“ALL HANDS CHECK BLASTOFF QUARTERS. BLASTOFF WILL BE ON SCHEDULE AT 2100 HOURS. REPEAT. ALL HANDS CHECK STATIONS.”
Lars’ heart began racing. In any Star Ship voyage the blastoff was a critical time. The Koenig drive could never be used safely until a ship had cleared a planet’s gravitational pull. That meant that chemical and atomic engines had to lift the vast weight of the ship from the ground and thrust it outward with gathering speed until escape velocity was reached. Giant gyroscopes helped carry the burden of stabilizing and guiding the great ship’s course through the first hazardous five thousand miles, but the spectre of disaster was ever present until the ship finally rode free of gravitational demands.
There had been ships whose gyros jammed and sent tons of metal and dozens of men plunging dizzily through the outer atmosphere into the sea. No one would forget the Mercury, which had struck New Chicago, jets still roaring, and rammed itself through four hundred feet of concrete and granite before the reaction chamber exploded.
But once in free fall the paramagnetic fields of the Koenig drive could be activated, hurling the ship forward through a distortion-pattern in normal space, carving the time of interstellar transport down to a fraction of that required with the Long Passage. The voyage to Vega III was scheduled for two months; it might take a day more, or two days less, but essentially only two months for a journey that would have consumed at least a hundred and fifty years on a Long Passage.
It was the Koenig drive that had given men the stars.
Lars began undoing his pack, storing his personal items in one of the wall lockers. That his bunkmate had already been here was abundantly clear. A used uniform had been thrown carelessly across the lower bunk; three shoes were scattered at random about the room, and both wall lockers had been appropriated. Lars sighed and began emptying the contents of one locker onto the bunk.
There was no question, he thought gloomily, that his bunkmate was Peter Brigham.
He had nearly finished when a voice behind him said, “Well! If it isn’t the farmer boy.”
Lars straightened up and turned slowly to the newcomer. “Hello, Peter,” he said evenly. “It looks as though we’re going to be bunkmates again, for a while.”
“Just like old times, eh?” Peter Brigham lounged in the oval doorway, his quick gray eyes flickering over to Lars’ belongings on the bunk. He looked older than Lars, though their ages were the same. He was of medium height, with jet black hair and a full lower lip that gave his face a petulant cast. But now he was smiling, a little half-smile that Lars had come to recognize the year they had bunked together at the Academy. “And here I thought you’d be up North trapping polar bears. I guess you made it through exams all right, after all.”
“I made it. So did you, I see.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“Oh, no. I just haven’t seen you since—you know.”
“Mmm. The Prom, you mean.” The dark-haired youth looked away. “No grudges, I trust.”
Lars hesitated a fraction of a second. Then, “No, no grudges.”
“That’s good. Say, are you still lugging this around?” Peter held up the little pocket photo-file from Lars’ pack, grinning maliciously. “Any new additions?”
“Yes. A new picture of the farm.”
“How dull.” Peter tossed it back on the bunk. “How are Greenland’s icy mountains doing these days, anyway?”
“About the same as the New York jungle. You know, Peter, you ought to get out and plow a field sometime. It’d do you good. You might even get over this idea that the Northland is all cold.”
“Well, I’ll leave the plowing to you, I think.” The half-smile returned. “I should really be up in the navigator’s shack right now, but I thought here’s poor old Heldrigsson stumbling aboard, and he’ll need somebody to show him around.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. “By the way, I hear you had a little trouble coming aboard this man-trap.”
Lars’ muscles tightened. “A little bit. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. Just another one of the funny little things that are happening on this ship, that’s all.”
Lars went on unpacking without any comment. He had never liked this thin, bitter classmate of his, and he could
think of no one he would less rather have as a bunkmate for two months in the cramped quarters of the Star Ship. But he particularly had no desire to confide his own conviction, just now crystallizing, that something was definitely not as it seemed on the Star Ship Ganymede. “It was just a mix-up,” he said casually. “It was straightened out in a hurry.”
“So I heard. Old Foxy went to bat for you. Its just as well he did, too. Those Security boys can get rough when there’s something to get rough about.”
Lars just looked at him and went on unpacking. For a while there was silence. Then as Lars unwrapped a spool of reader-tapes he had brought along, Peter’s eyebrows went up.
“Books, already!” he exclaimed. “Aren’t you sick of studying by now?”
“I’ve still got plenty to learn in my field,” said Lars. I suppose you have your navigation down cold, he thought.
“Ah, yes. Bugs of Other Planets and How They Bite. But really, now, don’t you get tired of all those smelly culture plates?”
“If it weren’t for the culture plates, there wouldn’t be any colonies,” Lars said shortly. “Nor any live exploratory crews coming back, either.”
“They’d never even get landed without a navigator.”
“True enough, but the navigator doesn’t give the go-ahead on a new colony site. Neither does the skipper. The exploratory crew can poke around all they like and decide anything they want to decide about a place, but when the chips are down it’s the ecologist who says okay or no-kay. And he’s got to know what he’s doing.”
“Well, maybe your’re right,” said Peter. “It’s a pretty good field, I guess, for a plodder.”
Lars flushed. He knew that he was slow. There were men like Peter Brigham in the Academy who could pick up their work quickly, with little or no effort. In five whole years Lars had never known Peter to thread a reader-tape until a week before examinations. But for Lars it was different. He had gotten through by slogging every inch of the way. He was a slow learner, a dogged worker who got through by digging and digging. Ideas came slowly to him; he needed time to tear through abstractions and foreign concepts to make them part of his knowledge. But once lodged in his mind, they were lodged for good. He wasn’t fast, but he was stubborn, and he was thorough.
He only vaguely sensed that these two qualities alone had finally brought him through the Academy in the face of stiff competition from much quicker minds. In the Colonial Service there was a place for stubbornness and thoroughness that all the cleverness in the world could never fill.
Lars grinned suddenly. “Tell you what, you flit around with your star maps, and I’ll plod, okay? But when we get to Vega III, I’ll know everything there is to know about the place. I’ll know what lands of bacteria and viruses can wipe out this ship, and what ones we can use for defense. I’ll know what we can use for food, and what we’d better keep away from. And I’ll know whether there’ll ever be a healthy colony of Earthmen on Vega III or not.”
Peter looked up at him. “Is that what all those reader-tapes are about?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I like to see you keeping busy,” said Peter, “but it seems a little silly to me, considering that the Ganymede isn’t going to Vega III.”
For a moment Lars thought he had heard wrong. “What did you say?”