Limbo System Read online

Father Simon nodded. The spin-down controversy had been the main topic of conversation in the sealed little world of the Maxwell for the last few weeks. Even someone as resolutely aloof from the ebb and flow of the ship’s politics as Father Simon was thoroughly familiar with it.

  “Without success, I take it?”

  “I’m afraid so. We will spin down on schedule. I’m afraid the captain puts abstract principles of ship handling above the welfare of the people on board. I’m sorry, Father.”

  “Oh, I expect I’ll be all right. I have a fairly strong stomach.” The priest smiled shyly. “Mostly I’m just anxious to get to our destination and begin observing.” As an astrometrician from the Vatican Observatory, Father Simon was especially interested in the ultra-long baseline observations the Maxwell would be making.

  Aubrey returned the smile. “I’m excited too, Father. Still, it’s a shame that so many people will be made so miserable for such trivial considerations.”

  “So our safety is unimportant, eh?” Major DeLorenzo said loudly. He had come back when he had heard what Aubrey was saying to Father Simon.

  Like a lot of military men, DeLorenzo was slightly deaf from being around explosions. He compensated by talking loudly and even in normal conversation his voice carried. All over the gym people paused and looked. Some of them continued to stare and listen, some of them made a great show of going back to their workouts. Only Dr. Takiuji continued his sword exercises uninterrupted.

  “All this fuss over a few upset tummies,” DeLorenzo made a throwaway gesture. “The problem with you people is you don’t have any willpower. Discipline yourselves and you’d never notice there is no gravity.”

  “That’s hardly fair,” Father Simon put in. “You know space sickness is real and extremely debilitating to those who suffer from it, even if you don’t.” DeLorenzo was one of those lucky people who was naturally immune to space sickness and he delighted in proving it.

  “Bull. A couple of days of zero-gravity won’t hurt anyone.”

  “But it is unnecessary,” Aubrey said. “You know the Ship’s Council voted to recommend that we stay spun up.”

  “And you know, I voted against it. If the captain says it’s too dangerous, that’s good enough for me.”

  “Of course,” Aubrey said deprecatingly. “After all you are steeped in hierarchical thinking. But we need a more consensual approach here.”

  “Doctor, in this case, your ‘consensual approach’ is based on the idea that the opinions of a dozen ignoramuses is worth more than the opinion of one expert.”

  “Those ‘dozen ignoramuses’ represent a consensus of nearly six hundred people.”

  “A dozen or six hundred, it doesn’t make you any more expert at ship handling.”

  “It’s not really an issue of ship handling. I have no doubt the captain is right in principle,” Aubrey said. “But simple calculations show that in practice the added margin is negligible.”

  “So now you’re an expert on ship handling,” DeLorenzo retorted. “Look around you. Spin is nearly two hundred and fifty meters across and another two hundred and fifty meters long. Do you have any idea how many hundreds of thousands of tonnes this all masses? What do you think it would be like trying to maneuver this ship with a gyroscope that big?”

  “I hardly think it takes an expert to understand the situation,” Aubrey said. “The fact is that other captains have made jumps spun up. Captains with more experience commanding starships than Captain Jenkins.”

  “So now he’s incompetent,” DeLorenzo flared. “Just because he has the guts to put the safety of the ship ahead of what you and your so-precious Council want, he’s not fit to command.”

  “Oh nonsense!” Aubrey snapped. “I did not at any time question the captain’s fitness to command. At most I questioned his judgment on this one issue.”

  “No, of course not. You’d never do anything as direct as questioning someone’s ability outright. They might have a chance to defend themselves. No, you’ll just insinuate, you’ll just hint. You’ll just poison the minds of everyone around that person until everyone looks at him like a monster.”

  “I think this has gone quite far enough.”

  “Quite far enough,” Father Simon put in tartly. “Especially since you have had this argument a dozen times before and neither of you has budged an angstrom. Unless you propose to resort to something other than argument you will just have to agree to disagree.”

