So Conrad took the duty seriously, and so did Bascal, and they were each careful to check up on the other at shift change, to make sure Viridity hadn’t drifted a few meters this way or that. The closer they got to the target, the less time they’d have to make up those errors. And gods help them all if anything happened to the hypercomputers, which were the only thing making these absurdly precise calculations even vaguely possible!
And gods help them, also, if the neutronium barge decided to change course, to deviate from its gravitationally expected path. This would not be done lightly—the energies involved were enormous—but of course the barge’s entire purpose was to slurp up Kuiper Belt matter and supercompress it. The vessel would follow its sensor-laden nose, ponderously seeking out new gas and dust concentrations, as well as the odd iceball or comet. Course changes would be small and exacting and optimized for minimum effort, but that didn’t mean a mere fetula would be able to keep up. Conrad lived in fear of this, and checked for it several times every hour.
But the mere existence of danger didn’t make helm duty interesting, and it didn’t keep Conrad from inventing games around it. One of these involved remapping the reflectivity of the sail. At any given time, only about ninety percent of it was actually mirrored. The rest was a shifting pattern of clear and black squares that kept the forces and torques properly balanced, so the sail would maintain proper alignment.
And it occurred to Conrad in the first couple of days that he could maintain these same precise forces while carefully using the dark and clear patches to draw dim, flickering pictures on the wellstone of the sail. So far, to his amazement, no one had noticed. Or if they’d noticed, they hadn’t said anything.
Conrad wasn’t much of an artist, and at first he’d restricted himself to geometric patterns. Circles, squares, polygons, simple flags ... Once he’d gotten the hang of it, though, he became more ambitious, and during one particular peek out the window he had looked at the batwing shape of the sail and seen it for what it was: the unrolled and flattened skin of a sphere, exactly like the spiky projecting lozenge shapes of some planetary maps. Every point on the sail corresponded to a point on (or just under) the surface of Camp Friendly. So for several days, in a haze of boredom and odd, nostalgialike enthusiasm, he carefully reconstructed the map of that homely, lovely planette, which he had helped to deface.
Adventure Lake was the easy part: he knew its shape and position very well, having circumnavigated it with a locator and sketchplate during a camp exercise. How Bascal, the Tongan, had chafed at that one! “At the age of five I was sailing in a crater lake that could drown this whole planette!”
The rest of it was much more difficult than Conrad had expected at first. He could reconstruct the locations of a few key buildings by recalling the views from their windows, or the rock formations jutting above the curving horizon, or the length of time required to walk or run between them. But there were actually a lot of buildings in the camp complex, and varied landscape features all over the planette, and his memory of them was surprisingly imperfect.
Still, here was the hobby farm, and the plateau, and the central landmark of the rock formations themselves. Here was the northern outpost of the Young Men’s Camp, and the sprawl of the Boys’ Camp and administrative offices. D’rector Jed’s wayward cabin got a little star to mark its former location. Conrad was working on the forest, to the northeast of Adventure Lake, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
He yelped and jumped.
“Sorry!” Martin Liss said, quickly and sheepishly.
“No concern. It’s my fault,” Conrad told him, turning to look.
“Am I early?”
Conrad glanced at the clock. “No. It’s completely my fault.”
He’d carefully arranged the duty roster so that every single day he’d have at least a few minutes alone, in private, with a different member of the crew. Not to sow the seeds of open mutiny—not yet anyway—but just to talk and work together. To reinforce their acquaintance, to get a better feel for their character and concerns. If a time for mutiny came, or even a time for more subtle action, he wanted to know where the lines would break.
Was it egotistical of him? Possibly, but he wasn’t taking anything on faith anymore. So far he’d learned that Ho was every bit as stupid and shallow and dangerous as he seemed. He also stank, since he refused to give up the clothes he’d gotten in Denver. When pressed on the point, he explained it thusly: if he threw them in the fax, he’d get back a Camp Friendly shirt and culottes, which would suck. He did wash his Denver clothes in the sink every few days, but the smell factor was definitely building up. “I can’t punch; I can’t kick,” he lamented. “But I can stink up the place, and look good doing it.”
Ah.
By contrast, Steve Grush was, if not smarter and nicer, then at least more careful than Ho. Steve was well aware that their odds of success—and perhaps even survival— were slim. He just didn’t have any better prospects, and figured space piracy was worth a shot. People would probably get hurt, but so what? That was what backups were for. It was an unimaginative but pragmatic view. Karl Smoit, for his part, didn’t like being on this mission at all, and was happy to complain about it when nobody else was in earshot.
There was of course the possibility that the wellstone ceiling was spying on them, and nothing was out of earshot, but Conrad didn’t know how to detect that, or what to do about it if he did. Besides, that would be a difficult thing to program into naïve wellstone. Jed was at least “roughing it” to that extent: his ceiling’s library was nearly as limited as the sail fabric itself.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Martin said.
Conrad waved the apology away. “In theory, I was expecting you. In practice, I got distracted.”
This was another thing he’d learned, as part of this underground personnel campaign: that he was terrible at remembering upcoming appointments and events. It was the sort of character flaw that could get a person killed under circumstances like these. He resolved to work on it.
“I see you brought the dust mops,” he said to Martin, who shrugged and handed him one. He took it, disentangled himself from the navigator’s chair, and “stood up” in the zero gravity. He proceeded to brush out the space under the instrument console, and glanced back at Martin. “Shall we?”
“Um, sure.”
“It’s amazing how much dust accumulates, how quickly. I hear it’s mostly human skin cells. We shed, like dogs and cats.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Try over there,” Conrad said, pointing. Then: “So how’s it going, anyway?”
“Good,” Martin replied, in a voice suggesting otherwise.
“Keeping busy?”
“Sure.”
“Obeying the rules?”
Martin snorted. “That’s like a joke, right? Only not really. Yes, I’m obeying the rules. Is there a choice?”
“Why?” Conrad asked. “Is someone giving you a hard time?”
Sullenly: “No.”
“Are you sure? If there is, you can let me know.”
“There isn’t.”
It went on like that for a while. Conrad wished more than once that they could both just come out and say what needed saying, but of course that could endanger either or both of them unless there was already perfect trust. Which there never could be, because they couldn’t really talk. And coming right out with it would also tip Conrad’s hand prematurely, which helped nothing.
But over the hour he developed a clear sense that yeah, Martin did have a problem with all this, and that yeah, to the extent that he trusted anyone in Viridity’s authority chain, he trusted Conrad the most. Not that he’d risk his life for Conrad or anything—probably not for anyone here—but he wouldn’t support the prince if an opportunity came up where he had any choice about it.