Somehow, I’d always thought of it as being composed entirely of featureless prairie, but I was wrong. Perhaps it started off that way, eons ago, and the subsequent action of wind led to the formation of the mountains we’ve seen. None of them was very high, not more than a couple of thousand metres, but with the land area of five billion Earths not yet explored who’s to say what will be found? The mountains are there, anyway, and some of them are capped with snow because our flight is taking us into the winter sector, and there are rivers and small seas. Our formation passes over them in a dead straight line, quietly and steadily, and sometimes the telescopes pick up herds of grazing animals. Perhaps settlers will not have to rely exclusively on vegetable protein, after all.
The unexpected variegation of the terrain is making the journey a little easier to endure, but after a time all seas are the same, all hills look alike…
When I wrote in an earlier entry that the five of us in the lead ship were luckier than the others in having more to do, I was not thinking about the members of the science staff. Sammy Yamoto in No 4 seems to be fully occupied with astronomical readings, including precise measurements of the width of the day and night bands as we cross them, or as they cross us. He now says that, even with improvised equipment, he could probably take a bearing on Beachhead City which would be accurate to within a degree or so. I suspect he is passing up his turn at the flying controls so that he can carry on with his work. I hope this is not the case, because he is one of the least expert pilots and needs the practice. Although five per ship is ample crew strength, this could be cut down, by illness, for example, and I’m making no provision for unscheduled stops. Any ships which have to go down for long periods will be stripped and left behind. With their crews.
Cliff Napier in No 2 is filling in free time by helping Denise Serra in a series of experiments connected with recording radiation and gravity fluctuations.
Sometimes — in fact, quite often — I find myself wishing Denise was on my ship. I could have arranged it at the start, of course, but I wanted to play fair with her. Having turned her down that night, I felt the least I could do was avoid obstructing the field. But now… Now when I dream about Aileen and Chris I dream they are dead, which means I’m beginning to accept it, and with the acceptance my pragmatic, faithless body seems to be nominating Aileen’s successor. I feel ashamed about this, but perhaps it is not as purely physical as I was supposing. Delia Liggett, who was a catering supervisor on the Bissendorf, is on my ship and two of the other men have a good practical relationship with her — but I can’t work up much interest in a hot bunking system. I’m positive this isn’t a ridiculous remnant of a captain-to-crew attitude, a notion that I ought to have her exclusively because I had the most silver braid on my uniform.
Outside the agreed goals of this mission I have, probably with some assistance from the pervading influence of the Big O, completely discarded the old command structure. I do remember, though, feeling some surprise at the make-up of the thirty-nine volunteers who came with me. My first supposition was that they would all be of executive rank and above, career-oriented men and women who were determined to take the Bissendorf incident in their stride. Instead, I found that over half of the seventy original volunteers were ordinary crewmen. Those who remained, after the selection procedure which cut the number down to the precise requirement, I regard and treat as exact equals.
O makes us equal.
In comparison to it we are reduced to the ultimate, human electrons, too small to admit of any disparity in size.
Day 54. Estimated range: 620,000 kilometres
We have completed our first scheduled landing and are in flight again. After fifty days in the air, the prospect of three days on the ground was exhilarating. We landed in formation on a level plain, the eight fully qualified pilots at the controls, and spent practically all the down-time in gathering grass and loading it into the processing machines. This is what passes for winter on O. The sun is still directly overhead, naturally enough, but with the days being shorter the temperature does not build up as high and has a much longer time to bleed away at night. It results in nothing more than a certain briskness in the air during the day, although the nights are a lot colder. (It makes me wonder why the designers of O bothered to build in a mechanism to provide seasons. If the hostel-for-the-galaxy notion is correct, presumably the designers carried out a survey of intelligent life-forms in their region of space to see what the environmental requirements were. And if that is the case, the majority of life-bearing worlds must closely resemble Earth, even to the extent of having a moderately tilted axis and a procession of seasons. Could this, for some reason I don’t fathom, be a universal pre-requisite for the evolution of intelligence?) It seems that weather isn’t going to be any problem during future stops, but our physical condition might. The simple task of cutting and gathering grass pretty well exhausted a lot of people, and now we are instituting programmes of exercises which can be performed on board ship.
Day 86. Estimated range: 1,038,000 kilometres
With more than a million kilometres behind us, it was beginning to look as though our journey time would be better than predicted, but the first hint of mechanical difficulties has shown up. The starboard propeller bearing on ship No 7 has started to show some wear. This is causing vibration at maximum cruise and we have had to reduce fleet speed by twelve kilometres per hour. The loss of speed is not very significant in itself, because it could be compensated for by extended engine life, but the alarming thing is that the propeller shaft bearings on all the ships are supposed to have been made in Magnelube Alloy Grade E. It is inconceivable that a bearing made to that specification could begin to show wear after only 83 days of continuous running — and the suspicion crosses my mind that Litman may have substituted Magnelube D, or even C. (I do not believe he would have done this out of pure malice, but if there was a shortage of blocks of the top grade metal and I had discovered it I would have ordered a redesign or would have stripped some of the Bissendorf’s main machinery to get the bearings. Either way, Litman would have had a lot of extra work on his hands, and the person he has become would not take kindly to that.) We must now keep a careful watch on all propeller shaft bearings because we carry no stocks of Magnelube Alloy and, in any case, barely retain the ability to machine it to the required tolerances. Like archaeologists burrowing deeper into the past, we are retrogressing through various levels of technical competence.
In the meantime, the flight continues uninterrupted. Over prairies, lakes, mountains, seas, forests — and then over more and more of the same. A million kilometres is an invisible fraction of O’s circumference, and yet seeing it like this has stunned one part of my mind. I was taught at school that a man’s brain is unable to comprehend what is meant by a light-year — now I know we cannot comprehend as much as a light-second. So far in this journey we have, in effect, encircled twenty-five Earths; but my heart and mind are suspended, like netted birds, somewhere above the third or fourth range of mountains. They have run into the comprehension barrier, while my body has travelled onwards, heedless of what penalties may fall due.
Day 93. Estimated range: 1,080,000 kilometres
Like Litman, like the others, I am becoming a different person.
I sometimes go for a whole day without thinking about Elizabeth Lindstrom. And now I can think about Aileen and Chris without experiencing much pain. It is as if they are in a mental jewel box. I can take them out of it, examine them, receive pleasure — then put them back into it and close the lid. The thought has occurred to me that the life of a loved one must be considered algebraically — setting the positive total of happiness and contentment against the negative quantity represented by pain and death. This process, even for a very short life, results in a positive expression. I wish I could discuss this idea with someone who might understand, but Denise is on another ship.