  DeLorenzo glared at Aubrey. “You’re right,” he said finally. Then he turned and nodded to the priest. “Father,” he said and stalked off to the locker room.

  “ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ eh Father?” Aubrey said as they watched him go.

  “It didn’t seem to be a very productive discussion.”

  Aubrey sighed. “You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t let myself be drawn by that man.”

  “I imagine he feels very much the same way about you.”

  The administrator smiled. “Father, you have a remarkable ability to see both sides of a discussion. You know, you really should have a seat on the Ship’s Council. You have a tremendous amount to contribute.”

  “Thank you, no,” Father Simon said. “I’ve already told you I have no interest in participating in the ship’s government.”

  “It is onerous, I know, but consensual management works best when widely divergent viewpoints and experience are represented.”

  “I’m afraid you overestimate my uniqueness,” Father Simon said. “I believe there is already at least one astrometrician on the Council.”

  That wasn’t what Aubrey had meant and they both knew it. Catholics were rare in space, so the priest was an object of curiosity and a fair amount of misunderstanding.

  “Well, if you should ever change your mind . . .”

  DeLorenzo came out of the dressing room wearing the neatly pressed khaki shirt and pants that were his everyday wear. Aubrey saw him across the gym and his mouth tightened.

  “You’re certainly much better qualified than some of our present members.” Father Simon followed Aubrey’s eyes and saw DeLorenzo. “To have a man like that in close quarters with hundreds of other people for months,” Aubrey shook his head. “And then to put him on the Ship’s Council.”

  “Major DeLorenzo is opinionated and rather loud, but his behavior seems civilized,” Father Simon said mildly. “As for his Council seat, he was elected, was he not?”

  “By the construction workers and technicians primarily,” Aubrey said disparagingly. “Oh, I can understand his appeal. He is a forceful speaker and he does have an attraction to people who prefer slogans and simplistic answers to careful consideration of real problems. Very frankly, though, he is a major source of dissension on the Council. A number of our difficulties stem from him and the few he influences.”

  “I thought you said that consensual management worked best with many different viewpoints represented.”

  Aubrey raised his eyebrows. “But a man like him? With his background?”

  “All I know of his background is rumor and second-hand stories. I am not called on to judge him on that basis, or indeed on any basis.”

  “You mean you sympathize with him?”

  Father Simon sighed. “No, by and large I do not. However, that is not the same thing as judging him.”

  “Father, I’m not interested in judging him either. But I have to run this ship.” Father Simon wondered what the captain would have thought of that claim, but he kept quiet. “He presents an immediate and continuing problem for me. Besides, if even half the stories about him are true, he represents something abhorrent.”

  “First, we don’t know that the stories are true. I think that charity demands we ignore them. Second, even if the outlines of the incident are true, it is not clear he deserves condemnation for his actions.”

  “But you’re a man of peace,” Aubrey said, surprised. “Isn’t that the essence of the Christian message?”

  “I think you misunderstand
Christ’s position,” Father Simon told him, “and the Church’s. The Church puts no prohibition on force per se, even on war. Indeed, in some circumstances the use of force is specifically approved.”

  “The doctrine of the Just War?”

  “Properly construed. That and much else.”

  “I would have thought you would have abandoned that idea by now.”

  “Self-defense remains as valid a concept today as it ever was.”

  “Oh, but surely . . .” Aubrey broke off. “Forgive me, Father, I don’t mean to argue religion with you.”

  Father Simon smiled. “Please, no apology necessary. Now if you’ll forgive me.”

  Father Simon was frowning as he left the gym. He shouldn’t allow himself to become annoyed with Aubrey and he shouldn’t bait the man the way he had. He made a special note to confess that when they returned to Earth and he could go to Confession again.

  It was even worse because for all his refined backbiting, Aubrey did have a point, Father Simon admitted to himself. Having someone as notorious as DeLorenzo on board did upset people. Given the lurid incident that had sent the Brazilian-Argentine into exile it could hardly be otherwise.

