I began to realize that a lot of arrangements in the Elsie were simply to see that we stayed healthy and reasonably happy. Not just school, but other things. Take the number we bad aboard, for example-almost two hundred. Uncle Steve told me that the Elsie could function as a ship with about ten: a captain, three control officers, three engineer officers, one communicator, one farmer, and a cook. Shucks, you could cut that to five: two control officers (one in command), two torch watchstanders, and a farmer-cook.
Then why two hundred?
In the first place there was room enough. The Elsie and the other ships had been rebuilt from the enormous freighters the LRF use to haul supplies out to Pluto and core material back to Earth. In the second place they needed a big scientific staff to investigate the planets we hoped to find. In the third place some were spare parts, like Reserve Captain Urqhardt and, well, me myself. Some of us would die or get killed; the ship had to go on.
But the real point, as I found out, is that no small, isolated social group can be stable. They even have a mathematics for it, with empirical formulas and symbols for “lateral pressures” and “exchange valences” and “exogamic relief.” (That last simply means that the young men of a small village should find wives outside the village.)
Or look at it this way. Suppose you had a one-man space ship which could cruise alone for several years. Only a man who was already nutty a certain way could run it-otherwise he would soon go squirrelly some other way and start tearing the controls off the panels. Make it a two-man ship: even if you used a couple as fond of each other as Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the trip even Juliet would start showing black-widow blood.
Three is as bad or worse, particularly if they gang up two against one. Big numbers are much safer. Even with only two hundred people there are exactly nineteen thousand nine hundred ways to pair them off, either as friends or enemies, so you see that the social possibilities shoot up rapidly when you increase the numbers. A bigger group means more chances to find friends and more ways to avoid people you don’t like. This is terribly important aboard ship.
Besides elective courses we had required ones called “ship’s training”-by which the Captain meant that every body had to learn at least one job he had not signed up for. I stood two watches down in the damping room, whereupon Chief Engineer Roch stated in writing that he did not think that I would ever make a torcher as I seemed to have an innate lack of talent for nuclear physics. As a matter of fact it made me nervous to be that close to an atomic power plant and to realize the unleashed hell that was going on a few feet away from me.
I did not make out much better as a farmer, either. I spent two weeks in the air-conditioning plant and the only thing I did right was to feed the chickens. When they caught me cross-pollinating the wrong way some squash plants which were special pets of Mrs. O’Toole, she let me go, more in sorrow than in anger. “Tom,” she said, “what do you do well?”
I thought about it. “Uh, I can wash bottles… and I used to raise hamsters.”
So she sent me over to the research department and I washed beakers in the chem lab and fed the experimental animals. The beakers were unbreakable. They wouldn’t let me touch the electron microscope. It wasn’t bad-I could have been assigned to the laundry.
Out of the 19,900 combinations possible in the Elsie, Dusty Rhodes and I were one of the wrong ones. I hadn’t signed up for the life sketching class because he was teaching it; the little wart really was a fine draftsman. I know, I’m pretty good at it myself and I would have liked to have been in that class. What was worse, he had an offensively high I.Q., genius plus, much higher than mine, and he could argue rings around me. Along with that he had the manners of a pig and the social graces of a skunk-a bad go, any way you looked at it.