Microcosmic God (30 page)

The second nodded as he filled my glass again. “There was a time, four or five hundred years ago, when a ship couldn’t have done without them. They had no automatic machinery to speak of then. The ships were self-powered, and half their capacity was given over to fuel. Half the rest was driving machinery. They had no power beams then; they had to plot their courses and steer them every trip. Now, of course, with the power beams that both guide and drive the vessels, things are different. There are only two or three hundred men in the System that know the theory of astrogation nowadays, and they are either research scientists or doddering scholars. It’s only tradition that keeps a crew aboard any more—that and the fact that the more jobs the Supreme Council can create, the better for everybody. I don’t kid myself—I know damn well that I could be replaced in a minute by two switches and a rheostat on the control panel back on Earth. That goes for everyone else riding these ships, too. Only the passenger ships carry captains, and they are there to impress the
passengers. Sort of glorified masters of ceremonies. No, space travel isn’t what it used to be.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but at least you do something for a living. You stand a regular watch and supervise the stowage and the passenger lists and keep the log and give the passengers the idea that the ship is in competent hands—but what about that chem super? False front is false front, but it’s usually attached to something solid. That guy hasn’t even an excuse for being aboard.”

“You don’t think so? Granted, his work is taken care of entirely by automatic machinery that hasn’t broken down once in the last three hundred years, but that isn’t the point. Remember—I told you that he is here
just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Certain eventualities. Got an hour or so? I’ll tell you a story about a chemical supervisor that might interest you.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got three weeks with nothing to do, let alone an hour. Start spinning.”

The second officer unzipped his collar, flipped a lever on his chair to tilt it back a little, and began.

The reason I think you in particular would be interested in this yarn is that it has to do with what happened when they did exactly what you say they should do—get rid of some hundred-odd thousand pieces of deadwood in the way of chem supers and their apprentices. Yeah, they did, about twenty-eight years ago. There was a great deal of noise about it at the time, because most of the old conservatives didn’t like the idea of breaking an old space tradition that way. They said that spaceships should no more take off without chem supers than they should without lifeboats. The fact that no one within the memory of living man had ever used a lifeboat for anything but joy-riding didn’t faze them.

The machinery was foolproof, rigidly inspected every trip, and all of it either one hundred percent automatic or remote control. Supers simply were not needed. The boys that held down the jobs were, with a few exceptions, friends of somebody who had a friend in the office. Their qualifications were courtesy ones; a couple of
oral questions were examination enough for them. Many skippers carried their relatives with them as supers. A lot of fellows grabbed the jobs because they were sincerely interested in space travel and that way they could have a good look around the ship to see how they liked it and what kind of work would suit them best. It was a set-up—harmless enough, to be sure, except for the fact that the supers got paid a high wage, and that made the rest of the crew a little sore because they had to work for a living.

This was before the days of the Functionalist government, when many of the space lines were privately owned and the big boys at the top were anxious to cut costs and increase profits without regard to the number of men they threw out of work. I don’t have to tell you that space transportation is as big an industry as they come; to get rid of a chem super and his apprentice on every single ship in the System that ever left any atmosphere was a big jolt. A few hundred thousand men thrown out of work all at once played hell with the economic balance, close as it was. Besides, most of those supers were absolutely worthless—bums, parasites, drifters, trouble-makers.

It was a foolish move, and the Council knew it; but the pressure put on by the profit-drunk “efficiency” experts of the space companies was too strong. They bounced them out—every last one of them. It’s interesting to know that it was that group of worthless exsupers who, by the noise they made, were ultimately responsible for the new set-up, where men are hired and paid for jobs that could be done away with—my job, for instance. It’s better that way. No one loses anything; the companies don’t gain so much, that’s all. They can afford it. And it has completely done away with unemployment.

But to get back to the supers. I know all about what happened because it happened aboard the
Maggie Northern
, my first ship—my first job on these cans. It was a first for the ship too—her first trip without a super.

