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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 78: Cooper 98
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 281
“Sailor, while you’re resting your mind by scraping the rust off the fission fuel ingots, why don’t you explain to me the process by which iron fissions into elements lower on the Table of Elements, what they are, how much is left in volume, mass, what percentage is temporarily ionized, the weight to within ten decimals of excess neutrons--?” The query went on even as Cooper worked hard on the scraping brush, and Angle occasionally interrupted with ‘false reports’ by various ‘messengers’ which made it hard to hear Zait, the senior ironman in the reactor chamber. Scraping rust was part of his job as a sailor; the calculations were training in the field of iron fission, which he would have to understand if he continued into officer’s territory.
Technically, they were on alert today. That didn’t stop normal work activities, but they had been told that they would be passing through a debris field, and should be prepared for any potential mishap. He couldn’t help wondering why, if they knew where the debris field was, they didn’t simply go around it, but that was a question for Brother Ortan in navigation, and as much as he would have preferred training in navigation over polishing iron ingots, this was where he was assigned at present.
There was a ping on the hull.
“What was that?” Angle said in a quite worried voice. Zait sighed.
“That,” he said, “would be the first significant rock to hit the hull in connection with today’s emergency. All right, stations, sailors. We’ll continue this later.”
Cooper didn’t really have an assigned station. He was supposed to be on call, ready to respond in the unlikely event of a hull breach. He stopped by his room. One of his roommates was there, sleeping, so he guessed the others would be in the galley. He found them there sipping beverages, and told them he was going to navigation.
He knocked, and the door opened in a moment. “Brother,” Ortan said.
“Brother,” Cooper replied. “I was hoping I could watch what you’re doing to get through the debris field.”
“Well, you’re welcome to come watch, but not much really. The debris is in orbit around the sun, dragging behind a comet, and it’s really mostly small rocks hundreds of miles apart which we hit because we’re traveling thousands of miles per hour, but unlike a planet we’re a relatively small target, so we don’t hit many. There’s also ice, more common and less dangerous. Most of it is harmless, but a chunk big enough could do a lot of damage if we hit it wrong.”
"What about these inertial field belts?"
"Oh, well, the ship’s systems are the same. But look, your belt will stop a bullet, but a bullet is small, and it’s not really moving that fast, not compared to a spaceship on a long haul. We can stop cannon shells from another ship, but a rock going effectively ten thousand miles per? No."
“And we can’t fly around them because even the really big ones are too small to see well enough in advance to change course around them?”
“Well, the huge ones are all plotted; some of them have names, or at least designations. I take them into account in plotting our course.”
There was a sound like rain on a roof. Cooper’s questioning look apparently communicated, as Ortan answered, “that was a cloud of what you would call sand, rocks that have been pulverized by colliding with each other. If you were outside in a suit, it would be a serious threat, but it’s not a danger to the ship.”
“So, why don’t we just go around the entire stream altogether?”
“What, leave the orbital plane to get past it, and then return? That sometimes makes sense, but it uses more fuel, and in our case it would put us in a very difficult position for trying to rendezvous with Luna. As it is, we’ve got the trick of trying to get to Luna on the sun side of Earth. Trying to get back into the planetary orbital plane at the same time would be very tricky. Speaking of which, it’s about time for a course adjustment.”
As Ortan turned his attention to the directional controls, Cooper realized that they did nothing, or nothing he had seen, by computer. The conquest of space in his own universe had become possible because of the advances in electronic computing, but here he saw none where they would have made much sense--not here in navigation where Ortan calculated trajectories by hand, not in the engine room where Zait was training him to calculate power yields from fission in his head. Did they even have computers? Is it just that no one ever thought to create them--no one on a dozen inhabited worlds if you included the inhabited moons ever had a situation that prompted them to build the equivalent of a Babbage Machine? Or was there some law against them, like in that book in which it had been decreed that no one was allowed to build a machine to do the job of a man, by which they meant think?
He wasn’t sure who to ask. Indeed, he wasn’t even sure what to ask. If they were illegal, he was carrying contraband and would prefer it not get out. He had been finding quiet isolated corners in which to read his Bible simply because he always had his study time in private and felt uncomfortable doing otherwise. He would have to be careful about that at least until he knew otherwise.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
