But what Robert said was, “Ah, sir, you just don't know the right robots. Think of that one that follows King Bruno around. What is it, Hector? Hugo?”
“Oh, yeah. Hugo. I've met him. It.”
“Eerie, isn't it? There's nothing human about it, but it's definitely . . . there with you. More so than this ship, or any hypercomputer I've spoken with. I could be friends with a machine like that.”
“Bruno spent a hundred years training that one. And it's still not finished.”
Robert laughed. “Who among us is finished?”
“Hmm,” Conrad said. “So, this activity here . . . Will it take you long?”
Robert glanced briefly at his thumb, making sure it was still on the interlock switch, then looked back at Conrad. “You trying to hustle me into storage?”
“Something like that. Have you got a timeline?”
In the confines of the crawl space, Robert shrugged. “Two days for fine-tuning? A week? I'm just guessing. We don't really have to do this at all, but I thought it might smooth out the ride. We've got predictive algorithms trying to steer us at low thrust into minimum-density zones, so we don't have to spend all our time juking around dust grains, but unfortunately this is where astrogation starts to become a challenge.”
“How so?” Conrad had studied astrogation, along with a lot of other subjects, but it was one of the many things that had gone in one side of his head and straight out the other, leaving no impression at all. Conrad wasn't sure if he was a stupid man or not, but he knew, at least, when somebody else knew a subject better than he did. Which was most of the time, alas, but that realization itself was maybe not so stupid.
The nearer Robert wriggled in the crawl space, adjusting his position while keeping his thumb on the interlock. He gestured with his free hand. 2 “There isn't any kind of fixed reference for where we are. Near a known object, yes, you can take some range measurements, but not out here in the middle of nowhere. So even where we have echo-ephemeris dust maps—which are extremely spotty out here, by the way—we can't say with any certainty where we are on the map. So we're still flying blind.”
And suddenly Conrad understood. “Ah, it's like driving a motorcar at night.”
“Hmm? A motorcar?”
“My father paves roads for a living. Well, maintains the paving, anyway. I used to do a lot of testing with him.”
“So,” Robert said, “you're in some sort of wheeled contraption then? Rolling along in the dark? With, like, searchlights shining out in front of you?”
Conrad nodded. “Right. And there's wildlife out in the country, and if you hit a deer or something it can bounce you right off the road. But you never know where the deer are going to be, and your headlights only shine so far, so the faster you drive, the less reaction time you have.”
“And the more violent your maneuvers have to be, when you suddenly see that deer in front of you. Okay, it's exactly like that. So I'm turning up the brightness on our searchlights.”
Just then, an alarm sounded, and Bertram Wang's voice echoed throughout the ship, calling out, “Collision avoidance! Brace for—”
The lurch was not terribly violent when it came. Maybe a hundred-meter juke, one-fifty, tops. But the sound of crashing equipment echoed down the ladder, from one or two decks up, and the sound of human cursing followed close behind it. Then, while Conrad and Robert looked at each other, came the slam slam bang of angry footsteps coming down the wellsteel rungs. Seconds later, Louis McGee appeared, throwing himself down in front of them and stomping up to the entrance of the crawl space.
“Goddamn it, Astrogation.” Louis seemed, for a moment, to be preparing to ask a question: Why can't you be more careful? Why can't you watch where we're going? Why don't you give us a little warning next time? But instead, he grabbed Robert by the foot, hauled him bodily out of the crawl space, and punched him hard in the stomach before Conrad could intervene.
“Security!” Conrad shouted at the walls, and the walls responded in the voice of Newhope: “Security alert, deck four service core.” And then Conrad was prying Louis off of Robert, with a head- and armlock he wasn't really sure would hold. But as Robert struggled to his feet, and as the other Robert wriggled free of the crawl space, their own efforts aided Conrad, and the three of them were able to restrain Louis effectively.
“You all right?” Conrad asked.
“No,” Louis said angrily. “I banged my fuffing head for the third time today.”
“I wasn't talking to you, numbskull,” Conrad barked. Louis was the third inventory officer, and had no business being out of storage this late, anyway.
“I'll be all right,” Robert said, a little breathlessly. “He mostly just surprised me. Well—uh!—maybe I'll step through a fax just to be safe.”
“You stupid ass,” Conrad said, smacking Louis across the top of the head. “Now I'm going to have to figure out a punishment. High space naval discipline, oh my little gods. You're probably going to have to be flogged, my friend. What would make you do something like this? Right in fuffing front of me?”
And with that, Louis started crying. “I want to go home. Oh, I want to go home.”
“Oh, brother,” Robert said wearily. “Here we go.”
Conrad was inclined to agree. They'd had their share of freakups onboard Viridity, and even occasionally onboard more civilized craft. It was only a matter of time before they had some here. A lot of people didn't take well to space—the distances, the dangers, the isolation. And no one had asked to be here, not really.
“I've got a big brother,” Louis whimpered. “He's forty-nine years older than me, and he always knows what to do. But it's taking three weeks to get his replies now, and it's only going to get longer. Three months, three years, twelve years when we finally get to Barnard. What good is a big brother if it takes him twelve years to give advice?”
“Just calm down,” Conrad told him. “Take deep breaths.”
Just then Security, in the person of an unescorted Ho Ng, came clanging down the ladder. He surveyed the scene, glancing dispassionately from face to face before meeting Conrad's gaze. “What happened?”
“Freakup,” Conrad said. “Escort him to storage, please. We'll worry about treatment options sometime in the future. Meanwhile, just get him out of here.”
Ho pursed his lips, studying Louis for a long moment. “What did he do, sir?”
“It doesn't matter.”
“It does if we want valid security and psych statistics. Did he damage equipment?”
“No,” Conrad said. “He threw a punch.”
Ho considered that. His eyes settled on Robert, noting the gut-pained kink in his stance. “Assaulting an officer. Out here that's a flogging offense.”
“Only if I say so,” Conrad corrected. “Or Xmary does. There are extenuating circumstances, and in my opinion Mr. McGee here is not fully responsible for his actions. Do you want him flogged, Astrogation?”
“No, I forgive him,” Robert said.
Conrad nodded. “Right. Louis? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I want to go home. I didn't want to be here, I was never part of the revolt. I was just, you know, there at the time. Can you fax me home, sir? Please?”
“Oh, for crying . . . Louis, you work in the inventory. You know as well as I do that we haven't got the data rate to transmit a person. Take some mental notes, if you like, and we'll mail them back for appendment to your archive. Do you want to be locally erased?”