By the end of the first twenty-four hours at full drive we were doing well. We were up to a quarter of light-speed, heading out from Sol at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic and already at the distance of Neptune. We had settled into a typical shipboard routine, each person giving the others as much space as possible. You do that when you know you have to spend a long time packed together into a space no bigger than a fair-sized kitchen.
And then, unexpectedly, our communications silence caused trouble.
The Hoatzin had been pleasantly quiet for hours. McAndrew had donned a suit, one of the new transparent models so light that you could sit in high vacuum and hardly realize you had a suit on at all.
He was going outside. Most people would be terrified at the prospect of leaving the capsule when the drive is on — if for any reason it turned off, the capsule would automatically spring out to the far end of the axle, to hold the interior field at one gee. But anyone not firmly secured to the capsule would fall at a hundred gee acceleration towards the mass disk. A quick end, and a messy one.
It never occurred to McAndrew that his inventions might fail. He had happily gone outside, for a status check of one of the new mass detectors that he would be using when we reached our destination in the middle of nowhere. We were heading for the region of lowest matter density known, out beyond the limits of the Oort cloud where we would find less than one atom per hundred cubic meters.
I was looking at the outside display screens, partly to scan the plume of plasma behind the Hoatzin for any sign of drive variability, and partly, to tell the truth, because I wanted to keep my eye on McAndrew. He doesn’t believe the balanced drive can give trouble, despite the fact that its very first use nearly killed him.
While I had my attention on the screens, Stefan Parmikan crept up behind me. I didn’t know he was there until I heard a soft, sibilant voice in my ear. “I am required to send a report to the Council every day, and be able to receive messages from them.”
I jerked around. Parmikan’s face was only a foot from mine. It was probably not his fault, but why was his mouth always so wet-looking?
“But Professor McAndrew tells me that we cannot send messages to Terra when the drive is turned on,” he continued.
“Quite right. To Terra, or anywhere else. The signals can’t get through.”
“In that case, the drive must be turned off once every shipboard day.”
“Forget it.” I was a bit brusque, but Lyle and Parmikan seemed to have come along on the expedition without learning a thing about the ship, the drive, or anything else. And Parmikan didn’t sound like he was asking — he was telling. “We lose a couple of hours every time we turn power on and off,” I went on. “And you’d have the living-capsule going up and down the axle like a yo-yo, to balance the change in acceleration from a hundred gee to zero. And anyway, once we’re a long way out the signal travel time is so long the messages would be useless.”
“But it is technologically feasible to turn off the drive, and to send and receive messages?”
“It is. And practically ridiculous. We won’t do it.”
Parmikan smiled his wet smile, and for once he appeared to be genuinely pleased about something.
“We will, Ms. Roker. Or rather, you will. You will turn the drive off once a day, for communication with Earth.”
He drew a yellow document from his pocket, stamped prominently with the Council seal, and handed it to me.
Not Captain Roker. Ms. Roker. It took only a few seconds to scan the paper and understand what it was. I was holding Parmikan’s appointment as captain of the Hoatzin for this mission. In all the excitement of preparing for our departure I had completely forgotten the original letter to me. An invitation to serve as crew member on the expedition, not captain. For the days before our departure I had instinctively and naturally assumed the senior position. And Lyle and Parmikan had been sly enough to go along with me, even addressing me as “Captain Roker” until we were on our way and it was too late to do anything about it.
“Well, Ms. Roker? Do you question the authority assigned by this document?”
“I question its wisdom. But I accept its validity.” I scanned down the rest of the page. Parmikan’s command extended from the time we left the Penrose Institute until the moment when we docked on our return. No loopholes. “I agree, you’re the captain. I don’t see anything here defining my duties, though, or saying that I’ll agree to them. So if you want to turn the drive off yourself, without my help…”
Stefan Parmikan said nothing, but his sliding brown eyes met mine for one triumphant split-second. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny playback unit, and turned it on.
“I’m reporting for duty right now,” said a voice. It was my own.
“For the expedition described in Professor McAndrew’s letter to you? But the mission and your role in it are not yet fully defined.” That was Dorian Jarver.
“You can define that later. I’m here, and I’m ready to start.”
There was a pause, as that section of the recording ended. Then Jarver’s voice came again: “In accordance with Captain Jean Pelham Roker’s earlier statement, this serves to define her duties on the Hoatzin mission identified as Project Missing Matter. Ms. Roker will serve as a general crew member, taking her orders and assignments from Captain Stefan Parmikan and from Senior Officer Van Lyle.”
Set-up. But my own fault completely. I had felt bad vibrations the moment I met Parmikan and Lyle. Then I had gone right ahead and ignored my own instincts. Let’s call that my third mistake.
McAndrew was climbing back in through the tiny airlock. I turned to him. “Mac, suppose we turned the drive off every day for a minute or two, long enough to send a burst mode message back to Earth. Allowing for the time we need to power the drive down and back up, how much would that add to our total trip?”
He stared at me for a moment, then his jaw dropped and his face took on a strange half-witted vacancy. That was fine. It just meant that he was off in his own world, thinking and calculating. I had given up trying to understand what went on inside McAndrew’s head when he was solving a problem. Even though what I had asked him was straightforward and I could have done the calculation myself given a little time, I would bet money that he was not using any technique I’d have chosen. As one of the Institute members told me years ago, McAndrew has a mind that sees round corners.
“Five days,” he said after a few seconds. “Of course, that’s shipboard days. Two months Terran, allowing for time squeeze.”
“Quite acceptable,” said Parmikan. “Ms. Roker, please work out the necessary arrangements and bring them to me.”
He turned and headed off for the private area of his own bunk, leaving me to fume and curse. And then, after a few minutes, to sit down and work out the best times for a regular interruption to the drive. I had to work it into other activities, so that Parmikan would make his daily call with minimum disruption to ship routine.
McAndrew came to me when I was almost finished. “Jeanie, I didn’t catch on to what he wanted when you asked me that, or I’d have said it was hard to do. You don’t have to take this sort of guff from him.”
“I do.” I picked up the results of my efforts, aware that Van Lyle had been watching me all the time I was working. “You know the first rule of space travel as well as I do: Like it or not, you can only have one captain. Parmikan is the captain of the Hoatzin.”