Bill was an expert at this, so much that it barely dawned on people that they were slowly sinking to the floor and needed feet for the first time in a while. When weightless, there’s no up or down as far as your inner ear is concerned, but your eyes know that tables and chairs don’t stand on the ceiling.
He picked up his phone. “Attention, please, folks. Gravity is going to get very uncomfortable for a few minutes while we leave orbit, even for you Martians, so please sit or lay down somewhere soft. Thanks for your cooperation.” The ship had traveled from asteroid to asteroid at Ceres’ gravity.
There were at least two “acceleration chairs” in every room except for the bathrooms, and all of the auditorium seating consisted of acceleration chairs. They had straps to keep you immobile in case of extreme pilot maneuvers, like dogfights with pirates, and hydraulics to lessen the force. They would have to “burn engines” at a half gravity to leave Mars’ gravitational field, more than twice what asterites were used to and enough to make a Martian uncomfortable.
Actually, Bill knew that a third of a gravity would get them out of Mars’ gravity well soon enough, but that extra push made the math of steering to Centauri much easier, and the bean counters said it made it cheaper. And they would have to feel real gravity soon enough, as Anglada was slightly bigger than Earth. The thrust would gradually increase from a little more than Mars’ gravity until it was slightly more than an Earth gravity. Nobody would notice.
Nobody but Joe and Walt. They had stairs to climb. They’d notice for sure.
Sylvia Hestor from Pallas was originally from Ceres, but her parents had moved to Pallas when she was two. She didn’t remember Ceres, but certainly remembered all the jokes about her name. But she had been named for a great grandmother on Earth, not the asteroid named Sylvia.
She laid on her bed rather than the acceleration chair. As the increasing weight squashed her into the mattress, she wondered if this was worth it and how long this horrible weight would last. She could barely breathe!
It only lasted forty minutes, but it felt like hours to everyone on the ship. Everyone but the captains, who were used to far more thrust.
When he lowered thrust back down to 3.3 G, Sylvia called Bill. “Captain Kelly?” she said, “Would it be possible to reduce the gravity a little more? And send a gurney around, I fell down trying to get out of bed and I can’t get up.”
As he summoned the medic (civilians called the medical robots “gurneys,” as they resembled the wheeled tables called “gurneys” in antiquity), his phone lit up with calls from most of the passengers. “Too heavy, huh?” he said without an-swering, and lowered thrust down to about Pallas’ gravity. At this low amount, he thought, it will take centuries to get there. Not that he did the actual math, that guess was wildly wrong. But he pulled up the programming interface and made it so the engines would gradually but imperceptibly gain thrust as they went. He wondered why whoever edited the rule book didn’t take into account all the asterites?
At the “halfway” point that wasn’t really halfway, but was when the braking maneuver was done, they would be at a full Earth gravity, possibly more. The computers would compute the necessary computations. At least, that was what they were designed to do, but machinery malfunctions. That’s why there were four main computers doing an awful lot of arithmetic.
Then he sent a ship-wide message saying that gravity would be lowered and he was sorry for the inconvenience. If he did it right, nobody would even complain at over a full gravity.
Then he went to lunch. Things were starting to normalize. Everyone would have a chance to talk with their counterparts on the solar team starting tomorrow, and it should be purely routine from now on.
He hoped.
Walt’s first foray to the engine room was after gravity had dropped down to lower than Ceres’ gravity. Unlike Joe, he was an electrician because training had become available, and a job was a job and money was money, and he was easily bored. After his forced retirement, that he had actually looked forward to, he had just been bored. It shouldn’t have surprised him.
But this ain’t too bad, he thought. This was a hell of a lot better equipped than where he was before he retired. And there weren’t any damned kids bossing him around. At the low gravity, the stairs weren’t even torture. Yet.
