The compleat collected s.., p.90
The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 90
Surgenor repeated the message at short intervals until the Chinese mainland passed them, then he continued to identify himself and express friendship only this time in Russian. Some of the ground stations responded with the conventional formal replies in Russian, others replied simply "Okay" and one, whose operator seemed intent on practising his English, talked until out of range. Soon they were over the Arctic Circle and beginning to slide Southwards into Canada. Surgenor switched to English, and relaxed.
"... This is Her Majesty's Space Vessel Mizar, for Mars on a colonial supply cruise," he said. "We are not contemplating dropping an atomic bomb on you—"
"I should hope not!" a female voice broke in from a station somewhere below. There was a soft laugh, then, "Pass, friend. And safe home, fellows ..."
They spiralled out beyond the thousand-mile vertical limit which marked the end of territorial boundaries, and the polite apologies for tresspassing the very thin air of space above those territories became unnecessary. With the post-takeoff checks completed Mizar again accelerated, this time at one half-G. This, which was the most economical thrust for her reactor, would be maintained for fifty hours. Lieutenant Selby, the Astrogator—and, as the ship's most junior officer, the cook, barber and general bottle-washer—had his first approximation already worked out. Surgenor watched him copying it into a virgin page of his scratch-pad and in painfully neat script for handing up to the Captain. Next to Murchison, Lieutenant Selby was the sanest man in the ship.
SELBY was young, he had steeped himself in the great traditions of the service, and enthusiasm burst from him at a constant, unvarying pressure. Surgenor had privately summed him up as a sincere but noisy idealist.
Lieutenant Selby had arrived at Mizar's enclosure, Surgenor remembered, literally hanging onto his current girl-friend's neck with one arm while his free hand gripped a heavy cane. To someone ignorant of the traditions it would have seemed a ludicrous sight, but any girl anywhere would have been outraged if her space officer escort had offered to walk beside her in any other way. That was one of the traditions which were really appreciated by presentable young officers of Selby's type. When he had crossed streets, Surgenor knew all traffic stopped for him, and with no bad-tempered hooting, either. And on crowded public transport well dare he offer his seat to anyone, no matter how many female strap-hangers surrounded him.
Tradition.
Space personnel nowadays were as healthy as anyone, but that had not always been so. Thirty years ago the drive reactors had been shockingly inefficient, a trip of one year was considered short and shipboard conditions—to put it kindly—were hellish. Marked atrophication of the main motor muscles resulted, also eye conditions due to improper filtering of raw sunlight, and very often sterility because of faulty shielding on the pile.
Nowadays people could not forget the time when a spaceman just back from a voyage was the most heroic and pitiful sight in the world.
It was funny, and rather awe-inspiring, how the whole thing had come about. In the late nineteen-sixties when, last as usual, the United Kingdom was in a position to put up its first manned satellite, it fell to the Navy—which still maintained a force of supersonic fighters operating from carriers—to supply the pilot for the vehicle. Other ascents were made, culminating in the one which circumnavigated the Moon, and all were piloted by Naval officers. And so it was that a service which was newer than tomorrow became part of one whose proud history and traditions stretched back for centuries. Then, with the return of the first ship to reach Mars after a voyage lasting two and a quarter years, it began to develop traditions which were uniquely its own.
Conditions were much better now, though. It was the psychological rather than the physical health that was in danger these days. But a spaceman was still considered a very special person, and officers like young Selby still got a kick out of carrying a cane and hanging a cheek-to-cheek stranglehold on a girl in public.
SELBY had the course in his hand and was on the point of handing it back to the Captain when Surgenor, with careful casualness, intercepted it. With the figures in his hand Surgenor paused and looked questioningly at the Captain's position, then he said "Yes, sir." and passed the paper directly to the Pilot, Lieutenant Kelso. You'll never carry this off, dammit! Surgenor told himself furiously, you were nearly stuttering just then ... But the two other occupants of the control-room had not noticed anything, apparently. He gave an inconspicuous sigh of relief.
Kelso and Selby were engaged on making course corrections with the utmost speed and efficiency, so as to impress the new Captain. The pilot rotated the gyros while the Astrogator, his eye to the finder which was part periscope and part sextent, called out figures. Watching them covertly, Surgenor thought, What a pair of opposites ...
