Hugh sighed again, not knowing why. With the lights back on, he felt safe and snug again, but was possessed of a deep sense of personal loss. He knew, subconsciously, that, having seen the stars, he would never be happy again. The dull ache in his breast, the vague inchoate yearning for his lost heritage of open sky and stars, was never to be silenced, even though he was yet too ignorant to be aware of it at the top of his mind. "What was it?" he asked in a hushed voice.
"That's," answered Joe. "That's the world. That's the universe. That's what we've been trying to tell you about."
Hugh tried furiously to force his inexperienced mind to comprehend. "That's what you mean by Outside?" he asked. "All those beautiful little lights?"
"Sure," said Joe, "only they aren't little. They're a long way off, you see; maybe thousands of miles."
"What?"
"Sure, sure," Joe persisted. "There's lots of room out there. Space. It's big. Why, some of those stars may be as big as the Ship, maybe bigger."
Hugh's face was a pitiful study in overstrained imagination. "Bigger than the Ship?" he repeated. "But ... but ..."
Jim tossed his head impatiently and said to Joe, "Wha'd' I tell you? You're wasting our time on this lunk. He hasn't got the capacity."
"Easy, Jim," Joe answered mildly; "don't expect him to run before he can crawl. It took us a long time. I seem to remember that you were a little slow to believe your own eyes." "That's a lie," said Jim nastily. "You were the one that had to be convinced."
"O.K., O.K.," Joe conceded, "let it ride. But it was a long time before we both had it all straight."
Hoyland paid little attention to the exchange between the two brothers. It was a usual thing; his attention was centered on matters decidedly not usual. "Joe," he asked, "what became of the Ship while we were looking at the Stars? Did we stare right through it?"
"Not exactly," Joe told him. "You weren't looking directly at the stars at all, but at a kind of picture of them. It's like... Well, they do it with mirrors, sort of. I've got a book that tells about it."
"But you can see 'em directly," volunteered Jim, his momentary pique forgotten. "There's a compartment forward of here..."
"Oh, yes," put in Joe, "it slipped my mind. The Captain's veranda. He's got one all of glass; you can look right out."
"The Captain's veranda? But--"
"Not this Captain. He's never been near the place. That's the name over the door of the compartment."
"What's a 'veranda'?"
"Blessed if I know. It's just the name of the place."
"Will you take me up there?"
Joe appeared to be about to agree, but Jim cut in. "Some other time. I want to get back; I'm hungry."
They passed back through the tube, woke up Bobo, and made the long trip back down.
It was long before Hugh could persuade Joe-Jim to take him exploring again, but the time intervening was well spent. Joe-Jim turned him loose on the largest collection of books that Hugh had ever seen. Some of them were copies of books Hugh had seen before, but even these he read with new meanings. He read incessantly, his mind soaking up new ideas, stumbling over them, struggling, striving to grasp them. He begrudged sleep, he forgot to eat until his breath grew sour and compelling pain in his midriff forced him to pay attention to his body. Hunger satisfied, he would be back at it until his head ached and his eyes refused to focus.
Joe-Jim's demands for service were few. Although Hugh was never off duty, Joe-Jim did not mind his reading as long as he was within earshot and ready to jump when called. Playing checkers with one of the pair when the other did not care to play was the service which used up the most time, and even this was not a total loss, for, if the player were Joe, he could almost always be diverted into a discussion of the Ship, its history, its machinery as equpment, the sort of people who had built it and then manned it and their history, back on Earth, Earth the incredible, that strange place where people had lived on the outside instead of the inside.
Hugh wondered why they did not fall off.
He took the matter up with Joe and at last gained some notion of gravitation. He never really understood it emotionally; it was too wildly improbable; but as an intellectual concept he was able to accept it and use it, much later, in his first vague glimmerings of the science of ballistics: and the art of astrogation and ship maneuvering. And it led in time to his wondering about weight in the Ship, a matter that had never bothered him before. The lower the level the greater the weight had been to his mind simply the order of nature, and nothing to wonder at. He was familiar with centrifugal force as it applied to slingshots. To apply it also to the whole Ship, to think of the Ship as spinning like a slingshot and thereby causing weight, was too much of a hurdle; he never really believed it.
Joe-Jim took him back once more to the Control Room and showed him what little Joe-Jim knew about the manipulation of the controls and the reading of the astrogation instruments.
The long-forgotten engineer-designers employed by the Jordan Foundation had been instructed to design a ship that would not -- could not -- wear out, even though the Trip were protracted beyond the expected sixty years. They builded better than they knew. In planning the main drive engines and the auxiliary machinery, largely automatic, which would make the Ship habitable, and in designing the controls necessary to handle all machinery not entirely automatic, the very idea of moving parts had been rejected. The engines and auxiliary equipment worked on a level below mechanical motion, on a level of pure force, as electrical transformers do. Instead of push buttons, levers, cams, and shafts, the controls and the machinery they served were planned in terms of balance between static fields, bias of electronic flow, circuits broken or closed by a hand placed over a light.
On this level of action, friction lost its meaning, wear and erosion took no toll. Had all hands been killed in the mutiny, the Ship would still have plunged on through space, still lighted, its air still fresh and moist, its engines ready and waiting. As it was, though elevators and conveyor belts fell into disrepair, disuse, and finally into the oblivion of forgotten function, the essential machinery of the Ship continued its automatic service to its ignorant human freight, or waited, quiet and ready, for someone bright enough to puzzle out its key.
Genius had gone into the building of the Ship. Far too huge to be assembled on Earth, it had been put together piece by piece in its own orbit out beyond the Moon. There it had swung for fifteen silent years while the problems presented by the decision to make its machinery foolproof and enduring had been formulated and solved. A whole new field of submolar action had been conceived in the process, struggled with, and conquered.
So, when Hugh placed an untutored, questing hand over the first of a row of lights marked ACCELERATION, POSITIVE, he got an immediate response, though not in terms of acceleration. A red light at the top of the chief pilot's board blinked rapidly and the annunciator panel glowed with a message: MAIN ENGINES: NOT MANNED.
"What does that mean?" he asked Joe-Jim.
"There's no telling," said Jim. "We've done the same thing in the main engine room," added Joe. "There, when you try it, it says 'Control Room Not Manned.'"
Hugh thought a moment. "What would happen," he persisted, "if all the control stations had somebody at 'em at once, and then I did that?"
"Can't say," said Joe. "Never been able to try it."
Hugh said nothing. A resolve which had been growing, formless, in his mind was now crystalizing into decision. He was busy with it for some time, weighing it, refining it, and looking for the right moment to bring it into the open.