  Ostensibly, DeLorenzo was attached to the Construction and Engineering section. He was to help with rigging the giant telescopes which were the reason for the Maxwell’s mission. In reality, he was in exile, swept under a convenient rug while the Brazilian-Argentine Confederation waited for the storm to die down.

  Major Autro DeLorenzo’s last job for his government had been roadbuilding, turning a muddy rutted track through the hills along the Bolivian border into an all-weather road. It was typical of the kind of projects modern armies were used for all over a war-ravaged planet. But this one was more difficult than most. In addition to the usual problems of supply, labor and equipment shortages, a torrential rainy season and atrocious terrain, there were the bandits.

  They were called Pacuarequeros, after the fortified hilltop villages where they lived. From time out of mind they had preyed on the people in the valleys below and collected tribute from travelers through the border region.

  The hilltop villages were over the border in Bolivia and seemed invulnerable. Neither country had the men or the resources to police the area effectively. Expeditions by either government produced, at most, a temporary end to the raiding and banditry.

  At first, DeLorenzo tried the traditional solution to dealing with the Pacuarequeros. He paid the bribes they demanded. But that was insufficient. The construction crews were too rich and tempting a target in a poor, backward land. Besides, the Pacuarequeros had an uneasy sense that the road meant change and that the change might destroy them.

  DeLorenzo appealed to his government for troops to guard his men, but there were none to be had. The bandits continued their raids on his camps and their ambushes of his construction crews.

  Finally, Major Autro DeLorenzo opted for something direct and more permanent. He picked a dozen men, armed them and turned them into a flying squad. Then he commandeered a tiltrotor VTOL aircraft at so close to gunpoint as made no difference.

  With a few rifles and a plentiful supply of blasting explosives, he loaded them into the tiltrotor and raided the hilltop villages at night.

  While some of DeLorenzo’s commandos stayed outside the village and shot anything that moved, the others went from house to house lobbing dynamite grenades into the huts. Surprise was complete. The Pacuarequeros never had a chance. Neither did their wives and children. In less than a month, Autro DeLorenzo effectively ended the Pacuarequero threat that had plagued the high plains for at least a century.

  DeLorenzo completed his road and returned home to a hero’s welcome. And a simmering pot of political trouble.

  His mission had succeeded, but far too many people had died. The confederation government was not unhappy to see the Pacuarequeros destroyed, but it did not want trouble with Bolivia and it didn’t want the unfavorable comment the action got from the rest of the world. It seemed prudent to stash DeLorenzo someplace until the heat died down.

  What, if anything, the silent brown people of the valleys thought of Major Autro DeLorenzo, no one ever bothered to ask.

  From the shuttle hays aft of Frame 23 there is a manually operated scuttle that leads to a trunk paralleling the ventilation risers to . . . no, that’s only on Bays 1, 2 and 3. On Bay 4 it’s . . .

  “Still at it, Mr. Kirchoff?” The voice boomed in his ear. Barry Kirchoff jumped and whirled, lost his purchase on the console and spun helplessly for a second before hooking his foot on the couch to bring himself under control.

  Hanging nonchalantly behind him was Karl Ludenemeyer, the Chief Engineering Officer. His feet brushed the overhead, putting him upside-down in relation to Kirchoff.

  “Yessir,” Kirchoff said lamely, furious at himself for his own clumsiness.

  “You’ll never get it all, you know,” he said shaking his head. “This ship is nearly four thousand feet long and eight hundred in diameter. There is no way you can memorize the entire layout.”

  “Perhaps not, sir.” But see if I don’t, dammit!

  “Even if you did, what good would it do when you’re transferred?” the older man went on, not unkindly. “You’d be better off practicing skills like working in zero-G. You should never be so startled you lose your grip. And floating over the couch on your stomach like that isn’t smart. One quick burst of acceleration and you’d get the back slammed into your gut.”

