Dad was busy unclamping their couches and moving them to what was the floor, now that the ship was spinning. He stopped when I came in and we sat around and talked. I told him about Captain’s mast. He nodded. “We saw it in the screen. I didn’t notice your shining face, however.”
I said I hadn’t been called on.
“Why not?” Peggy wanted to know.
“How should I know?” I thought about mast for a bit and said, “Say, George, the skipper of a ship in space is just about the last of the absolute monarchs, isn’t he?”
Dad considered it and said, “Mmm… no, he’s a constitutional monarch. But he’s a monarch all right.”
“You mean we have to bow down to him and say ‘Your Majesty?” Peggy wanted to know.
Molly said, “I don’t think that would be advisable, Peg.”
“Why not? I think it would be fun.”
Molly smiled. “Well, let me know how you make out. I suspect that he will just turn you over his knee and paddle you.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t dare! I’d scream.”
I wasn’t so sure. I remembered those four hundred million miles of dirty dishes. I decided that, if the Captain said “Frog,” I’d hop.
If Captain Harkness was a monarch, he didn’t seem anxious to rule; the first thing he had us do was to hold an election and set up a ship’s council. After that we hardly laid eyes on him.
Everybody over eighteen could vote. The rest of us got to vote, too; we were told to setup a junior council—not that it was ever good for anything.
But the senior council, the real council, ran the ship from then on. It even acted as a court and the Captain never handed out punishments again. Dad told me that the Captain reviewed everything that the council did, that he had to, to make it legal—but I never heard of him overruling their decisions.
And you know what the first thing was that that council did—after setting up meal hours and simple things like that? They decided we had to go to school!
The junior council promptly held a meeting and passed a resolution against it, but it didn’t mean anything. We had school, just the same.
Peggy was on the junior council. I asked her why she didn’t resign if she wasn’t going to do anything. I was just teasing—as a matter of fact she put up quite a battle for us.
School wasn’t so bad, though. There is very h’ttle to do in space and when you’ve seen one star you’ve seen ’em all. And the first thing we had in school was a tour of the ship, which was all right.
We went in groups of twenty and it took all day–”day” by ship’s time, I mean. The Mayflower was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side—top shaped. The point of the cone was her jet—although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her “torch.”
If you count the torch end as her stern, then the round end, her bow, was where the control room was located; around it were the Captain’s cabin and the staterooms of the officers. The torch and the whole power plant space were cut off from the rest of the ship by a radiation shield that ran right through the ship. From the shield forward to the control room was a big cargo space. It was a cylinder more than a hundred feet in diameter and was split up into holds. We were carrying all sorts of things out to the colony —earth moving machinery, concentrated soil cultures, instruments, I don’t know what all.
Wrapped around this central cylinder were the decks for living, “A” deck just inside the skin of the ship, “B” deck under it, and “C” deck just inside that, with “D” deck’s ceiling being the outer wall of the cargo space. “D” deck was the mess rooms and galley and recreation rooms and sick bay and such; the three outer decks were bunk rooms and staterooms. “A” deck had steps in it every ten or fifteen feet because it was fitted into the outer curve of the ship; this made the ceilings in it of various heights. The furthest forward and furthest aft on “A” deck were only about six feet between floor and ceiling and some of the smaller kids lived in them, while at the greatest width of the ship the ceilings in “A” deck must have been twelve or thirteen feet high.