To Selby the Captain was definitely not the chummy type. A disciplinarian, cold, stern and distant, was how the astrogator saw him, Surgenor knew. With creases in only the right places on his coveralls and cap just so, and with an aura of calm authority and competence radiating from his whole personality. The tradition-soaked mind of Selby had certain fixed ideas of how a spaceship captain should look and behave, and Surgenor knew that their present Captain was Selby's ideal.
The ship's Pilot, on the other hand, was a more complicated person.
Kelso was a realist; he thought that he could see through the Captain. That business of the skipper taking a back seat and allowing him to handle the takeoff, for instance. That was an incredibly rare occurrence, because newly-appointed Captains usually wanted to do everything themselves for the first few months and their Pilots especially became little more than passengers. This Captain had acted differently and, although Lieutenant Kelso suspected that the whole thing was just a means to gain his loyalty and support—that in some obscure fashion he was being suckered by the Captain—he still appreciated being allowed to handle that takeoff. That, no matter what the reason behind it, had been a very real professional compliment.
AT THE moment Surgenor knew that both Kelso and Selby—the latter especially since his course had been returned to him for execution without being given the usual checkover by the Captain—were solidly and wholeheartedly behind the skipper. They swore by him in all the languages they knew. Surgenor hoped profoundly that they would stay that way.
Looking at the empty Captain's position—empty to Surgenor, that was—he found his mind slipping back to that small room in Woomera's Space Medicine building, to another empty chair and to a Captain's Interview the like of which had never been seen before, for the simple reason that it had been conducted without a Captain ...
Unaware that they had been the subjects of a radical hypno-conditioning process that was both subtle and fantastically thorough, the crew of Mizar had arrived one by one, supposedly for their interview with the new captain. To Surgenor and the other naval psychologists present, Kelso, Murchison and Selby had chatted, talked shop and discussed their technical qualifications with the thin air above an empty swivel chair. But to those crew members that chair had not been empty, just as at the present moment the Captain's couch in Mizar's control-room was not empty ...
Then, as now, the Captain that the crew saw and spoke to had no actual existence. He was an hallucination—three different hallucinations, in fact. Kelso saw his Captain as a sharp, shrewd, hard-headed individual, a know-it-all who really did know it all. Murchison's ideal was the soft-spoken, easy-going type, and Selby saw something of a Captain in the romantic tradition, a sort of cross between Captain Bligh and Horatio Hornblower. But in each case the individual members of the crew saw a Captain who inspired in them the maximum amount of confidence, loyalty, and respect of which they were capable.
And Surgenor's chief duty—the one which was not listed against his name—was to keep the crew from discovering this deception. He, who possessed none of the technical abilities usual with the post, was the real Captain of Mizar. And the successful completion of his pet project demanded that he at all times act only the part of First Lieutenant, second-in-command to a figment of his own devising ...
"SHIP ON course. One half-G thrust, sir," Kelso announced suddenly, with a glance towards the Captain's position.
This was the point, Surgenor thought, where he should exert his authority just a little. He put a sarcastic edge to his tone and said, "I suppose we'll hit what we're aiming at, Selby?"
The Astrogator laughed. "Yes, sir. Eventually." To him the question had obviously been a huge joke.
A joke ...!
Surgenor had trained himself, when faced with an unusual or inexplicable reaction to what should be normal stimuli, to do and say nothing until the explanation appeared. He did that now, but his mind was working furiously. Back at Woomera the authorities concerned with the economics rather than the romance of spaceflight were becoming worried over the quantities of reserve reaction mass being used by ships making drastic and wasteful course corrections. Over a distance of thirty or forty million miles a small navigational error could become a very big thing indeed, and could cause a severe drain on the ship's safety reserve of working fluid. The time to correct faults was at the earliest possible moment, and Surgenor's ambition was to have a nice, smooth trip with neither excitement nor minor blemish—such as fuel wastage—to mar it.
But junior officers did not laugh when their First Lieutenant made pointed remarks about their astrogation—not like that, anyway, as though sharing some secret joke.
