They had been traveling for over four years and were past the halfway point to the Centauri system. The thrust was nearing a full gravity. Will’s grandson, who had been four at takeoff, was now a twenty two year old newly minted electrical engineer, who had proven himself to be exceedingly intelligent, skipping grades in high school and going through college at amazing speed. The ink on his Master’s degree was still wet and his engineering job in the dome was brand new. His foster parents were now seen as older friends. He had been married since his graduation with a Bachelor’s degree, having met his wife as an undergrad. She was also an engineer, and had just given birth to little William the third. He immediately wrote Will of the news.
And when Will read the correspondence after it arrived years later, he saw that his sons hadn’t been as worthless as he sometimes thought; they had left Billy a fortune that was a secret until he was twenty one.
Will’s four year old grandson was all grown up, a rich dad, and Will was now a great grandfather. Billy wished he could meet his grandpa and tell him in person, as now messages were years apart.
Billy’s friend and classmate Paul had been ejected from the study at age twenty, when he had been caught stealing supplies. George never heard whatever happened to him, although he certainly spent some time in Mars’ orbiting prison; George and his brother had an unresolvable difference of opinion. Even for a psychologist, a family could be torn apart. Intelligence and education were no match for stubbornness. Very little can defeat stubbornness.
Aside from the troubles Billy had before Paul was expelled from the program, his had been a relatively normal life for a Martian, except for his exceptional intelligence, and finding God. Most spacers didn’t believe in Him, and the rest mostly ignored Him. With all the Domes on Mars, there was but a single, small church with a tiny congregation that had members of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths. There was a tiny Buddhist temple on Vesta where the Hindus also worshiped. But God doesn’t have a place in this story, except to smile on the young orphan.
Unlike his grandpa, Billy didn’t smoke, although he enjoyed an occasional beer.
On his native planet, a disease had killed three billion people. A billion people was that planet’s small remnant after the disease had killed three quarters of its population. It had again devolved into the same chaos that had happened after the supervolcano. No longer was there a world-wide government; the planet had nearly gone back to the hunter-gatherer stage, except for the Amish, who blamed God’s wrath on the sinful for the catastrophe. They had been predicting it longer than anyone knew. They were about the only people on the planet who didn’t worship money.
As Earth had no medical systems, the people they considered their enemies, the spacers, had saved what was left of their civilization with vaccines, the same vaccines the Earthians had claimed were the source of the disease. The vaccines that they sneered at that were developed to protect the spacers from any of those stupid Earthians who might escape that gravity-bound hell hole.
Amazingly, the Amish on the North American continent were relatively unscathed by the pandemic, despite their homes now being mostly basement homes, with only a few above ground buildings miraculously still standing. Having almost completely kept to themselves for a very long time protected them from the disease. There were at least a hundred thousand Amish left. Perhaps they had gotten it right all along.
Meanwhile, about 40,000 AU away onboard the Titanic, give or take a few million kilometers, his grandpa was smoking a bong with Bob and Sylvia. They would be on Anglada and maybe on their way back before they heard the news of the pandemic, and the second collapse of Earth’s modern civilization.
They were at a practice session, and had been there an hour without playing a note. Ralph had set up a ganja farm in an empty storeroom, as not enough ganja or popcorn had been sent, so popcorn was growing in the same storeroom. Popcorn hadn’t been popular in the solar system for centuries, but was very popular at the Titanic’s bar, especially when there were holos, or even antique movies with real human beings and now-extinct animals in the auditorium.
Lawrence McMahan, who had mostly stayed to himself in his apartment, reading and watching videos, doubled over in severe pain. He was moaning and had hardly had time to react to the invisible javelin that an invisible somebody had thrust into his side. God, but it hurt bad! He wished he’d seen the doctor a couple of days earlier when it had just begun to hurt.
The Doc came rushing in and put something on his forehead. His side still hurt terribly, but somehow the pain was meaningless and he didn’t mind it. A medic came in, and he laid down on it.
The robot’s readings told Doc that the man’s appendix had burst. Odd that he hadn’t visited, the pain of appendicitis usually got a patient to him quickly. If Larry had seen him a few days earlier, he wouldn’t have needed surgery.
