Дэймон Найт: Orbit 11

“Then who is Wad?”

“If I tell you, will you tell me what it was you asked him?”

The girl’s shoulders moved, for Daw could see the bulky metal shoulders of her suit move with them. “I suppose so—Gladiator would tell you if you asked.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be the same thing as your telling me, Mrs. Youngmeadow. You see, Wad is me. I suppose you could say, too, that I am Wad, grown up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know how ship captains are trained?”

“I know an officer’s training is very hard—”

“Not officers—captains.” Unexpectedly Daw launched himself toward her, his arms outstretched like a bird’s wings, dodging the wide-spaced guy wires until, almost beside her, he caught one and swung to a stop.

“That was good,” she said. “You’re very graceful.”

“I like this. I’ve spent a lot of time in space, and you won’t find any of that sucking furniture in my cabin. You can laugh if you like, but I think this is what God intended.”

“For us?” He could see the arch of her eyebrows now, through the dark transparency of her faceplate.

“For us. Leaping between the worlds.”

“You know, understanding people is supposed to be my profession—but I don’t think I really understand you at all, Captain. How are captains trained, anyway? Not like other officers?”

“No,” Daw said. “We’re not just officers who’ve been promoted, although I know that’s what most people think.”

“It’s what I thought.”

“That was the old way. I suppose the British carried it to the ultimate. Around eighteen hundred. Have you ever read about it?”

The girl did not answer.

“They put their future skippers on board warships when they were boys of eight or nine—they were called midshipmen. They were just children, and if they misbehaved they were bent over a gun and whipped, but at the same time they were gentlemen and treated as such. The captain, if he was a good captain, treated them like sons and they got responsibility shoved at them just as fast as they could take it.”

“It sounds like a brutal system,” Helen Youngmeadow said.

“Not as brutal as losing ship and crew. And it produced some outstanding leaders. Lord Nelson entered the navy at twelve and was posted captain when he was twenty; John Paul Jones started at the same age and was first mate on a slaver when he was nineteen and a captain at twenty-three.”

“I’m sorry. . . .” The girl’s voice was so faint in Daw’s earphones that he wondered for a moment if her suit mike was failing. “I’ve never heard of either of those men. But I’ll look them up when we get back to Gladiator.”

“Anyway,” Daw continued, “it was a good system—for as long as people were willing to send promising boys off to sea almost as soon as we’d send them off to school; but after a while you couldn’t count on that anymore. Then they took boys who were almost grown and sent them to special universities first. By the time they were experienced officers they were elderly—and the ships, even though these weren’t starships yet, had become so large that their captains hadn’t had much real contact with them until they were nearly ready to take command of a ship themselves. After a hundred years or so of that—about the time the emphasis shifted from sea to space—people discovered that this system really didn’t work very well. A man who’d spent half his life as a subordinate had been well-trained in being a subordinate, but that was all.”

The taut cable beneath Daw’s suit-glove shook with a nearly undetectable tremor, and he turned to look toward the hatch, aware as he did that the girl, who must have felt the same minute vibration, had turned instead to the mouths of the connecting tubes that led deeper into the ship.

The man coming through the hatch was Polk, the cyberneticist, identifiable not by his face but by the name and number stenciled on his helmet. He saluted, and Daw waved him over.

“Got something for me, Captain?”

“I think so, the big cabinet in the center of this module. It’s their computer mainframe, or at least an important part of it.”

“Ah,” said Polk.

“Wait a minute—” There was an edge of shrillness to Helen Youngmeadow’s voice, though it was so slight Daw might easily have missed it. “How can you know that?”

“By looking at the wiring running to it. There are hundreds of thousands of wires—braided together into cables, of course, and very fine; but still separate wires, separate channels for information. Anything that can receive that much and do anything with it is a computer by definition—a data-processing device.”

Polk nodded as though to support his captain and began examining the great floating octahedron Daw had pointed out. After a minute had passed the girl said in a flat voice, “Do you think theirs might be better than ours? That would be important, I suppose.”

Daw nodded. “Extremely important, but I don’t know if it’s true. From what I’ve been able to tell from looking into that thing they’re a little behind us, I think. Of course there might be some surprises.”

Polk muttered, “What am I looking for, Captain, just their general system?”

“To begin with,” Daw said slowly, “I’d like to know what the last numbers in the main registers were.”

Polk whistled, tinny-sounding over the headphones.

“What good would that be?” Helen Youngmeadow asked. “Anyway, wouldn’t they just print it—” She remembered how much of Gladiator’s output came over CRTs and audio, and broke off in midsentence.

Polk said, “Nobody prints much in space, Mrs. Youngmeadow. Printing—well, it eats up a lot of paper, and paper’s heavy. It looks to me like they use a system a lot like ours. See this?” He passed a spacegloved hand across the center of one facet of the cabinet, but the girl could see no difference between the area he indicated and the surrounding smooth grey metal. To look more closely she dove across the emptiness much as Daw had a moment before.

“This was one of their terminals,” Polk continued. “There are probably thousands scattered all through the ship. And they seem to have been used about the same way ours are, with turnoff after a set period to conserve the phosphors; they go bad if you excite them for too long.”

“I’ve noticed that on Gladiator,” the girl said. “If something’s written on the screen—when I’m reading, for example—and I don’t instruct it to bring up the next page, it fades out after a while. Is that what you mean? It seems remarkable that people as different as these should handle the problem the same way.”

Daw said, “Not any more remarkable than that both of us use wires—or handles like the one that opened the hatch outside. Look inside that box, though, at the back of that panel and you’ll find something that is remarkable. Show her, Polk.”

The cyberneticist unlatched the section he had indicated. It swung out smoothly, and the girl saw the display tubes behind it, tubes so flat that each was hardly more than a sheet of glass with a socket at the base. “Vacuum tubes?” she said. “Like a television? Even I know what those are.”

Daw grunted. “Vacuum tubes in a vacuum.”

“That’s right. They shouldn’t need anything around them out here, should they?”

“They don’t, out here. This ship, or at least parts of it, goes into atmospheres at times. Even though the crew doesn’t seem to care whether there’s one in here or not.”

“Captain,” Helen Youngmeadow said suddenly, “where is my husband?”

Hours later Moke’s voice (unexpectedly loud and near because Moke had the kind of voice that transmitted well through the phones’ medium-range frequencies) asked a similar question: “You find Youngmeadow yet, Skipper?”