Most of the passengers were already there for this shuttle trip up, the fifth and not the last of the day. Everyone would be taken on one master ship out to the Point. Most of the others were just killing time or milling around, and there was, curiously, little conversation and much tangible anxiety. Here and there a few would find others they knew and strike up a conversation, perhaps comparing destinations or billet numbers on the ship to the Point, but he saw no one he knew more than vaguely.
He felt somewhat old in this company, although he was just barely thirty-two. Most of the men and women in the terminal looked barely out of their teens to him, and all seemed in far better shape than he was or felt. They were white, yellow, and every shade of brown, European and African and Asian in all their varieties, yet they shared a single common bond that was shaping their future.
“Attention! Attention!” boomed a voice over a loudspeaker, and conversation ground to a halt as they turned to look at a navy chief in the dark blue Logistics Command uniform. “We will be embarking immediately. There is no need to rush, as everything has been preassigned. When I tell you, walk to the loading doors to your right and give your name to the personnel officer there. He will hand you a small card with your name and your billet number and location aboard ship, on the back of which is printed a basic map of how to get there from the ship’s dock. Ship’s personnel will also be aboard both the shuttle and throughout the passenger area of the ship to assist you. Do not attempt to change that billet or circumvent the system. We must find you en route, and mess and sleep schedules have to be adjusted accordingly. We can work out any serious problems after we are under way.”
The people were quite efficient, and the passengers did act a little stupid trying to be first even though it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter what seat you got on the shuttle; you couldn’t see a blasted thing anyway. He, too, felt the urge to rush aboard though. It beat hell out of sitting around being bored to death and it provided some relief to be on the way.
The trip up proved a bit disconcerting after four years of being planetbound, and he found his stomach doing tiny flip-flops at the takeoff. Still, it took only about forty minutes to break free of Titan, much of which was in the same primordial mess as before humans had arrived and built their tiny islands of habitability there, and rendezvous and dock with the big mother ship.
He’d remembered how spartan the navy ship had been coming out, but this one was even worse, a converted cargo carrier that had been converted only to the minimum. They’d put in six decks to hold people and cargo out to the Point, but then they’d divided the decks using thin plastic sheeting that resembled office partitions and didn’t even go all the way to the ceiling. These divided the decks into a series of rooms, or actually roomettes, about four meters by three meters, containing two sets of spartan bunk beds with hospitallike straps “just in case,” a pull-down desk at the end, and four folding canvas-backed chairs now all folded and stored under the bottom bunks. The door was little more than a shower curtain, or so it looked to him.
“There’s also a little wash basin and mirror that pulls out above the desk,” said a woman’s voice behind him. He started, turned, and saw a very attractive Eurasian woman wearing a skin-tight green body stocking that left little to the imagination, and high-heeled boots.
“Oh, sorry—must have the wrong one,” he managed.
She looked on her card. “Deck C, billet 125,” she read. “Yours too?”
He looked at it and nodded. “I’ve lived in many a coed dormitory in my time, but never quite this close,” he managed.
“They slipped up on a fair number of these assignments,” she told him. “Don’t bother to complain. You’ll get the old song and dance about how they’re too busy now and will work it out later. That means five days later.” Five days, of course, being the length of time they’d be outbound before disembarking to the Flux ship. “I don’t mind if you don’t.”
“Oh, certainly not!” he said both brightly and honestly. Frankly, the whole thing was something of a turn-on. “I’m Toby Haller, Landscape Engineering.”
“Candy Kwong, local administration,” she responded. “Glad to know you. In case you’re wondering, the lavatories are coed, too, and are about ten meters to your right up the aisle. The showers are forty meters to the left. There’s something of a lounge to the right of the loos that’s not large enough for all of us, but it has tea and coffee available and is regularly resupplied with biscuits and other snacks. Dining is three long ladders or stairways down on F deck, and they don’t call it ‘mess’ for nothing. We’re on the swing shift—1100, 1500, and 2300 for food, and it’s lights-out on this deck from 0400 to 1000 hours. I was on the first shuttle and I’ve checked.”
“Very impressive,” he told her. “This place is so noisy now, I have an odd feeling that catnaps will be impossible in spite of nothing to do.”
“Oh, there are some things to do. I didn’t see it, but they have an exercise room on F deck as well as the mess, a basic library, and a bunch of ten-year-old SV shows in a little theater there, as well as small meeting rooms for divisional conferences.”
