“Hunh.” said Todd. “Golf clubs. There’s the hatch.” He gripped the coaming and looked into the trunk. “You know, I came within that of just popping through. It’s, what, three meters to the bottom?”
“Be nice to forget and just jump through, gravity inside takes over. Splat.” Peters grinned. “I got four ornh says it happens at least once when we’re shepherdin’ sailors out here.”
“No takers here.”
It almost happened to Todd anyway, but they both got in without breaking anything. “This’s gonna be a problem,” Peters observed when they were in the airlock. “Can’t get but two, maybe three people in here at a time. Gonna take a while to cycle everybody through.”
“Can’t be helped.” Todd shook his head. “So, same time, same place, tomorrow morning? We’d better make sure we know what we’re doing before we start turning the animals loose.”
“And it’s fun, too,” said Peters. “Yeah. I ain’t gonna be ready to take ‘em outside tomorrow, we might as well take the chance to play on our own again.”
“I know what I’m gonna do,” Todd declared. “I’m gonna go in and out of that hatch maybe a hundred times, ‘till I can do it without looking and make it look easy. Then I’m gonna stand around and chuckle, real soft, while those apes fall on their ass trying it.”
“You’re a hard man, Todd,” said Peters with a chuckle. “Sounds good to me. See you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” the younger sailor agreed. He continued down the stairs, bound for the bay and the cleanup effort, and Peters sighed and headed aft. The next class would be wondering where he’d took off to, and he’d better show up or have Chief Joshua all over his butt. Another llor in the Space Navy, he thought resignedly.
But the session went well. Nobody fell out, nobody spewed, and nobody gave him any lip; all the sailors got so they could get across the practice room and predict where they’d hit, which was about where Peters had been before pulling his Major Mike act. Now for a bite to eat and tackle the Keezer problem. Time was running out.
Keezer was waiting by the retard consoles—or rather walking away, having given up waiting. Peters started to run, then looked around. A dozen or so sailors were painting, cleaning, and generally lurking around the bay. He converted his run into a brisk walk, head up. The Grallt saw him, probably recognizing the blank suit, and held up short of the aft hangar bay access.
“Pleasant greetings, and apologies, Keezer,” he said when he got within earshot.
“Yes,” said the zerkre, without any reaction that Peters could detect. “Did you want further instruction in the retarders?”
“Yes, but I have a more immediate problem. Were you aware that our prime group would be returning in this llor?”
“No.” She shook her head. “When will they arrive?”
“During third ande.”
Keezer’s face contorted, and she made an angry gesture. “An ande from now? There is nothing quite so effective as advance planning, is there?”
“I’m sorry.” Peters spread his hands.
“Ssth. It’s clear you are just a messenger. You could have brought the message sooner, though.”
Peters sighed. “Yes.”
Keezer nodded. “I have a full schedule, but it’s clear I must alter it. I’ll speak to my superiors.”
“Good.” Peters frowned. “First we must solve a problem. We need information so we can convert our units to yours. We have the conversion for time, but mass and distance are more difficult.”
“Hm. I can help you with distance.” She fingered open a pocket, pulled out something shiny, handed it to Peters. “Can you read the numbers?”
“Yes, but what—ah.” He pulled out the tab of a tape measure; the case was circular, but it was otherwise familiar, down to the slight transverse curve that made the blade stiff when extended. “Thank you, Keezer. I do not—don’t think it will be damaged. I will return it to you as soon as possible. Which unit is tell?”
“This.” She pointed to lines going all the way across the blade, repeated about every thirty centimeters. “One interval is tell.”
“Thank you,” Peters said again.
“Mass. Mass is, as you said, more difficult.” Keezer looked across the bay, fingering her jaw. “I think you don’t have some of the words, but perhaps after a little time…”
It took a lot of backing and filling before Keezer got Peters to understand “electron”, and “proton” took longer because he didn’t know the word in English. One of each made up the lightest substance possible, a gas that burned in air with a blue flame and was very light. “Hydrogen,” he was inspired to say.
Keezer grimaced. “I hope that’s the correct word in your language,” she warned. “Seven eights of those make the smallest unit of mass.” She smiled. “That’s a mistake. The unit was intended to be one babble of babble.” When Peters didn’t respond she knelt and slapped the deck. “The ship is made of babble.” The second word: iron. Todd had found that out. “But one babble of iron has less mass. The difference is energy.”
“I don’t understand,” said Peters. “But I will remember.”
“I hope so,” said Keezer. “I don’t remember things I don’t understand.” She paused. “This unit is very small, so small it isn’t useful. A square of twos of that unit is a small unit called anthu. A square of squares of anthu is a gorz.”
Peters sighed. “Thank you. Now please excuse me. I must find my associate while I still remember. Can we meet here at the beginning of third ande?”
Keezer shook her head in irritation. “Or a few tle after. I must collect my people.”
“I must as well. Good day.”
Hernandez took the tape measure with delight, but Peters’s explanation of gorz didn’t click at first. After the third repetition a light seemed to dawn. “OK, run the numbers,” he told the other programmer. “What’s two to the sixty-fourth hydrogen atoms weigh? No, wait.” He looked at his own screen, not seeing it. “Fifty-six hydrogen atoms, times two to the sixty-fourth.”
Clark tapped keys. “‘Bout a tenth of a gram.”
“And a square of squares—hah! That’s easy. What’s 4096 times that? Sixty-four sixty-fours.”
“453 grams,” Clark got. “Point one-oh-oh-six.”
“That’s a gorz, then,” said Hernandez with satisfaction. “453.1006 grams. Why does that sound so familiar?”
“You ain’t gonna like this,” warned another sailor, who was fiddling with the tape measure.
“Spit it out, Vogt,” Hernandez growled.
Vogt grinned. “454 grams is a pound, old style. And this—” he pointed at the tape measure, “—near as I can get it, the marks are right at 303 millimeters, maybe 303.4. A foot’s 304.8 millimeters. Feet and pounds. Quarters and eighths and sixteenths. Granny always said we never shoulda gone to the metric system. Looks like Granny was right.”
The specs they had had been digitized from the original manuals, which had numbers in feet and pounds. The AI routines had put in conversions to metric, but the original values were on the bitmaps. Conversion to gorz was redundant, as Vogt pointed out. “Just put in pounds, right from the manual, except in backwards base eight. The difference is less than a quarter of a percent, and we don’t know what they’ve done to the planes anyway.” It took longer to disable the automatic conversion routines than it would have to convert the metric measurements to Grallt. Peters left them to it, and went to hunt down Warnocki. Time was running out.