Marion Bradley - Survey Ship

In the gym, Teague knelt and set the gravity to one-half of normal. “Does this bother you?” he asked.

“N-no,” Ching said, “As long as there’s enough to know whether I’m right-side-up or upside-down.” Was that what he had meant by fighting to stay in control?

“Here, try the springboard,” he said “Spring up in the air and somersault; and let me catch you in midair. I won’t let you fall, I promise you.”

Hesitantly, Ching sprang up from the board, letting her narrow body spin free in a double somersault in midair; felt Teague’s arms clasp around her and they spun the length of the gym in a single soaring leap.

After a few more maneuvers, feeling that Ching seemed somehow less frightened, Teague went back to the controls.

“All the way off, this time?”

She looked at him, scared and yet exhilarated, given confidence by his own ease in midair. Then she nodded, laughing a little, breathless. “I don’t think I could be afraid of anything when you were with me, Teague.”

With a decisive movement, Teague turned the controls all the way to OFF, felt himself float upward and made a bound to catch Ching as she drifted free. She laughed again, clasping him in her arms, letting him soar with her the full length of the gym, giving herself over to the strange, empty, falling sensation.

“You’re right, Teague, it is fun when you don’t try to fight it!” She slid from his arms, soaring free, spinning dizzily around the room, her laughter still high and breathless as she leaped toward the ceiling, flew downward. He bounded after her as she took off like a swallow, arms folded, soaring.

Teague felt the sudden, hard jolt, put out a hand to save himself; came down on one wrist, feeling agony tearing through the tendons as the wrist let go; clasped it, with a cry of pain, fighting to recover his balance; the movement ripped lightnings of renewed pain through his arm as he ran, but too late. Ching fell like a stone, striking head-first, and lay still.

Peake was on the Bridge with a silent, sullen Ravi, doing the painstaking work of triangulation from four points of reference to work out the Ship’s precise position; a necessary, daily ordeal until they could absolutely trust the computers again.

“I hope Ching gets that finished before we leave the Solar System,” Ravi muttered.

“There’s no way she could do that. Not if she worked round the clock,” Peake said, “and she’s been virtually doing that; she stops for meals and a two-hour exercise period and the daily music session, and the rest of the time she’s been wedged inside the computer module, where for all I know she’s tearing the infernal thing to pieces! She estimated another ten days when I asked her, and that’s assuming she can keep up that murderous routine without her health or morale suffering.”

“She’s not in the computer now, is she?”

Peake shook his head. “I think she’s probably sleeping; she and Fontana were sorting some music, some fairly archaic duets they wanted to try singing. Or she and Teague may have gone off to their cabins for a bit of rest and recreation — so to speak. And they’re certainly entitled, the way they’ve been working to repair everything.”

“I wish I could do something to help,” Ravi said, “but inside the computer I’d be about as much help as a snowball inside a nuclear reactor. ”

Peake looked at the small, dark man with sympathy. He said, “I know, I hate feeling helpless. I do feel they should have sent a second computer technician; if I had been making the decisions, I’d probably never send a crew smaller than ten. It would make the trip easier on all of us, too. But as things are, we simply have to do what we can in our own fields, and let the others do theirs. At that, I suspect that if Ching picks someone to teach, in order to have a backup computer technician, you’ll probably be the one. You’re a natural mathematician — and on top of that, you’re physically small enough to fit into the computer module. I understand that makes a difference.”

“So Ching said,” Ravi agreed, “and I admit I’d be interested. There was a time, when we started choosing specialties, that I considered computer work. But having started with navigation and astronomy, I felt that meteorology and oceanography would be more useful; two specialties for in space, two for any planet we were surveying.”

“That’s what they usually recommend,” Peake said. “I wish there had been a Navigation first specialist, though. When I think of all the trouble they would have saved if they had added another four people to the crew. Another navigator. Another computer tech. At least. Maybe another medic. Perhaps another engineer.”

“I don’t understand why they didn’t,” Ravi said, “and of course well never know. I’d have been glad to have Mei Mel, or Fly, or even Jimson…”

“It wouldn’t have bothered you, Ravi? To have both of us?”

Ravi shook his head. He said, “No, certainly not. I liked Jimson, though he was a little — well, unpredictable. No more so, certainly, than Moira, though.” And pain moved suddenly in him again. He did not believe that what he felt for Moira was a neurotic obsession. He simply wanted to love her, cherish her, treat her as the other half of himself, to love her as his own soul, the female part of his humanity. She had so completely misunderstood him. He did not want to possess her; if she desired other men she was free to have them, he did not want in any way to narrow her horizons, but only to help her expand them to cosmic limits. And she had rejected this, rejected it entirely. He loved her no less for the rejection; it still seemed to him that in loving Moira he had learned more about love, about the secrets of awareness locked at the heart of life; only now it seemed to him that instead of God’s self being centered somewhere in the great, eternal, infinite vastness of stars out there beyond the window of the Bridge, he was somehow linked to that cosmic pulsing, and that its echo was here within the focus of the Ship, that it was in his comrades here. It was within Moira, within himself, within all of the others, and even Peake’s craggy face seemed infinitely beautiful to him, infinitely worthy of love and even worship. He knew that if he carried this even a little further it would dissolve into sentiment and self-pity, but now he looked at Peake and felt, with an overflow of pure and unsentimental emotion, that he would give his life for him, or for any of them, and that he would not even notice the difference. As long as one of them lived he would continue to survive as part of the cosmic unity he felt flowing among them all. Even the pain and regret he felt because Moira had refused his love was irrelevant; he had somehow moved to a point where pain and pleasure were irrelevant and interchangeable. He would love Moira, he would continue to pour out his love upon her, as upon God, uncaring whether she accepted it, or even knew about it; his mistake had been in telling her about it, the love was no less because she did not return it. Describing the position of the Ship among the stars, entering it formally in the log, he felt somehow that he had described his relationship to God with the numbers.

This new state of mind was so unexpected, so much a strangeness, that he actually stopped a moment to wonder, Am I going insane, is this exultation only insanity’s dangerous leading edge of euphoria? Maybe I should talk to Fontana about it. And yet he was functioning perfectly well, his mathematical calculations were impeccable — for Peake, duplicating his work on the calculator, had validated them to the last decimal place — he was making accurate observations, his body performed exactly as well as he told it to, he was eating normally, digesting his food, and playing music with the others, not going off on some ecstatic trip of his own. His pulse, respiration, color perception, blood pressure, and urine were all normal, or so Peake had pronounced them at the regular three-day medical checkups. He reacted well to normal gravity, to partial gravity and to free-fall. Therefore he assumed he was physically and mentally normal, in an abnormal emotional state.