Imperial Earth

For the first time in his life, Duncan Makenzie had seen the planet

Earth with his own unaided eyes. Part 11

I - -1 L Transit

I I

SIRIUS

After three hundred years of spaceships that were mostly fuel tanks,

Sirius was not quite believable. She seemed to have far too many windows, and there were entrance hatches in most improbable places, some of them still gaping open as cargo was loaded. At least she was taking on some hydrogen, thought Duncan sourly; it would be adding insult to economic injury if she made the round trip on a single fueling. She was capable of doing this, it was rumored, though at the cost of doubling her transit time.

It was also hard to believe that this stubby cylinder, with the smooth mirror-bright ring of the radiation baffle surrounding the drive unit like a huge sunshade, was one of the fastest objects ever built by man. Only the interstellar probes, now far out into the abyss on their centuries-long journeys, could exceed her theoretical maximum-almost one percent of the velocity of light. She would never achieve even half this speed, because she had to carry enough propel lent to slow down and rendezvous with her destination. Nevertheless, she could make the voyage from Saturn to Earth in twenty days, despite a minor detour to avoid the hazards-largely psychological-of the asteroid belt.

The forty-minute flight from surface to parking orbit was not Duncan’s first experience of space; he had made several brief trips to neighboring moons, aboard this same shuttle. The Titanian passenger fleet consisted of exactly five vessels, and as none possessed the expensive luxury of centrifugal gravity, all safety belts were secured throughout the voyage.

Any passenger who wished to sample the joys and hazards of weightlessness would have just under two hours to experience it aboard

Sirius, before the drive started to operate. Although Duncan had always felt completely at ease in free fall, he let the stewards float him, an inert and unresisting package, through the airlock and into the ship.

It had been rather too much to expect the Centennial Committee to provide a single cabin-there were only four on the ship-and Duncan knew that he would have to share a double. L.3 was a minute cell with two folding bunks, a couple of lockers, two seats-also folding-and a mirror-vision screen.

There was no window looking out into space; this, the Welcome Aboard! brochure carefully explained, would create unacceptable structural hazards.

Duncan did not believe this for a moment, and wondered if the designers feared an attempt by claustrophobic passengers to claw a way out.

And there were no toilet facilities-these were all in an adjacent cubicle, which serviced the four cabins around it. Well, it was only going to be for a few weeks…. Duncan’s spirits rose somewhat after he had gained enough confidence to start exploring his little world. He quickly learned to visualize his location by following the advice printed on the shipboard maps; it was convenient to think of Sirius as a cylindrical tower with ten floors. The fifty cabins were divided between the sixth and seventh floors. Immediately below, on the fifth level, was the lounge, recreation and dining area.

The territory above these three floors was forbidden to passengers. Going upward, the remaining levels were Life Support, Crew Quarters, and-forming a kind of penthouse with all-round visibility-the Bridge. In the other direction, the four levels were Galley, Hold, Fuel, and Propulsion. It was a logical arrangement, but it would take Duncan some time to discover that the Purser’s Office was on the kitchen level, the surgery next to the freight compartment, the gym in Life Support, and the library tucked away in an emergency airlock overlapping levels Six and Seven…. During the circumnavigation of his

new home, Duncan encountered a dozen other passengers on a 61 similar voyage of exploration, and exchanged the guarded greetings appropriate among strangers who will soon get to know each other perhaps all too well. He had already been through the passenger list to see if there was anyone on board he knew and had found a few familiar Titanian names, but no close acquaintances. Sharing cabin L.3, he had discovered, was a Dr. Louise

Chung; but the parting with Marissa still hurt too much for the “Louise” to arouse more than the faintest flicker of interest.

I In any event, as he found when he returned to L.3, Dr. Chung was a bright little old lady, undoubtedly on the far side of a hundred, who greeted him with an absent-minded courtesy which, even by the end of the voyage, never seemed to extend to a complete recognition of his existence. She was, he soon discovered, one of the Solar System’s leading mathematical physicists, and the authority on resonance phenomena among the satellites of the outer planets. For half a century she had been trying to explain why the gaps in

Saturn’s rings were not exactly where all the best theories demanded.