Chalmers smiled, a little wearily. ‘He’s not a fool, Roger. He’s as sincerely concerned about their welfare as you are. Half the crew, particularly the older ones, would go mad within five minutes. But don’t be disappointed, the project has more than proved its worth.’
‘It won’t do that until they "land". If the project ends it will be we who have failed, not them. We can’t rationalize by saying it’s cruel or unpleasant. We owe it to the 14 people in the dome to keep it going.’
Chalmers watched him shrewdly. ‘14? You mean 13, don’t you, Doctor? Or are you inside the dome too?’
This ship had stopped rotating. Sitting at his desk in Command, planning the next day’s fire drill, Abel noticed the sudden absence of movement. All morning, as he walked around the ship — he no longer used the term Station — he had been aware of an inward drag that pulled him towards the wall, as if one leg were shorter than the other.
When he mentioned this to his father the older man merely said: ‘Captain Peters is in charge of Control. Always let him worry where the navigation of the ship is concerned.’
This sort of advice now meant nothing to Abel. In the previous two months his mind had attacked everything around him voraciously, probing and analysing, examining every facet of life in the Station. An enormous, once-suppressed vocabulary of abstract terms and relationships lay latent below the surface of his mind, and nothing would stop him applying it.
Over their meal trays in the commissary he grilled Matthew Peters about the ship’s flight path, the great parabola which would carry it to Alpha Centauri.
‘What about the currents built into the ship?’ he asked. ‘The rotation was designed to eliminate the magnetic poles set up when the ship was originally constructed. How are you compensating for that?’
Matthew looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure, exactly. Probably the instruments are automatically compensated.’ When Abel smiled sceptically he shrugged. ‘Anyway, Father knows all about it. There’s no doubt we’re right on course.’
‘We hope,’ Abel murmured sotto voce. The more Abel asked Matthew about the navigational devices he and his father operated in Control the more obvious it became that they were merely carrying out low-level instrument checks, and that their role was limited to replacing burnt-out pilot lights. Most of the instruments operated automatically, and they might as well have been staring at cabinets full of mattress flock.
What a joke if they were!
Smiling to himself, Abel realized that he had probably stated no more than the truth. It would be unlikely for the navigation to be entrusted to the crew when the slightest human error could throw the space ship irretrievably out of control, send it hurtling into a passing star. The designers of the ship would have sealed the automatic pilots well out of reach, given the crew light supervisory duties that created an illusion of control.
That was the real clue to life aboard the ship. None of their roles could be taken at face value. The day-to-day, minute-to-minute programming carried out by himself and his father was merely a set of variations on a pattern already laid down; the permutations possible were endless, but the fact that he could send Matthew Peters to the commissary at 12 o’clock rather than 12.30 didn’t give him any real power over Matthew’s life. The master programmes printed by the computers selected the day’s menus, safety drills and recreation periods, and a list of names to choose from, but the slight leeway allowed, the extra two or three names supplied, were here in case of illness, not to give Abel any true freedom of choice.
One day, Abel promised himself, he would programme himself out of the conditioning sessions. Shrewdly he guessed that the conditioning still blocked out a great deal of interesting material, that half his mind remained submerged. Something about the ship suggested that there might be more to it than — ‘Hello, Abel, you look far away.’ Dr Francis sat down next to him. ‘What’s worrying you?’
‘I was just calculating something,’ Abel explained quickly. ‘Tell me, assuming that each member of the crew consumes about three pounds of non-circulated food each day, roughly half a ton per year, the total cargo must be about 800 tons, and that’s not allowing for any supplies after planet-fall. There should be at least 1,500 tons aboard. Quite a weight.’
‘Not in absolute terms, Abel. The Station is only a small fraction of the ship. The main reactors, fuel tanks and space holds together weigh over 30,000 tons. They provide the gravitational pull that holds you to the floor.’
Abel shook his head slowly. ‘Hardly, Doctor. The attraction must come from the stellar gravitational fields, or the weight of the ship would have to be about 6 x 1020 tons.’
Dr Francis watched Abel reflectively, aware that the young man had led him into a simple trap. The figure he had quoted was near enough the Earth’s mass. ‘These are complex problems, Abel. I wouldn’t worry too much about stellar mechanics. Captain Peters has that responsibility.’
‘I’m not trying to usurp it,’ Abel assured him. ‘Merely to extend my own knowledge. Don’t you think it might be worth departing from the rules a little? For example, it would be interesting to test the effects of continued isolation. We could select a small group, subject them to artificial stimuli, even seal them off from the rest of the crew and condition them to believe they were back on Earth. It could be a really valuable experiment, Doctor.’
As he waited in the conference room for General Short to finish his opening harangue, Francis repeated the last sentence to himself, wondering idly what Abel, with his limitless enthusiasm, would have made of the circle of defeated faces around the table.
‘…regret as much as you do, gentlemen, the need to discontinue the project. However, now that a decision has been made by the Space Department, it is our duty to implement it. Of course, the task won’t be an easy one. What we need is a phased withdrawal, a gradual readjustment of the world around the crew that will bring them down to Earth as gently as a parachute.’ The General was a brisk, sharp-faced man in his fifties, with burly shoulders but sensitive eyes. He turned to Dr Kersh, who was responsible for the dietary and biometric controls aboard the dome. ‘From what you tell me, Doctor, we might not have as much time as we’d like. This boy Abel sounds something of a problem.’
Kersh smiled. ‘I was looking in at the commissary, overheard him tell Dr Francis that he wanted to run an experiment on a small group of the crew. An isolation drill, would you believe it. He’s estimated that the tractor crews may be isolated for up to two years when the first foraging trips are made.’
Captain Sanger, the engineering officer, added: ‘He’s also trying to duck his conditioning sessions. He’s wearing a couple of foam pads under his earphones, missing about 90 per cent of the subsonics. We spotted it when the EEG tape we record showed no alpha waves. At first we thought it was a break in the cable, but when we checked visually on the screen we saw that he had his eyes open. He wasn’t listening.’
Francis drummed on the table. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered. The subsonic was a maths instruction sequence — the fourfigure antilog system.’
‘A good thing he did miss them,’ Kersh said with a laugh. ‘Sooner or later he’ll work out that the dome is travelling in an elliptical orbit 93 million miles from a dwarf star of the G0 spectral class.’
‘What are you doing about this attempt to evade conditioning, Dr Francis?’ Short asked. When Francis shrugged vaguely he added: ‘I think we ought to regard the matter fairly seriously. From now on we’ll be relying on the programming.’
Flatly, Francis said: ‘Abel will resume the conditioning. There’s no need to do anything. Without the regular daily contact he’ll soon feel lost. The sub-sonic voice is composed of his mother’s vocal tones; when he no longer hears it he’ll lose his orientations, feel completely deserted.’