Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

“No, they don’t mind vacuum.” Daw was already climbing into the module. There were no floors and no interior partitions; windowed solids that might have been instruments lined the hull wall; machines the size of buildings, braced with guying cables thousands of feet long, dotted the vast central space.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” the girl said. “Like being in a birdcage—only I can’t tell which way is up.”

“Up is always an illusion on a ship,” Daw told her. “Why have illusions?” He was already far over her head, exploring. “No chairs, no beds. I like it.”

“You mean they don’t rest?” The girl had launched herself toward him now, and she put herself into a slow roll so that, to her eyes, the interior of the module revolved around her.

“No.” Daw moved closer to one of the great mechanisms. “Look, on our ship we have couches and chairs with thousands of little suction holes in them, so that when your clothes touch them you stay where you put yourself. But somebody who might have been doing something more valuable had to make every one of those pieces of fancy furniture, and then a hundred times their cost was spent lugging them up out of Earth’s gravity well into space. Then their pumps require power, which means waste heat the ship has a hard time getting rid of—and any time we want to go anywhere on reaction drive—all the close-in maneuvers—we have to accelerate their mass, and decelerate it again when we get there. All this to hold you down on a ship that never gets up much over half a G, and in addition to the crash couches on the tenders and lifeboats.”

“But we have to lie down to sleep.”

“No, you don’t; you’re simply accustomed to it. All you really have to do is pull your feet off the floor, turn out the lights, and hold onto something—like this guy wire—with one hand. Which is probably what the people who built this ship did. Our ancestors, in case you’ve forgotten, were a tree-dwelling species; and when we go to sleep with our hands around anything that resembles a limb, we automatically tighten up if it starts to slip out.”

“You still think this ship was built by human beings?”

Daw said carefully, “We’ve never found one that wasn’t.”

“Until now.”

“You don’t.”

There was no reply. Daw looked at the girl to make certain she was all right, jockeyed himself to within touching distance of the great machine, then repeated, “You don’t?”

“People? With no airlock?”

“The hatch we used may not have been intended for use in space. Or there might be safety devices we don’t know about, deactivated now.”

“There wasn’t any atmosphere, even before we opened it; as large as this place is, it would have to discharge for hours, and we’d have felt the push as we came through. There wasn’t anything. You said yourself that they didn’t mind vacuum.”

Daw said, “I was thinking they might use this one for some special purpose, or they might wear suits all the time in here.”

“Captain, I love mankind. I know when somebody says that, it’s usually just talk; but I mean it. Not just the people who are like me, but all human beings everywhere. And yet I don’t like this ship.”

“That’s funny.” Daw swung himself away from the machine he had been examining. “I do. They’re better naval engineers—I think—than we are. Do you want to go back?”

“No, of course not. The job is here. What are you going to do now?”

“First check out a few more modules; then have some of our people land on the opposite corner of this thing with routes mapped out for them that will take at least one man through every module. They can work their way toward us, and I’ll take their reports as they come in.”

“Are you going into some of the other modules now?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll come with you. I don’t like it here.”

It was almost ten hours later when the first searchers reached the point where Daw and the girl waited, having traversed the diagonal length of the ship. They came in talking, in threes and fours, having met when their lines of search converged. Daw, who except for one brief return to Gladiator had spent the time studying some of the devices in the corner module and those immediately adjacent, broke up the groups and questioned each man separately, using a private communication frequency. Helen Youngmeadow chatted with those waiting for debriefing and waved to each party going back to ship.

In time the groups thinned, fewer and fewer men clustered around the girl; and at last the last crewman saluted and departed, and she and Daw were alone again. To make conversation she said, “It always seems so lonely on our ship, but seeing all these men makes me realize how many there are; and there are some I’d swear I’ve never even met.”

“You probably haven’t,” Daw said. The list Gladiator was flashing on his in-helmet display showed one man still out, and he was not sure the girl was aware of it—or that she was not.

“I’ve been wondering what they all do. I mean, the ship can almost run itself, can’t it?”

“Yes, Gladiator could pretty well take care of herself for a long time, if nothing had to be changed.”

“If nothing had to be changed?”

“We have to worry about damage control too, on a warship; but adaptability is the chief justification for a big crew. We can beat our swords into plowshares if we have to, and then our plowshares back into swords; in other words we can rewire and re-rig as much as we need to—if necessary fit out Gladiator to transport a half million refugees or turn her into a medical labor factory. And when something like this comes up we’ve got the people. This ship is too big to have every part visited by a specialist in every discipline, but the men I’ve just sent through her included experts in almost any field you could think of.”

She was too far off for him to see the beauty of her smile, but he could feel it. “I think you’re proud of your command, Captain.”

“I am,” Daw said simply. “This was what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it.”

“Captain, who is Wad?”

For an instant the question hung in the nothingness between them; then Daw asked, “How did you meet Wad?”

“I asked the ship something—a few hours ago when we went back—and she referred me to him. He looks like you, only . . .”

“Only much younger.”

“And he’s wearing some sort of officer’s insignia—but I’m certain I’ve never seen him before, not at mess or anywhere else.”

“I didn’t think Gladiator would do that,” Daw said slowly. “Usually Wad only talks to me—at least that’s what I thought.”

“But who is he?”

“First I’d like to know what question you had that made the ship turn you over to him—and how he answered it.”

“I don’t think it was anything important.”

“What was it?”

“I think she just felt—you know—that it needed the human touch.”

“Which Wad has in plenty.”

“Yes.” Helen Youngmeadow sounded serious. “He’s a very sympathetic, very sensitive young man. Not like an empathist of course, but with some training he could become one. Is he your second in command?”

Daw shook his head, though perhaps she could not see it. “No,” he said, “Moke’s my second—you’ve met him.” He thought of the times he and Moke had shared a table with Helen Youngmeadow and her husband—Youngmeadow slender and handsome, a bit proud of his blond good looks, intelligent, forceful and eloquent in conversation; Moke’s honest, homely face struggling throughout the tasteless and untasted meal to hide the desire Youngmeadow’s wife waked in every man, and the shame Moke felt at desiring the wife of so likeable a shipmate as Youngmeadow.