Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself.
Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special.
Like Ramrobots #141 and #142, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland--like Ramrobot #144, not yet built-Ramrobot #143 carried the seeds of revolution. That revolution was already in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat.
The medical revolution that began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli Whitney's cotton gin in less than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly; but there was motion. In Brazil a small but growing, alliance agitated for the removal of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders. They would be opposed, but they would win.
On twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto's orbit. Pluto and Neptune were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic effects.
The ramscoop generator came on.
The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating, it was two hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars.
In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn't be done, and they were right. A ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light.
For Ramrobot #143, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star, then a dim orange spark. The drag on the ramscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than compensated for by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes in Neptune's Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot's steady fusion light: a tiny, fierce blue-white point against Tau Ceti's yellow.
The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot the stars crept together, until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember red, and Tau Ceti showed brilliant white. The pair of red dwarfs known as L726-8, almost in the ramrobot's path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if somebody heavy had sat down on the universe.
Ramrobot #143 reached the halfway point, 5.95 light-years from Sol as measured relative to Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship throughout the voyage.
But a relay clicked in the ramrobot's computer. It was message time. The ramscoop flickered out, and the light died in the motors as Ramrobot #143 poured all her stored power into a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the beam drawing steadily ahead.
A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking nurse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders.
Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and as the nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter, Matt examined his bottle critically. "Doesn't look so good," he said.
The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat wasting her time!
"I better run it through again," Matt decided aloud. And he drank it.
"It was apple juice," he said later that night. "I almost got caught sneaking it into the medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damndest color."
"But why?" his father asked in honest bewilderment. "Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know she's part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital"
"I think it was funny," Jeanne announced. She was Matt's sister, a year younger than Matt, and she always sided with him.
Matt's grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his years. "One for Uncle Matt."
Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. "You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and you'll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can't you leave well enough alone?"
His father's evident concern penetrated Matt's mood. "Don't worry, Ghengis," he said easily. "Miss Prynn's probably forgotten all about it. I'm lucky that way."
"Nonsense. If she doesn't report you, it'd be through sheer kindness."
"Fat chance of that."
In a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple though major: he now had a new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew. He was to give up smoking immediately.
He could feel the pull of internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen, and went to work.
Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaints practical joke-and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, "Matthew Leigh Keller?"
"Convicted of treason," Major Jensen said instantly. "Six years ago. He escaped over the edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks."
But he hadn't, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen's predecessor had gone instead. Yet Keller had died .... "What's he doing playing practical jokes in colonist medcheck station?"
After a moment of cogitation Major Jensen said, "He had a nephew."
"Be about fifteen now?"
"Perhaps. I'll check."
Keller's nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself. I could follow standard practice and send him a reprimand.
No. Let him think he'd got away with it. Give him room to move around in, and one day he'd replace the body his uncle stole.
Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to desist.
The snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its surface was a montage of big and little pits, craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on the hull, even on the cargo pod thirty miles behind. The ship looked pebble-finished.
The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop design had suffered its last major change.
Now, eight and a half years beyond Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the cargo spool rewound until the cargo pod was locked in its socket.