“Oh, she’s all right. Just big…what’s on the screen?”
“Power equivalences. This experiment in protracted discomfort. You know what Monday-morning quarter-backing is?”
“Cricket term?”
“Never mind. Just figuring out what the total energy waste is going to be, spinning up and spinning down. Enough to run the ship’s life support systems for five months. For a largely irrelevant test.”
“I don’t know. We’ve already found out that goats can’t cavort on heavy planets.”
“The stresses that are actually going to vary are longitudinal and pitchwise, not radial. Be a more logical, and economical, test to accelerate full-blast for a day, then flip and come back. But nobody listens to Dr. Ogelby.”
“You’re the expert, though. Isn’t strength of materials what the test is all about?”
“Well, yes and no. I’m the expert in the sense that a nutritionist would be the expert in a kitchen. They don’t let him dictate the menu.” He turned off the machine. “Even though that would be best for all concerned.”
Suddenly there was a deep shuddering sound, like a huge bell rung once in the distance. “Shit,” John said, and sat up suddenly. “Something popped. Try the door.”
I stepped over to the door and palmed the button; it opened normally. There was real pandemonium two doors down. I closed it on the noise.
“No nearby pressure drop, then.” John had tapped in a sequence that gave him a spread-out diagram of the ship, titled DAMAGE CONTROL. “Nothing yet.” After about a minute, a large area on the outermost shell, about ten levels’ worth, began blinking red. Red letters alongside the diagram blinked “PP O2 < 40 mm Hg.”
“Christ. How much less than forty millimeters? I wonder if anyone’s alive in there.”
“That’s all housing,” I said, “but there can’t be many people there, at two gees. Everyone’s up here.”
“We’ll see.”
“Should we call someone, find out what’s happening?”
“No. They’ll call here soon enough.” He turned on the general information channel, where an anonymous voice was telling everyone not to panic; just stay put, we’ll soon know what the problem is. After a minute Jules Hammond came on and calmly told everyone to move away from the outermost two shells, either into the interior or up to Uchū…den. Then there was another noise, not as loud. (It was almost worth the disaster to see old Hammond actually flinch.) John put the map back on and we saw that the damaged area had expanded on both sides, to cover fourteen levels. The red letters now said “PP 02 = 0,” hard vacuum.
“It’s like a seam splitting,” John said. “I wonder how far it can go.”
“Are we in any danger?”
He shrugged. “Can’t tell. Theoretically not. But the-oretically this shouldn’t be happening.”
Eliot Smith’s image appeared on the screen. “This is going to everyone Grade Fifteen and above. Look, we don’t know what’s happening yet. Appears to have stopped. We have an inspection team going out, and we’re spinning down as fast as possible. The damaged areas are Shell One, Levels Twelve to Twenty-six. We think most of the levels were vacant, but anybody who was in there is dead unless they were near a suit.
“That’s all I or anybody else knows. Don’t tie things up by calling my office or anyplace else for information. I’ll be back in touch as soon as there’s news.”
I started to get the shakes. I’d been in Shell One all morning, as close to the damaged area as Level Thirty. John held me for a while and then fed me some wine. Dan and Evy both called to make sure I was safe.
Eventually they found forty-eight desiccated bodies in the blown-out area, and one woman lost both legs below the knee, cut off by the emergency doors as she scrambled for safety. Nine more casualties turned up after roll call, their bodies evidently wafted into space through the rent that suddenly appeared in the floor.
It was sabotage. Two people had gone in a week before Spin-up, cordoned off an area, pulled up the floor plates, and systematically cut through a score of foamsteel girders. They had the proper uniforms and had covered themselves by putting a phony work order in the computer, but nobody had bothered to check. They were radical Devonites who had come aboard under false identities. They left a note explaining what they had done and why, intimating that they had done more, and then committed suicide by electrocution during sex. (Simultaneous orgasm is a sacrament to Devonites, but that sounds like too much of a good thing.)
The repairs would only take a few days, but the sabotage slowed us down by a lot more than that. Every centimeter of the ship had to be inspected for more sabotage, which would take some weeks. More than two thousand people decided they wanted to go back to New New. I had five months to come up with replacements, and I suspected it would be a little harder to find people this time around.
The whole ship was at zerogee while repairs were going on. It was bothersome but interesting. The only places equipped with Velcro carpets were the two small shells nearest the hub, so everyplace else you had to sort of bounce off the walls. I got pretty good at it after a couple of days, but then I’d had a lot more practice than most people, not only in New New’s recreation area but also during the long isolation periods. Some people never got used to it, always winding up stranded in the middle of a corridor. Hundreds had to be evacuated because they couldn’t stop vomiting. We cleaned up constantly, but the ship had a definite gastric odor for weeks.
Work was a little hard at first because sitting is an unnatural posture in zerogee, and the chair in front of my console is permanently welded in place. I was holding on to the chair with one hand and typing with the other, a slow process. Finally I improvised a seat belt by sacrificing two head bands, and my problems became more properly abstract.
A disproportionate number of the people who lost heart were “singles,” people with no counterparts in New New. I could eventually get most of their profiles through HI, assuming New New would cooperate and beam the information to me, but some would be lost forever. About one person in five can’t handle the process, and of those that could, some were going to die before they would get a turn on the machine.
I didn’t know any of the people who died in the sabotage, though of course I had communicated briefly with all of them during Start-up. All but three had been down in the two-gee area for exercise; physical fitness extremists. Ironically, most of them were Reform Devonites (who, like their orthodox brothers, seem hellbent on carrying a huge set of muscles to an early grave).
4 
With one month to go, I was suddenly deluged—more than five hundred people changed their minds and decided they’d rather go back to New New.
“We could force them to stay,” Daniel said. All four of us were together, a fairly rare thing, picking at box lunches in John’s room. “They did sign a contract.”
“Sure they did,” I said. No request to leave had ever been refused. Who would want to spend a century with people there against their will?
“What is the breakdown like?” John asked. “Losing a lot of singles?”
“Not this time. A lot of lowechelon engineers, unfortunately; maintenance people.”
“No training problem, at least,” Daniel said.
“Take your research cronies and make them do some useful work,” Evelyn said.
Dan shook his head. “Some of them. We’ll spare the m/a research, anyhow. I want to live to see Epsilon.” This was something the scientists had been mum about until last week. We might be able to get considerably more speed out of the ship than its original design allowed for. The m/a drive worked out to an overall efficiency of only fifteen percent of emceesquared. But there was very little practical research on the propulsion system; nobody had ever seen a full-scale one until S-l used it for the return trip from Janus. Now, we were going to have one blasting constantly for over a year, with an army of scientists and engineers scrutinizing it—followed by unlimited time to mull over their observations.