That evening after dinner, if such a thing as “evening” could be thought to exist on a ship like this, Bill went to the commons for a beer before turning in. The smell of a lit muggle hit him in the face as he walked into the commons; Will and Mary were at the bar smoking and laughing. He took his beer back to his quarters. He hated that smell and wished the company would disallow smoking. Surely they had brought smokeless ash trays? This ship had everything else, surely they hadn’t skimped on ash trays and gotten cheap junk! He would have to look tomorrow. If there weren’t any he would have the robots construct some. That was something they couldn’t do when he was first hired, but that was a long time ago. The new printers could print molecules from atoms, and anything larger with precision down to the molecular level.
It was Salter’s shift an hour after Bill’s head hit the pillow. When Mort got on duty, the first thing he did was curse out loud. “God damn that asshole!” he exclaimed, referring to Captain Kelly, and shoved the thrust back up to the point three four gravities the book prescribed.
The sudden increase in thrust woke Bill suddenly and startlingly. He jumped out of bed to react to the obvious emergency before his brain woke the rest of the way up and he remembered... Salter! That damned moron! How could any-body that stupid even find his way out of the uterus? The damned doctor probably had to stick his hand in to guide him out.
He got back in bed, feeling sorry for the fool who would soon feel his passengers’ wrath. He went back to sleep with an evil grin. Well, he thought, the idiot asked for it!
The psychologists both knew that there would be a reckoning for the captain. They needed to do nothing. Harold, on the other hand, was very busy. Some of the elderly passengers had fallen from the rapid gravity change, one of whom had broken her arm, and seven who were having a hard time breathing. He would have a word with Ralph and Jerry when he’d finished treating all these patients. Lucky nobody had a heart attack!
Meanwhile, back on Mars the children were being situated. Parents were again meeting with the teachers, the staff psychologists.
Billy was the only one without a parent. When he had reached Mars, his grandfather had already left and was on his way to Anglada, as if a four year old could know where or even what Anglada was.
So a married pair of psychologists on the Anglada mission’s Solar team became Billy’s foster parents. George and Mildred seemed like nice people. Aside from the foster child Billy, they had no children. Many spacers didn’t, although there were more than enough babies to replace all the spacers, but families with more than three children were rare. This was unlike Earth, where, George heard, they breed like crazy. Probably makes up for the short life expectancy.
Today Billy was going to meet his grandpa for the first time, over the video link. It would seem like a normal phone call for a few weeks, the grownups said, then would look and sound funny later on. They would find out that their math was wrong, that psychologists were no better at orbital mechanics than historians were.
Bill was awakened again, this time by an enraged Mort, screaming through the phone. “God damn it, Kelly, what the hell did you tell these fucking people?”
“Be with you in a minute,” he said, and rolled out of bed. That moron, he thought, it’s still heavier than these poor people are used to. A whole lot heavier.
The robot had started perking coffee when it detected him arising. He saw that he was on duty in forty five minutes as he got dressed. Should he wait until he was on duty to speak to Mort?
No. It would serve him right, but no. Idiots can’t help being stupid, no matter how annoying they can be sometimes. And it would be that much longer that these poor asterites would have had to be tortured.
The modern coffeemakers were fast, and the robot handed him a cup of coffee just as he was fastening the last of his garment’s fasteners. He walked through the door in his quarters that opened directly into the pilot room, sipping from the mug.
Normally wearing the pale complexion that every spacer wore, Salter’s face was bright red. He screamed “Damn it Kelly, what the hell is wrong with you? What did you tell those damned people?”
Bill sighed, and softly said “Mort, look, I didn’t say anything to them. I raised the gravity like the book says and all hell broke loose on my phone. None of these people have ever experienced gravity that heavy before, and some of them can’t even walk that heavy. I programmed it to make our passengers happy while getting us there at the same time.”
“Look, asshole,” Salter shouted, shaking his finger at Bill like it was a shaky firearm he could shoot his head off with, “The god damned book says...” and his eyes got big and he collapsed on the floor with his eyes still open, his red face rapidly turning pale.
