sixteen

Day 8. Estimated range: 94,350 kilometres

For a start, I am determined to avoid the abbreviations traditionally used by diarists — their function is that of shortening a necessary task, whereas my aim is to prolong a superfluous one. (The term ‘ship’s log’ might be more appropriate than ‘diary’; but, again, the log is a record of the events of a voyage, whereas the daily entries in my book are likely to be the only pseudo-events in a continuum of pure monotony.) (If I go on splitting hairs like this about the precise meanings of words in the opening sentence, I’ll never get beyond it; but the reference to abbreviations isn’t quite right, either. I intend to use the symbol ‘O’ instead of writing out ‘Orbitsville’ in full each time. O is much shorter than Orbitsville, but that is coincidental — it is also more expressive of the reality.) Cliff Napier was right when he guessed I was glad the job of manufacturing autopilots was beyond our resources. My reasoning was that flying the ship by hand would keep us occupied and help to reduce the boredom. It isn’t working out that way, though. There are five of us on board and we spell each other at the controls on a rota which is arranged so that the two most experienced pilots — Braunek and myself — are in the cockpit at daybreak and nightfall. These are the only times when flying the ship becomes more difficult than driving an automobile. Because day and night are caused by bands of light and darkness sweeping over the land at orbital speed, there is no proper dawn and no proper dusk, and some fairly violent meteorological processes take place.

In the ‘morning’ a sector of cold air which has been sinking steadily for hours suddenly finds itself warming up again and rising, causing anything from clear air turbulence to heavy rain. At nightfall the situation is reversed but can be even more tricky because the air which cools and begins to descend conflicts with currents rising from the still-warm ground.

All it amounts to, however, is that there are two half-hour periods when the control column comes to life. Not enough to occupy us for the next three to four years, I’m afraid, although we in the lead ship are a little luckier than the others in having a little extra work to do. There is the inertial course reference to be monitored, for instance. It is a simple-looking black box, created by O’Hagan and his team, and inside it is a monomaniac electronic brain which thinks of nothing but the bearing they fed into it. Any time we begin to wander off course a digital counter instructs us to go left or right till we’re back on line again, and the rest of the squadron follows suit.

Linked to the black box there is a one-metre-square delton detector which in a year or two, as we get considerably closer to Beachhead City, should begin to pick up other delta particles and provide course confirmation. Sometimes I watch it, just in case, or just to pass the time, but there isn’t really any need. It would feed a fresh bearing into the course reference automatically, and is also fitted with an audio attention-getter. I still watch it, though… and dream about EL. No abbreviations — Elizabeth Lindstrom.

Day 23. Estimated range: 278,050 kilometres

We’ve completed perhaps a fortieth of the journey, having flown a distance roughly equivalent to going round the Earth seven times. Without stopping. Another way to reckon it is that, after 23 days, we’ve gone nearly as far as a ray of light would have travelled in one second, but that’s a depressing thought to anyone who has been accustomed to Arthurian flight at multiples of light-speed. A more positive thought is that we’ve learned quite a lot about O.

Somehow, I’d always thought of it as being composed entirely of featureless prairie, but I was wrong. Perhaps it started off that way, eons ago, and the subsequent action of wind led to the formation of the mountains we’ve seen. None of them was very high, not more than a couple of thousand metres, but with the land area of five billion Earths not yet explored who’s to say what will be found? The mountains are there, anyway, and some of them are capped with snow because our flight is taking us into the winter sector, and there are rivers and small seas. Our formation passes over them in a dead straight line, quietly and steadily, and sometimes the telescopes pick up herds of grazing animals. Perhaps settlers will not have to rely exclusively on vegetable protein, after all.

The unexpected variegation of the terrain is making the journey a little easier to endure, but after a time all seas are the same, all hills look alike…

When I wrote in an earlier entry that the five of us in the lead ship were luckier than the others in having more to do, I was not thinking about the members of the science staff. Sammy Yamoto in No 4 seems to be fully occupied with astronomical readings, including precise measurements of the width of the day and night bands as we cross them, or as they cross us. He now says that, even with improvised equipment, he could probably take a bearing on Beachhead City which would be accurate to within a degree or so. I suspect he is passing up his turn at the flying controls so that he can carry on with his work. I hope this is not the case, because he is one of the least expert pilots and needs the practice. Although five per ship is ample crew strength, this could be cut down, by illness, for example, and I’m making no provision for unscheduled stops. Any ships which have to go down for long periods will be stripped and left behind. With their crews.

Cliff Napier in No 2 is filling in free time by helping Denise Serra in a series of experiments connected with recording radiation and gravity fluctuations.

Sometimes — in fact, quite often — I find myself wishing Denise was on my ship. I could have arranged it at the start, of course, but I wanted to play fair with her. Having turned her down that night, I felt the least I could do was avoid obstructing the field. But now… Now when I dream about Aileen and Chris I dream they are dead, which means I’m beginning to accept it, and with the acceptance my pragmatic, faithless body seems to be nominating Aileen’s successor. I feel ashamed about this, but perhaps it is not as purely physical as I was supposing. Delia Liggett, who was a catering supervisor on the Bissendorf, is on my ship and two of the other men have a good practical relationship with her — but I can’t work up much interest in a hot bunking system. I’m positive this isn’t a ridiculous remnant of a captain-to-crew attitude, a notion that I ought to have her exclusively because I had the most silver braid on my uniform.

Outside the agreed goals of this mission I have, probably with some assistance from the pervading influence of the Big O, completely discarded the old command structure. I do remember, though, feeling some surprise at the make-up of the thirty-nine volunteers who came with me. My first supposition was that they would all be of executive rank and above, career-oriented men and women who were determined to take the Bissendorf incident in their stride. Instead, I found that over half of the seventy original volunteers were ordinary crewmen. Those who remained, after the selection procedure which cut the number down to the precise requirement, I regard and treat as exact equals.

O makes us equal.

In comparison to it we are reduced to the ultimate, human electrons, too small to admit of any disparity in size.

Day 54. Estimated range: 620,000 kilometres

We have completed our first scheduled landing and are in flight again. After fifty days in the air, the prospect of three days on the ground was exhilarating. We landed in formation on a level plain, the eight fully qualified pilots at the controls, and spent practically all the down-time in gathering grass and loading it into the processing machines. This is what passes for winter on O. The sun is still directly overhead, naturally enough, but with the days being shorter the temperature does not build up as high and has a much longer time to bleed away at night. It results in nothing more than a certain briskness in the air during the day, although the nights are a lot colder. (It makes me wonder why the designers of O bothered to build in a mechanism to provide seasons. If the hostel-for-the-galaxy notion is correct, presumably the designers carried out a survey of intelligent life-forms in their region of space to see what the environmental requirements were. And if that is the case, the majority of life-bearing worlds must closely resemble Earth, even to the extent of having a moderately tilted axis and a procession of seasons. Could this, for some reason I don’t fathom, be a universal pre-requisite for the evolution of intelligence?) It seems that weather isn’t going to be any problem during future stops, but our physical condition might. The simple task of cutting and gathering grass pretty well exhausted a lot of people, and now we are instituting programmes of exercises which can be performed on board ship.