more of the “farm” than that the green plants should scavenge carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen; the mess officer wanted tiny green scallions, fragrant fresh mint, cherry tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, new potatoes. Matt began to wonder whether it wouldn’t have been simpler to have stayed in Iowa and grown tall corn.

When he started in as air-conditioning officer Matt was not even sure how to take a carbon-dioxide count, but shortly he was testing his growing solutions and adding capsules of salts with the confidence and speed of a veteran, thanks to Brunn and to spool #62A8134 from the ship’s files—“Simplified Hydroponics for Spaceships, with Growth Charts and Additives Formulae.” He began to enjoy tending his “farm.”

Until human beings give up the habit of eating, spaceships on long cruises must carry about seven hundred pounds of food per man per year. The green plants grown in a ship’s air-conditioner enable the stores officer to get around this limitation to some extent, as the growing plants will cycle the same raw materials—air, carbon dioxide, and water—over and over again with only the addition of quite small quantities of such salts as potassium nitrate, iron sulphate, and calcium phosphate.

The balanced economy of a spaceship is much like that of a planet; energy is used to make the cycles work but the same raw materials are used over and over again. Since beefsteak and many other foods can’t be grown conveniently aboard ship some foods have to be carried and the ship tends to collect garbage, wastepaper, and other trash. Theoretically this could be processed back into the cycles of balanced biological economy, but in practice this is too complicated.

However,
all
mass in an atomic powered ship can be used, if desired, as reaction mass, mass for the rocket jet. The radioactive materials in the power pile of an atom-powered ship are not themselves used up to any great extent; instead they heat other materials to extreme temperatures and expel them out the rocket tube at very high speeds, as a sort of “steam” jet.

Even though turnip greens and such can be used in the jet, the primary purpose of the “farm” is to take the carbon dioxide out of the air. For this purpose each man in the ship must be balanced by about ten square feet of green plant leaf. Lieutenant Brunn, with his steady demands for variety in fresh foods, usually caused Matt to have too much growing at one time; the air in the ship would get too fresh and the plants would start to fail for lack of carbon dioxide to feed on. Matt had to watch his CO
₂
count and sometimes build it up by burning waste paper or plant cuttings.

Brunn kept a file of seeds in his room; Matt went there one “day” (ship’s time) to draw out Persian melon seeds and set a crop. Brunn told him to help himself. Matt rummaged away, then said, “For the love of Pete! Look at this, Mr. Brunn.”

“Huh?” The officer looked at the package Matt held. The outside was marked, “Seeds, melon, Persian—jumbo fancy, stock #12-Q4728-a”; the envelope inside read “Seed, pansies, giant variegated.”

Brunn shook his head. “Let that be a lesson, Dodson—never trust a stock clerk—or you’ll wind up half way to Pluto with a gross of brass spittoons when you ordered blank spacecharts.”

“What’ll I substitute? Cantaloupe?”

“Let’s grow some watermelon—the Old Man likes watermelon.”

Matt left with watermelon that he took along the truant pansy seeds.

Eight weeks later he devised a vase of sorts by covering a bowl from the galley with the same sponge-cellulose sheet which was used to restrain the solutions used in his farming, thereby to keep said solutions from floating around the “farm” compartment during free fall. He filled his vase with water, arranged his latest crop therein, and clipped the whole to the mess table as a centerpiece.

Captain Yancey smiled broadly when he appeared for dinner and saw the gay display of pansies. “Well, gentlemen,” he applauded, “this is most delightful. All the comforts of home!” He looked along the table at Matt. “I suppose we have you to thank for this, Mr. Dodson?”

“Yes, sir.” Matt’s ears turned pink.

“A lovely idea. Gentlemen, I move that we divest Mr. Dodson of the plebeian title of ‘farmer’ and designate him ‘horticulturalist extraordinary.’ Do I hear a second?” There were nine “ayes” and a loud “no” from Commander Miller. A second ballot, proposed by the Chief Engineer, required the Executive Officer to finish his meal in the galley.