“Mort?” He put his coffee down and felt for a pulse; there was none. He reached for the emergency heart robot that hung on the wall when the Vestan doctor rushed in, panting and sweating, and tore open Salter’s shirt, and put something on his chest and watched a tablet.
“Is he going to be all right, Doc?”
“Don’t know yet. Got a pulse, we need to get him to the hospital.”
Civilians, Bill thought dismissively. A medic rolled up and lifted Morton on to itself, and rolled towards the infirmary while putting a tubed hypo patch on Salter’s arm, with the doctor following. As the pilot room door opened, there was a small crowd outside with about two dozen angry people. The doctor glared at them, and didn’t even need to speak. They quickly moved aside as the doctor and medic went past and the door closed.
Meanwhile, Bill rapidly ran the formula he had pro-grammed the day before, and the gravity started getting lighter. He walked outside. “Can I help you folks?”
They looked at one another. Had Captain Kelly punched Captain Salter and knocked him out? “The weight,” one said, when another asked “What happened to Captain Asshole?”
“I don’t know, he was pretty angry when he collapsed. What did you folks tell him?”
“Well, look, Captain,”
“It’s Bill, but go on.”
“Look, I never felt weight like that before. It’s horrible. If I’d known it was like that I wouldn’t have signed up.”
“Well, look, folks, Salter can’t help being stupid. He got mad when I tried to explain that you folks aren’t used to gravity like that. He’d probably been steaming for hours. I’ll see if Ralph will try talking to him again when he wakes up. If he wakes up, that is, he’s pretty old, you know. Doc doesn’t know if he’ll make it.”
His phone beeped. He looked at it and said “Excuse me, folks, there’s something I need to take care of,” and went in the pilot room and closed the door.
Charles Ramos from GOTS security was on the phone. His family had worked for the company for generations, all in security. Bill had known his late great great grandfather, who had been in charge of all company security and had been about Bill’s age. Of course, both the company and security were far smaller then.
“Hey, Charlie, anything serious?” Bill asked. “Do we need to strap down?”
“Probably not, but there’s a small fleet of maybe half a dozen coming towards us. Probably legitimate shippers, but it could be pirates. Thought you’d want to know.”
“I do. Thanks, Charlie.”
The phone beeped again. It was the psychologist, Jerry, who was one of the ship’s two real leaders, although only they knew that. “You’re due to talk to the solar team in half an hour, Captain.”
“Thanks for the reminder, but there’s a problem that I’m not allowed to discuss with passengers. I’ll have to post-pone the video visit for a little while.”
Jerry already knew, having been alerted by the computers. “Okay, thanks. Let me know,” he said.
“Oh, and Salter had a heart attack or something over a mistake in the book, could you have a word with him if he wakes up?”
“Oh? Yeah, thanks for informing me,” despite the fact that he already knew Mort was in the infirmary.
It looked to Charlie like the oncoming fleet was coming straight for his own fleet. Two in Charlie’s fleet were ahead of the Titanic, two behind, and eight encircling it. All were armed with lasers, rail guns, EMPs, and atomic explosives. He picked up his phone and adjusted the ship’s radio frequency.
“Oncoming fleet, you’re on a collision course. Please respond.” Of course, there was almost no chance of collision in the vastness of space. There was no answer to his hail.
“Unknown ships, change course or you will be disabled.” There was still no answer.
“Watson, break ranks and take ‘em out.”
“Atomics?” Watson answered.
“Negative, unless absolutely necessary. Use an EMP.”
“Aye, Captain.”
EMP was an acronym for electromagnetic pulse, which was what this weapon loosed. It was basically a giant capacitor, holding enormous amounts of electricity which was fed to a huge coil all at once, producing the pulse of electromagnetism. The pulse from Atom bombs in Nevada in the nineteen forties would drain car batteries and blow fuses for miles. An EMP did no visible damage, although electronics would all be destroyed.