Shelving the problem temporarily—it was high time he got busy with his main job—Surgenor twisted around to face the Captain's couch. Careful now, he warned himself, don't act nervous, or stammer, or lick your lips. He said crisply, "Lieutenants Kelso and Selby have the first watch, sir. Permission for Lieutenant Murchison and myself to go below?" He waited just long enough for permission to be granted, then spoke into the intercom telling Murchison that he was relieved. While Selby moved to bring the power room repeaters under his eye Surgenor unstrapped and stood up.
The expression 'going below' merely meant that he was off-duty and not that he had to go to his cabin or the wardroom; normally it was in order for a relieved officer to remain in the control-room and chat. Surgenor, however, was going to see that the expression was taken literally on this voyage. At the descending ladder he turned and spoke again:
"There's—ah—no need for you to stay here, sir. I think you should get your head down for a while. And have I permission to speak to you, sir, in your cabin?"
He had a glimpse of raised eyebrows from Selby and the Pilot at his temerity in practically ordering the Captain out of his own control-room. That, Surgenor admitted, had been a risk, but they were probably expecting him to be well and truly told off about it when he got to the Captain's cabin, so there would be no harm done.
THE WARDROOM occupied the level immediately below the control-room, and underneath that the galley and the cabins of Kelso, Murchison and Selby. On the deck below that again were the cabins of the Captain and First Lieutenant, the water recovery unit and the Binder, after which the ship was a mass of fuel tanks, cargo space and plumbing to the stern stabiliser fins. It was when Surgenor was about to enter his cabin that he met Murchison on the way up.
"If you're going up to. the control-room," Surgenor said lightly, "don't."
"Why not?" Murchison's tone was not annoyed, just mildly curious.
"The Captain says only watch-keeping officers are to be in the control-room,"' Surgenor replied. "Q.R., A.I. and all that. Social gatherings are to be confined to the wardroom."
"I didn't think the Captain was regulation minded," said Murchison equably. A slow smile grew around his mouth and he added, "New Captains have to be strict for a while, or they don't feel like Captains. I'm going to read a book."
The Engineer Officer was Surgenor's smallest worry, he thought as he entered his cabin and sat awkwardly on the spring hammock. Murchison's isolated position while on duty and his appetite for massive tomes on nuclear physics when off were the reason for that. Definitely, Murchison should not be a major problem, but the same could not be said for Kelso or Selby—especially not Kelso and Selby together.
The principle of divide and rule, Surgenor thought sardonically; or more accurately, divide and avoid gossip, comparisons and eventually friction. It was imperative for Surgenor's purpose that he keep the crew apart, doubly so that not more than one at a time aired their problems with the Captain. Traditionally the Captain held himself aloof—took his meals in his own cabin and so on—so that part of it should not be too difficult. But Surgenor was thinking of the time fifty hours hence when Mizar would no longer be in powered flight. Then there would only be one watch-keeping officer needed in the control-room, and when that one was himself the other three would be free to get together and talk anywhere in the ship ...
Chapter Two
SURGENOR felt restive. There were books which he could study, or the ship was still within receiving distance of Earth commercial broadcasts if he wanted relaxation that way, but he could not settle to either. Half angrily, he reached across and switched on the cabin intercom. It was much too early to be doing this, he knew—three or four days at least should have been allowed for the situation on board to stabilise itself—but the uncharacteristic reaction of Selby a few minutes ago had Surgenor puzzled.
The intercom in Surgenor's cabin was not standard equipment, the difference being that it could be switched on without the fact of its being in operation registering on the indicator light at the other end of the line. He hunched forward, prepared in the manner of all eavesdroppers to hear a certain amount of ill about himself.
"... Stupid, d'you think, or just ignorant?"
The voice was quick, impatient, high-pitched. Selby.
"It must be ignorance," Kelso's voice replied more slowly. "Nobody could be stupid enough to practically order a Captain out of his own control-room." There was a pause. "But Lieutenant-Commanders, Space, have no right being ignorant. It's peculiar. We happened to shake hands, you know, just before he took me in for the Captain's Interview. He ... didn't know how."
There was an unusally long period of silence then Selby, strangely subdued, said, "If he's ignorant—real ignorant, I mean—how will that affect the other business?"
