The ship jarred and the indicator light for the repeller field flashed. These locks were designed to hold much bigger ships: the grapplers were groping in thin vacuum. The field held the ship centered in the lock, but the grapplers were too short. He increased the consistency of the repeller field to that of titanium steel twenty feet out from his cruiser in all directions. Let them sink their claws into that.
Clunk
They did.
A voice came through the speaker:
“Prepare for debarkation.”
Here goes nothing, Joneny thought. The pressure in the lock was Earth normal. What about the rest of the starship? The robots should have sense enough not to allow admittance if there was anything wrong. Just in case he slipped a pressure gell in with his survival kit. He checked the power pack on his belt, tied his left sandal thong, which had come undone, and went to the door.
Selector fields had made double airlocks obsolete. The iris of metal rolled away and he was looking across the inside of the starship’s lock to where the flexible entrance tube had stuck against the side of the repeller field.
Though Joneny’s ship had a comfortable semblance of gravity, the starship was in free fall. He launched himself across and felt weight leave him. Then the round end of the tube moved up to engulf him like the mouth of a lamprey eel. The light was a soft blue-white. Inside the tube he brought himself to a halt by pressing a button on his power belt. He caught hold of the rail running down the side of the tube and hauled himself along.
Rectangular windows looked out into the rest of the lock, ill lit with the same blue-white. Fifteen feet later the ribbed wall turned to smooth steel and the windows ceased. He’d come to the body of the ship. He turned as a faint sound behind him lisped through the tube. A triple jaw clamped over the mouth of the passage. It was comparatively cool in the tube and a breeze was coming from someplace. He reached the end.
Running off in both directions was a triangular corridor. A spiral bar wound through the middle. An arrow pointing one way read, RECREATION HALL, and one pointing the other read, NAVIGATION OFFICES. Joneny’s English was of the scholarly type: conversationally adept, but including few technical words, since they had almost all been superseded. He was acquainted with a good number of Latin and/or Indo-European roots that were supposed to help one out of obscure translation situations.
After racking his mind, he decided that the Navigation Offices would prove more interesting. He was a little curious to see what they re-created down the first corridor, as well as what sort of re-creation system they could have. But the idea of sacrifices to the sea left him completely bewildered — so he headed in that direction.
A moment later he came to a small room. A large post rose in the center. Around the wall were screens, dials, and seats before numerous desks. The bulkhead was metal, so Joneny put a light magnetic field on his sandal soles, drifted to the floor, and went click. He glanced at the desks. Obviously this part of the ship had had gravity at one time.
“Just a moment,” a voice said through a speaker. “I will try to locate a human agent to deal with you as requested.”
“Thanks,” Joneny answered the robot. It had certainly taken its time. “Where is everybody around here?”
“Too complicated a question. I will try to locate a human agent.” After five seconds of silence, the speaker said, “No human agent can be found who will respond. Apologies, sir.”
“Aren’t there any people left alive on this ship?” asked Joneny.
“People are alive,” answered the robot. The flat automaton voice sounded unintentionally menacing.
On the desk was a pile of books. Books! Real books were Joneny’s delight. Heavy, cumbersome, difficult to store, they were the bane of most scholars. Joneny found them entrancing. He didn’t care what was in them. Any book today was so old that each word glittered for him like the facet of a lost gem. The whole conception of a book was so at odds with this compressed, crowded, breakneck era that he was put into ecstasy by the simple heft of it. His own collection, some seventy volumes, was considered a pretentious luxury by everyone at the University. The glory of the collection, each page sealed in plastic, was the Manhattan telephone directory for 1975.
He clicked toward the desk and lifted the top volume. It came away with a tug and a tsk as the magnets came loose. He opened it; the pages were thin sheets of metal, silver under the blue light. The writing was machine made. It was a logbook or diary, each entry timed and dated. Turning to the middle of the book, Joneny read at random:
Have been in the desert now for thirty-nine hours. Don’t know whether the ship can take much more of this. Sand count varies between fifteen and twenty-two. The terrifying thing is that we have no way of knowing how long it will go on. The first desert we encountered twelve years ago took us fourteen hours to get through. Two years later we left the sea again to travel through light sand for nearly eleven months. The wear on the ship was incredible. Much more of this, it was decided back then, and the ships would not make it through the third generation. Then again there was sudden clear sailing with nothing but ocean for almost six years. Next there was a sandstorm of tremendous intensity for almost three hours where the count was over one hundred fifty — which did almost as much damage as the first fourteen-hour one we passed. How long will this one last? Another hour? A year? A hundred years? Five hundred?
A later entry:
Sand count has remained fairly steadily at six for the past nine days. That is something to be thankful for, but even at one or two for an extended enough time, it will prove fatal to us. Married this evening: Afrid Jarin-6 and Peggy Ti-17. There was a celebration at the Market. I left early, slightly drunk. They have selected fetus BX-57911, containing some of my genes. Peggy said jokingly, “Since you’re going to be the godfather, you might as well have a hand in its genetics.” I guess because it’s still primarily Afrid’s and Peggy’s, Afrid took the joke very well. I left feeling depressed. Kids like them, who came out of the Market themselves, seem so flat and bland to us who remember Earth. Of course they have been told nothing about the real danger of the desert. They can milk so much pleasure out of so little; they believe so strongly in the successful outcome of our voyage that it would be cruel to blight what little they can enjoy by the truth about the sand. I knew it would only make me feel worse, but I gave Leela a call over in Beta-2. “How you doing, Captain?” I asked.
“Fine, thanks, Captain.”