Tales of the Flying Mountains (29 page)

We met a number of dwellers as we walked, male and female, moving along the halls or in and out of the apartments. They hailed Furlow, who seemed popular, and he made jovial response. The place might almost have been a small new settlement in the Belt.

Almost. Not quite. The difference, the wrongness grew on me with each step I took.

There were no children; that was to be expected at this stage. But there were too many old people. Nearly half of those I saw were wrinkled, white-haired, worn down by time. They kept their vigor; decks have been mopped with more than one Earthside tourist who referred to an aged asterite as a Senior Citizen. But they had spent most of their years.

And their briskness was lacking in the young. With few exceptions, those in the prime of life sauntered rather than strode, loafed around in a park circle through which we passed, sat slackly behind half-open doors watching 3V. Unlike the old, they tended to be pale and soft.

I did spy one good-looking group of youngsters, bounding along in a cloud of laughter. But they weren't on duty. The apparatus they carried was for a game of spaceball. And … I'm no prude, but some of the boy-girl antics weren't seemly … in public … on a ship!

“Haven't they anything better to do?” I exclaimed.

“Why, no,” Furlow said. “Isn't it common knowledge? Part of the eventual crew are already aboard because they're concerned with preparations or maintenance, like me. But a larger part is simply here for the free food and lodging. How else could we attract them?”

Awhirl with bewilderment, I barely noticed his continuing talk while he hustled me onward:

“Getting back to our trouble, I'm sorry to say it of your outfit, Win, but I'm certain the fault is lousy design. No blame on you; you didn't draw the plans. And the components are okay. You know your company doesn't make but a few of those. It buys units from specialist manufacturers and fits them together. The black box principle, hey, boy? When something blows, you don't muck around trying to find one transistor or whatever the little dingbat is, one out of maybe a million, and fix it or replace it. No, you see right away on the meter which sealed unit isn't taking in the input or putting out the output. You yank that whole unit, plug in a fresh one, and repair the damage at your leisure.”

I thought, vaguely, that he didn't mean to insult me with a kindergarten lecture. He merely suffered from logorrhea. Perhaps he wasn't even listening to himself. I tried not to. The thunders rolled remorselessly on:

“Well, now. Our power grid worked fine at first. Just fine. But then, several months back, it started going floomp. Irregular intervals, no predicting when. Nor any predicting which boxes would blow. They might be in the voltage regulation, the phasing control, the amplification, anywhere. Suddenly, boom, several units stop operating. Alarms sound, ring-ding-ding, poor Uncle Hodge got to tumble out of a sound sleep, like as not, and come fixeefixee. We've got bypasses and standbys, sure. Nothing bad happens, no shutdown. But you don't like being without plugged-in spares, not in space you don't, hey? So you replace the blown units.

“Then you try to figure out what made them blow. I took charge of that. Opened each one myself. That was another reason I prevailed on the Foundation to delay calling in the contractor. We have to be absolutely certain that we can make every repair ourselves. You can't trot across any four and a half light-years to lend a hand, can you, my boy?

“In every box, the inside components were fused, so badly that it wasn't worth repairing, not even worth removing the parts that had escaped damage.”

I grew alert. He hadn't told me anything I didn't know, but he sounded as if now he might. “I'd like to check those boxes too,” I said.

Furlow raised beefy shoulders and let them fall again. “Sorry. I only kept one to show. For the rest, well, you realize how it is, Win. Skilled labor is worth more, by a good big factor, than the machine time it takes to make new units like these. So, like I said, repairing them wouldn't pay. However, each one
is
pretty damn expensive. Think of those rare elements and special isotopes that have to be put into the crystal structures just so. They don't come cheap. In fact, the Foundation's getting awful worried about these losses.

“So, trying to save the project what money I could. I've been shipping the ruined units to Mountain King Electronics on Hebe. They buy 'em to salvage the valuable nuclides. That way, a little of the cost gets returned to the Foundation. Not much, but a little.”

