Whitker looked up and squeaked dimly. “Oh, yes. All the tune. I humored him. He was an old man, you know. And now he’s dead.” The tears leaked from his rheumy eyes and traced the sad furrows beside his nose.
Was he getting through? “What did he say, Mr. Whitker? About faster-than-light?”
The old man said, “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”
That damned formula again! “But what does it mean, Mr. Whitker? What did he say it meant?” Ross softly urged.
The old man looked surprised. “Genes?” he asked himself hazily. “Generations? I don’t remember. But you go to Earth, young man. Flarney said they’d know, and know what to do about it, too, which is more than he did. His very words, young man!”
Ross didn’t dare stay longer. Furthermore he suspected that the old man’s attention span had been exhausted. He started from the room with a muttered thanks, and was stopped at the door by Whitker’s hand on his shoulder.
“You’re a good boy,” Whitker squeaked. “Here.”
Ross found himself walking down the corridor with an enormous wad of cellosponge in his hand.
The bunks were hard, but that didn’t matter. Dormitories were the outermost layer of the hulk, pseudogravity varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance, and the field generator was conventionally located near “Minerva’s” center. When your relative weight is one-quarter normal you can sleep deliciously on a gravel driveway. This was the dormitory’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was too many steel slabs, tiered and spotted too close, too many unwashed males, too much weary snoring. The only things in short supply were headroom and air.
Not everybody slept. Insomniacs turned and grunted; those who had given up the struggle talked from bunk to bunk in considerately low tones.
Bernie muttered from a third-tier bunk facing Ross’s: “I wonder if she made it.”
Ross knew what he meant. “Unlikeliest thing in the world,” he said. “But I think she went fast and never knew what hit her.” He thought of the formula and “They’d know on Earth—and know what to do about it too.” Earth the enigma, from which all planetary peoples were supposed to be derived. Earth—the dot on the traditional master
charts, Earth—from which and to which no longliners ever seemed to travel. Haarland had told him no F-T-L ship had in recent centuries ever reported again after setting out for Earth. Another world sunk in barbarism? But Flarney had said—no; that was not data. That was the confused recollections of a very old man, possibly based on the confused recollections of another very old man. Perhaps it had got mixed up with the semilegendary origin story.
Poor sweet Helena! He hoped it had happened fast, that she had been thinking of some pleasant prospect on Hal-sey’s Planet. In her naive way she’d think it just around the corner, a mere matter of following instructions. . . .
So thought Ross, the pessimist.
In his gloom he had forgotten that this was exactly what it was. In his snobbishness he never realized that he was guilty of the most frightful arrogance hi assuming that what he could do, she could not. In his ignorance he was not aware that since navigation began, every new instrument, every technique, has drawn the shuddery warnings of savants that uneducated skippers, working by rote, could not be expected to master these latest fruits of science—or that uneducated skippers since navigation began have cheerfully adopted new instruments and techniques at the drop of a hat and that never once have the shuddery warnings been justified by the facts.
Up the aisle somebody was saying in a low, argumentative tone, “I saw the drum myself. Naturally it was marked Dulsheen Creme, but the guards here never did give a damn whether then- noses were dull or bright enough to flag down a freighter and I don’t think they’ve suddenly changed. It was booze, I tell you. Fifty liters of it.”
“Gawd! The hangovers tomorrow.”
“We’ll all have to watch our steps. I hope they don’t do anything worse than getting quietly drunk in their quarters. Those foot-kissing orderlies’ll get a workout, but who cares what happens to an orderly?”