The incident was less than trivial, and Surgenor forgot it as the module crews abandoned the table and crowded into the dimness of the observation room on the same deck. He went with them, moving with a casual stride which befitted a veteran of many such star jumps, yet contriving to be among the leaders. Watching the Instant Distance drive in action, seeing the star fields abruptly shift and knowing he had covered light-years with the speed of thought, was an experience Surgenor could never regard as commonplace.
The observation room had twelve swivel chairs—one for each member of the ship’s company—which were grouped midway between two hemispherical viewing screens. Forward was a view through the centre of Martell’s Cluster. The curved screen was like a bowl of black champagne, frozen, with a thousand silver bubbles checked in flight by the briefness of man’s existence. Surgenor waited for the jump, trying to feel it happening, even though he knew that any process which was slow enough to be perceived would probably be fatal.
On the instant, with no sense of anything having moved, the disc of a new sun appeared, seemingly to have driven the other stars outwards.
“We’ve arrived,” Clifford Pollen said, acknowledging the fact that Aesop had taken them right into the target system, and looking furtively grateful for yet another safe transit. Pollen, still gathering material for his projected book, was a connoisseur of legends about ships which had essayed routine jumps, and in the beta-space universe—where the gravitation flux was like a storm howling among the galaxies—had been swept away by freak eddies, to emerge in normal-space at points remote from their destinations. Surgenor knew there were regions where the intergalactic wind penetrated chinks in the gravity shield of the Milky Way, but their locations and boundaries had been well charted. He had no qualms about the Instant Distance Drive, and derived a gently malicious pleasure from Pollen’s enduring nerviness.
The next few weeks would be occupied by normal-space approaches to planets and, where feasible, direct examination by the survey modules. Depending on how things went, the Sarafand could spend a full month in the present system, and there were three others yet to be visited.
Surgenor looked at the alien sun and thought about the precious fleeting afternoons of winter on Earth, about football matches and cigar stores and women at supper tables, and about the deep comforts of families drawing together at Christmas. And he knew that Aesop was wrong, that the voyage should not have been extended. He stood up without speaking and went to the island of privacy which was his room. Not bothering to lock the door—a rule of shipboard life was that no crewman ever entered another’s quarters uninvited—he sat down and closed his eyes.
“Hear these words,” he said presently, using the code phrase which put any member of the ship’s company on to the computer.
“I’m listening to you, David,” Aesop said mildly, voice accurately beamed to Surgenor’s ears.
“It was a mistake to include four extra system surveys in this mission.”
“Is that an opinion? Or are you in possession of data which have not been made available to me?” A dryness had crept into Aesop’s voice and Surgenor was almost certain that the choice of words constituted sarcasm, but he had never been able to establish the exact degree of verbal subtlety of which Aesop was capable.
“I’m giving you my assessment of the situation,” he said. “There’s a lot of tension building up in the crew.”
“That is predictable. I have made allowances for it.”
“You can’t predict how human beings will react.”
“I did not say I could predict their actions,” Aesop said patiently. “I can assure you, though, that I weighed every important factor before making my decision.”
“What factors?”
There was a barely perceptible pause, an indication that Aesop considered the question a stupid one, before the computer spoke. “The volume of space explored by the Cartographical Service is roughly spherical. As the radius of this sphere increases, its surface area…’
“I know all that stuff,” Surgenor interrupted. “I know the Bubble is growing and that the job gets bigger all the time and that there’s an economic pressure to extend the missions. I was asking about the human factors. What do you go on when you’re trying to assess them?”
“Apart from the body of general psychological data available to me, I can refer you 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 the nature of the activities, run to fifteen million words; then there are the reports of the various civilian agencies which…’
“Forget it.” Surgenor, aware that he was being out-manoeuvred, decided to try a different approach. “Aesop, I’ve been with you on the Sarafand a long time, long enough to start thinking of you as a human being, and I believe I can speak to you just as one man would talk to another.”
“Before you begin, David, will you answer two questions?”
“Of course.”
“One—what gave you the curious notion that I would be subject to flattery? Two—where did you get the even more curious idea that ascribing human attributes to me could possibly be construed as flattery?”
“I have no answers to those questions,” Surgenor said heavily, defeated.
“That is a pity. Proceed.”
“Proceed with what?”
“I’m ready for you to speak to me as one man would talk to another.”
Surgenor did exactly that for almost a minute.
“Now that you have relieved your mental stresses,” Aesop commented at the end of the outburst, “please be reminded that the correct code phrase for verbal disengagement is ‘Hear me no morel’.”
Surgenor tried for a final obscenity as the audio connection was broken, but his imagination failed him. He prowled around the room for a while, forcing himself to accept the realization that there was no way of getting back to Earth by Christmas, then went down to the hangar deck and began carrying out system checks on his survey module. At first he found it difficult to concentrate, but then his professionalism took over and several hours went by quickly. The light panels at the “noon’ section of the circular deck were glowing brightest, giving the impression of a midday sun beyond, when he emerged from the vehicle and went to lunch. He sat down beside Hilliard.
“Where have you been?” Pollen said.
“Checking out my sensor banks.”
“Again?” Pollen raised one eyebrow in amusement, his slightly prominent teeth glistening.
“It keeps him out of mischief,” Hilliard said, winking at the others.
“I’ve never had to backtrack halfway round a planet,” Surgenor replied, reminding Pollen of an incident he was anxious to forget, and specified his meal on the menu buttons. His soup had just emerged from the dispensing turret when Tod Barrow came into the mess and, after surveying the table, sat down opposite him. Barrow, who had evidently been working out in the gymnasium, was wearing a track suit and smelled of fresh sweat. He greeted Surgenor with unexpected and excessive joviality.
Surgenor gave him a slow nod. “Is the shower unit out of action?”
“How would I know?” Barrow looked innocently surprised at the question.