Watson sped up to a full gravity. As he closed in, the lasers started firing at him from the oncoming ships, but nobody’s boats had armor as good as GOTS. Then the screen turned white for a second. He laughed; GOTS vessels were almost impervious to atomic blasts unless it was incredibly close, within two hundred meters.
He shot his EMP where it would detonate in the middle of the ships. It shorted itself out through the coil, and the oncoming ships all went dark. Watson returned to the matrix, and Ramos called home; his job was to protect the Titanic until they were a hundred astronomical units south of the planetary planes on the way to Proxima. Ships would be brought out to tow the pirate vessels back to Mars to be returned to their rightful owners, and their crews held for trial, if the air and heat held out long enough for them to survive. Nobody would worry if they didn’t.
Bill called. “Charlie? I saw the flash, is everything all right?”
Charlie laughed. “Of course. That was one of their atomics, not sure where they got it, but it was two kilometers away. Somebody’s getting a bonus!”
Bill grinned. The bonus would go to Charlie and his crew, of course. They weren’t likely to run into any more pirates, as they were headed southward, away from the orbital planes and away from the belt, where the pirates mostly haunted.
The conversations with the solar team could have been done with tablets or phones, but this trip wasn’t haphazard like the Sirius journey had been. There would be a psychologist monitoring each end of each conversation, especially since the solar team was composed of children like Billy. Later in the journey, conversations would become monologues, as it would become less and less like a phone call and more and more like a movie, and the children would be elderly adults before the project was finished.
William sat before the video screen, a small one only half a meter wide, rather than the normal screen, which was a room’s actual wall that looked not like a screen, but an opening into a different room. That’s what the small screens looked like, too, which looked kind of weird, a framed opening into elsewhere.
Ralph sat on the other side of the desk with a tablet and stylus, in a chair by the wall. Billy’s face came into view, the spitting image of his son Arnold at that age. He smiled, and the child’s eyes got wide.
“Daddy! Daddy! They told me you were dead!” and he started crying. He could see, slightly on-camera, someone trying to comfort the boy if he craned his head to the side of the screen.
“No, Billy, I’m not your daddy, I’m your daddy’s dad. You look like he did when he was your age.”
Billy wore a frown of disbelief on his wet face.
“Really, Billy, look at me closely. Did your daddy have as many wrinkles as me? Was his hair gray?”
The boy seemed to be examining the screen from the other side. He looked a little confused. He looked off-screen and the man with him said something Will couldn’t hear.
“Okay,” Billy said, “I guess you’re not Daddy. You’re really his daddy? You look just like him. Except your hair.”
“Yes. Everybody has a mommy and a daddy.”
“Not me. I don’t have a mommy.”
“Not now. She died when you were born. But you did have a mommy, you just can’t remember her.”
Ralph said “Will? Think maybe the boy has enough to think about? You’ll have another talk tomorrow.”
“Maybe you’re right. Billy, they tell me I have to go, so I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay, uh, grand dad? ‘Bye.”
Will sat back with a dazed expression on his face.
“Are you all right?” Ralph asked.
“He looks just like Arnold! Just like him!”
George now had to explain to a four year old how “tomorrow” to his grandfather was “in a couple of days or so” on Mars.
The next day, Doc reported that Salter was still in a coma. The robot’s readouts said he had suffered a stroke and its medication was being administered intravenously, which also cleared blockage in his arteries that was close to causing a heart attack. He still couldn’t tell if Salter would live, or how much real time his life had experienced; how old he was in his own subjective time, how much entropy he had eaten. He didn’t know that Bill could supply that information if he needed it, as it was in the company databases.
Billy sat in front of the screen waiting for the data to load. It didn’t take this long Sunday when he first met him. Finally his grandfather’s image came on the screen, only completely lacking depth. “Hi, Grandpa! I still think you look like Daddy.”
Will smiled. It was less than twenty four hours since he had first spoken to Billy, and this conversation took all day because of the lag caused by the speed of light. The Titanic was a long, long way from Mars. The distance was increasing too fast for holograms, so old fashioned two dimensions had to suffice.
