Jim Baen's Universe

NSF Contest Winner

A Better Sense of Direction

Written by Mike Wood

 Illustrated by R.Stephen Adams

We ran out of tinned spaghetti-in-tomato-sauce less than seven years into the voyage. For my daughter, Stella, it was a crisis. Stella had always hated space rations, but she was okay with tinned spaghetti. It was the only thing she ever seemed to eat. Stella was six years old, and anyone who has ever spent time with a six-year-old will know how fussy they can be with food. Stella’s relationship with tinned spaghetti was more a fixation. She didn’t just eat the stuff; she didn’t just play with it; she communed with it.

The spaghetti crisis wasn’t the first trauma to follow Stella’s unplanned arrival on the crew list, but for Jodie and me, it was probably the most unsettling. Accommodation on a starship is cramped, and privacy is a scarce commodity, so a tantrum under these conditions, let me tell you, is a tantrum on steroids.

****

Stella was the first true child-of-the stars. She was conceived on the starship and she was born on the starship. Children had always been part of the mission plan, hence the low average age of the crew (Babes in Space, they called us). But it had never been part of the plan to have the first birth take place only nine months out of Earth orbit.

To be fair, a young crew is an impetuous crew, and Jodie and I, being scientists (of a sort), were drawn to experimentation. Our ship, Castor, had been suspended at L2 for the three days that were set aside for crew embarkation and provisioning. Jodie and I were amongst the first to board. We had just three days of weightlessness before the photon engines were due to fire-up, hitting us with the point-two gee of thrust that would be our constant companion for the next twenty-odd years; ten years accelerating then ten more years to wind it back down.

“Jodie,” I said, “have you ever wondered what it might be like in zero gravity?”

“I don’t need to wonder. This is zero gravity. It sucks. I’ve been puking for four hours.”

“No, Jodie, you misunderstand. I’m talking about what it might be like. You know . . .” I winked. I worked my eyebrows up and down my face in a choreography of suggestiveness.

“Ah.”

She got my drift.

“Did you misunderstand what I just said, Luke . . . about the puking?”

“Space-sickness is in the mind. All you need is something that will take your mind off it.”

“And you reckon . . .”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Well, okay then.”

So we had three days—three days in which to explore the boundaries of science. Well, let me assure you, zero-gee-nooky is not up to much. It’s tricky, it’s horribly messy, and it is not a cure for space-sickness. Also, it is rife with unexpected dangers. I managed torn ligaments as well as a four-day concussion, while Jodie brought the whole, sorry experience to a close by dislocating her thumb. Then the engines powered-up. With the return of gravity the space-sickness sufferers perked up . . . but not Jodie. Her space-sickness metamorphosed, seamlessly, into morning sickness.

Captain Bligh (her real name’s Catherine Blair) was furious when we told her the results of our adventure. She even threatened to turn the ship around and send us home, but the accountants, God bless them, saved us on that call. What the captain did insist on, though, was that we share a cabin and assume joint responsibility for the baby’s upbringing. This was fine by me; I’d had a thing for Jodie ever since college. Jodie wasn’t quite so pleased, though, and she sulked about the arrangement for many months afterwards. I put this down to hormonal changes. I knew she would come round eventually, and I was right. She gave up throwing stuff at me a couple of years ago, and we moved to a mutually stress-free and congenial silence. Our relationship did not blossom into what you’d call love, but at least she stopped trying to trick me into the air-lock.

I first noticed Jodie at college. It was her walk. She had the action. Jodie’s walk could stop traffic, usually in a way that involved broken glass, rolling hubcaps and seeping pools of oil and antifreeze. She didn’t seem to realise the effect that she was having on her immediate environment. She would glide through town with those hips all swaying and pulsing to a Caribbean beat, and the traffic accidents would simply pile up around her. And then I noticed the T shirts, with slogans printed across her boobs: “Beam me up Scotty,” “ . . . to boldly go,” “Make it so.” She was a Trekky.