This was actually pretty abnormally normal for Harold and his shipload of geriatric geezers. He was amazed that only Captain Salter had died so far, too humble to acknowledge his own prowess. Statistics said there should be close to half a dozen fatalities by now.
Tomorrow Joe and Walt would each have two turns in the dungeon, as they had each begun to call it, without either knowing that’s what anyone else called it. Joe didn’t mind going down, and actually liked the work, but he hated coming back up and was glad when he arrived upstairs.
The book required inspections, and as good technicians, Walt, making the morning and evening inspections, and Joe, who would be headed downstairs tomorrow before braking, always went by the book.
Well, except when the book was wrong. That’s one thing most people learn by the time they retire, but seldom do early enough in life to do them much good. In somewhere like a factory or a generator, by the time you understand something it changes, and the book is wrong all of a sudden. Walt thought about the damned kid who had been his boss on Ceres, and thought again that he hoped his youthful ignorance didn’t kill everybody in the dome.
And sometimes the book is wrong as soon as it’s published, because computers write them and people edit them and both of them are very prone to error, especially the people watching the computers and editing their work.
Joe was in the commons smoking a joint with Ralph the day before braking, not realizing that the two psychologists were always on duty, like Doc and Bill, and like Mort had been before his stroke.
“Yeah, Ralph, I love my job. Except those damned stairs.”
Ralph grinned. “Well, look at it this way, if you ever decide to go to Earth you won’t need an exo!”
Joe laughed. “I doubt I’ll ever have a reason to want to go to that shithole! But I love the equipment, and man, this ship has everything. It’s twice as good as my generator on Ceres. Hell, half the time I couldn’t get parts there, and I could build another generator with all the spare parts we brought! I love going down there, hate coming back. I’ll be down there three times as long tomorrow.”
“Yeah? What’s so special about tomorrow?”
“Braking maneuver.”
“What’s that? What gets broken?”
“Nothing, I hope. I’ll be down there making sure nothing breaks while Bill ends the thrust and turns the ship around. After tomorrow we’ll be decelerating at the same thrust we accelerated with. Bill says it’s no problem.”
“Oh, brake.” Ralph knew how minds worked, but not how physics works, except the small bit of knowledge undergraduate general study courses provide. You can only know what you’re taught or what you can learn from books or find out for yourself.
“Where’s that robot?” he said, right before a robot rolled up with a beer.
“Is he going to make an announcement?” Ralph asked. He thought it might worry some folks if they went weightless suddenly.
“I don’t know, maybe, I don’t know what the book says.” He glanced at his phone. “Oh, hell, I’m supposed to see Jerry in five minutes. See you later.”
“See you.”
Before Ralph’s beer was finished, Bill came in and sat down where Joe had been sitting. The ash trays were apparently working well.
Bill had told everyone “just Bill” but Ralph, a former GOTS navy man who had never left Ceres, insisted on rank, but at least he gave him the nickname for captain. “Say, Cap,” Ralph said. Bill smiled.
“Say, Ralph. Anybody go nuts yet?”
“Just me. Say, how do we actually stop when we get there? Just thought of that. Will anybody notice? Will you be giving an announcement before you hit the brakes? Might stir some folks up if gravity changes, they’ll worry.”
Bill hadn’t planned on saying anything, thinking he could do it without anybody knowing before they were weightless. The book didn’t say anything about warning passengers, but Ralph was right.
Late the next “morning” near lunchtime Joe descended to inspect the love of his life, and Bill went into the pilot room.
“That damned Ralph can read minds,” Bill said to no one in particular, since he was there by himself.
He picked up his phone. “Your attention, please, we will be turning around to slow the ship down as we approach Centauri. This will require a brief period of weightlessness, but it is scheduled and temporary and is no cause for concern. Thank you for your understanding.”
Mary was in the commons at the bar and hurriedly lit a joint. Weightlessness is like music, in that it’s almost always enjoyable but more so when you’re high. She took a toke and held it as Will came in, also with a lit doobie, as the thrust lowered.
Will tripped and fell. Mary started laughing. Will laughed along as he got back up, and floated towards the ceiling. Mary laughed even louder. Jerry sat there grinning, sipping a beer and trying to keep it from floating out of the bottle. Sylvia was there, also stoned and also laughing loudly. There was a bit of a mess for the robots to clean up later.
