“Done by the author.”
“Silly. Okay, let’s read this thing.”
Wanker began to read.
A moment later he sat back with a look of annoyed perplexity.
“What the hell is this supposed to be? What language is this?”
“The author’s idiosyncratic dialect of Anglo-Irish.”
“Huh? I can’t understand a word of it. Is there a translation?”
“No translation is available.”
“But this is gibberish!”
The librarian made no comment.
“Take it away. Thank you very much.”
Captain Wanker capitulated. He whiled away the rest of the journey in one of the ship’s simsex pods.
CHAPTER 10
Lt. Diane Warner-Hillary announced, “Captain, we have entered Galactic Sector Four.”
“Begin deceleration to subluminal velocity,” the captain ordered. “Continue on present course.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Lt. Commander Angus Sadowski.
The electrogravitic field that surrounded the star-ship Repulse changed polarity. The ship still occupied a bubble in the continuum — an area outside of space and time but not very far from either, in which conventional physical laws could be bent but not broken. But now that bubble was contracting. When the ship dropped below the speed of light, the Repulse popped back into normal space and became a conventional physical object again, subject to the usual laws governing its ilk, as opposed to a set of quantum probabilities, which it had been reduced to inside the bubble.
The ship underwent tremendous deceleration in a short time. A partial dispensation from Newtonian physics (as opposed to Einsteinian) was in effect as long as the electrogravitic field still existed. Had this not been so, the ship’s occupants would have been squashed to jelly against the forward bulkheads.
The star cruiser’s speed dropped dramatically. Slower and slower it went, until the Repulse was barely moving at all — a mere hundred kilometers per second. Practically at a dead stop, the ship drifted in a vastness that was more empty than most regions of interstellar space. Here floated a molecule of gas, there a mote of dust. The Repulse had not much else for a neighbor, except for a faintly luminescent nebula and an even fainter ring of glowing gas. The latter hung two points off starboard at a distance of about half a light-year.
At last, word came that the captain would come out of his cabin and go to the bridge. Mr. Rhodes and Darvona stood by the hatch, as if in wait of some miraculous coming-out, a white figure in a shroud, perhaps.
The hatch rolled up and Wanker stepped out.
He saw the two standing there.
“What the devil do you want?”
“Nice to see you again, sir!” Mr. Rhodes said. “Just want to accompany you to the bridge.”
“Oh?” Wanker grumbled something unintelligible. He looked around. “What’s Strangefinger been up to?”
“Not a lot, sir, while we’ve been under power. But they’ll begin in earnest now.”
“Crazy business, doing this out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Security reasons, sir. The doctor said they couldn’t trust the graving dock crew.”
“I wouldn’t trust Strangefinger any farther than I could spit.”
Wanker smoothed his rumpled fatigue uniform, which he’d slept in a few nights. Red stubble grew in tufts on his cheek. He hadn’t bathed in quite a while.
“You look fine, sir,” Darvona told him, as if reading his doubts.
“Maybe I’d better step into the fogger,” Wanker said. “Get freshened up.”
“Captain, you’re okay,” Mr. Rhodes said, afraid that Wanker would never come out again if he ducked back in. “Please, let’s go to the bridge.”
“Well, all right.”
Reluctantly, the captain followed them to the nearest access tube.
The captain seated himself at the captain’s console, an extremely complex display of instruments that he had yet to study. He felt guilty about that. Above it hung a huge thing like an oversize helmet — the cyberhelmet, or communications sensorium. It was a virtual reality device that put him in intimate contact with the ship, its environs, its instruments, and with certain key crew members. Used mostly during combat, it was also a tricky thing to master.
He pushed a button and the helmet lowered. He poked his head inside it.
It was dark inside. Was the thing on? It was supposed to be on all the time. Then he noticed a legend in his peripheral vision: TEMPORARILY INOPERATIVE. Well, so much for the cyberhelmet. He pushed the thing off his head.
“Navigator! What is our exact position?”
Warner-Hillary answered, “We’re about ten trillion kilometers from the edge of the Kruton Interface… give or take, you know, a couple billion kilometers. Sort of. I mean, we’re kind of like in the middle of nowhere.”
Wanker regarded the navigator in silence for a moment. Then he said patronizingly, “Thanks for that travelogue, Lieutenant. Can you be a bit more specific?”
“Well, sir, we’re kind of like… here.” Warner-Hillary touched a finger to her screen. “I’ll punch it up on your monitor, sir.”
“I have it.”
“Okay, sir, you see that fuzzy blob there toward the top of the screen?”
Wanker studied bis screen. “Fuzzy blob toward the top of the screen … you mean the one that’s ring-shaped?”
“Ring-shaped?”
“All right, what about it?”
“Okay, we’re about three decimeters to the right of it, and a little bit down.”
Three decimeters …? But that’s off my screen.”
“Huh? It’s on my screen, sir… Wait a minute. You’ve got the wrong blob. It’s on the other side. The one that looks like a weasel.”
“Weasel? Oh, you mean this one? That’s no weasel. You mean the camel.”
“Sir, it doesn’t look like a camel to me. Looks like a weasel.”
“Ridiculous. It looks like a camel. See the humps?”
“What bumps, sir?”
“Humps. Those little things there. Little humps.”
Warner-Hillary inclined her head. “I can’t see any little humps.”
“There are two of them, like a camel.”
“Sir, it looks like a weasel to me.”
“Mr. Rhodes, come here, please.”
Rhodes got up from his console and came to the captain’s.
Wanker tapped the screen. “Doesn’t this look like a camel to you?”
Rhodes studied it. “Sir, that looks like a humped weasel.”
“A what?”
“Humped weasel, sir. It’s a species found on Proxima Centauri Two. Good eating.”
“Nonsense. That’s a camel.”
“Well, sir, it’s backed like a weasel.”
“It isn’t backed like a weasel, it’s backed like a camel.”
Darvona peered over their shoulders. “Looks like a whale to me.”
Wanker rose from his seat, then both he and the first officer took a step back to regard the screen from a fresh perspective.
“The hell it does,” Wanker said.
“Oh, I think it does,” Rhodes said. “If you look at it sideways.”
“Huh? Oh. Well, maybe.”
“In fact, I think it looks very like a whale.”
“You’re both balmy. Anyway, Navigator, where did you say we are again?”
“Well, sir, just about two decimeters to the right of that weasel blob—”
“I thought you said three decimeters?”
“Well, not exactly three. Maybe two, two and a half.”
“The captain’s right, it’s a camel,” Sven said, having gotten up and come to look.
“You see?” Wanker said. I’m not imagining things.”