Lieutenant Brunn explained the mishap that resulted in the flower garden. Captain Yancey frowned. “You’ve checked the rest of your supply of seeds, of course, Mr. Brunn?”

“Uh, no, sir.”

“Then do so.” Lieutenant Brunn immediately started to leave the table, “—after dinner,” added the Captain. Brunn resumed his place.

“That puts me in mind of something that happened to me when I was ‘farmer’ in the old
Percival Lowell
—the one before the present one,” Yancey went on. “We had touched at Venus South Pole and had managed somehow to get a virus infection, a sort of rust, into the ‘farm’—don’t look so superior, Mr. Jensen; someday you’ll come a cropper with a planet that is new to you!”

“Me, sir? I wasn’t looking superior.”

“No? Smiling at the pansies, no doubt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hmmph! As I was saying, we got this rust infection and about ten days out I didn’t have any more farm than an Eskimo. I cleaned the place out, sterilized, and reseeded. Same story. The infection was all through the ship and I couldn’t chase it down. We finished that trip on preserved foods and short rations and I wasn’t allowed to eat at the table the rest of the trip.” He smiled to himself, then shouted at the galley door, “How you getting along in there, Red?”

The Executive Officer appeared in the doorway, a spoon in one hand, covered dish in the other. “Fine,” he answered in a muffled voice, “I just ate your dessert, Captain.”

Lieutenant Brunn shouted, “Hey! Commander! Stop! Don’t! Those berries are for breakfast.”

“Too late.” Commander Miller wiped his mouth.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Dodson?”

“What did you do about air-conditioning?”

“Well, Mister, what would you have done?”

Matt studied it. “Well, sir, I would have jury-rigged something to take the Cee-Oh-Two out of the air.”

“Precisely. I exhausted the air from an empty compartment, suited up, and drilled a couple of holes to the outside. Then I did a piping job to carry foul air out of the dark side of the ship in a fractional still arrangement—freeze out the water first, then freeze out the carbon dioxide. Pesky thing was always freezing up solid and forcing me to tinker with it. But it worked well enough to get us home.” Yancey backed away from the table. “Hartley, if you’re through making a pig of yourself, let’s run over that meteor-layout. I’ve got an idea.”

The ship was approaching the orbit of Mars and soon would be in the comparatively hazardous zone of the asteroids and their company of space drift. Matt was rotated, in turn, to assistant astrogator, but continued as ship’s farmer. Tex looked him up one day in the hydroponics compartment. “Hey! Hayseed—”

“Hey yourself, Tex.”

“Got the south forty plowed yet? Looks like rain.” Tex pretended to study the blinking lights used to stimulate plant growth, then looked away. “Never mind—I’m here on business. The Old Man wants to see you.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, why didn’t you say so, instead of banging your choppers?” Matt stopped what he was doing and hurriedly started climbing into his uniform. Because of the heat and the humidity in the “farm” Matt habitually worked there bare naked, both for comfort and to save his clothes.

“Well, I did tell you, didn’t I?”

The Captain was in his cabin. “Cadet Dodson, sir.”

“So I see.” Yancey held up a sheet of paper. “Dodson, I’ve just written a letter to the Department, to be transmitted as soon as we are in radio contact, recommending that fresh flowers be grown in all ships, as a means of stimulating morale. You are credited therein as the originator of the idea.”

“Er…thank you, sir.”

“Not at all. Anything that relieves the tedium, the boredom, the barrenness of life in deep space is in the interest of the Patrol. We have enough people going space-happy as it is. Flowers are considered good for psychotics on Earth; perhaps they will help to keep spacemen from going wacky. Enough of that—I’ve a question to ask you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want to know why in the devil you were spending your time growing pansies when you are behind in your study schedule?”

Matt did not have anything to say.