I came aboard her—I was a teenage kid at the time—with a suitcase with a busted handle under my arm and more ignorance than sense under my hat. I got in a lot of people’s way and was finally shunted into the rocket man’s fo’c’sle. I stood in the middle of the floor feeling shy. I hadn’t known a spaceship would be like this. Like
every kid my age, I had filled myself full of stories about the trade, and thought it would be cramped and stuffy with tiered bunks and lacking every facility a he-man would sneer at. But this, one of the poorest-equipped freighters in the Great Northern ore fleet, had three men to a room, each with a bed with innerspring mattress, hot and cold running water—the works. Some bright soul had painted a garden scene on the windowless bulkhead and had rigged it up with a window frame, glass and curtains. There was a kid a couple of years older than me sitting on a bench looking sad. He looked up at me.

“Hi. You the new wiper?”

“Yeah.”

He got up and stuck out a hand. He was a good-looking kid, very tall. Well set up. “My name’s Hume. Welcome to our dirty little home.”

“I’m Babson. It don’t look so bad.”

“Neither does Fuzzy here,” said Hume as a burly individual, the third wiper, came into the room. “But, boy—wait till you get to know him.”

Fuzzy stopped in his tracks as he saw me and waited while his apelike face lit up. Then he ambled over to me, looked into my face, circled me slowly. “I seen that hay spread on the gangplank an’ I figgered they was goin’ to coax somethin’ like this aboard,” he said as if to himself. “What they doin’, Hume—shippin’ hog-callers now that they got rid of the supers?”

I got sore right away, not knowing kidding when I ran against it. “I don’t think I like this guy, Hume,” I said, and squared off to this Fuzzy.

Fuzzy said, “Heh! It talks!” But he went over to the lockers and began being busy.

“Don’t mind him,” Hume told me. “He ain’t happy. I was super on this scow, see, and he was tired of working for a living and was after my job. Darn near got it, too—didn’t you, Fuzzy?”

Fuzzy grunted.

“Would have, too, only the Council wiped the job off the books. That’s the only thing about losing my job I like—it didn’t go to a heel like that.”

Since Hume seemed to be getting away with talking behind Fuzzy’s back to his face that way, I thought I might as well chime in. “What’d he do?”

“Started studying chemistry, of all things! He was all set to prove to the Board that he knew more about my job than I did. As if anyone cared about how much a chem super knew! Anyhow, he’s all set to pull his little blitz on me when the job disappears. This scow, being an ore boat and notably ill-equipped, has no apprentice super. I get demoted to wiper; Fuzzy is still a wiper; you’re another.”

I laughed. Fuzzy swung around. “All right, you mugs. I’ll get my chance to show you wise eggs up yet. Some day, that job’s going back on the books. When it does, I get it.”

“Not a chance,” said Hume. “It took the Council three hundred years to get rid of the job. You’ll be on a government pension before you ever hear of it again.”

Fuzzy opened his mouth to say something else but the loudspeaker cleared its throat and announced the takeoff. The two wipers jumped to their bunks, threw up a lever and lay down. I followed suit; in a few seconds there was a grinding roar and our beds slid on quad-rantal rollers up against the bulkhead. There was a moment of crushing weight, and just when I thought I’d never get the strength to draw in another breath, the beds slid back off the bulkhead and were parallel with the floor again. In those days the momentum screens were inoperable inside the Heaviside Layer, and during the few seconds it took to get outside, the acceleration was really rough. They could lay it on thick because it lasted such a short time, but I can tell you, the headache you carried around with you for a couple of hours after starting was one to stand up and sneer at all the other headaches on Earth, laid end to end.

I learned all I had to know about being a wiper within two days after starting. I had a station to keep clean, a few alleyways to sweep, and the 12 to 4 space man to keep entertained. His job was to clean another station, sweep the alleyways I didn’t sweep, and entertain me. In the old days, you know, they had an engine room aboard, and a crew to run it; and they had a control room and another crew to
run that. The Plotnick-Martin power beams took care of that now. The three space men held lifeboat tickets and the wipers didn’t, and that was the crew. They stood watches, two at a time, four hours on and eight off, and then there was a pinheaded individual who used to wander around the alleyways at odd hours doing nothing that I could see. He answered to the title of captain and he carried papers certifying his ability as a stowage expert for this particular ship.

