Robert Heinlein - The Number of the Beast

"Of sorts. A one-church village."

"Do you see ornithopters? Anything that could give us trouble?"

"Depends. Are you interested in church architecture?"

"Jake, this is no time for a cultural chat."

"I'm required to advise you, sir, This church has towers, something like minarets topped off with onion-shaped structures."

"Russian Orthodox!"

Hilda said that. I said nothing. I eased Gay's nose up to level flight, lined her up with what I thought was downstream, and snapped, "Gay, Scout!"

The canal was still in sight, almost under us and stretching over the horizon. I was almost lined up with it. Gay, Scout!

"Anybody see that settlement that was almost ahead before this last transition? Report."

"Captain Zebbie, it's much closer now but on this side."

"I see. Or don't. Jake isn't transparent."

"Captain, the city-quite large-is about a forty-five-degree slant down to starboard, not in sight from your seat."

"If forty-five degrees is a close guess, a minimum transition on that bearing should place us over the city."

"Captain, I advise against it," Jake told me.

"Reasons, please."

"This is a large city that might be well defended. Their ornithopters look odd and ineffective but we must assume they have spaceships as good or better than ours or the Tsar could not have a colony here. This causes me to suspect that they may have smart missiles. Or weapons utterly strange. I would rather check for onion towers from a distance. And not stay long in one place-I think we've been here too long. I'm jumpy."

"I'm not"-my sixth sense was not jabbing me-"but set verniers for a minimum transition along L axis, then execute at will. No need to be a slow fat target."

"One minimum, L axis-set!"

Suddenly my guardian angel goosed me. "Execute!"

I noticed the transition principally because Gay was now live under my hand-air bite. Perhaps she had not been quite level. I turned her nose down

to gather maneuvering speed unpowered, then did a skew turn-and yelped, "Gay Bounce!" having seen all that I wanted to see: an expanding cloud. Atomic? I think not. Lethal? You test it; I'm satisfied.

I told Gay to bounce three more times, placing us a bit less than fifty klicks above ground. Then I spent a trifle of power to nose her over. "Jake, use the binox to see how far this valley runs, whether it is all cultivated, whether it has more settlements. We are not going to get close enough to look for onion spires; that last shot was unfriendly. Rude. Impetuous. Or am I prejudiced? Science Officer? Le mot juste, s'il vous plait."

"Nye kultoorni."

"I remember that one! Makes Russians turn green. What does it mean? How did you happen to know it, Sharpie?"

"Means what it sounds like: 'uncultured.' I didn't just 'happen,' Cap'n Zebbie; I know Russian."

I was flabbergasted. "Why didn't you say so?"

"You didn't ask me."

"Sharpie, if you handled the negotiations, we might not have had trouble."

"Zebbie, if you'll believe that, you'll believe anything. He was calling you a spy and insulting you while the palaver was still in French. I thought it might be advantageous if they thought none of us knew Russian. They might spill something."

"Did they?"

"No. The colonel was coaching his pilot in how to be arrogant. Then you told them to halt, in French, and no more Russian was spoken save for meaningless side remarks. Zebbie, when they tried to shoot us down just now, would they have refrained had they known that I had studied Russian?"

"Mmm- Sharpie, I should know better than to argue with you. I'm going to vote for you for captain."

"Oh, No!"

"Oh, Yes. Copilot, I'm going to assume that everything this side of the hills and involved with this watercourse-courses-twin canals-is New Russia and that honorary Englishmen-us!-aren't safe here. So I'm going to look for the British colony. It may turn out that they won't like us, either. But the British are strong on protocol; we'll have a chance to speak our piece. They may hang us but they'll give us a trial, with wigs and robes and rules of evidence and counsel who will fight for us." I hesitated. "One hitch. Colonel Snotsky said there was no such country as the United States of America and I had the impression that he believed it."

Sharpie said, "He did believe it, Cap'n Zebbie. I caught some side chatter. I think we must assume that, in this universe, there was no American Revolution."

"So I concluded. Should we all be from the East Coast? I have a hunch that the West Coast may be part Russian, part Spanish-but not British. Where are we from? Baltimore, maybe? Philadelphia? Suggestions?"

Sharpie said, "I have a suggestion, Cap'n Zebbie."

"Science Officer, I like your suggestions."

"You won't like this one. When all else fails, tell the truth."

-three seconds is a long time-

Deety:

Zebadiah is convinced that I can program anything. Usually I can, given a large and flexible computer-but my husband expects me to manage it with Gay Deceiver and Gay is not big. She started life as an autopilot and is one, mostly.

But Gay is sweet-tempered and we both want to please him.

While he and my father were looking over the area that we thought of as "Russian Valley" or "New Russia," he asked me to work up a program to locate

the British colony in minimum time, if it were in daylight. If not, then we would sleep near the sunrise line, and find it on the new daylight side.

I thought of bouncing out about a thousand kilometers and searching for probable areas by color. Then I realized that I didn't know that much about this planet. "Dead sea bottoms" from space looked like farm land.

At last I recalled something Zebadiah had suggested yesterday-no, today! less than two hours ago. (So much had happened that my sense of time played tricks. It was still accurate-but I had to think instead of just knowing.)

Random numbers- Gay had plenty of them. Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being.

I defined a locus for Gay: nothing east of where we were, nothing in "Russian Valley," nothing on the dark side, nothing north of 450, nothing south of 450 south. Yesterday I could not have told her the latter; but Mars has a good spin, one a gyrocompass can read. While we slept, Gay had noted that her gyrocompass did not have its axis parallel to that of this strange planet and had precessed it until it did.

Inside that locus I told Gay to take a Drunkard's Walk, any jumps that suited her, a three-second pause at each vertex, and, if one of us yelled "Bingo!" display latitude, longitude, and Greenwich, and log all three, so we could find it again.

Oh, yes-she was to pause that three seconds exactly one minimum Habove-G at each vertex.

I told her to run the program for one hour....ut that any of us could yell "Stop!" and then say "Continue" and that would be time-out, not part of the hour. But I warned my shipmates that yelling "Stop!" not only slowed things but also gave Russians (or British or anybody) a chance to shoot at us. I emphasized that three seconds is a long time (most people don't know it).

One hour- Three seconds for each check- Twelve hundred random spot checks- This is not a "space-filling" curve. But it should locate where the British were most thickly settled. If one hour did not do it, ten hours certainly would. Without Gay, without her ability to do a Drunkard's Walk, we could have searched that planet for a lifetime, and never found either colony. It took the entire human race (of our universe) thirty centuries to search Terra... and many spots were missing until they could be photographed from space.

My husband said, "Let's get this straight." He bounced us four minima. "These subprograms-~ Gay, are you listening?"