I tracked down the local branch and joined. I went to all the meetings, the screenings . . . I bought the Spock ears. I learned enough Klingon to get by, and I moved in on her inner circle.

But we never spoke. I was one of her entourage; the drooling, pathetic onlookers; the pimply male adolescent no-hopers. I seemed destined to be, forever, a voyeur by day and a fantasist by night.

Then I overheard a conversation. She and a small group of her inner circle friends had signed up for Castor and Pollux. Jodie was hard-core Trekky, and she was heading for the stars. The very next day I signed up myself. I went through the interviews and the pre-selection training and the medicals . . . I hung in there. The numbers were pared down. Each evening the TV audiences voted, and more of us fell by the wayside until, at last, the United States of Europe had their four viewer-selected reps: Me, Jodie, Jorge and Chantel. Jodie and Jorge drew Castor, and I drew Pollux, with Chantel. I was supposed to be ecstatic, but I was devastated. The two ships were to fly, side-by-side, for twenty-odd years, and there could be no physical contact between the crews. I never really wanted to even make the trip, I mean, twenty years! I’d faked the psychs; I had motivation but it wasn’t space that drove me on.

I wrote the email. I was bailing, and my finger was actually hovering over the send button when the news broke; Jorge had concealed a genetic disorder that came about from his tight-fisted father using a back-street baby-designer during his conception, and he was bumped. The reserve, Henri, was French, like Chantel, so they shunted Jodie over to Castor with me. Two Brits, two French. There were also four Asians—the rest, thirty-two on each ship, were American.

Jodie and I became a team, sort of. And, well, you know the rest.

****

So, the spaghetti crop failed, and Stella went on one for a couple of weeks. Things were so desperate I even tried replicating spaghetti by extruding homemade pasta through a spare photon diffuser, then mixing in some tomato paste and boiling the lot to hell and back. Everyone, the whole crew, loved it . . . except Stella. It wasn’t the same as tinned. It got me posted in the galley, though. I was happier there. My speciality was drive systems, but I’d faked the exams. It made me a bit jumpy when I was poking around in there with my greasy rag when there’re so many lives hanging on my imaginary expertise. The engines were sparky-clean, but I knew jack about fixing them if they ever stopped firing. Brad, the cook, on the other hand was a choux-chef, and very frustrated in a culinary world of concentrates, and he knew more about photon drive systems than I did. So we swapped, and we were both happier for it.

Stella sleeps through these days, and so, therefore, do Jodie and I. So, when I was dragged from sleep by the alarm after only four hours of zzs, I felt particularly cheated. I’d only recently reacquainted myself with the luxury of eight straight hours. But it wasn’t Stella, this time; it was Captain Bligh, calling the full crew to the galley, the only room where we could all assemble. Last time we were here was when the weird stuff started happening with the marker stars, a few years ago.

“Thanks for coming down,” she said, as if we had any choice. “We have a problem.”

“It’s the thrust isn’t it?” Jodie said. There were a number of nodding heads. Quite a few had noticed.

“Pollux has been pulling away from us for a couple of days. Nothing serious to begin with, but in the last few hours it’s become more noticeable.”

“I’ve got greens right across the board,” said Brad. “Can’t be the engines.”

“Unless we’re venting, for’ard, it can’t be much else,” said Bligh. “Brad, I want you and Luke to get your heads together and run a full set of diagnostics on the drive. I’ll come and help. Anyone else got any ideas?”

There were blank looks.

“Okay, so we need an end-to-end integrity-check . . . everyone. The instruments aren’t showing any anomalies, but they could be faulty. It’s hands-on, I’m afraid. I want every inch of the hull examined.”

The gathering broke up amid a sotto-voce chorus of grumbles and curses. An end-to-end was a miserable task, involving hours of crawling and wriggling into the most claustrophobic, cold and inhospitable corners of the ship. I was relieved to have drawn the cerebral option.

It took Captain Bligh five hours to find the cause. She called us all back to the galley. I saw what she had found, and suddenly I developed an overwhelming urge to go end-to-ending; to find one of those cold, cramped corners and hide there.