That ship was quite something. There may be a few of them left—bulky old KH-type ore carriers. The series has been discontinued now, but it seems to me I saw one or two of them on the inter-asteroid runs a few years ago. Her capacity was something like two hundred thousand tons net and she was loaded to the ceil-plates with granular magnesium and sodium for the Sun mirrors of Titan. I don’t have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable. You may not know, though, that the girders are all solid mag, because great rigidity isn’t needed out there, and mag is cheap. The mirrors are silvered with sodium, which is bright and easy to handle. They have a patrol for each of the mirrors, which patches up meteorite punctures when they occur, squirting liquid sodium around the holes until they fill, then shaving them down with N rays. Well, we were bringing them their stock in trade, and it was an interesting cargo to handle. The mag was flaked to facilitate melting and casting, and the sodium was melted on Earth and run right into the holds where it “froze.” When we discharged it, we would simply heat up the holds and pump it out. As long as it was loaded in an atmosphere of nitrogen and pumped out in space, there was little danger from it. We had tanks of nitrogen under pressure aboard, because after the sodium solidified in the holds it contracted. The space it left had to be filled with something, and it better not be air or water! Hence the nitrogen.

After a couple of weeks of this kind of life I began to wonder about the stories I had read, and what happened to all the glamour and adventure the space service was steeped in. I even went so far as to ask Hume about it. He thought it was very funny.

“That whiffed out with the power beams,” he told me. “There wouldn’t be anyone aboard these ships if it weren’t for the fact that
someone has to keep the chrome clean and the books up to date. Then, of course, there are emergencies.”

“What?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh—I dunno. I never heard of any. But just in case some of the machinery turned out not to be foolproof, which has never happened so far, or in case something happened to the ship—”

“But what
could
happen?”

“Well—aw, why worry about it? Nothing ever has. If it did, it would happen so quickly we’d never know about it, or the ship would take care of itself so fast that by the time we realized there was an emergency, it would be past history.” He sat down on the mess room table and put his feet on the bench. “Look, kid, I might as well wise you up. This is no kind of a life for a human being. If any of us were worth a damn in any trade at all, we wouldn’t be here. If the Board members weren’t as worthless as we are, they’d build ships without crew’s quarters. If you have any gumption, you’ll get off as soon as we get back to Terra, and go back to raising castor beans or whatever else it was you were doing before you shipped aboard this mud hen. If you have no gumption, you’ll stay here with the rest of us bums and pray that the world in general and the Space Commerce Board in particular doesn’t get hep to what soft, soft cushions a space tradition has shoved under our fat—”

Crash!

It wasn’t a loud noise, and it wasn’t much of a lurch, but both were so utterly unexpected that both of us found ourselves thrown very hard and very flat.

Hume looked at me blankly. The lights went out, flashed on again as an automatic emergency circuit snapped in. He said in a weak voice, “Well, there’s your emergency!” and fainted away.

A voice I had never heard before said sharply, through the speakers, “Emergency! Stand by!” I rightly assumed that this, too, was an automatic alarm. I shook Hume until he sat up.

“What do we do now?” I snapped at him. I rather think I was a little panicky.

“I only work here,” he said with a sickly attempt at levity. There were voices in the alleyway outside. We drifted out there. It was the
captain and two of the space men.

“How should I know? Who do you think I am—Plotnick?”

“Who’s Plotnick?” asked one of the stooges. The fact that Plotnick had invented the power beam that Martin had adapted to interstellar commerce was just another of those things that those guys never got around to learning.

“Plotnick’s dead,” said the other stooge brightly.

“The captain ain’t dead,” said the first stooge even more brightly.