Starman Jones (11 page)

“Yes, indeed. You can spare him, Hal?”

“Oh, certainly, Captain. He’s hardly a key man where he is.” The Purser smiled. “Bottom deck valet.”

The Captain smiled and turned to the Astrogator. “I see no objection, Doc. It’s a guild matter, of course.”

“Kelly is willing to try him. He’s short a man, you know.”

“Very well, then…”

“Just a moment, Captain.” The Astrogator turned to Max. “Jones…you had a relative in my guild?”

“My uncle, sir. Chester Jones.”

“I served under him. I hope you have some of his skill with figures.”

“Uh, I hope so, sir.”

“We shall see. Report to Chief Computerman Kelly.”

Max managed to find the control room without asking directions, although he could hardly see where he was going.

The change in Max’s status changed the whole perspective of his life. His social relations with the other crew members changed not entirely for the better. The control room gang considered themselves the gentry of the crew, a status disputed by the power technicians and resented by the stewards. Max found that the guild he was leaving no longer treated him quite as warmly while the guild for which he was trying out did not as yet accept him.

Mr. Gee simply ignored him—would walk right over him if Max failed to jump aside. He seemed to regard Max’s trial promotion as a personal affront.

It was necessary for him to hit the slop chest for dress uniforms. Now that his duty station was in the control room, now that he must pass through passengers’ country to go to and from work, it was no longer permissible to slouch around in dungarees. Mr. Kuiper let him sign for them; his cash would not cover it. He had to sign as well for the cost of permission to work out of his guild, with the prospect of going further in debt to both guilds should he be finally accepted. He signed cheerfully.

The control department of the
Asgard
consisted of two officers and five men—Dr. Hendrix the Astrogator, his assistant astrogator Mr. Simes, Chief Computerman Kelly, Chartsman First Class Kovak, Chtsmn 2/c Smythe, and computermen Noguchi and Lundy, both second class. There was also “Sack” Bennett, communicator first class, but he was not really a part of the control gang, even though his station was in the Worry Hole; a starship was rarely within radio range of anything except at the very first and last parts of a trip. Bennett doubled as Captain Blaine’s secretary and factotum and owed his nickname to the often-stated belief of the others that he spent most of his life in his bunk.

Since the
Asgard
was always under boost, a continuous watch was kept; not for them were the old, easy days of rocket ships, with ten minutes of piloting followed by weeks of free fall before more piloting was required. Since the
Asgard
carried no apprentice astrogator, there were only two officers to stand watches (Captain Blaine was necessarily an astrogator himself, but skippers do not stand watches); this lack was made up by Chief Computerman Kelly, who stood a regular watch as control officer-of-the-watch. The other ratings stood a watch in four; the distinction between a computerman and a chartsman was nominal in a control room dominated by “Decimal Point” Kelly—what a man didn’t know he soon learned, or found another ship.

Easy watches for everyone but Max—he was placed on watch-and-watch for instruction, four hours on followed by four hours off in which he must eat, keep himself clean, relax, and—if he found time—sleep.

But he thrived on it, arriving early and sometimes having to be ordered out of the Worry Hole. Not until much later did he find out that this stiff regime was Kelly’s way of trying to break him, discover his weakness and get rid of him promptly if he failed to measure up.

Not all watches were pleasant. Max’s very first watch was under Mr. Simes. He crawled up the hatch into the control room and looked around him in wonderment. On four sides were the wonderfully delicate parallax cameras. Between two of them Lundy sat at the saddle of the main computer; he looked up and nodded but did not speak. Mr. Simes sat at the control console, facing the hatch; he must have seen Max but gave no sign of it.

There were other instruments crowded around the walls, some of which Max recognized from reading and from seeing pictures, some of which were strange—tell-tales and gauges from each of the ship’s compartments, a screen to reproduce the view aft or “below,” microphone and controls for the ship’s announcing system, the “tank” or vernier stereograph in which plates from the parallax cameras could be compared with charts, spectrostellograph, dopplerscope, multipoint skin temperature recorder, radar repeater for landing, too many things to take in at once.

