Take “B” deck—there were two thousand passengers sleeping in it. It was 150 feet across—fore and aft, mat is—and not quite 500 feet around, cylinder fashion. That gives about forty square feet per passenger, on the average, but a lot was soaked up in stairs, passageways, walls, and such. It worked out that each one had about room enough for his bunk and about that much left over to stand on when he wasn’t sleeping.
You can’t give a rodeo in that kind of space; you can’t even get up a game of ring-around-the-rosy.
“A” deck was larger and “C” deck was smaller, being nearer the axis, but they averaged out the same. The council set up a staggered system to get the best use out of the galley and the mess rooms and to keep us from falling over each other in the ‘freshers. “A” deck was on Greenwich time; “B” deck was left on zone plus-eight time, or Pacific West Coast time; and “C” deck drew zone minus-eight time, Philippine time.
That would have put us on different days, of course, but the day was always figured officially on Greenwich time; the dodge was just to ease the pressure on eating facilities.
That was really all we had to worry about. You would wake up early, not tired but bored, and wait for breakfast Once breakfast was over, the idea was to kill time until lunch. All afternoon you could look forward to the terrific excitement of having dinner.
I have to admit that making us go to school was a good plan; it meant that two and a half hours every morning and every afternoon was taken care of. Some of the grown ups complained that the mess rooms and all the spare space was always crowded with classes, but what did they expect us to do? Go hang on sky hooks? We used up less space in class than if we had been under foot.
Still, it was a mighty odd sort of school. There were some study machines in the cargo but we couldn’t get at them and there wouldn’t have been enough to go around. Each class consisted of about two dozen kids and some adult who knew something about something. (You’d be surprised how many adults don’t know anything about anything!) The grown up would talk about what he knew best and the kids would listen, then we would ask questions and he would ask questions. No real examinations, no experiments, no demonstrations, no stereos.
Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.
Things got so dull that it was hardly worth while to keep up my diary, even if I had been able to get microfilm, which I wasn’t.
Dad and I played an occasional game of cribbage in the evening—somehow Dad had managed to squeeze the board and a pack of cards into his weight allowance. Then he got too busy with technical planning he was doing for the council and didn’t have time. Molly suggested that I teach her to play, so I did.
After that I taught Peggy to play and she pegged a pretty sharp game, for a girl. It worried me a little that I wasn’t being loyal to Anne in getting chummy with Peg and her mother, but I decided that Anne would want me to do just what I did. Anne was always friendly with everybody.
It still left me with time on my hands. What with only one-third gravity and no exercise I couldn’t sleep more than six hours a night. The lights were out eight hours but they didn’t make us go to bed, not after the trouble they had with it the first week. I used to fool around the corridors after lights out, usually with Hank Jones, until we both would get sleepy. We talked a lot. Hank turned out not to be such a bad guy as long as you kept him trimmed down to size.
I still had my Scout suit with me and kept it folded up in my bunk. Hank came in one morning while I was making up my bunk and noticed it. “See here, William,” he said, “why do you hang on to that? Let the dead past bury its dead.”