“Hi, Billy. They’ll teach you about DNA later in school. When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably look like me.”
“The picture looks different than the last time.”
“We keep going faster and faster as we travel, son. It gets harder and harder for the computers to process the data the faster we go, so yesterday the picture was a hologram, today it’s flat, two dimensional.”
Billy didn’t get “process the data” but he understood “Harder” and “faster.” “Oh,” he said.
People don’t realize that humans are born smarter than they will ever be again, and more ignorant than they will again ever be. Most of what a four year old experiences is brand new, which is why when they reach their teens and twenties, they don’t seem to know the difference between “new” and “different.” Change for improvement is a good thing. Change for the sake of change is stupid, a wisdom that youth can’t fathom because of youth itself, and was part of the Grommler insanity.
“Jerry said they had it figured wrong, that they thought we’d have holos at least until the security force went back to Mars. In a few weeks you may have to dictate a letter to me, and your foster parents or the computer may have to read letters I send to you. At least until you learn to read.”
“I can read.” Will smiled; “see Spot run” wasn’t good enough for a conversation, even one with a four year old. He didn’t realize that Billy would be in the second grade in a few months, ship’s time.
“Well, they can help you. How do you like Mars?”
He smiled hugely. “I love it! People smile, nobody smiled back home. They’re nice, there’s other kids to play with, and I can jump real high here! Uh, Grandpa, this phone, George said that you talked to me yesterday but it’s two days here, and I couldn’t understand all the words he used. How does it work?”
Will smiled, and said, “Well, I don’t rightly know, myself, son, but the answer’s in a book somewhere.”
The two were happy, and happily continued their conversation. Billy thought it was like talking to his daddy, Will thought it was like talking to his son when his son had been little.
Joe was happy, as well, down in Bill’s dungeon inspecting the generators and engines. When he finished, he climbed the five flights of stairs to the flight deck where everyone lived.
Four flights up he had to sit on a step and rest, completely winded. His leg hadn’t hurt in over a week, but it was very painful now. By the time he reached the top, both of his legs hurt, not just the injured one. The one that had been hurt was excruciating, all up and down the leg. And the readings had indicated that they were still well under a third of an Earth gravity. He trudged to his apartment with a decided limp, took three arpirins, opened a jar of beer, and filled a bong.
Over half of all adults smoked, although a lot of people, like Captain Kelly, could barely stand the smell. Joe spoke to the television and settled down to watch a game of Martian basketball, a game that was much like Earthian basketball, only the baskets were ten meters high rather than ten feet. Earthian Basketball, along with all organized sports, had been extinct on Earth since after the Yellowstone catastrophe.
Doris was beating Sylvia a hundred two to twenty five. It was far more than a beating. Sylvia’s sports teams were the worst in the belt, he thought. He wanted to see Doris play Mars, now that would be a game!
Since Doris was so much bigger than Sylvia, you would think that the Dorisians would be better players, but neither asteroid had much gravity at all. It was hard to even walk on either asteroid without a heavy gravity belt or a loaded backpack.
The Doc called Bill and informed him that Salter’s condition had improved. He was now stable, but still in a coma. He still couldn’t tell if the co-captain could ever resume his duties. Bill was glad he had Joe and Walt doing hardware inspections; that was the worst part of being captain. Well, except for the damned rich people.
These science guys weren’t bad, he thought. Nothing like the entitled, spoiled, rich assholes who acted like they thought they were gods or something. Those were normal back when he had normal runs. That was always one reason he used to like cargo runs, rich passengers are mostly rude and demanding. These guys were just normal people and no problem.
Will walked down the hall towards the commons with a huge smile on his face and a song in his heart. He really liked that kid. He was in such a good mood he thought he could probably even put up with Mary without being extremely stoned or drunk.