“Here, in my hand, I have a photon diffuser,” she announced. “There are carbon deposits. The resulting hot-spots have damaged the machining.” And now she raised her voice to an accusatory level. “I was puzzled about the carbon. How could carbon deposits form in this way? The components were installed in ionised white-room conditions.”

She scratched some of the black carbon off and rubbed it between her fingers.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is pasta.”

And she looked straight at me.

Everybody looked straight at me. They looked at their chapped and blistered fingers, the result of five hours of arctic end-to-ending, then they looked, again, at me.

There are times when one longs for a duvet under which to crawl.

The captain wasn’t finished.

“What is more,” she said, “this is the spare. The one in the engine—the one currently holding us back to just point eight gee, is in better shape.”

She looked straight at me again, then looked at each of the thirty-five worried faces.

“Questions?”

“What’s the bottom line?” This was Anjana, the pilot.

“The bottom line is, at our current loss of acceleration, status quo maintained, we’ve added about four years to our journey time. On the other hand, my gut feeling is that the diffuser will continue to degrade, then . . . who knows?”

“Don’t we have more than one spare?”

“There’s triple redundancy on all the stressed parts. The diffuser isn’t stressed. We have one spare to cover the minimal risk of build flaws. The planners are at fault, they didn’t anticipate the additional stresses imposed by cookery.”

“How about Pollux? Can we use their spare?” said Jodie.

The captain shook her head. “The unstressed parts, the minimal redundancy items, are shared inventory. We carry some of the spares, Pollox carries others. This is the one spare diffuser for Castor and Pollux. I called Captain Schiffer, just to be sure, and he confirmed—this is the only one.”

“Can’t we repair it?” I asked. My voice was tiny and unwelcome.

The captain looked at me for a long, silent moment, then said,

“No.”

****

“Daddy, why don’t people like you any more?” It had only taken Stella a couple of days to pick up the bad vibes.

“What makes you think nobody likes me?” I didn’t have a comfortable answer, so I was stalling for time.

“They call you names.”

“They’re just a bit upset, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“It’s going to take us all a bit longer to get to New World, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Your Daddy made a mistake with the engines, honey. It’s nothing more. They’re all overreacting.” Jodie had leapt to my defence. This was unprecedented. I began to think that she was, well, starting to warm towards me a little. Then I realised that she was deflecting our daughter away from an associated matter. I had made the pasta to try and appease Stella’s long and apocalyptic temper tantrums. Stella had wanted spaghetti.

“If everyone’s so upset about us taking longer, Daddy, then why don’t we just go straight there?”

“No, honey, we’re going slower, that’s all. It will take us a few more years because we’re not gaining speed quite so quickly,” said Jodie.

“So why don’t we just go the short way?”

I took over trying to explain. “If I want to go from the front of the ship to the back of the ship it will take longer if I walk slower, see?”

Stella exploded in a frustrated storm of tears.

“I know that. You said. But if you want to get there quicker . . . Why . . ! Not . . ! Go . . ! The short way!” She screamed the words. She threw her beaker of juice across the room. It bounced off the holo’ and sticky, fluorescent orange liquid exploded onto the front screen and dripped down onto the carpet. Jodie and I looked at each other. We’d seen this sort of thing coming before. We knew the signs.

“I’m not sure what you mean, honey. Explain to me.” I tried to sound patient.

Stella’s bottom lip was quivering with frustration or rage or something, but she gathered some control, then, with a straight arm, she pointed out to her left.

“New World is there,” she said. Then she pointed straight up above her head, towards the front of the ship.

“We’re going that way. We’re just going down the spaghetti!” she shouted the last word.

I looked over at Jodie and shrugged. I was worried that my daughter was having some kind of a mental crisis. Maybe living in space all her life . . .

Jodie came over and put her hand lightly on my arm.

“Wait,” she said. She didn’t want me saying any more. Her eyes held a strange, almost wondrous expression. “Explain again, darling, for Mummy.”

“We keep going