“Were there lots of eggs?” Bottom asked enviously.
“What do you think? I mean, her being as big as she is? She was just beginning to lay when I left—and, listen, somebody’s got to take them in for freezer tagging. You don’t expect her to do it, do you?”
There wasn’t, really, any particular reason why any one of them, rather than any other, had to perform that task. But, as Obie said, it had to be done. All the females were jealous of the Fourth Major Senior, both the other males were jealous of Obie, Obie himself was too full of himself to consider such a task—one way or another, it was Sandy who wound up twirling the sticky baton to catch each of the egg masses as they emerged from the swollen ovipositor of the Fourth Major Senior.
He had never done that before. It was kind of interesting to do. They looked like that Earth thing called “caviar,” with a salty-sour smell that disturbed him.
As was customary, he wrapped them in transparent plastic and carried them through the halls to the sorting section, all the Hakh’hli he met scattering out of his important way. He lingered while the sorters gently coaxed the masses apart into dishes of warm water; watched while each one was weighed and sniffed and tested and labeled with the codes of Obie and the Fourth Major Senior. He waited until he saw them put into trays and frozen before he left.
Sandy did not know why the whole process was so fascinating to him. He only knew that it was. For all that time he was absorbed, and on the way back to the cohort’s quarters he felt stirrings in his groin and a warmth flooding through his body and, oh, how impatient he was for the day when he would land on Earth, with its countless millions of nubile, human females.
Chapter 4
Although on the ship’s plans the seven-twelfths of its cubage given over to the propulsion systems is described as “fuel storage,” that isn’t quite right. The three drive motors take up no more than a twelfth of a twelfth of that space, and the real fuel takes even less. The fuel for the Hakh’hli drive comes in three lumps. Each one, now, is about the size of a Hakh’hli’s head. They are small, but they are heavy. Each one masses something like four by ten to the fourteenth grams. Although they are matter, they are not normal, baryonic matter, which is composed at root of nothing but up and down quarks. The fuel of the Hakh’hli ship is what Earth physicists called “strange” matter, because it is made up in equal parts of up, down, and strange quarks combined. It is the most violently energetic substance known. What takes up most of the space in the “fuel compartment” is simple hydrogen gas, there for no other purpose than to be fired out of the ship’s nozzles at near light speed when driven by the energies of the strange matter. What takes up the rest of the space is the containment for the fuel itself. Those basketball-sized fuel elements need bracing to keep them in place, because they are heavy. They weigh as much as all the rest of the ship combined, and, since they are what they are, they could not be kept in a galvanized-iron tank. Strange matter has to be held by electromagnetic fields, which themselves have to be braced against the fabric of the ship. Fortunately for the ship’s designers, the fuel core weighs nothing at all when the ship is at rest—because nothing does—and when the drive is in operation the back-pressure against the core is exactly equal to the drive thrust that moves the ship. Newton’s laws of equal and opposite motion hold good here, too. When the core is activated the strange quarks boil off to heat the hydrogen working fluid and shove the ship along as it accelerates, and the masses are in balance. There is enough strange-matter fuel to last for a long, long time. It has been powering the ship for 3000 years, and it is good for 10,000 more before it is used up. In fact, it never will be used up. One of the strangest things about strange matter is that the more you use it, the more you have left; and that is a problem that has been worrying the Hakh’hli on the ship for some centuries.
Sandy had never seen the drive engines. No one on the ship did except for the specially bred drive engineers, who managed to live (though not very long) in the residual radiation that would have killed anyone else, human or Hakh’hli, in hours. Sandy had never desired to be one of them. What he did desire was to be allowed to pilot the great interstellar ship itself. Naturally there was no chance of that. Sandy wasn’t supposed to pilot the landing ship, either, when the time came for him and all his cohort at last to brave the garbage barrier that surrounded the Earth and drop down onto its surface. Piloting the lander was Polly’s job, though any of the others could take over. But the flight simulator that all the members of his cohort trained on—ah, that was another matter.
What made it possible for Sandy to sneak in a few lessons was that flight-simulation took place right after the midday meal and its consequent stun time. Since Sandy was physiologically exempt from stun time he could get there before any of the others. It helped, too, that the instructor in charge was not the smartest Hakh’hli on the ship. The reason he was there was that he had actually been in the crew that was preparing to land somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. They never did land, because there wasn’t anything big enough to land on, but he was the closest the Hakh’hli had to an experienced lander pilot. Although he had never been authorized to let Sandy try his hand at pilotage, he had never been ordered not to, either. With a little wheedling, Sandy got past him and again took his place in the simulator capsule.
Sandy had brought cushions with him and used them to wedge himself into the kneeling-seat that had never been designed to accommodate a mere human anatomy. For a quarter of a twelfth-day—no, he corrected himself; for about twenty minutes, in the Earth reckoning of his new wrist watch—he was able to go through the whole sequence, from the magnetic-repulsion “launch” of the capsule from its recess in the side of the great interstellar ship, through the course-correction that brought it over the Earth’s pole in a descending slant, through the dodging of space debris and the buffeting of atmospheric entry, and to a good, or at least not catastrophic, landing on a level, snow-covered plain between high mountains. The simulator made it all real. When the “lander” lurched away from the mother ship—pistons gave it a realistic jolt as it happened—the screens showed the black of space, and the green planet underneath, and the great ship shrinking rapidly away. When he “turned” the lander, the same pistons gave his capsule enough of a twist to match physical sensations with the slipping images on the screens, and they filled in again to suggest the terrible jolting of atmosphere entry.
A session in the lander simulator was as good as any Earthly video game for a young adult, or actually a lot better. It wasn’t good enough, though. When Sandy had to get out to make way for the first real space cadet from his cohort he was sulking. “I don’t see why I can’t fly it down,” he complained to Polly—unwisely, because she gave him a pinch.
“Because you’re too little, and too clumsy, and too dumb!” she told him. “Now get out of the way so I can check out!”
He glowered after her as she climbed in. Obie touched the small of Sandy’s back in sympathy. “I’d let you fly if I could,” he said. Sandy shrugged morosely; they both knew that Obie’s time for influencing anyone else in the cohort had passed with his brief sexual phase. “Well,” Obie said helpfully, “do you want to do something else? I’m last on the list; we’ve got at least a twelfth and a half before my turn.”
“Do what?” Sandy asked.
“We could watch an Earth film,” Obie proposed. “There’s a ‘Star Trek’ I’d like to see again. I like those funny spaceships.”
“No way,” Sandy said positively, because Earthly ideas of nonexistent spaceships weren’t what interested him; if he were going to watch films on his free time he wanted something with prettier girls in scantier clothing. Or alternatively—
He looked around thoughtfully. The four other waiting members of his cohort had started a Questions Game—name all fifty-three states of the U.S.A. in order, left to right, from Guam to Puerto Rico—and were conspicuously shunning both Sandy and Obie. The communications screen was being ignored. “Well,” he said slowly, “there is a film I’d like to see again. Only it isn’t from Earth. It’s Hakh’hli.”