And, for a change, Mary wasn’t in the commons! He sat at the bar and got his pack of Margler’s Ganja Extra Strength Tubes out and lit one. The robot rolled over to where he sat and he ordered a beer, which the robot delivered, along with an ashtray. It was one of the new smokeless ones, he saw, as the smoke was pulled into the tray. The smoke would be converted to the energy required to run the noiseless fan that was devoid of moving parts. Charging batteries was a thing of the ancient past. These days, the device itself was its own “battery” with the device’s case itself supplying power, and only tiny amounts of electricity were needed, as devices had become more and more efficient as time went on, although physics does, of course, have hard limits.
He noticed that this was one of the new, more efficient, expensive ones that didn’t glow or spark, just sucked the smoke and ash in. He had no idea how it worked, though it looked like the smoke and the ash tray were somehow magnetic.
Joe’s arpirins had taken hold and his legs didn’t hurt so much, so he walked down to the commons, and there sat his old friend Will Lathiter! He sat down next to him and said “Will!”
Will’s smile turned to a look of amazement and his eyes got huge. “Joe! What the hell are you doing here?” His grin was back, even bigger. He grabbed Joe’s hand and almost shook it off. They had spoken via video often, but this was the first time he had seen his old friend in person in almost two decades. What a wonderful day! “I wrote you and Harry and Ken right before I left!”
Joe replied “So did I!”
When Will let go of Joe’s hand, he lit the joint back up, hit it, and handed it to Joe, who toked up. Will coughed, and said “When was the last time we got high together, Joe?”
“When was it you had to come to Ceres for work last? What, eighteen years?”
“Yeah, pirates almost got us on the way home, but GOTS got ‘em. How you been, anyway? What are you doing here? You hadn’t retired last time we talked.”
“I have to tell you, Will, work really sucked, thanks to that God damned kid they had in charge. When I heard a boat full of old timers was headed to Centauri, and they needed an electrician, I jumped at it. Wasn’t anything left for me on Ceres, anyway. I hope that damned dumb kid don’t blow up the dome!”
Bill walked in. Good, he thought, somebody found the new ash trays. He barely smelled the ganja. He sat at a table and ordered dinner.
Bob Black walked in and posted a poster on one of the walls with his phone, and sat down next to Will and Joe, who were drinking and smoking and laughing and having a great time. Jerry wasn’t.
He was in his office sitting at his desk, mentally composing the report. Mary Watkins had just finished her second conversation with the child, Paul, on Mars, and Jerry was worried, especially after conversing with his Martian counterpart. Mary showed signs of narcissistic personality disorder. More worryingly, there were possible hints of disassociative identity disorder. He hoped that didn’t pan out; some of its sufferers could be dangerous to others or themselves. He would have to confer with Ralph. Jerry wondered how she got past the mental health screenings. He wrote up his report and walked down to the commons; he wanted a good stiff drink. Or three.
Mary was in her room worrying, and what was most worrying was that she didn’t know what it was she was worried about. She just felt uneasy. She called for a robot to bring lunch to her room.
Three days later, Bob Black sat on the stage in the commons with his guitar. It was a real antique, an ancient Fender Stratocaster, tuning it with a normal electronic tuner like they’d had almost since the Strat had been invented. The computer-generated Muzak that Bob hated played. Bar stools were all occupied and a large fraction of the tables were, as well. More than half of the people there had never heard real music, played on a real musical instrument by a real person before.
Bob’s family had been musically inclined for generations. He had been named after another guitar player long ago, his great grandfather Rob Black; both were named “Robert Black” on birth certificates.
Not only had he seemingly inherited his musical talent, which science didn’t say was hereditary, but musicians did, but also thousands of books of sheet music and tens of thousands of recordings of music going back centuries. He’d had them all digitized, and the physical books and antique analog media were locked up in a warehouse on Mars.
His guitar tuned up, he started with an ancient tune called “Thirty Days in the Hole” from one of the antique recordings. He never had found out what “Newcastle Brown” was, a disease, maybe?