Rendezvous in Space
“I am somewhat fatigued, Corporal, since you aren’t kind enough to inquire.”
The Lieutenant was dressed from collar to shoe-soles after the fashion of our hosts (or captors) except that his wounded arm was sealed inside the silvery-gray suit, folded across his chest. “Nor shall I be using this—” he indicated the missing sleeve, “—for quite some time, I gather. Aside from that, well, I consider the alternative.”
His skin-tone was good. His movements seemed powerful. There was a healthy sparkle in his eyes—especially once he caught sight of Lucille.
“Well, well! Pardon me, Corporal—you were through with that chair, anyway, were you not? What have we here, gentlemen, a veritable cactus-blossom among the thorns?” Rosy fingers seemed to brush along Lucille’s white, graceful neck, well up into her cheeks. She stared down with apparent shyness at the table-top, nervously fingering a napkin.
Me, I must have eaten too much at dinner. I suddenly wanted to regurgitate.
“More likely just another thorn, Lieutenant,” answered Geoffrey Couper before the girl could speak. “A more decorative one than most, admittedly. Sir, allow me to introduce my colleagues. Owen Rogers; I believe that your term is ‘armorer’, also Sc.D., Praxeology, Mekstrom University Limited, Titan—one of the habitable moons in our system. Captain Williamson you’ve met. I’m Geoff Couper, Mission Supervisor. This is Lucille Olson-Bear, Security and Defense—our principal thorn, in fact. And now I think that’s quite enough of titles for the moment.”
The Lieutenant bowed low over the table, scooped up Lucille’s hand, kissed it as he clicked his heels. I’d seen him do this before, back home. “Miss Olson-Bear, gentlemen. You have my deepest gratitude. My life is indeed yours, for you have preserved it in the face of the bleakest—”
“Thank the Corporal, here,” interrupted Rogers, “He kept you in one piece, in the face of the bleakest, long enough for us to find you.”
“Why, yes, er ... well done, Corporal. It shall be so entered in my report when we return to Vespucci.” He straightened, turned to face Couper with a shrewd expression. “We are returning to Vespucci, are we not?”
Suddenly I could understand all of the previous embarrassed pauses I had encountered. Nor was there anything I wanted to say, about this, either.
“Um, directly, Lieutenant,” Couper answered.
“Make that, um, indirectly,” Lucille corrected, “Lieutenant, we were just explaining to your Corporal, here, that our standing orders call for checking in with our primary vessel now. Not until that’s accomplished ...”
He spread the palm of his good hand outward. “Say no more, my dear girl, you have my complete understanding—my thoroughgoing sympathy. I, too, have impatient superiors to whom I must deliver an account of myself and my regrettably diminished command. I would impose that much further upon your gracious hospitality. Have you a microwave capable of—”
“Microwave?” Lucille was plainly puzzled.
“Microwave!” Couper was amused.
“Not even for cooking,” answered Williamson. “And even then, it wouldn’t—”
“The man is talking about radio,” said Rogers. “Electromagnetic spectrum. Lieutenant, I’m sorry to tell you it would take—what, Ev?”
Williamson rolled his eyes back in thought. His muzzle twitched slightly.
“Little Tom
tells me we’ve gone four-point-two-three light years.”
“It would take four-point-two-three years for an electromagnetic message to reach Sca,” Rogers explained. “Let alone Vespucci, even if we happened to have the equipment, which we don’t—you’d have to look in some museum somewhere. And even if—well, your Corporal’s been pretty closed-mouthed about telling us the location of your planet.”
“Four ... light years!” I couldn’t help myself, It took superhuman effort not to scream it back at him. “You say we have come that far in only—”
“Steady on, son,” said Couper. “We don’t communicate by radio wave any more, Lieutenant. And, without belittling any of its considerable accomplishments, I rather doubt that your civilization could make much sense of the paratronic transmissions we might send them instead. Even so, the EM spectrum transmission-reception lag would be lessened by a factor of only ... let’s see: just a whisker under
e
squared times
pi
...”