I hadn't known that, though it was obvious that continual replacement of sophisticated black boxes would in time become financially murderous. My concern had been with the functioning of the system itself. Furlow was right; once the ship was off in interstellar space, he couldn't order supplies or bring in consultants. And what
Astra
could carry was limited.

And without interior power—for light, heat, ventilation, weight, bionics, utilities, a thousand different and essential machines—her people were dead.

“You have kept a spoiled unit, you said?” I asked.

“Yes, sure, sure, I expected somebody'd want to see one. It's from a six-way junction-point current distributor. You can take my word its condition is typical.… But here we are. Here's the dear old fuel tank.”

A racket of voices and boom-boom music had been growing around us. Turning a corner, we saw the Pallas Palace. It was a sizable cabin with a vitryl bulkhead fronting on the hall. A bar was to the rear, tables to the front, a small dance floor on one side. Despite the early hour, it held a score or so, and saxophones were moaning out of a speaker. I don't like saxophones. My boyhood was misspent on a farm asteroid, and I got tired of listening to lovesick cows.

We made our way through the air, which was smoky enough to cut, among beer-wet tables and past squirming dancers, to the bar. It had live service. That didn't surprise me; why haul the mass of needless automata out of the Solar System? What did surprise, and dismay, was that crewfolk—they could only be crewfolk—were behaving like this.

“Morning, Ed, morning!” Furlow bellowed above the noise. “Double bourbon, straight, and what'll you have, Win? On me.”

I tried to refuse, but he was so insistent that finally I took a soft drink. I also hate soft drinks.

We were standing there sipping, Furlow hailing everybody in sight and occasionally reaching out to paw some giggling girl, when a hand closed around my arm and a voice said, “My God, if it isn't Winston Sanders! Hoy, lad!”

I turned, and choked. The man was slim, dapper, sharp-featured, with slick black hair and snapping brown eyes. I knew him of old, a college chum. We'd seen each other infrequently since I became an engineer dispatched from world to world and he settled down in an insurance agency on Juno; but our reunions were good. It had saddened me two years ago to see, in a letter from a mutual acquaintance, that Jake Jaspers had been convicted of embezzlement.

“Son of a bitch!” The traditional spaceman's oath sputtered out of me. He grabbed my hand almost as energetically as Furlow but, somehow, more warmly. After a second I put aside both astonishment and moralism. We pounded each other on the back and I ordered a beer after all.

“What're you doing here, Jake?”

“Oh, passing the time. I'm in the steward's department, accounting office, but till the next load of gear arrives, I've nothing to account about, and my wife—say, I bet you don't know I'm married. Can you come to dinner? Have you signed on with us?”

“No, I'm troubleshooting. But, uh, that is, I heard——”

Jaspers laughed, entirely at ease. “That! My sentence was suspended on condition I join this ship. We've got quite a few like me.”

I was glad for his sake. You can debate whether the Republic is right in rejecting Earth-style psycho-rehabilitation as an insult to the individual and a menace to liberty. But you can't blink the fact that our labor bases are pretty bleak. Not inhumane, of course; most have facilities for recreation, conjugal visits, spare-time education; and the work done is socially useful; but I'd hate to spend several years in one, and it'd have been worse for a
bon vivant
like Jake Jaspers.

Nevertheless—a starship with criminals in the crew?

“Sure, I'd be happy to come eat,” I mumbled. He told me his apartment number, we set a time, and then I managed to detach Furlow from the bar.

He guided me through several deeper levels. Near the axis of the vessel, we stopped. Here was the core of the complex over which he presided: control rooms, workshops, the great central computer and its satellites scattered through the whole ship. On the way I had mentally reviewed the schematics.

The energy source was the same set of fusion reactors that activated the gyrogravitic drive. There was no reason to install another set for Furlow's department. If either engines or interior grid failed, the ship was equally doomed. But naturally, this mutual use complicated an already difficult problem.

The reactors had given no trouble. They continued faithfully furnishing as much power as desired. What kept breaking down was the distribution of that power.

