Beynac was among those who could keep their eyes open meanwhile without getting sick. Being alone, he could sing songs when he had breath to spare, the bawdier the better. Nevertheless he disliked such sessions; and here, in microgravity, they demanded more time per daycycle than on the Moon. Eventually he wearied of his repertory, fell silent, and combatted monotony with memories and thoughts.
They went back to Kaino. “Had we Lunarians our ships, this were no necessity,” the young man had said, a few watches ago at mess. “For us, at any rate; and for Earthling passengers, no worse than on our world. We would accelerate throughout the voyage.”
“If you could afford a fleet of torchcraft, you would have no need to trade across space,” Beynac bantered him. “You could just wallow in your money.”
Kaino scowled. “Does Fireball sit back wile?” His words shook with longing. “To go—And we’d not buy the ships, we’d build them.”
“Even then, my son, it’s not economic to boost the whole way, except for special purposes.”
“We’d make it be! But who dares set us free? Often did Guthrie sneer at government, but never did he move to push it off us. He too feared us.”
Beynac was about to reply that that was nonsense. A spacefaring enterprise ought rationally to welcome able newcomers. Competition would be no problem; the existing lines had more calls on them than they could meet. However, powerful though Fireball was, there were limits to its influence.
Rydberg forestalled him. “I have looked at the parameters of Lunarian astronautics,” the captain said in his methodical fashion. “Given access to antimatter at a reasonable price, torching may well become profitable for many kinds of haul, if not every kind. Accelerating at a constant one-sixth g. a Lunarian crew would not need centrifuge time. Therefore they could be fewer, perhaps solo. Speed at turnover would be proportionately lower than for a full g, therefore less fuel-costly. Of course, transit time would be greater, by a factor of approximately the square root of six, but that would make no large difference in the inner System. Even this crossing of ours would have taken only about a month.”
He had been right to steer the conversation away from politics, Beynac thought. When six men, two of them Lunarian, were cramped together for week after week after week, nerves wore thin.
Would it have helped if two or three were female? That was common practice on missions for Fireball, if not every spaceline. But no, Dagny had doubtless been right when she argued against it (and, her husband suspected, was the one who got the company to make all-male a condition of the charter). Given the Lunarian temperament, whether you believed it was genetic or cultural, the potentialities might be explosive.
Beynac laughed a little. She needn’t have worried about him on that account, if she did. From the first, she had been woman enough for him, “and then some,” as her North Americans would put it.
His duty to his body was done for the nonce. He could go toss this drenched, smelly sweatsuit in the cleaner, sponge-bathe, don his coverall, and, oh, seek his cubicle, he supposed, play a show before next mess. He hadn’t watched The Marriage of Figaro for years. Earphones. He was the single man aboard who cared for opera. Terrestroid Moondwellers, isolated both from Earth and from their children, were apt to keep archaic tastes.
He touched the off switch. His weight dropped as the centrifuge whirred to a halt, until he hung inmidair between the slack cables. Reaching out for a handhold,-he pulled himself and the platform to a stanchion, used his safety belt to secure the gymnastic equipment, and started for the door.
It opened. Ilitu looked in. “Ah, sir, I awaited your loosing,” he said.
“Is anything wrong?” Beynac asked. He became conscious of how lonely the ship was, a metal bubble adrift through the thin seething of the cosmos.
“Nay. It is but that they have acquired a good optical of the asteroid. I thought you would like to see it at once.”
“Yes, indeed. Thank you.” Beynac followed his graduate student forward through the axial passage. The consideration touched him. This wasn’t the first friendly gesture Ilitu had made. He was more—all right, more human, more open than most Lunarians. Sometimes Beynac fe!t closer to him than to any of his sons and daughters.