“Sixty days,” supplied Williamson, who seemed to be an instant mental calculator, in addition to being the underworked pilot of this machine. “It would take two months, and, long before then, we’ll be at the Rendezvous. Face it: there’s nothing faster in the known universe for transportation or communication, than a spaceship like
Little Tom.”
-2-
“Look,” said Rogers, in the impatient tone of a someone explaining ColorCom to a blind man. “I’ve keyed the colors so you’ll understand, okay?”
“Okay nothing,” I objected. It was getting harder to concentrate by the minute. “What do colors have to do with sinking through the floor?”
Dinner was long over. Couper, Williamson, the Lieutenant were all conferring. Lucille had gone below, which is where I would be going if I could ever get the hang of it. I, alone among the company, was still unshowered, unshaven, extremely unslept. That fact was being brought home to me now as I struggled to comprehend what my fellow armorer was “explaining”.
“Look, Whitey, this little ship isn’t keyed to your ... call it brainwaves, I guess you’d say. There’s no point in correcting that now, since we’ll be at Rendezvous pretty soon. So I’ve adjusted this section of the floor—right over your quarters—to let you through.”
I puzzled over this for a moment. “Very thoughtful, of you or the ship. What keeps me from breaking both ankles when I hit the floor below?”
He snorted, “That’s what I’m trying to explain, Corporal! I’ve marked the section yellow. The deck below is blue. You step onto the yellow section, the ship senses that it’s you—never mind how it knows ...”
“Great. Then what?”
He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “You saw how the dinner-table came up? The molecules that the floor’s composed of simply expanded, readjusting themselves to take up a little more room, and
viola,
a table!”
“That’s
voila,”
Williamson commented from across the room. The alien had incredibly sharp hearing, I thought to myself. “No strings attached.”
“Whatever,” Rogers replied. “Where was I? Step on the yellow part, a piece of floor belowdecks expands until it reaches the ceiling. Its blue molecules then interlace with these yellow ones, and you get green!”
“I am getting that way already.” I sighed, shaking my head. “You’re telling me that the molecules of the two floors actually intermingle?”
“There isn’t a cubic inch of this whole ship that isn’t smart that way. Then the yellow upper floor molecules get out of your way, while the blue lower floor molecules contract again, lowering you gently to the—”
“Hold it! That may be perfectly all right for carpet molecules, Rog, I don’t know. But I am not mingling my personal molecules with any—”
“Of course not! No mingling. They get completely out of your way, leaving a perfect Whitey-shaped hole—actually it’s the shape of your latitudinal cross-section—as you sink sedately through the floor.”
I looked at the yellow pentagon he had adjusted for me, observing that his taste in interior decor matched his sartorial taste. The rest of the carpeting up here was maroon. “Sorry, Rog, it just seems like magic ...”
“Right,” he replied smugly, “Any sufficiently advanced technology will—”
“Resemble advanced technology,” Couper finished for my mentor as he approached us, “And nothing more. That theory you’re quoting, Rog, is a crock. Once a civilization gets the idea of technology, per se, into its collective head, it eventually stops believing in magic at all.”
Rogers protested. “But Whitey just stated—”
“I heard him. He’s obviously tired and probably didn’t mean it literally.”
I opened my mouth to agree with him—also to comment that his hearing was fully as acute as that of the furry pilot—but yawned, instead.
“All this palaver is keeping him from a hot shower and a soft bed.”
I shut my mouth, stepped onto the pentagon, not caring much what happened.
“Sweet dreams, Whitey,” Rogers told me as I began to sink through the floor, “And remember, whatever else you do down there, don’t push the button in the john marked ‘TR’. Hey, cut it out, Coup, I was only kidd—!”
-3-
The ceiling closed neatly over my head, depriving me of further byplay between the two. I found myself descending into a small, tidy compartment with a pair of single beds. It connected with a compact head.
Shaking off my robe, I peeked at the shower stall, expecting more of Rogers’ “magic”. I was not disappointed. The curtain consisted of a rigid but elastic membrane, perfectly transparent, with no opening visible. On a hunch, I pushed a hand against it. The hand went through exactly as I had expected, immediately followed by the rest of me. The membrane then changed from transparent to translucent, offering me privacy.