“Oh—hello! Oh, dear!” came another voice, and they turned and saw a small, mousy-looking girl with a freckled face and reddish-brown curly hair wearing yellow pants and an overly large plain white T-shirt. She looked somewhat startled to see Haller.
“Deck C, billet 125?” Candy Kwong asked casually.
The girl nodded. She looked to be not yet out of her teens. “Y-yes, but—”
“I’m afraid they were random in all respects,” Haller told her apologetically. “Ms. Kwong and I have decided we can stand each other’s embarrassment, but if this isn’t true with you, I’ll arrange a switch in any case, being, as it were, the odd man in all respects.”
The girl seemed to be looking him over top to bottom, and he could see what was going through her mind. She really didn’t want to be the one to make waves and seem the total prude, and her sense of vicarious adventure was tweaked, but she really would have preferred not to make the choice. He felt a bit sorry for her, really. He might have lied and told her he was gay or something, but he really didn’t want to stifle a budding friendship with somebody who looked like Candy Kwong.
“N-no,” she decided at last. “I’ll make do. All of us will have to make do for quite a while. I suspect. I’m Millie Galsworthy.”
By God, she looks like a Millie Galsworthy too. he thought. “I’m Toby Haller and this is Candy Kwong. What division are you with?”
“Oh, I’m not in any, really. Not yet anyway. My father’s a Logistics officer and my mother’s in administration. They both went ahead a few weeks ago, but I had to finish up some tests before I could join them.”
“How old are you, Millie?” Kwong asked nicely.
“Seventeen.”
They could both sympathize with her. In a world of Ph.D’s. bureaucrats, and soldiers, she was more than a bit out of her element. Her future was somewhat limited as well. It would be a very long time, perhaps half a lifetime, before they were any universities on New Eden worth mentioning, and in spite of being a military brat, she didn’t really look the type to enlist, either physically or temperamentally.
Eventually, Millie warmed to them, and as they went down and ate what the navy insisted was food, she told them that her parents and she had discussed it all thoroughly. Their problem was hardly unique; there were quite a large number of married couples with families in the project. A few, but not many, had in the end decided not to go because of the limits on their children, but her parents had been committed to it and she had supported them. Now she could go with them and try to find a niche, or she could remain behind, return to Earth, and get an education—but at the cost of being cut off from her parents for that period and with no certainty that she would later be considered valuable enough to rejoin the program.
“Have you given any thought as to what you might do out there?” Candy asked Millie. While there would be jobs for the nontechnical out there, there would also be nontechnical personnel for them.
“Oh, I thought I’d just help out wherever I could, find a man, and have a lot of babies,” Millie responded casually.
Toby Haller almost choked to death on his coffee.
Later, they just walked around the huge ship for a while, then went back up to the sleeping area. It was bedlam in there, with hundreds of voices all talking at the same time and bouncing off the walls, but they found that, in time, you got used to it.
Finally, an electronic gong sounded throughout the ship, followed by the eternal squeal of a boatswain’s whistle. “Attention all personnel, attention all personnel,” came an echoey official-sounding man’s voice over the ship’s P.A. system. “Prepare to sail. Repeat, prepare to sail.”
There wasn’t much for passengers to do, and no preparations were needed in these days of modern deep space flight, but a strange and unnatural hush fell over the entire deck and perhaps the entire ship. They sat there, almost frozen, and beyond could be heard the clanging of bells and whining of buzzers and the grinding of heavy machinery. The nearly imperceptible vibration of a ship in dock was replaced by an increasing vibration that ran through the ship. There was a momentary dim in the lights as the ship switched entirely to internal power, and then some gentle lurches as the great craft backed slowly out of its orbiting dock, stopped, turned, and proceeded forward and out of the Saturnian system.
They had been on artificial gravity since leaving the shuttle, so there was little change personally, but the sounds and feel of a big ship on its own were clear and unmistakable.
It would take several hours under an expert pilot to completely clear the mess that was the miniature solar system around Saturn; only then could they slowly accelerate to full power and attain speeds their ancestors only dreamed of. Even so, it was painfully slow compared to the trip the passengers aboard were about to make. While they would make the Point in a mere five days, it would take them almost five years to reach the next nearest star at this speed, and perhaps a hundred and fifty years to reach any system useful to humanity even with Flux terraforming. They, however, were going a far greater distance than that, and they were going to do it in no time at all.