“Sorry, Dave.” Hilliard looked shaken, but triumphant. “He had no right…’
“You had no right to go into his room—that’s one thing you just don’t do shipboard.”
“Yeah, how about that?” Barrow put in, struggling to his feet. “He violated my privacy.”
“Not as much as you violated mine,” Hilliard said.
“It was my tape.” Barrow turned and lifted the dripping tangle from his plate. “Anyway, a smear of soup won’t do it any harm. I’ll clean it and feed it back in the cassette.”
“Go ahead.” Hilliard paused to smile. “But it won’t do you any good—I wiped it first.”
Barrow swore and moved towards Hilliard again, but was pushed down into his chair by several men acting in concert. Surgenor was relieved to see that the general weight of opinion was against Barrow—a situation less likely to get out of hand than one where there were two evenly matched sides. Barrow surveyed the ring of unfriendly faces for a moment, then gave an incredulous laugh.
“Look at them! All screwed up over nothing! Relax, men, relax!” He dropped the green-and-silver tape back into his soup and pretended to spoon it into his mouth. “Hey, this is good stuff, Pinky I think you found the best thing to do with these stinking Trance-Ports.” A number of men laughed, and there was an immediate easing of tension. Barrow clowned his way through the rest of the meal, giving an excellent impression of a man who was incapable of bearing a grudge. But Surgenor, watching him closely, was unable to accept that it was anything more than an impression. He left the table with a premonition that the episode was far from ended.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hear these words,” Surgenor said to the quietness of his room.
“I’m listening to you, Dave.”
“Things are getting worse.”
“That statement is too generalized to have any…’
“Aesop!” Surgenor took a deep breath, reminding himself there was no point in getting angry at a computer no matter how articulate the machine might be. “I’m talking about the psychological stress on the survey crews. The signs of strain are becoming more pronounced.”
“I have observed pulse rates going up and skin resistance going down, but only on isolated occasions. There is no cause for alarm.”
“No cause for alarm, he says. Aesop, does it occur to you that I—because I’m a human being—could know more about what goes on inside human beings than you do? I mean, you can never really know what’s going on inside a man’s head.”
“I am more concerned with his actions, but should I need information concerning the mental states of crew members I can refer to the relevant abstracts from Mission Final Reports for the past century. Those of the Cartographical Service alone occupy some eight million words; military records, more extensive because of…’
“Don’t go through all that again.” A new thought struck Surgenor. “Supposing there was cause for alarm, suppose things really started getting out of control—what could you possibly do about it?”
Aesop’s voice was peaceful. “I could do many things, David, but the indications are that adding a simple psychotropic drug to the drinking water would be quite sufficient to restore a stable condition.”
“You’re empowered to tranquillize human beings any time you feel like it?”
“No—only when they feel like it.”
Again, Surgenor was almost certain that the linguistic subtlety built into the computer was being used to mock him. “Even that’s too often for my liking. I wonder how many people know about this.”
“It is impossible to compute how many people know, but I can give a relevant piece of information.”
“Which is…’
“That—no matter how many more you decide to tell—you will not be back on Earth by the twenty-fifth of December.”
Surgenor stared coldly at the speaker grille on the wall of his room. “Read me like a book, did you?”
“Not really, David—I find books quite difficult to read.”
“Aesop, do you know you have a nasty supercilious streak?”
“The adjectives are inapplicable in my…’ Aesop broke off in mid-sentence—something Surgenor had never known him to do before. There was a pause, then the voice returned, more rapid now and charged with designed-in urgency. “There is a fire on the hangar deck.”
“Serious?” Surgenor grabbed for his boots and began pulling them on.
“Moderate concentration of smoke, but I detect only a localized blaze and there are no electrical circuits registering. The situation appears to be well within the capacity of my automatic systems.”
“I’ll go down and have a look,” Surgenor said, relaxing a little as the spectre of a major catastrophe receded. He left the room and ran to the main companionway, slid down it and sprinted to the head of the stair which led below. It was crowded with men who were anxious to find out what had happened. The circular hangar deck was hazed with oily drifting smoke which obscured the outlines of the six survey vehicles in their stalls, but even as Surgenor entered he could see that it was being efficiently drawn into the ceiling grilles. In little more than a minute the smoke had vanished except for stray whiffs arising from a box on one of the workbenches.
“I have turned off the fire-control sonics,” Aesop announced. “Complete the extinction manually.”
“Look at this.” Voysey got to the workbench first and picked up a small laser knife which was lying with its projection head pointing at a smouldering box which contained oily waste. “Somebody left this cutter switched on low power.” He studied the tool curiously. “This thing’s dangerous. The range limit is broken—that’s what started the fire.”
While one of the men broke out a fire-control grenade and fumed it into the box, Surgenor took the cutter from Voysey and examined it. The range-control plate had been twisted completely out of line in a way which, to him, did not look accidental. Another odd fact was that the waste box with the charred hole in its side invariably sat on the floor with clamps securing it to the leg of the bench. It was almost as if somebody had started the fire deliberately, but that was something no sane person would do. A spaceship was a machine for keeping human beings alive against all the dictates of nature, and it was unthinkable that anybody should try to damage the machine…
“I guess we were lucky,” Voysey said. “There’s no harm done.”
Aesop spoke immediately. “That remains to be seen, gentlemen. The hangar deck was in the clean air condition for electronics maintenance on Modules One, Three and Six. All exposed units will have to be inspected for contamination, then cleaned and given function checks. I suggest that you begin work on them now—otherwise there could be delays in the forthcoming survey.”
Groans of protest were heard from a number of men, but Surgenor fancied that most of them were pleased at having some genuinely necessary task to perform. It created a break in the shipboard routine and gave them a comforting sense of being useful. He joined in the work, putting aside his speculations about the origins of the fire, and spent two hours engrossed in checking out electronics packs. The survey modules were designed for repair by replacement to a large extent, so that relatively untrained men could keep them operational, but in spite of that the job of inspecting and changing major components was one which demanded concentration. As always, Aesop assisted in and monitored the various tasks. His long-range diagnostic microscopes, mounted on the ceiling, made sporadic movements as they projected enormously magnified pictures of circuits on to large screens.
By the time the evening meal was supplied by the auto-kitchen Surgenor was deeply but pleasantly tired. He was relieved, therefore, when the meal passed off without any more trouble between Hilliard and Barrow. After they had eaten, most of the complement watched a holoplay. Surgenor had two large whiskies, found himself growing dangerously nostalgic about Earth at Christmas, and went to bed early.