Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years

We could see him caving in hour by hour, and we tried to be good to him, to help him relax. Mirrik told stories, and Steen Steen did a pretty fair juggling act, and Jan took him for a walk and came back looking a little flushed and rumpled. I wasn’t too happy about that, but I told myself it was All For The Cause. By the second day Ron’s data-transmission speed was about two thirds what it had been at the start, and the next day it was even slower. And he was nowhere near the midpoint of the job. On his fourth shift of the third day he stopped suddenly, looked around the laboratory, blinked, and said, “What time is it? Does anyone know the time? My watch won’t tell me. I’ve asked it, but it won’t tell.”

Then he stood up and, as though all his bones had suddenly been pulled from his body, crumpled and dropped.

The base medic said it was simply exhaustion, ordered Ron not to do any TP work for a week, and hauled him away for a few days of deepsleep recuperation. There were two other TPs available on Higby V: Marge Hotchkiss and a gloomy Israeli named Nach-man Ben-Dov. Since the communications net had to stay open for messages around the clock, this presented certain problems of scheduling. With Ron temporarily out of the hookup, Hotchkiss and Ben-Dov were required to put in twelve Earthnorm hours each day simply handling routine switching and transmitting assignments. That was four hours a day more than the supposed maximum for TP work, and left neither of them any time at all for us. Since they had already been working overtime for the three days that Ron had been transmitting full-time from our lab, neither of them took kindly to an extension of their duties. Particularly dear Marge.

Dr. Schein pulled some strings and we managed to work out a deal. First, it was agreed that the TP staff on Higby III, where some patchy farming settlements have been founded lately, would intercept all incoming messages bound for Higby V. These would be relayed from III to V by ordinary radio transmission; we undertook to pay the extra cost of this. That took about half the burden off the local TP staff. The military people were willing — grudgingly — to defer most outgoing messages until Ron got better, which also helped. The two TPs would still have to be on call four hours a day apiece for normal duties. But that left each one of them four hours a day for us.

We didn’t want any more collapses, though. We decided on a pattern whereby Ben-Dov would come out to the lab and transmit for us for two two-hour shifts, while Marge was sleeping. Then somebody would drive him back into town and get Marge, who’d come out and do two two-hour shifts while Ben-Dov was handling the ordinary stuff at the communications office. Then Ben-Dov would get some sleep and Marge would go back to put in her four hours of office work. That gave us the four daily shifts we had been getting out of Ron, and still left the two TPs time to handle their real work without burning out. Our transmission times were different now, though. Ron had preferred to do his transmitting in one sixteen-hour burst, two hours on and two hours off for the full four shifts, followed by eight hours of exhausted sleep. But Marge and Ben-Dov didn’t work that way. They kept shifting their sleep periods around, now knocking out in the evening, now in the middle of the day; they might put in eight hours of TP (four work, four rest) after breakfast and then eight more (four work, four rest) after dinner, with a nap in between. With sleepdrugs it’s no trick to arrange your slumber pattern to suit your whims, of course, and you know all about the odd living habits of the TP tribe. It made life weird for us, though, since somebody had to be around to assist the TP, bring snacks, correlate the computer printouts, and so forth. We tried to maintain a normal digging schedule at the site — yes, we’re still digging through all this — and yet have somebody available to hold the TP’s hand no matter what hour.

Pilazinool, who needs one hour of sleep out of every twenty-four, did much more than his share of this work. Too bad, for his gifts were needed elsewhere.

We did manage to get most of the data transmitted. Marge was no joy to have around the lab, and even less fun to drive back and forth from town — I made a point of avoiding that assignment — but I’ll give her credit: she’s got superb TP stamina. She’d come in, pick up the data sheets, start sending, and hum along on the dreary job faster than Ron ever did, and with less apparent effort. I suspect she could have volunteered for overtime work and not suffered for it. But of course the idea never entered her head.

Ben-Dov was an odd one: about fifty years old, graying, paunchy, always needing a shave, not at all displaying the conqueror-of-the-desert image that most Israelis try to project. Yet behind his sloppiness he was made of iron. We talked a little; he said that until the age of thirty he had never even been outside of Israel, though he moved around a lot inside the country; he grew up in Cairo, studied in Tel-Aviv and Damascus, and drifted around to Amman, Jerusalem, Haifa, Alexandria, Baghdad, and the other important Israeli cities. Then he got the urge to travel and signed up for TP duty at the Ben-Gurion Kibbutz on Mars. Like a lot of other TPs he’s kept on wandering, getting farther and farther from Earth with each change of post, but always volunteering for bleak, desolate planets like Higby V.

Mirrik, who as I think I told you is a big one on religion, became greatly excited when he found out Ben-Dov was an Israeli. “Tell me about the ethical constructs of Judaism,” the huge Dinamonian bellowed eagerly. “I myself am Paradoxian, but I have studied many of the creeds of Earth, and never before have I encountered an actual Jew. The teachings of Moses concerning—”

“I’m sorry,” said Nachman Ben-Dov mildly. “I’m not Jewish.”

“But Israel — am I wrong, is this not the Jewish nation of Earth?”

“There are many Jews in Israel,” said Ben-Dov. “I am, however, of the Authentic Buddhist faith. Perhaps you know of my father, the leader of the Israeli Buddhist community: Mordecai Ben-Dov?”

Mirrik hadn’t; but he already knew a good deal about Authentic Buddhism, and his tusks drooped in disappointment as his opportunity to find out the inside data on the Laws of Moses faded. That’s the trouble with the spread of global communications: tribal structures break down. You get Authentic Buddhists in Israel, and Mormons in Tibet, and Revised Methodist Baptists in the Congo, and such. I must admit that Ben-Dov’s Buddhism startled me, though.

Jewish or not, he was a fine TP operator. He and Marge between them waded beautifully through the data sheets. At the end of his week of rest, Ron San-tangelo returned to the job, now on a work-sharing basis with the other two, and the skull-to-skull transmission of our first photo was completed. Back from Luna City came an acknowledgment; they had decoded the transmission and were going to work on trying to locate the zone of space shown.

I tried to do something a little shady about this time.

I called Ben-Dov aside after he had finished his stint for the day and said, “In your data-boosting, have you had occasion to link minds with an Earthside relay girl named Lorie Rice?”

“No,” he said. “We haven’t relayed anything through Earth.”

“Do you know her? She’s my sister.”

He thought a bit. “I don’t think so. You know, space is very large, and there are so many members of the communications net—”

“Well, you could relay something through her, couldn’t you? By way of giving the other relay people a rest. And maybe if you did, you could slip in an extra thought or two, just to tell her that Tom says hello, that he’s doing fine and misses her a lot—”