Love and best wishes from Africa Tower.

TRANSCRIBE STORE

TRANSMIT POOLE

16 – The Captain's Table

The arrival of such a distinguished passenger had caused a certain disruption in the tight little world of Goliath, but the crew had adapted to it with good humour. Every day, at 18.00 hours, all personnel gathered for dinner in the wardroom, which in zero-gee could hold at least thirty people in comfort, if spread uniformly around the walls. However, most of the time the ship's working areas were held at lunar gravity, so there was an undeniable floor – and more than eight bodies made a crowd.

The semi-circular table that unfolded around the auto-chef at mealtimes could just seat the entire seven-person crew, with the Captain at the place of honour. One extra created such insuperable problems that somebody now had to eat alone for every meal. After much good-natured debate, it was decided to make the choice in alphabetical order – not of proper names, which were hardly ever used, but of nicknames. It had taken Poole some time to get used to them: 'Bolts' (structural engineering); 'Chips' (computers and communications); 'First' (First Mate); 'Life' (medical and life-support systems); 'Props' (propulsion and power); and 'Stars' (orbits and navigation).

During the ten-day voyage, as he listened to the stories, jokes and complaints of his temporary shipmates, Poole learned more about the solar system than during his months on Earth. All aboard were obviously delighted to have a new and perhaps naïve listener as an attentive one-man audience, but Poole was seldom taken in by their more imaginative stories.

Yet sometimes it was hard to know where to draw the line. No one really believed in the Golden Asteroid, which was usually regarded as a twenty-fourth-century hoax. But what about the Mercurian plasmoids, which had been reported by at least a dozen reliable witnesses during the last five hundred years?

The simplest explanation was that they were related to ball-lightning, responsible for so many 'Unidentified Flying Object' reports on Earth and Mars. But some observers swore that they had shown purposefulness – even inquisitiveness – when they were encountered at close quarters. Nonsense, answered the sceptics – merely electrostatic attraction!

Inevitably, this led to discussions about life in the Universe, and Poole found himself – not for the first time -defending his own era against its extremes of credulity and scepticism. Although the 'Aliens are among us' mania had already subsided when he was a boy, even as late as the 2020s the Space Agency was still plagued by lunatics who claimed to have been contacted – or abducted – by visitors from other worlds. Their delusions had been reinforced by sensational media exploitation, and the whole syndrome was later enshrined in the medical literature as 'Adamski's Disease'.

The discovery of TMA ONE had, paradoxically, put an end to this sorry nonsense, by demonstrating that though there was indeed intelligence elsewhere, it had apparently not concerned itself with Mankind for several million years. TMA ONE had also convincingly refuted the handful of scientists who argued that life above the bacterial level was such an improbable phenomenon that the human race was alone in this Galaxy – if not the Cosmos.

Goliath's crew was more interested in the technology than the politics and economics of Poole's era, and were particularly fascinated by the revolution that had taken place in his own lifetime – the end of the fossil-fuel age, triggered by the harnessing of vacuum energy. They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the twentieth century, and the waste, greed and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.

'Don't blame me,' said Poole, fighting back gamely after one round of criticism. 'Anyway, see what a mess the twenty-first century made.'

There was a chorus of 'What do you mean?'s around the table.

'Well, as soon as the so-called Age of Infinite Power got under way, and everyone had thousands of kilowatts of cheap, clean energy to play with – you know what happened!'

'Oh, you mean the Thermal Crisis. But that was fixed.'

'Eventually – after you'd covered half the Earth with reflectors to bounce the Sun's heat back into space. Otherwise it would have been as parboiled as Venus by now.'

The crew's knowledge of Third Millennium history was so surprisingly limited that Poole – thanks to the intensive education he had received in Star City – could often amaze them with details of events centuries after his own time. However, he was flattered to discover how well-acquainted they were with Discovery's log, it had become one of the classic records of the Space Age. They looked on it as he might have regarded a Viking saga; often he had to remind himself that he was midway in time between Goliath and the first ships to cross the western ocean...

'On your Day 86,' Stars reminded him, at dinner on the fifth evening, 'you passed within two thousand kay of asteroid 7794 – and shot a probe into it. Do you remember?"

'Of course I do,' Poole answered rather brusquely 'To me, it happened less than a year ago'

'Um, sorry. Well, tomorrow we'll be even closer to 13,445. Like to have a look?' With autoguidance and freeze-frame, we should have a window all of ten milliseconds wide.'

A hundredth of a second! That few minutes in Discovery had seemed hectic enough, but now everything would happen fifty times faster.

'How large is it?' Poole asked.

'Thirty by twenty by fifteen metres,' Stars replied. 'Looks like a battered brick.'

'Sorry we don't have a slug to fire at it,' said Props. 'Did you ever wonder if 7794 would hit back?'

'Never occurred to us. But it did give the astronomers a lot of useful information, so it was worth the risk... Anyway, a hundredth of a second hardly seems worth the bother. Thanks all the same.'

'I understand. When you've seen one asteroid, you've seen them -'

'Not true, Chips. When I was on Eros -'

'As you've told us at least a dozen times -, Poole's mind tuned out the discussion, so that it was a background of meaningless noise. He was a thousand years in the past, recalling the only excitement of Discovery's mission before the final disaster. Though he and Bowman were perfectly aware that 7794 was merely a lifeless, airless chunk of rock, that knowledge scarcely affected their feelings. It was the only solid matter they would meet this side of Jupiter, and they had stared at it with the emotions of sailors on a long sea voyage, skirting a coast on which they could not land.

It was turning slowly end over end, and there were mottled patches of light and shade distributed at random over its surface. Sometimes it sparkled like a distant window, as planes or outcroppings of crystalline material flashed in the Sun...

He remembered, also, the mounting tension as they waited to see if their aim had been accurate. It was not easy to hit such a small target, two thousand kilometres away, moving at a relative velocity of twenty kilometres a second.

Then, against the darkened portion of the asteroid, there had been a sudden, dazzling explosion of light. The tiny slug – pure Uranium 238 – had impacted at meteoric speed: in a fraction of a second, all its kinetic energy had been transformed into heat. A puff of incandescent gas had erupted briefly into space, and Discovery's cameras were recording the rapidly fading spectral lines, looking for the tell-tale signatures of glowing atoms. A few hours later, back on Earth, the astronomers learned for the first time the composition of an asteroid's crust. There were no major surprises, but several bottles of champagne changed hands.

Captain Chandler himself took little part in the very democratic discussions around his semi-circular table: he seemed content to let his crew relax and express their feelings in this informal atmosphere. There was only one unspoken rule: no serious business at mealtimes. If there were any technical or operational problems, they had to be dealt with elsewhere.