Overhead through the astrogation dome was the starry universe. He stared at it, mouth agape. Living as he had been, inside a steel cave, he had hardly seen the stars; the firmament had been more with him back home on the farm.

“Hey! You!”

Max shook his head and found Mr. Simes looking at him. “Come here.” Max did so, the assistant astrogator went on, “Don’t you know enough to report to the watch officer when you come on duty?”

“Uh—sorry, sir.”

“Besides that, you’re late.” Max slid his eyes to the chronometer in the console; it still lacked five minutes of the hour. Simes continued, “A sorry state of affairs when crewmen relieve the watch later than the watch officer. What’s your name?”

“Jones, sir.”

Mr. Simes sniffed. He was a red-faced young man with thin, carroty hair and a sniff was his usual conversational embellishment, at least with juniors. “Make a fresh pot of coffee.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Max started to ask where and how, but Mr. Simes had gone back to his reading. Max looked helplessly at Lundy, who indicated a direction with his eyes. Behind the chart safe Max found a coffee maker and under it cups, saucers, sugar, and tins of cream.

He burned himself before getting the hang of gear’s idiosyncrasies. Mr. Simes accepted the brew without looking at him. Max wondered what to do next, decided to offer a cup to Lundy. The computerman thanked him quietly and Max decided to risk having one himself, since it seemed to be accepted. He took it over beside the computer to drink it.

He was still doing so when the watch officer spoke up. “What is this? A tea party? Jones!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Get the place policed up. Looks as if a herd of chucks had been wallowing in it.”

The room seemed clean, but Max found a few scraps of paper to pick up and stuff down the chute, after which he wiped already-gleaming brightwork. He had started to go over things a second time when Lundy motioned him over. Max then helped Lundy change plates in the parallax cameras and watched him while he adjusted the electronic timer. Mr. Simes pushed the ready button himself, which seemed to be his sole work during the watch.

Lundy removed the plates and set them up in the tank for chart comparison, took the readings and logged them. Max gave him nominal help and gathered some notion of how it was done, after which he again wiped brightwork.

It was a long watch. He went to his bunk drained of the elation he had felt.

But watches with Dr. Hendrix and with Chief Kelly were quite different. The Worry Hole was a jolly place under Kelly; he ruled as a benevolent tyrant, shouting, cursing, slandering the coffee, slurring his juniors and being sassed back. Max never touched a polish rag when Kelly was at control; he was kept too busy not merely helping but systematically studying everything in the room. “We haven’t a condemned thing to do,” Kelly shouted at him, “until we hit Garson’s Folly. Nothing to do but to ride this groove down until we hit dirt. So you, my laddy buck, are going to do plenty. When we get there you are going to know this condemned hole better than your mother knew your father—or you can spend your time there learning what you’ve missed while your mates are dirtside getting blind. Get out the instruction manual for the main computer, take off the back plate and get lost in them wires. I don’t want to see anything but your ugly behind the rest of this watch.”

Within ten minutes, Kelly was down on his knees with him, helping him trace the intricate circuits.

Max learned, greatly assisted by his photographic memory and still more by the sound grounding in theory he had gotten from his uncle. Kelly was pleased. “I reckon you exaggerated a mite when you said you hadn’t learned anything in the
Thule.
”

“Well, not much.”

“Johansen have the Worry Hole when you were striking?”

“Uh, yes.” Max hoped frantically that Kelly would not ask other names.

“I thought so. That squarehead wouldn’t tell his own mother how old he was.”

There came a watch when Kelly trusted him to do a dry run for a transition approach on the computer, with Noguchi handling the tables and Kelly substituting for the astrogator by following records of the actual transition the ship had last made. The programming was done orally, as is the case when the astrogator is working under extreme pressure from latest data, just before giving the crucial signal to boost past the speed of light.

Kelly took it much more slowly than would happen in practice, while Noguchi consulted tables and called out figures to Max. He was nervous at first, his fingers trembling so that it was hard to punch the right keys—then he settled down and enjoyed it, feeling as if he and the machine had been born for each other.

Kelly was saying, “—times the binary natural logarithm of zero point eight seven oh nine two.” Max heard Noguchi’s voice call back the datum while he thumbed for the page—but in his mind Max saw the page in front of his eyes long before Noguchi located it; without conscious thought he depressed the right keys.

