From space the Ship looked something like a collection of paper sculptures, strung together in a cluster anyhow, without need for the high-speed streamlining of Earth or gravity, and without any kind of linear organization. There would be sufficient gravity to make the crew comfortable and keep them fit — the DeMag gravitators were the only thing which had made deep-space voyages practicable from a human biological standpoint. But gravity could be sharply localized for the crew’s comfort in a given spot or area; there was no need to orient the Ship on any given axis. Inside, the arrangements made sense; but from outside it looked chaotic. Teague thought the Ship looked like a collection of helium balloons which had somehow drifted together — balloons which just happened to be spherical, cubical, octahedral, or conical.
Moira was wondering what it would look like from the outside when the enormous sheets of thin mylar, the light-sails which operated on solar pressure, were spread out around the conglomeration of shapes. Peake thought, sadly, that Jimson had never seen the Ship — then revised that thought. Jimson was probably seeing it right now, or at least, he had seen it this morning from the space station; he had probably had a good look at it from the Lunar Shuttle, too. Jimson had been assigned as an administrative assistant on the space station, and would probably be in charge of it, a few years from now.
I wonder if he feels like Moses, looking from afar at the Promised Land?
Jimson hadn’t spoken to Peake when the announcements were made. Not once.
And then the Shuttle was drawing up alongship, and they were going through the motions of getting into pressure suits — second nature now, after years of drill on it — and decanting through the airlock. Only minutes later, they were in the DeMagged main cabin, watching the airlock close and the Lunar Shuttle pull away, and Peake realized that there was no one to give the order, this time, to get out of pressure suits. So he checked the pressure of the cabin, shrugged, and unfastened his own helmet, hanging it meticulously in the rack.
Six of us, Moira thought, alone with the Ship which has been our goal, our summit, our daydream for the best part of twelve years. Is that al] there is to it? They had all been expecting some more formality than this. But what more could there be? They were the graduates, they had been given the final sink-or-swim test. If they had not been capable of functioning on their own, without further instruction, they would be now among the failures, serving apprenticeships on space stations, satellites, governing the Earth colonies some day — but they were the independent ones. This Ship gave them the freedom of the universe, and they had to prove themselves in it. They would evolve their own procedures, they would make themselves into a crew — or they would not; it was just as simple, and as enormous, as that.
Suddenly she was frightened, and, looking around at her five shipmates, she was sure they were frightened too. ESP? she wondered, and thought; no; just common sense. If we weren’t scared, we wouldn’t be as bright as we have to be, just to have come this far.
“Look,” said Peake, “there is your cello, Moira. And my violin.”
Ching looked at her viola, in its case. These were the only really personal articles they would retain from Earth and the life that was past. She said into the lengthening silence, “Well, here we all are. What do we do first?”
“I was taught,” Teague said dryly, “that the first thing you do on any Ship is to check the Life-Support system, and I imagine that’s my job — I don’t think there’s anyone else here who specialized in Life-Support systems.”
“My second specialty,” Fontana said. “I suppose I’ll be your standby.”
“Well — shall I go and do it?” Teague looked around, then realized there was no one to tell him to do it or not to do it. He said “Right. As I remember from the plan, the main Life-Support system should be through the door there — airlock — sphincter — whatever you call it.” He turned toward it. Peake said, “We might as well all go. We’ll have to learn our way around,” and followed Teague and Fontana. The others came crowding after.
As Teague thrust himself through the dilating sphincter, he experienced a sudden, violent shift of orientation. His feet had been “down”; suddenly he was head-down, his feet somehow “over his head.” Even though he knew instantly what had happened, that he had moved from a DeMag gravitator located toward the floor of the main cabin, into a DeMag field located at the other apex of the corridor he had entered, it took him a moment to get his flailing feet “down.” Peake actually tumbled and fell. Moira did an athlete’s flip and came up standing. And then, to all of them, “down” was where it was, and they looked back at the crazy, somehow disoriented airlock which seemed to be in the “ceiling” of the present room,
“Wow,” Teague muttered, “that’s going to take some getting used to!”
“The Life-Support stuff looks familiar, anyhow,” Fontana said, and they went toward it. “All new and shiny, anyhow.”
“Do you suppose we’ll ever get used to it, after that battered old stuff we learned on at the Academy?” Teague asked. “They sure didn’t skimp on shiny new state-of-the-art stuff, did they?”
Fontana was studying the air-supply mechanisms, “It’s like all new systems; has to be tested and run in, checked out for bugs,” she said, “and I’m not happy with that mixture of inert gases.”
“You won’t find any bugs in it, any more than in the drives,” Moira said. “I installed most of it myself.” Her voice was defensive, and Fontana shrugged, not willing to pursue the matter.
“Time will tell, I guess. Look, they have touch-set monitors, and the flow system is backed up there, so that we can monitor oxygen, air, and DeMags in every part of the Ship on this visual tell-tale—”
Ching peered over her shoulder. “Does that mean you can see into every room and watch what we’re doing?”
“Hell no,” Teague replied, his hands already moving on the air-system console, “who needs to? But we can use sensors to find out how much air and oxygen there is in any sector; if one of us should be unconscious, we can locate whoever’s missing, or if there’s air-loss anywhere.” He was running his hands over protein synthesizers. “Looks all right, and there’s enough raw material in the converters that with molecular-fusion techniques we can synthesize everything we’re likely to need for the next, I should roughly say, twenty-nine years, after which time we find a sun with something like the chemical composition of our own, and catch ourselves a small asteroid or two for the next eighty or ninety. That’s assuming that we recycle clothing and water, but not figuring in body-waste recycling.”
“I want to see the drives,” Moira said. “I put them in; but I want to see them in their place in the Ship.”
Teague smiled at her and touched the console again. “Looks like we have a considerable way to go, to get there; the drive chamber’s at the far end of this walkway—” he pointed, “furthest from the living quarters. Navigation and computer areas are closer.”
Another of the dizzying gravity-reversals brought them down — or, at least, “down” — to another module, this one spherical, with seats and many controls. “You’ll drive the Ship from here anyway, Moira,” Peake pointed out, indicating the console for manipulation of the light-pressure sails.
She said, “I want to see the hardware itself. See how it looks in situ.” Nevertheless, she slid gracefully into the contour seat, her hands hovering over, but not touching the console.
“Where are we going? Which way?”
Peake realized, with shock, that nobody knew. “I guess it depends on who’s the chief navigator,” he said. “It was my second specialty, so I suppose I’ll be navigator’s assistant.”