And—once in a very great while—his answers. Knefhausen had lost track of the days; on one visit he asked, then begged', to be told the date. The Justice Department man refused curtly, but on the next visit relented. Some superior had decided, no doubt, that after ail such information could not cause harm. Knefhausen thanked him profusely and then, after he had left and Knefhausen was greedily eating his long-delayed breakfast, he realized what the date was. It was his birthday! He was sixty-five years old that day!
Surely a significant age for one to attain, he thought; the traditional age of retirement, an age at which a man should be able to look back on a career and count up its prides and failures. How frustrating that in his own case neither the world nor he himself could yet be sure what those were.
It was an age, too, only five years short of the Biblical three score and ten. Knefhausen's life would in no great time be over.
He put down his spoon and regarded the rest of his oatmeal with loathing. Those ruffians on the Constitution! How dare they not report? To close out the ledgers of his own life with proper accounting of credits and losses they must render their statement! For months now, even years, he had thought of them with jealous sorrow, but now it was only rage. Let them come to him now, and he would wring their impudent, ruffianly necks!
15
TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ASTRONOMICAL UNITS AWAY IT was the birthday for another human being, whose name was Jeron. It was his first. Although he was too small to know it, he was not having a happy infancy.
By the time Jeron was born, in the same, most unusual way as the rest of his cohort, his parents (all of them) had learned of their sentence of death. They did not recover quickly. Although there were times when they seemed able to screen off that knowledge, there were other times when it colored every word and action. Jeron was a fast learner even before he was weaned. He took in attitudes with his mothers' milk, and words with his first spoonful of what he would later learn to call "squacipro." Jeron was a healthy and strong baby, who emerged into the world without that boiled-lobster look of every generation before him. He was also, of course, inordinately intelligent. He was speaking before his first birthday. He responded to words like "eat" and "bed" and "wet?" without knowing that they were words, or that words were a part of language. Since his infant brain was not greatly more competent than a dog's, he learned as a dog might: the words were cues, like a tone of voice or the rattle of a leash. Some words and phrases he took in without processing at all. "Goddam Kneffie" and "Kraut bastard" were stored as single concepts, he heard them so often.
He heard them a lot, in raging tones or despairing, in his first months, because then the terror and the outrage had not yet worn off for his parents. The dollops of baby food Aunt Eve steered past his tiny new teeth were sometimes salted with her tears. She was the one hit hardest, for reasons Jeron would learn as he grew older; and the other parents were tender with her, sometimes, as she was with the babies she cared for. When they remembered, they would stop to soothe her. Even Uncle Will (who was dead) whispered kindly to her, "We can live in the Constitution for a long, long time." He used their birthright English language, and that was another kindness. Most of the grownups spoke English around Eve, pretending that it was for the children's sake rather than hers. It would be a long time before Jeron understood how hurtful all that kindness was.
Eve wiped a clot of baby food off the corner of Jeron's chubby mouth with a fingertip, then pushed the food through his lips and spun the lazy Eve to bring the next baby into reach. By the large brown eyes Eve knew this one was Forina. She smoothed the little girl's tufty black hair before dipping the spoon again into the puree of squash (citrus/protein). "Oh, sure," she muttered, "we can hang on until we run out of something. But what about them}"
Although Uncle Will was kind, or meant to be, Eve and the others had concerns that he was no longer equipped to share. "It will be all right," he whispered, drifting off on one of his unfathomable errands.
Eve spun the wheel to the next child. "Easy for you to say!" she called after him. "You don't have to worry about dying anymore!" She sighed, finished feeding the last child, touched each diaper to make sure none had yet turned damp, and then, for the first time, smiled. "All right, you kids," she said softly. "Now comes the nice part. You're all going to get your presents as soon as I finish singing! Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . ."
Although Jeron did not know it, his home changed rapidly all through his first year of life. The Constitution was slowing down, though still moving at nearly 40 percent of the speed of light. Outside—though he rarely saw it, and did not know what he was seeing when he did—the narrow rainbow ring of stars had widened, become less intense, and the circles of blackness fore and aft were shrinking. In each second they traveled a distance ten times as great as the diameter of the Earth they had left behind. In not much over a quarter of an hour they could have plunged from the Earth into the Sun—and might as well have, for all the hope of long-range survival they could realistically entertain.
But they were no longer realists; they had broken through that cage as well as others.
It was not only in its position in space that the starship Constitution was changing. Its appearance changed, too. It no longer looked the same, inside or out, as when it left low-Earth orbit, and it kept on looking different. The ship that had pulled slowly away from its assembly orbiter two thousand and some days before was simple and clean, inside and out. As the Constitution had been put together in space, it did not need to be streamlined. But it was as easy to make it radially symmetrical as not, and moreover the surface/ volume relationship made the roundest shape the cheapest.
So as it first moved under its own power it looked like a football with sections of pipe strapped to its side. By the time it rounded perihelion and used up its gravity gain from the Sun the side boosters were jettisoned. It was plain football, then, all the way out to Pluto's orbit and a long way beyond.
Then the nest-building began, and the alterations to the ship's basic drive, and the accident.
Will Becklund died in that accident, or at least his body did. A great tragedy. Especially to Will. The accident need not have happened if they had all been more skilled, but they were still learning.
By then all of the original crew of the Constitution, or all but sweet, slow Eve, were no longer patient with the clumsy, primitive work of the ship's designers. Restructuring the plasma drive was only one step, although it was the hardest; they had not yet got used to brute-force manipulation of refractory metals. The rest was comparatively easy. Outside the smooth hull shedlike extrusions and willowy towers grew. Jim Barstow opened a glassy seam all down the length of the ship, so that he could watch the starbow more beautifully. Inside, each of the eight astronauts—or of the seven, after Will Becklund passed beyond that sort of concern— shaped himself . a living space, and all of them joined to expand the greeneries and sweeten the common chambers. After Jim Barstow rebuilt the drive it became simple to control the ship's acceleration. Some thrust was useful, so that they would know which way was down; very much thrust was wasted, because they were pushing against relativistic mass increase. They compromised on three-quarters of a G, then on half, then on about a tenth of a gravity for a long time, gentle enough so that walls supported little weight and partitions need not be strong. Their home was not much more than tissue and foil, as easy to change to suit their changing moods as a Japanese dwelling before the firestorms of World War II.