Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

Look at the second sketch, the one with “right ascension” across the top and “light-years” down the side.

I must be the only person out of the hundreds in this ship who did not know that our first stop on this voyage would not be Proxima. Mr. Lopez (who was showing me the bridge) looked at me as if I were a retarded child who had just made another unfortunate slip. (But that did not matter because he is not interested in my brain.) I didn’t dare explain to him that I had been snatched aboard at the last moment; it would have blown my cover. However, Miss Rich Bitch is not required to be bright.

The ship usually stops at Proxima both going and coming. Mr. Lopez explained that this time they had little cargo and only a few passengers for Proxima, not enough to pay for the stop. So that cargo and those passengers were put off until the Maxwell warps next month; this trip the Forward will call at Proxima on the way home, with cargo and, possibly, passengers from the other seven ports. Mr. Lopez explained (and I did not understand) that traveling many light-years in space costs almost nothingÄmostly rations for passengersÄbut stopping at a planet is terribly expensive, so any stop has to be worthwhile on the balance sheet.

So here is where we are going this trip (see second sketch again):

first to Outpost, then to Botany Bay, then to The Realm, on to Midway, Halcyon, Forest, Fiddler’s Green, Proxima (at last!), and on home to Earth.

I’m not unhappy about itÄquite the contrary! I will get rid of this “most valuable cargo in the galaxy” less than a month after warping away from Stationary StationÄthen the whole long trip home will be a real tourist trip. Fun! No responsibilities. Lots of time to look over these colonies squired around by eager young officers who smell good and are always polite. If Friday (or Miss Rich Bitch) can’t have fun with that setup, it is time to cremate me; I’m dead.

Now see the third sketch, declination across the top, light-years down the side. This one makes the routing seem quite reasonableÄ but if you look back at the second sketch, you will see that the leg from Botany Bay to Outpost, which seems on the third sketch to skim the photosphere of Forest’s sun, in fact misses it by many lightyears. Picturing this voyage actually calls for three dimensions. You can take the data from the sketches and from the table below and punch it into your terminal and pull out a three-dimensional hologram; it all makes sense seen that way. There is one on the bridge, frozen so that you can examine it in detail. Mr. Lopez, who made these sketches (all but Joe Centaur and the sad wolf) warned me that a flat plot simply could not portray three-dimensional cosmonautics. But it helps to think of these three sketches as plan view, side view, and front elevation, as in visualizing a house from its plans; that is exactly analogous.

When Mr. Lopez gave me a printout of this table, he warned me

that the data are of about grammar-school accuracy. If you aim a telescope by these coordinates, you will find the right star, but for science and for cosmonautics you need more decimal places, and then correct for “epoeh”Äa fancy way of saying you must bring the data up to date because each star moves. Outpost’s sun moves the least; it just about keeps up with the traffic in our part of the galaxy. But the star of Fiddler’s Green (Nu~2] Lupi) has a vector of 138 kilometers per secondÄenough that Fiddler’s Green will have moved more than 1. 5 billion kilometers between two visits five months apart by the Forward. This can be worrisomeÄaccording to Mr. Lopez it can worry a skipper right out of his job because whether or not a trip shows a profit depends on how closely a master can bring his ship out of hyperspace to a port planet without hitting something (such as a star!). Like driving an APV blindfolded!

But I will never pilot a hyperspaceship and Captain van Kooten has a solid, reliable look to him. I asked him about it at dinner that night. He nodded. “Ve find it. Only once haf ye had to send some of de boys down in a landing boat to buy someting at a bakery and read de signs.”