“I take for granted you've run independent checks on the computers,” I said.

“Independent and exhaustive, my boy. On the main one, on the auxiliaries, and on the lot of them in every combination and permutation. Look over my results if you want. Nothing came out less than magnificent.” Furlow puffed himself up. “If I couldn't make sure of that, I shouldn't be in this job, hey?”

I nodded irritably. It was a duck-billed platitude. The chief electrical engineer had to be good in all specialties that concerned his work, but first and foremost he had to be a computerman.

The schematics went on running through my brain. Counting the square kilometers of inside space—cabins, holds, corridors, shops, machine sites—
Astra
had the dimensions of a large city. And her power requirements were more, in volume as well as intricacy. Life might flourish aboard her, balancing its intake and outgo as automatically as life does on the mother world. But maintaining an environment where this was possible—in a hull alone for decades in airless, sunless, radiation-riddled space—took a network of artifacts whose complexity approached that of a living organism. And every one of those artifacts drew the energy that ran it from the electrical web which, simultaneously, linked them all together.

Here a heater, there a cooler; here a light, there a stove; here a cybernet requiring EMF exact to the microvolt, there a superwaldo drawing five hundred amps; here a radiation meter detecting single electrons, there a screen field which, created in an emergency, sucked megajoules in its first few seconds of buildup; and on and on, endless kilometers of wire, millions of transformers, transducers, electronic valves, amplifiers, regulators, generators, motors.… The human mind could no more visualize this creation of the human mind than an embryo can imagine the adult into which it will change itself.

“Okay,” I said, foreseeing the answer, “what do you think is at fault in these breakdowns?”

“I told you,” Furlow stated. “Rotten design. Maybe no one could've done better than your company did. Nothing quite like this has ever been made before. But the upshot is, the system's unbalanced. It's liable to violent surges, where positive feedback sets in—not throughout the whole, which'd at least trip circuit breakers, but locally. Before safety devices can operate, a number of components have gotten more juice than they can take.”

“But the computers,” I objected, “especially the main one, the computers are supposed to keep track of the current flow and vary it according to capacity as well as demand.”

“Yeah, they're supposed to. Only they aren't doing it, my boy, they aren't doing it. Now and then they lose control. Right away you get a situation like a power blackout in an old-time interstate grid.”

“What would cause the loss of control?”

“Probably inadequate monitoring. The instruments which keep the computers ‘aware' of the state of the system at every point and every instant—well, my theory is that sometimes those instruments get ‘confused' and send false information. This makes the computers order some very wrong shunting, which bollixes the monitors still worse, and so it goes. In a few milliseconds, you've built up bad trouble. Then after the damage has been done, when the standbys and bypasses cut in, the coefficients change and you get proper operation again—for a while.”

I scowled and tugged my chin. “As for what starts the ‘confusion,'” I said, “you feel that the system itself does?”

“Yeah. You can't expect monitors, computers, and regulators to do everything when a grid is this size and this complicated. The grid has got to have some inherent stability. True?”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed reluctantly.

“Well, this one doesn't seem to.”

“If you're right,” I said, “the whole works will have to be ripped out, redesigned, rebuilt, retested——”

“Well, nobody's going to travel with a power system we can't trust.”

“You might not get the chance to quit,” I told him. “You may simply get laid off when they abort the project. My company contracted to put in a grid according to an agreed-on design. Our warranty only covers workmanship. It has to be that way; it's normal practice, in a largely experimental job like this. We're not obliged to do it over from zero, for nothing, and we won't, because we can't afford to. And the Astra Foundation doesn't have infinite money, either.”

Having already faced on my own account the possibility of a total abort—since Furlow's diagnosis was bound to occur to any person who dealt with this kind of layout—I spoke in sadness rather than dismay. Also, I noticed, in puzzlement more than sadness. Because damnation, the grid ought not to be unstable! It wasn't that different from the ones in places like Tritown.