“I’ve been looking over the reports Mr. Thurlow sends me and I find that both Mr. Jensen and Mr. Jarman are covering more ground than you are. In the past few weeks they have pulled ’way ahead of you. It’s a fine thing to have hobbies but your duty is to study.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve marked your performance unsatisfactory for this quarter; you have the next quarter in which to make up the deficiency. By the way, have you made up your mind about your next move?”

Matt did a double take, then realized that the Captain had changed the subject to chess; he and Matt were fighting it out for first place in the ship’s tournament. “Uh, yes, sir—I’ve decided to take your pawn.”

“I thought so.” Yancey reached behind him; Matt heard the pieces click into their sockets as the Captain made the move on his own board. “Wait till you see what’s going to happen to your queen!”

The speeds of the asteroids, flying boulders, rocks, sand, and space drift that infest the area between Mars and Jupiter vary from about fifteen miles per second near Mars to about eight miles per second near Jupiter. The orbits of this flying junkyard are erratically inclined to the plane of the ecliptic an average of about nine degrees and some of the orbits are quite eccentric as well.

All this means that a ship on a circular orbit, headed “east,” or with the traffic, may expect the possibility of side-swiping collisions at relative speeds averaging two miles per second, with crashes remotely possible at double that speed.

Two miles per second is only about twice the muzzle velocity of a good sporting rifle. With respect to small stuff, sand and gravel, the
Aes Triplex
was built to take it. Before the ship reached the danger zone, an all-hands chore in space suits took place; armor-plate segments, as thick as the skin of the ship, were bolted over the ship’s quartz ports, leaving only the eyes of the astrogational instruments and the radar antennae exposed.

To guard against larger stuff Captain Yancey set up a meteor-watch much tighter than is usual in most parts of space. Eight radars scanned all space through a global 360°. The only condition necessary for collision is that the other object hold a steady bearing—no fancy calculation is involved. The only action necessary then to avoid collision is to change your own speed, any direction, any amount. This is perhaps the only case where theory of piloting is simple.

Commander Miller put the cadets and the sublieutenants on a continuous heel-and-toe watch, scanning the meteor-guard ’scopes. Even if the human being failed to note a steady bearing the radars would “see” it, for they were so rigged that, if a “blip” burned in at one spot on the screen, thereby showing a steady bearing, an alarm would sound—and the watch officer would cut in the jet, fast!

However, even the asteroid belt is very empty space indeed; the chances were strongly against collision with anything larger than a grain of sand. The only difference in the
Aes Triplex
, aside from the increased work for the junior officers, was a ship’s order directing all hands to strap down when sleeping, instead of floating loosely and comfortably about, so that the sleeper would not break his neck in case of sudden acceleration.

P.R.S.
Aes Triplex
was equipped with two jeeps, nestled in hangar pockets—quite ordinary short-range, chemically-powered rockets except that they were equipped with search radar as powerful as the ship’s. When they reached their search area a pilot and co-pilot were assigned to each jeep—and a second crew also, as each rocket was to remain away from the ship a week at a time, then swap crews and go out again.

Lieutenants Brunn, Thurlow, and Novak, and Sublieutenant Peters were designated pilots. A cadet was assigned to each senior lieutenant and Sublieutenant Gomez was teamed with Sublieutenant Peters. Matt drew Lieutenant Thurlow.

Dr. Pickering took over the mess. That left Sublieutenant Cleary as “George,” the man who does everything—an impossibility, since meteor-guard and search watches would have to be kept up. Consequently the two jeep crews not actually in space had to help out even during their week of rest.

Each Monday the ship placed the jeep rockets on station so that the three vessels would sweep the largest possible volume of space, with their search fields barely overlapping. The placement was made by the mother ship, so that the jeep would be left with full tanks in the unhappy event that she was not picked up—and thereby have enough fuel to shape an orbit toward the inner planets, if need be.