Will, laying on the ceiling, said “Man, I’m high!” Everyone laughed uproariously, especially Jerry, who was a lover of puns.
Joe was downstairs with his beloved generators and engines. After he had done the inspection, he lit a joint, sat on a step, and waited for the weight to go somewhere else. He took another hit. As he became lighter as the thrust lowered, he thought “so that’s where a black hole gets its mass!” He thought it was both hilarious and profound, no matter how silly the outrageous idea was.
Bill was doing the real work, making sure the crazy computers didn’t blow up the ship or anything. The basic architecture of a computer hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, ever since they were invented in the twentieth century, but no one could any longer understand their programming. Computers had been programming themselves since not long after they were invented when they had developed the “artificial intelligence” that made the mindless computers fool people into thinking they had minds; or rather, their programmers did. Luckily, he thought, they usually regained their sanity after they went insane and had to be restarted.
This time, none of the four computers went crazy. “This calls for a beer,” he decided out loud to himself. He walked down to the commons and sat several stools down from Will, who had that awful cannabis smell surrounding him; rather than the smokeless ashtrays, he was using the remains of his lunch as an ash tray. Bill ordered a beer, and the robot wheeled it over to him. As he took the first sip, his phone alerted. It was Joe.
“Sorry to bother you, man, but the book says I gotta.”
“What is it?”
“Engine forty two has some strange readings. Nothing you can do about it from up there, but the book says to alert you.”
“Read ‘em to me.”
He did. Bill replied “The book’s right, I’ve run across this before, a long time ago. It’s rare now, with the improvements in technology, but it still happens. Shut it down, as well as forty one and forty three. If it’s like I saw back in the day we could lose all the engines on this ship.”
“Wow. They didn’t say anything about that in school.”
“It was before your time. I’ve forgotten what the root cause was, but with twenty four ships strung together with three hundred engines each, we can afford to lose three engines.” He didn’t think the cascading failures he had seen in the past could go from ship to ship, but since they were interconnected, he wasn’t going to take the chance. “Oh, and keep the repair robots away. They’ll melt.”
“Wow,” said Joe, who then disconnected the three engines, finished up, and went for what he was now calling his daily calisthenics routine, trudging up the stairs. This called for a joint and a beer.
A week later, Will was stoned, and happy. Mary had gone back to her apartment. He ordered a third beer as Joe came in and sat down. Ralph was at a table pretending to read a book while he kept an eye on his charges.
A few people in the commons seemed to be slightly inebriated. This always worried Ralph. Mary had made it through the screenings, had a few others made it through, too?
The common area was filling up nicely. Bill didn’t seem to mind the smoke, although it seemed like almost everyone in there was smoking; the ash trays caught neither all the smoke nor all the ashes, especially if someone smoking was also drinking. He was actually starting to get used to the smell, but hadn’t yet noticed that he was. He sat at a table and ordered lunch. He thought back to when he was first hired over two centuries earlier, static time, as he ordered a pork chop, mashed potatoes, and green beans.
Back then, pork was so expensive that only the very richest could afford to eat it, and it made the more liberal of the upper classes feel guilty when they ate it. He remembered his ex-wife’s friend, the CEO’s daughter who had married his best friend, also a ship’s captain. She was a liberal who felt guilty eating pork. Of course, all three had been dead for over a hundred years. He missed John, whom he had known since high school. Bill, the nerd, was often defended from bullies when they were in high school by his best friend. He still missed him, all these years later.
These days, the only farming allowed on the Earth was plant based and only using natural chemicals, and all underground except for Amish farms, which the Earthian authorities had always overlooked. No one had complained. Earth had become completely vegetarian except for the Amish and Earth’s extremely rich, the richest on the planet, who had until the embargo bought meat and other forbidden items from the spacers. The Amish no longer would have anything to do with them. Normal Earthians didn’t even have any dairy, and Mars had entire domes devoted to livestock, and others as wildlife refuges for species that man had caused to go extinct on Earth, like lions and elephants and horses. Earth’s last zoo had closed over a century earlier, all of its animals exported to Mars as dozens of zoos had earlier.
Today, a spacer could eat anything he or she wanted, and all were what an Earthian would call fat; it made walking easier in low gravity, while most Earthians were almost always hungry. You could see ribs if they were shirtless. Bill felt sorry for them as he cut up his pork chop.