Robert Heinlein - Time For The Stars

"You mean read it to my twin?"

"That's what I said."

"Do you want him to record?"

"Traffic is always recorded. Didn't they teach you anything?"

I thought about explaining that they really hadn't because there had not been time, when I thought, oh what's the use? He probably thought I was Pat and assumed that I had had the full course. I picked up papers Mei-Ling was through with and sat down.

But Travers went on talking. "I don't know what you freaks are up here for now anyhow. You're not needed; we're still in radio range."

I put the papers down and stood up: "Don't call us 'freaks.' "

He glanced at me and said, "my, how tall you've gown. Sit down and get to work."

We were about the same height but he was ten years older and maybe thirty pounds heavier. I might have passed it by if we had been alone, but not with Mei-Ling present.

"I said not to call us 'freaks.' It's not polite."

He looked tired and not amused but he didn't stand up. I decided he didn't want a fight and felt relieved. "All right, all right," he answered. "Don't be so touchy. Get busy on that traffic."

I sat down and looked over the stuff I had to send, then called Pat and told him to start his recorder; this was not a practice message.

He answered, "Call back in half an hour. I'm eating dinner."

("I was eating lunch but I didn't get to finish. Quit stalling, Pat. Take a look at that contract you were so anxious to sign.")

"You were just as anxious. What's the matter, kid? Cold feet already?"

("Maybe, maybe not. I've got a hunch that this isn't going to be one long happy picnic. But I've learned one thing already; when the Captain sends for a bucket of paint, he wants a full bucket and no excuses. So switch on that recorder and stand by to take down figures.")

Pat muttered and gave in, then announced that he was ready after a delay that was almost certainly caused by Mother insisting that he finish dinner. "Ready."

The traffic was almost entirely figures (concerning the take-off, I suppose) and code. Being such, I had to have Pat repeat back everything. It was not hard, but it was tedious. The only message in clear was one from the Captain, ordering roses sent to a Mrs. Detweiler in Brisbane and charged to his LRF account, with a message: "Thanks for a wonderful farewell dinner."

Nobody else sent personal messages; I guess they had left: no loose ends back on Earth.

I thought about sending some roses to Maudie, but I didn't want to do it through Pat. It occurred to me that I could do it through Mei-Ling, then I remembered that, while I had money in the bank, I had appointed Pat my attorney; if I ordered them, he would have to okay the bill I decided not to cross any bridges I had burned behind me.

Life aboard the L.C., or the Elsie as we called her, settled into a routine. The boost built up another fifteen per cent which made me weigh a hundred and fifty-eight pounds; my legs ached until I got used to it—but I soon did; there are advantages in being kind of skinny. We freaks stood a watch in five, two at a time—Miss Gamma and Cas Warner were not on our list because they hooked sidewise with other ships. At first we had a lot of spare time, but the Captain put a stop to that.

Knowing that the LRF did not really expect us to return, I had not thought much about that clause in the contract which provided for tutoring during the trip but I found out that the Captain did not intend to forget it. There was school for everybody, not just for us telepaths who were still of school age. He appointed Dr. Devereaux, Mrs. O'Toole, and Mr. Krishnamurti a school board and courses were offered in practically everything, from life drawing to ancient history. The Captain himself taught that last one; it turned out he knew Sargon the Second and Socrates like brothers.

Uncle Alfred tried to sign up for everything, which was impossible, even if he didn't eat, sleep, nor stand watch. He had never, he told me, had time for all the schooling he wanted and now at last he was going to get it. Even my real uncle, Steve, signed up for a couple of courses. I guess I showed surprise at this, for he said, "Look, Tom, I found out my first cruise that the only way to make space bearable is to have something to learn and learn it. I used to take correspondence courses. But this bucket has the finest assemblage of really bright minds you are ever likely to see. If you don't take advantage of it, you are an idiot. Mama O'Toole's cooking course, for example: where else can you find a Cordon Bleu graduate willing to teach you her high art free? I ask you!"

I objected that I would never need to know how to cook high cuisine.

"What's that got to do with it? Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself. Look at Uncle Alf. He's as happy as a boy with a new slingshot. Anyhow, if you don't sign up for a stiff course, old Doc Devereaux will find some way to keep you busy, even if it is counting rivets. Why do you think the Captain made him chairman of the board of education?"

"I hadn't thought about it. "

"Well, think about it. The greatest menace in space is going coffin crazy. You are shut up for a long time in a small space and these is nothing outside but some mighty thin vacuum... no street lights, no bowling alleys. Inside are the same old faces and you start hating them. So a smart captain makes sure you have something to keep you interested and tired—and ours is the smartest you'll find or he wouldn't be on this trip."

I began to realize that a lot of arrangements in the Elsie were simply to see that we stayed healthy and reasonably happy. Not just school, but other things. Take the number we bad aboard, for example—almost two hundred. Uncle Steve told me that the Elsie could function as a ship with about ten: a captain, three control officers, three engineer officers, one communicator, one farmer, and a cook. Shucks, you could cut that to five: two control officers (one in command), two torch watchstanders, and a farmer-cook.

Then why two hundred? .

In the first place there was room enough. The Elsie and the other ships had been rebuilt from the enormous freighters the LRF use to haul supplies out to Pluto and core material back to Earth. In the second place they needed a big scientific staff to investigate the planets we hoped to find. In the third place some were spare parts, like Reserve Captain Urqhardt and, well, me myself. Some of us would die or get killed; the ship had to go on.

But the real point, as I found out, is that no small, isolated social group can be stable. They even have a mathematics for it, with empirical formulas and symbols for "lateral pressures" and "exchange valences" and "exogamic relief." (That last simply means that the young men of a small village should find wives outside the village.)

Or look at it this way. Suppose you had a one-man space ship which could cruise alone for several years. Only a man who was already nutty a certain way could run it—otherwise he would soon go squirrelly some other way and start tearing the controls off the panels. Make it a two-man ship: even if you used a couple as fond of each other as Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the trip even Juliet would start showing black-widow blood.

Three is as bad or worse, particularly if they gang up two against one. Big numbers are much safer. Even with only two hundred people there are exactly nineteen thousand nine hundred ways to pair them off, either as friends or enemies, so you see that the social possibilities shoot up rapidly when you increase the numbers. A bigger group means more chances to find friends and more ways to avoid people you don't like. This is terribly important aboard ship.

Besides elective courses we had required ones called "ship's training"—by which the Captain meant that every body had to learn at least one job he had not signed up for. I stood two watches down in the damping room, whereupon Chief Engineer Roch stated in writing that he did not think that I would ever make a torcher as I seemed to have an innate lack of talent for nuclear physics. As a matter of fact it made me nervous to be that close to an atomic power plant and to realize the unleashed hell that was going on a few feet away from me.