Alienist. Laurence M. Janifer
few programs built into the boards. Most of those did not immediately look useful—I carry a fair number of interactives to while away trip time, and I could debug most of those, some letter-writing equipment, and my several files of music tapes.
And even they, I realized after the first few seconds, had some use for me, right there and then. I could check what the boards told me those programs were doing against what (according to the portables) they actually were doing—and get some idea of where my machinery was playing games.
First things first, though: I was still, apparently, going at the Hell of a clip toward God knew where. Was this illusion?
I dragged out a large, unwieldy box with snake attachments, thumbed its primary switch, showed it the relevant boards, and set it down at the rear of the cabin. The thing weighed about sixty pounds, and, I hoped, was going to be worth every last ounce.
The snakes fished around, found connections, sockets and shielded holes, flipped shields open where indicated, settled into the sockets and connections, and hummed for what felt like ten or twelve years, and was actually (its little topside clock told me) thirty-eight seconds. Then its dials and displays began to read out.
My engines, according to the tester, were putting out eight-tenths of max power, and exhaust was encountering minimal resistance.
This defines as going at the Hell of a clip through empty space. I punched in a stop command, waited, punched in a stop-fuel-feed command, waited, punched in a stop-fusion-run command, and waited some more. Any one of the three should act to stop my engines, and perhaps, by some wild mischance, one of them would.
The tester told me, a few seconds later, that one of them had. I was now, at least, not increasing the clip I was going at. Slowing down was going to be something else again, and putting the ship into braking mode might, it occurred to me, do something fatal to the works. I might be left with a ship I couldn’t control at all—or, if an explosion decided to happen, with no ship whatever.
Well, what else was new? I punched in braking orders. By that time, I was holding my breath, and when I noticed the fact I told myself firmly that breathing was a necessary and even a desirable function, and climbed slowly back to something within hailing distance of normal.
The tester couldn’t quite tell me that the brakes were on, but it could tell me that engine function had resumed, and that the direction of exhaust had changed. What I needed was a way of finding out what my speed was relative to the rest of the universe, so to speak, and I wished, a little bemusedly, for Sherlock Holmes’ tools. On a train from somewhere to somewhere—en route to Baskerville Hall, if memory served, where he was going to investigate a Houn’ Dog—Holmes had calculated the speed of the train he was on because the telegraph poles it passed were a quarter-mile apart, and “the calculation,” he told his publicist, a fellow named Whatsis, “is a simple one.”
So it would be, if I could find some telegraph poles out there, at known distances. My locator would show me the local star field, and just possibly identify one or two of the handier objects—but how could I trust the information it gave me? There is no way to run a check on a locator, short of a full field shop; locators are what you expect to run checks with.
Well, there might be a way.
The board clock had gone on automatically when I’d dropped out of space-four, but I didn’t have to trust it; the big engine tester had a clock, and my alarm is a portable, because I can rig it to wake me and not disturb anyone else who happens to be sleeping aboard. Neither could tell me the precise millisecond I’d come back to normal space—the board clock would do that—but if both agreed not only with each other (which they did) but with the board clock, too, about what time it was being, I could then take the board figure for return to normal space as a first approximation. What eight-tenths max would give me for initial speed I knew without much thought, and the millisecond at which I’d got response to my brake command, the tester clock and my portable alarm would tell me—had told me, in fact, and identically, and I’d filed the readings, noticing both out of an eye-corner, without having to think about it. I would then have initial speed, and a start from which to measure duration of my braking burn.
So I could find out just when I’d be at a dead stop, and could at that point (I hoped) turn off the braking I’d just turned on.
The calculation was a simple one—for a good hand calculator, suitably instructed. I watched my alarm, handier than the tester clock at the rear of the cabin, like a hawk, or a bandsaw, or something or other, and punched in all the stop commands at time zero.
The tester told me there was no engine function.
Cheers and applause. I was now somewhere, and I would be at the same somewhere for a while. Step two, at last, coming up.
I fed in two interactives—the first two I happened to grab, Conversational Saurian and a little thing called Old Earth Burleycue—some Kurt Weill tapes (after reaching for Laura Quink’s Songs from the 20th, and deciding I wasn’t at all in the mood for charming antique folk guitar), and my letter-writer, one at a time. The debug programs told me that the things were doing what my boards showed me they were doing—but the boards insisted they were, each and all, doing their things perfectly. This was not quite the case.
That was worrisome. There were some fascinating small oddities. The letter-writer worked just as specified, except that it did everything in duplicate. The Saurian tape—I was doing a refresher course, in hopes of getting back to Rasmussen some time soon—seemed to be all right.
The Kurt Weill bits I tried—Surabaya Johnny and the Army Song—played at something like twice normal speed, boosting everything into a manic sprint and turning the rough baritones of the Army Song into chirping little sopranos. And Old Earth Burleycue did its usual cheery and stimulating job with the stage show, selecting two lovely and accomplished strippers from its varied cast, but kept going into freeze during my visits to the backstage dressing rooms.
I punched for some beef, rolls, horseradish and the makings for coffee, added in iced mango as a dessert, and was faintly surprised that it all arrived at speed. I made myself a small scratch dinner and thought things over while I chewed.
Uncertainty is built into space-four, as everybody knows. Figuring out what had done the damage was a job for a mathematician and a space-four theorist, and could wait any amount of time. Figuring out what damage had been done was something else again.
Circuitry and wave guidance had been hurt, somehow; that much was clear. But what had changed, as far as I could trace, was in response circuitry: speed response for the Weill, singularity for my letters program, rate of response for the Burleycue. I wasn’t getting material out of left field; I was getting the material my boards said I was getting, delivered a little oddly.
That, I could live with. It gave me some hope that my locator would provide answers I could trust, though possibly not at its usual speed.
At any rate, it gave me enough hope to punch up the locator again, point it at the surround, and instruct it to tell me where the Hell I was.
It took four full minutes to respond—not unheard-of, but very unusual. The response time for my rig averages about eighteen seconds; in difficult cases, perhaps thirty-one.
And the response (I translate freely from the program) was, when it finally did arrive:
“Damned if I know.”
I did not scream and curse. Somehow, I’d been expecting as much; whatever had bit me was not, I had been assuming, going to be satisfied with dumping me, say, in orbit around Kingsley, or Alphacent, or within shouting distance of Mars Dome.
No, it was going to do what it had done—the complete job. If I was going to be lost, it had decided, I was going to be entirely lost.
The first query for any locator is Where am I? The second is Star Ident. If you need the second, you are in trouble, but how serious the trouble is you can’t know until the thing checks in with a set of idents. Or, of course, doesn’t—if there is nothing whatever that can be identified for H-R placement and spectral signature, you are in more trouble than you ever