If the thing you were avoiding was the size of a thumbnail or a particularly large grain of sand, and it was bearing right down the ship's centerline, then you really only had to dodge fifteen meters to let it skate past the edge of the hull with nary a scratch. But that did nothing to protect the sail, which was needed to slow down again at Barnard, and which was actually still giving them some fairly substantial push, even out here in the Oort Cloud, ten times as far from the sun as the orbit of Neptune.
And fuck if it was empty space. The last-minute dodges—“jukes” they were called—were happening ten or fifteen times a day. This was down substantially from the third-day peak of a hundred and four, but damned annoying nonetheless. Human bodies simply weren't meant to withstand this sort of sustained battering. Even null-gee hockey players would fax themselves a fresh body after every game, but here onboard ship, in the middle of operations, there generally wasn't time. For this reason, all nonessential personnel were being cycled—very willingly—into fax storage. The ship had been quiet before, but now it was deathly quiet. As the thrum of the nav engines faded away, the air resumed its stillness.
The skeleton crew—now a partial skeleton crew—actually had no particular use for Conrad Mursk. He didn't keep the engines or the fax machines running; he didn't navigate; didn't maintain or forecast or repair. Thus he was tempted—more tempted every day—to jump in the fax and let this part of the mission be over. Stored as data, he'd experience no time or sensation of any kind. He would simply step out of the fax in a hundred years, and everything would be great. But somebody did have to look after the crew as a whole, and anyway Conrad felt it was bad form for a first officer to go to sleep while there was still work being done.
So he dusted himself off, climbed gingerly back onto the railing, and slid four decks down to Engineering.
There, Money Izolo's crew of five was down to just himself and Peter Kolb. And Peter didn't look too happy. He was holding his eye and glaring balefully at a waldo hanging down from the ceiling. This was one of those things you could stick your arms into, to operate robotic arms inside one of the reactor cores. But it necessarily had some solid and angular parts, whose indentations were clearly visible in the flesh around Peter's eye.
“Hi, Petes,” Conrad said, pulling out the sketchplate which held his to-do list. (He was a big believer in lists; they had saved his life more than once during the Revolt, and were anyway vital in holding entropy at bay.) “You okay?”
“I think I popped my eyeball,” Peter complained.
“Popped it? No way.” Conrad immediately felt better about his own bruises, and guilty for whining about them, even to himself.
“He's fine,” Money said from across the room. He was staring intently into a holie display on one of the wall panels and waving a wellstone sketchplate at it to absorb the image, and presumably perform some calculation on it. “Quit clowning around, you. I need those cooling parameters updated.”
“No, seriously,” Peter insisted. “I'm hurt.”
“Let me see,” Conrad told Peter. And then, when Peter didn't pull his hand away, more firmly: “Let me see. That's an order.”
Reluctantly, Peter uncovered the wounded eye, and Conrad couldn't suppress a groan of disgust. “Eeew. Yuck.”
“Did I pop it?” Peter asked worriedly.
“You did something to it.” Truthfully, Conrad couldn't really tell what he was looking at. There wasn't a lot of blood, and as far as he could tell there was no eyeball jelly leaking out or anything, but something unpleasant had happened to the eyelid, and to the eye underneath. There were vertical gashes of pink and white where nothing like that was supposed to be, so that it barely looked like an eye at all.
“All right,” Money relented. “Go visit Stores and have yourself reprinted. But hurry back—I need those numbers or we're going to vent some irreplaceable coolant mass. Understand? Mass we'll have to do without for a hundred years, or maybe forever.”
“Yes, sir,” grumbled Peter, brushing past Conrad and hurrying out the door.
“You could be more sympathetic,” Conrad said.
It was an understatement, but Money just shrugged. “It's always something with that kid. Maybe he'll be more careful next time. Meanwhile, power demands on this fusion reactor are jumping around like spit on a heat sink, and the cooling system is not keeping up.”
“I'm surprised that isn't automated,” Conrad said. “You've got hypercomputers, right?”
“Well, yes and no. Newhope was designed with people in mind. There are built-in tasks for us, and of course there are always issues the designers didn't foresee. For example, this predictive cooling algorithm looks as though it was based on some kind of weather program, like for a domestic climate controller. It never has worked very well, and until we get it replaced, I'm using Peter.”
“I see.”
Money turned back to his panel for a moment, then looked up at Conrad again. “Was there something you needed?”
Conrad nodded, glancing once at his sketchplate for confirmation. “Yeah, but it's pretty much just a status report. I'm trying to stop by all the stations today that still have crew, and see how everyone's doing. Looks like I've got your answer, or part of it anyway.”
“Things could be easier here,” Money admitted.
“You have a lot of issues like this?”
He pursed his lips for a moment. “Oh, a few. Five or six. Keeps us busy enough.”
“Okay,” Conrad said, nodding and frowning with the false wisdom he had learned at leadership school. As probably the smartest of the former Blue Nudists, Money was not the sort to be ordered around. He needed a gentler touch, a bit of praise and persuasion. “So you're fully burdened. You don't anticipate freeing up anyone else for storage?”
“Not until the engines stop firing, no.” 1
“Hmm.”
“Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.
“The comm antenna is another issue. We're already using the whole sail for this, so there's no room left to expand communications. As our distance from Earth increases, we'll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. We are supposed to be on our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or nearly.”
“Why so?”
Money shrugged. “Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is asymmetric. With no crew, you don't have to worry about it, and with a thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with statistics. But right now we've got almost as many fax machines as people, and it's getting to be a grind.”
“And here I've been taking them for granted,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Do we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life easier?”
“Yah,” Money said vaguely, “I don't know about that. Talk to your Chief of Stores. She's my main energy customer after propulsion.”