“Correction!” sang out Kelly. “Look, meathead, you don’t put in them figures; you wait for translation by Noggy here. How many times I have to tell you?”

“But I did—” Max started, then stopped. Thus far, he had managed to keep anyone aboard the
Asgard
from learning of his embarrassingly odd memory.

“You did what?” Kelly started to clear the last datum from the board, then hesitated. “Come to think of it, you can’t possibly feed decimal figures into that spaghetti mill. Just what
did
you do?”

Max knew he was right and hated to appear not to know how to set up a problem. “Why, I put in the figures Noguchi was about to give me.”

“How’s that again?” Kelly stared at him. “You a mind reader?”

“No. But I put in the right figures.”

“Hmm…” Kelly bent over the keyboard. “Call ’em off, Noggy.” The computerman reeled off a string of ones and zeroes, the binary equivalent of the decimal expression Kelly had given him; Kelly checked the depressed keys, his lips moving in concentration. He straightened up. “I once saw a man roll thirteen sevens with honest dice. Was it fool luck, Max?”

“No.”

“Well! Noggy, gimme that book.” Kelly went through the rest of the problem, giving Max raw data and the operations to be performed, but not translating the figures into the binary notation the computer required. He kept thumbing the book and glancing over Max’s shoulder. Max fought off stage fright and punched the keys, while sweat poured into his eyes.

At last Kelly said, “Okay. Twist its tail.” Max flipped the switch which allowed the computer to swallow the program and worry it for an instant; the answer popped out in lights, off or on—the machine’s equivalent of binary figures.

Kelly translated the lights back into decimal notation, using the manual. He then glanced at the recorded problem. He closed the record book and handed it to Noguchi. “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said quietly and walked away.

Noguchi reopened it, looked at the lights shining on the board and consulted the manual, after which he looked at Max very oddly. Max saw Kelly staring at him over a cup with the same expression. Max reached up and cleared the board entirely; the lights went out. He got down out of the computerman’s saddle. No body said anything.

Max’s next watch was with Dr. Hendrix. He enjoyed watches with the Astrogator almost as much as those with Kelly; Dr. Hendrix was a friendly and soft-spoken gentleman and gave as much attention to training Max as Kelly did. But this time, Kelly lingered on after being relieved—in itself nothing, as the Chief Computerman frequently consulted with, or simply visited with, the Astrogator at such times. But today, after relieving the watch, Dr. Hendrix said pleasantly, “Kelly tells me that you are learning to use the computer, Jones?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Very well, let’s have a drill.” Dr. Hendrix dug out an old astrogation log and selected a transition-approach problem similar to the one Max had set up earlier. Kelly took the manual, ready to act as his “numbers boy—” but did not call the translations. Max waited for the first one; when it did not come, he read the figures from the page shining in his mind and punched them in.

It continued that way. Kelly said nothing, but wet his lips and checked what Max did each time the doctor offered a bit of the problem. Kovak watched from nearby, his eyes moving from actor to actor.

At last, Dr. Hendrix closed the book. “I see,” he agreed, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “Jones, that is an extremely interesting talent. I’ve read of such cases, but you are the first I have met. You’ve heard of Blind Tom?”

“No, sir.”

“Perhaps the ship’s library has an account of him.” The Astrogator was silent for a moment. “I don’t mean to belittle your talent, but you are not to use it during an actual maneuver. You understand why?”

“Yes, sir. I guess I do.”

“Better say that you are not to use it unless you think an error has been made—in which case you will speak up at once. But the printed tables remain the final authority.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Good. See me, please, in my room when you come off watch.”

It was “day time” by the ship’s clocks when he went off watch. He went to the passageway outside Dr. Hendrix’s room and waited; there Ellie came across him. “Max!”

“Oh. Hello, Ellie.” He realized uncomfortably that he had not seen her since his tentative promotion.

“Hello he says!” She planted herself in front of him. “You’re a pretty sight—with your bloodshot eyes matching the piping on your shirt. Where have you been? Too good for your old friends? You haven’t even been to see Chipsie.”