  You’re a fine one to talk, hanging upside down. But Kirchoff knew that if he said anything, Ludenemeyer would probably demonstrate some tricky maneuver that would bring him down easily on his feet no matter which way the thrust came from. Once more he felt completely inadequate.

  “Spin down’s coming up,” Ludenemeyer said. “Make sure your station’s secured.”

  “I’ve already been over it twice, sir.”

  “Then go over it again, Mr. Kirchoff. Engineering is no place to have something come loose under acceleration.” With that he twisted and darted away like a minnow—a bulky minnow in khaki coveralls.

  Kirchoff bit his lip. As a product of the new engineering officers’ school on Luna he was considerably different from Ludenemeyer and the rest of the engineering crew who had come up through the informal apprenticeship program that served to train most workers in space. That not only made him different, it grated on the other engineering officers.

  He knew he had a theoretical grounding that most engineering officers did not. But he was also keenly aware that Ludenemeyer and the other senior officers had years of practical experience that he lacked. That only made him more determined to show the value of the Academy approach. He was also years younger than most engineering officers. It didn’t help that he was slender with a shock of dark hair and a fair, almost girlish, complexion that made him look like an adolescent.

  With a last look at the diagram, Barry Kirchoff turned away and started to make one more inspection of his area.

  All through the ship, the speakers chimed, their voices resonating and beating together like the echoes in some impossibly shaped space.

  “Five minutes to spindown. Secure for zero-gravity. Five minutes to spindown.”

  Throughout the living quarters of the ship there was a bustle as fittings were given a last-minute check. In the garden spaces near the core the last of the nutrient-rich water drained from the racks of growing plants back into the tanks. The super-humid air around the roots would keep the plants supplied for several days. Further out toward the hull other workers went over their sections looking for anything loose which might float away.

  Fore and aft of Spin, the motors spaced around the ship’s central core ceased receiving energy from the power system and gradually started sucking energy from the huge turning cylinder within the Maxwell’s hull.

  It was a slow, tedious process. Spin was almost two hundred fifty meters in diameter and nearly two hundred fifty meters long. It massed in the hundreds of thousa
nds of tonnes and revolved just under four times a minute. That represented a lot of energy to manage and it was best bled off under careful control. So the computers monitored the motor/generators and humans monitored the computers and everywhere on the ship humans and computers looked for the least sign that something was amiss.

  As the rotation drained away, the humans in their bunks around the periphery of Spin felt weight drain away with it. Their bodies became lighter and lighter on the pads. Their blood pulsed in ways unfamiliar to people who had spent their lives in gravity. Inner ears and stomachs also responded to the sensations. Some of the people clenched their eyes tight to try to hold down their stomachs. Some of them forced their eyes wide and stared fixedly at the walls to convince themselves they were not falling, no matter what their bodies told them. Many of them were miserably sick and most of them prayed for it to be over soon.

  The speaker chimed again. “Full stop. Spin zero. Full stop. Prepare for jump.”

  At his station, Captain Peter Jenkins rechecked the status display and nodded to the pilot. Grim gray, Iron Alice DeRosa played the sidestick under her right hand gently, delicately giving the final orders to the ship.

  At the far rear of the ship, Michael Clancy ran his hand through his curly gray hair and checked his instruments one more time. Then he dogged his spacesuit helmet and checked them again. A few feet from him the ship’s torch pile stood ready and waiting.

  “All stations report ready, sir,” Lieutenant Kirchoff told his superior.

  The chief of engineering looked coldly at his subordinate.

  “Don’t tell me, Mr. Kirchoff”. Tell the captain.”

  Kirchoff reddened. “Yessir.”

  Ludenemeyer sighed audibly and turned back to his own display. He hated managing people almost as much as he loved his machinery. If he had his choice would have been back doing Big Mike Clancy’s job, but that wasn’t possible. The Engineering Officer’s place was forward, in front of the ship’s main pile and next to the drive room. Although what Ludenemeyer or anyone else on board could do if the star drive malfunctioned, he hadn’t the faintest idea.