They clustered around the narrow magnifying port. "All right," piped Jeromolo Bill, standing on tiptoes to see what the taller, older ones could see without effort, "so where do we go, dad?"
Jeron quelled him with a look. Jeron was fully a man now, especially in his own opinion. He had attained his six thousandth day just a week or so before, and besides he was captain of this vessel. Having put by such childish things as the nasty sniping ridicule in Jeromolo Bill's voice, he snapped, "Shut up, kid," squared his shoulders, and prepared to issue commands.
For this he was well qualified, since he had been secretly studying stories about ship's captains out of the tapes transmitted by open-time communicators from Earth long ago. "Um, hum," he said thoughtfully, out of Horatio Horn-blower, and, "Is the crew assembled?" out of Nicholas Monsarrat. But the crew was long since assembled, even fumbly, blowsy Aunt Eve, and he really hadn't a clue. Damn clouds! How could you make a plan when you couldn't see what you were looking at?
Of course, there were the maps.
They were good maps. They had been assembled out of the-recollections of the Original Eight, but their memories were good and some days of shrill bickering had mediated their differences. Unfortunately the maps lied. They pretended that there were differences in color between sea and land, and even between one nation's land and another, and Jeron could see none.
Gradually, however, he began to realize that those sections of the globe with visible shadows and folds could not be sea, and therefore must be land. Then he began to perceive shores and peninsulas— that one, no doubt, was Yucatan, protruding into the Gulf of Mexico. But where was Florida? Where, in fact, was the Atlantic Ocean?
At that point he realized he was looking at it the wrong way up. The maps always presented themselves with north at the top. The planet itself was not so obliging. That peninsula just disappearing over the horizon was half a world away from the Yucatan. "Ah, yes," he said, nodding sagely, "you see, that is Italy just going out of sight; of course, you must have recognized the Mediterranean Sea?"
"I think I see the Pyramids," Aunt Eve said, hiccoughing slightly. And it was true. Although there were clouds over the eastern Mediterranean, farther south the skies were transparent. Those sharp-angled blocks were unmistakable.
It was time for action. "Molomy," he ordered, "see that our first batch of gifts is in the landing craft. Bill! You will navigate us to a landing. I advise that you get some sleep first, so go take a little nap."
Jeromolo Bill whistled scornfully but, after waiting enough of a second to indicate that he was doing it because he thought it was worth doing, not because he was told to, he turned and headed for his cubicle, leaving Jeron to study the slowly turning globe. Molomy reappeared and drafted the rest of the children to help her stow the landing craft. Aunt Eve, with a malt-nut in her hand but no longer drinking, stared apprehensively over his shoulder; and Uncle Ghost, thrilled and uneasy as any of them, allowed himself to be seen beside them.
"The Horn of Africa," he whispered, and Eve shuddered. The field of view shifted ever westward as the ship orbited, the Indian subcontinent with the pearl of Ceylon hanging from its tip; a muddle of islands; then the broad Pacific. Australia was clear enough, and the smudge just at the southern rim of the Earth might easily be New Zealand . . . but what, Jeron wondered, was this astonishing sprinkling of white? Could they be ships? Ocean liners? Immense ones?
He said nonchalantly to Aunt Eve, "I did not believe so much technology had survived until I saw the cruise ships."
She gazed blearily at the sea, and shook her head. "Don't see them. Hard to pick them out among all those icebergs, I guess."
Jeron kept his face masklike as he nodded, but he was thrilled. Icebergsl It was as though she had said, ah, yes, dragons. "But icebergs are not the question, Aunt Eve. We must decide on where to land."
Aunt Eve sighed. The prospect of meeting von Knefhausen and all those others down there was pressing heavily on her. "Well," she said doubtfully, "pretty soon you'll see a sort of twisty thing up there, I think, and that'll be the Isthmus of Panama. Pretty much straight up north from there is where we ought to go."
"Oh, yes," he said, nodding wisely, "Florida."
"No! Who wants to go to Florida? But once we find Florida then we just go up the coast to Chesapeake Bay, I think I'll know that when I see it, and then it's just up the Potomac River to Washington. Where dirty old Dieter lives. Lived. Whatever. But," she added, "I think I will make myself presentable before we land."
"Next orbit!" Jeron called after her back. "Ninety minutes! See you're ready! And then"—he swallowed—"we're going to be there."
When an early spacecraft came back to Earth, an Apollo or a Salyut or a Shuttle, the timing had to be precise and the entry window was tiny. Great banks of computers in Houston or some Russian town took the readouts from a thousand sensors and converted them into simple yes-no instructions: "Burn." "Stop burning." "Burn for 1.3 seconds." "Burn yaw thruster." "Pray."
The returnees from Alpha-Aleph had no such ground support going for them. They had only two things, though either was enough. First they had the landing craft itself, with Jim's power plant and Ski's plasma, and so they could have come down like an elevator if they chose. And they also had Jeromolo Bill.
The six-year-old was in his full power now. His genes had been edited for mathematics, and not merely the relativistic phase-shifting of the high-speed voyage itself. As a matter of pride he plotted a course. It required him to take into consideration the shuttle's geocentric position vector, the gravitational parameter of the Earth, the gravitational force due to the Earth's nonsymmetric mass distribution and the time-varying contributions from tides, the perturbing force due to the effects of the Sun and Moon, the force due to the effects of atmospheric resistance, and the force due to solar radiation pressure. Since he had no data on many of these, he had to deduce them as he went along, from the perturbations observed in the very ship he was flying. He did it in his head. He was able to feel the responses of the sensors and convert them into attitude and thrust instructions as well as any IBM or Cray-1 monster in old Texas, and it did not even raise a sweat.
The difficulties were quite other than that. The difficulties included the fact that the world did not look the way it was supposed to.
There wasn't any Florida, for instance. Where there should have been a peninsula, there was only a string of tiny islets. All up and down the coast, and all to the west, there were broad, ragged bays where there should have been river mouths and deltas. Clearly the world's water level had risen. The question was, was there still a Washington, D.C.?
As they felt the first gentle shaking that told them their shuttle, for the first time in its life, had an atmosphere around it. Eve appeared and buckled herself in. She was sober, clean, and dressed in her best clothes.
Jeron was captain, Bill was pilot, but Eve was Aunt Mommy. She leaned forward to gaze at the approaching globe, and the others waited on her word.
There was a thunderstorm over the Virginia shore and a line of squalls all the way up into Pennsylvania. It was no real problem for the landing craft that Shef had designed, but the fact that the integrity of the ship was assured did nothing for the integrity of the stomachs of the crew. None of them had been exposed to that sort of lurching, staggering motion for a quarter of a century; most never had. Eve did not seem to notice the turbulence. Through a break in the clouds she saw the river, grossly swollen, an island with a marble monument, a hillside covered with grave stones, a bridge nearly awash, and from them recognized the marsh that had been Washington National Airport. She placed a finger on the port. "There, Bill," she said.