There were no faucets. Instead, a colored band, ranging gradually from blue to red, crossed one wall at chest level. I touched it in the middle. Water began to flow, by which I mean
flow.
The stinging ultrasonically-propelled mist I was used to at home was replaced here with a torrent that nearly knocked me off my feet. I had touched the broad colored band at its top edge—no savage Whitey; Couper was right about technology—now I placed a finger nearer the bottom; the pressure slackened. I ran the finger up again, enjoying a Vespuccian-bred reflexive guilty feeling as liter upon liter cascaded all around me.
Soap: there did not seem to be any. I glanced around the stall. Not so much as a tray. At least I could scrub as well as possible, as I had in the stream, learn the secret of the missing soap tomorrow. Finishing up, I noticed that soap was not the only amenity lacking. There had not been any towels hanging outside in the bathroom, I was certain now. Nor any in the stall (they would be soaked through in any event). Possibly there was a cabinet outside. I stepped through the curtain—
—coming out dry as the sands of my native planet!
Clean, as well. I recalled suddenly how my hair had squeaked in the shower, how the flaking film of unsloughed skin had been blessedly absent. The shower was a stall, all right. Purely for recreation or relaxing purposes, I guessed. It was the transparent membrane-curtain that—literally—did all the dirty work. I stepped back into the bedroom, pondering Couper’s argument with Rogers about technology and magic, wondering for just a moment after all, who had really been correct.
Another notion stopped me. According to my new acquaintances,
Little Tom
was only an auxiliary ship. Wait until we reached the other—
Surprise! On the right-hand bed, rolled up in their Vespuccian-issue fabric belt, lay a pair of 8 millimeter Darrick pistols. My pair, it appeared, in their regulation holsters. Unsnapping the flap of one holster—they were adjustable for wearing on the right or left side—I checked the grip. I was empty. Well, either Earthian technology had its limits, or they wanted me to have my weapons, but did not trust me with live ammunition. Nevertheless, it was good to have these pistols back. I wondered how they had been retrieved. I would hate to be the Scavian nobleman holding them if Lucille did the retrieving.
Turning, I noticed a bare spot in the blue carpet. The robe I had discarded there was gone. Working my way around the walls, pushing my hand against them as I had done the shower curtain, I finally found a closet whose “door” vanished upon penetration. Sure enough, there was the robe, hanging right beside the remnants of my uniform—also that of the Lieutenant. Do not ask me how the robe had gotten into the closet.
Magic?
Really good room service?
I was not fooled. All of this was great fun, it was interesting, but Couper had been correct. Magic it was not. I folded down the soft, clean blanket, climbed into bed, cradling the double pistol belt in my arms. The lights began dimming on their own. I was not afraid, not of the darkness nor of the power these people possessed. I simply envied them their wealth, their knowledge, hoping hard that someday, my own people ...
My last conscious thought: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.
-4-
I awoke from a dreamless sleep, better rested than I had felt in months. Beside me, in the other bed, Lieutenant Sermander lay snoring, still wearing what Lucille had called a “smart suit”. Rogers had used a similar expression, attempting to explain the weirdly cooperative carpet.
Untangling myself from the bedclothes, I moved quietly out of long habit, so as not to disturb the Lieutenant, stumbled into the bathroom to discover no particularly magical surprises where the rest of the plumbing was concerned, except that all of it seemed to use a lot of water.
I decided to test that gimmicky shower curtain again.
Into the stall, out again.
I definitely felt different. Clean, not particularly refreshed. I think a person needs hot running water to wake him up, to shake him out—not to mention doing something about what a good night’s sleep does to his hair. I fiddled around some more with that red-blue shower control, deciding to ask about toothbrushes later. Yes, if you happen to be morbidly curious, there was also a shower curtain-type membrane stretched across the toilet seat. These people may have spent water like it was going out of style, but they certainly did not waste paper.