I am dependent on my great-niece Kathleen and on Molly, her mother. Pat and I can still talk, but only with their help; if we try it alone, it’s like trying to make yourself understood in a machine shop. You know the other fellow is saying something but the more you strain the less you hear. Pat is fifty-four, now that we have peaked on this leg; we just don’t have anything in common. Since Maude’s death he isn’t interested in anything but business-and I am not interested in that.
Unc is the only one who doesn’t feel his original telepartner slipping away. Celestine is forty-two now; they are coming together instead of separating. I still call her “Sugar Pie,” just to hear her chuckle. It is hard to realize that she is twice my age; she ought to have braids and a missing front tooth.
All in all, we lost thirty-two people in the Plague. I had it and got well. Doe Devereaux didn’t get well and neither did Prudence nor Rupe. We have to fill in and act as if the others had never been with us. Mei-Ling’s baby died and for a while we thought we were going to lose Mei-Ling, but now she takes her watch and does her work and even laughs.
I guess the one we all miss the most is Mama O’Toole.
What else of importance has happened? Well, what can happen in a ship? Nothing. Beta Hydri was a washout. Not only nothing resembling an Earth-type planet, but no oceans-no water oceans, I mean; it was a choice for fuel between ammonia and methane, and the Chief Engineer and the Captain had long worried conferences before they settled for ammonia. Theoretically the Elsie will burn anything; give her mass-converter something to chew on and the old “e equals mc2” gets to work; the torch spits the mass out as radiation at the speed of light and neutrons at almost the speed of light. But while the converter does not care, all of the torch’s auxiliary equipment is built to handle fluid, preferably water.
We had a choice between ammonia, already liquid, and an outer planet that was mostly ice, but ice not much warmer than absolute zero. So they crossed their fingers, put her down in an ocean of ammonia, and filled up the old girl’s tanks. The planet we named Inferno and then called it nastier names. We had to sit there four days at two gravities and it was cold, even with the ship’s air heaters going full blast.
The Beta Hydri system is one I am not going back to; creatures with other metabolisms can have it and welcome. The only one who was pleased was Harry Gates, because the planetary arrangements followed Bode’s Law. I wouldn’t care if they had been in Vee formation.
The only other thing that sticks in my mind was (of all things!) political trouble. Our last peak started just as that war broke out between the Afro-European Federation and Estados Unidos de Sud. It shouldn’t have meant anything to us-it did not, to most of us, or at least we kept our sympathies to ourselves. But Mr. Roch, our Chief Engineer, is from the Federation and his first assistant was born in Buenos Aires. When Buenos Aires got it, probably including some of Mr. Regato’s relatives, he blamed his boss personally. Silly, but what can you expect?
After that, the Captain gave orders that he would check Earthside news before it was printed and he reminded us of the special restrictions on communicators in re security of communications. I think I would have been bright enough to submit that dispatch to the Captain before printing it, but I can’t be sure. We’d had always had free press in the Elsie.
The only thing that got us out of that mess was that we peaked right after. When we came out of peak, fourteen years had passed and the latest political line-up had Argentina friends with her former enemies and on the outs with the rest of South America. After a while Mr. Roch and Mr. Regato were back playing chess together, just as if the Captain had never had to restrict them to keep them from each other’s throats.