“Ridiculous,” he said aloud, and bent over his self-imposed penance again.
Chapter FOURTEEN
“I never thought I’d find myself praying for bad weather,” Camilla said. She closed the door of the small repaired dome where the computer was housed, joining Harry Leicester inside. “I’ve been thinking. With what data we have about the length of the days, the inclination of the sun, and so forth, couldn’t we find out the exact length of this planet’s year?”
“That’s elementary enough,” Leicester said. “Write up your program and feed it through. Might tell us how long a summer to expect and how long a winter.”
She moved to the console. Her pregnancy was beginning to show now, although she was still light and graceful. He said, “I managed to salvage almost all of the information about the matter-anti-matter drives. Some day–Moray told me the other day that from the steam engine to the stars is less than three hundred years. Some day our descendants will be able to return to Earth, Camilla.”
She said, “That’s assuming they’ll want to,” and sat down at her desk. He looked at her in mild question. “Do you doubt it?”
“I’m not doubting anything, I’m just not presuming to know what my great-great-great-great–oh hell, what my ninth-generation grandsons will want to be doing. After all, Earthmen lived for generations without even wanting to invent things which could easily have been invented any time after the first smelting of iron was managed. Do you honestly think Earth would have gone into space without population pressure and pollution? There are so many social factors too.”
“And if Moray has his way our descendants will all be barbarians,” Leicester said, “but as long as we have the computer and it’s preserved, the knowledge will be there. There for them to use, whenever they feel the need.”
“If it’s preserved,” she said with a shrug. “After the last few months I’m not sure anything we brought here is going to outlive this generation.”
Consciously, with an effort, Leicester reminded himself, she’s pregnant and that’s why they thought for years that women weren’t fit to be scientists–pregnant women get notions. He watched her making swift notations in the elaborate shorthand of the computer. “Why do you want to know the length of the year?”
What a stupid question, the girl thought, then remembered he was brought up on a space station, weather is nothing to him. She doubted if he even realized the relationship of weather and climate to crops and survival.
She said, explaining gently, “First, we want to estimate the growing season and find out when our harvests can come in. It’s simpler than trial and error, and if we’d colonized in the ordinary way, someone would have observed this planet through several year cycles. Also, Fiona and Judy and–and the rest of us would like to know when our children will be born and what the climate’s likely to be like. I’m not making my own baby clothes, but someone’s got to make them–and know how much chill to allow for!”
“You’re planning already?” he asked, curiously. “The odds are only one in two that you’ll carry it to term and the same that it won’t die.”
“I don’t know. Somehow I never doubted that mine would be one of the ones to live. Premonition, maybe; ESP,” she said, thinking slowly as she spoke. “I had a feeling Ruth Fontana would miscarry, and she did.”
He shuddered. “Not a pleasant gift to have.”
“No, but I seem to be stuck with it,” she said matter-of-factly, “and it seems to be helping Moray and the others with the crops. Not to mention the well Heather helped them dig. Evidently it’s simply a revival of latent human potential and there’s nothing weird about it. Anyhow, it seems we’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“When I was a student,” Leicester said, “all the facts known positively about ESP were fed into a computer and the answer was that the probability was a thousand to one that there was no such thing… that the very few cases not totally and conclusively disproven were due to investigator error, not human ESP.”
Camilla grinned and said, “That just goes to show you that a computer isn’t God.”