"I'm hoping it won't," Kelso replied quietly. "The Captain, theoretically, is supposed to be absolutely in the dark about these things: he turns a blind eye, but for various reasons cannot be involved directly. An uninformed or over-zealous First Lieutenant makes things more difficult. But not impossible. We'll just have to see that he stays ignorant."
"Good!" said Selby with returned enthusiasm. "I was worried there for a while. We'll just have to do something this trip, and no excuses. Last time it was Captain Ellis going sour on us, and the time before that I was the ignorant one—the ship will be getting a bad name! So let's plot a little sedition, eh?"
"Lieutenant Selby," said Kelso, suddenly authoritative, "don't be so blasted eager! We have eight months, maybe more, to think of something, so keep your eyes on your panel and—"
Surgenor switched off at that point, he had heard enough. Then he thought deeply for several minutes.
So the crew thought their First Lieutenant ignorant. He smiled at the thought; they did not know how right they were. Surgenor did not possess one-tenth of the technical knowledge necessary to a space officer, but he was hoping to keep that fact hidden from the others. This ignorance referred to something else entirely, and he thought he knew now what it was.
The handshake, the password, the secret recognition signals ...
WHEN SURGENOR'S project had been approved and he had been transferred into the Service, the Naval psychologists had told him to expect something like this. Maintaining mental and physical health in a ship in space—a highly-artificial environment comparing unfavourably with the worst of Earth's penal institutions—called for a rather special type of man, and even then it was necessary to bring certain stabilising influences to bear. These included the traditions and strict discipline of the Service, and the fantastic amount of responsibility and technical competence placed on and required of its Captains. But for a long time now there had been another influence at work. Apparently a sort of secret society had grown up among the space-going personnel—its existence was known, but nothing else. However, no official cognizance had been taken of it—certain high Naval authorities plus the Service psychologists had decided that it was an added stabilising influence and that anything which helped maintain the sanity and efficiency of space officers was not to be risked by an official investigator, especially an influence so juvenile, melodramatic and obviously innocent as this.
Maybe Surgenor would find himself being inducted into this secret society during the voyage, and maybe not. If he was, then he did not want to eavesdrop on the little secrets and seditions of the organisation now in case his reactions when he came to be initiated were not convincing. He smiled to himself, looked at his watch, then got up quickly. It was time he relieved Selby in the control-room so as to allow the astrogator to prepare dinner.
On the way up he realised that he still did not know the reason for Selby's joking acceptance of his crack about the other's astrogational ability. But that would probably make itself clear with time. Certainly there could hardly be a connection between secret societies and bad navigation.
AFTER he had given orders to prepare the meals, Surgenor decided to lay a little more groundwork for the voyage ahead. He added, "The Captain, as is customary, will be taking all meals in his cabin. He has asked that I take them to him and not Lieutenant Selby or anyone else. Also, if anyone wants to see him on either a technical or personal matter, they must arrange it through me, and see him only one at a time—he was very particular about the last."
Surgenor softened his tone slightly and went on, "So it looks to me as if we are going to be allowed to run the ship pretty much as we like—the Captain will only take a hand if we make a muck of something. But if we do, God help us!"'
"... This is Her Majesty's Space Vessel Mizar, for Mars on a colonial supply cruise," he said. "We are not contemplating dropping an atomic bomb on you—"
"I should hope not!" a female voice broke in from a station somewhere below. There was a soft laugh, then, "Pass, friend. And safe home, fellows ..."
They spiralled out beyond the thousand-mile vertical limit which marked the end of territorial boundaries, and the polite apologies for tresspassing the very thin air of space above those territories became unnecessary. With the post-takeoff checks completed Mizar again accelerated, this time at one half-G. This, which was the most economical thrust for her reactor, would be maintained for fifty hours. Lieutenant Selby, the Astrogator—and, as the ship's most junior officer, the cook, barber and general bottle-washer—had his first approximation already worked out. Surgenor watched him copying it into a virgin page of his scratch-pad and in painfully neat script for handing up to the Captain. Next to Murchison, Lieutenant Selby was the sanest man in the ship.
SELBY was young, he had steeped himself in the great traditions of the service, and enthusiasm burst from him at a constant, unvarying pressure. Surgenor had privately summed him up as a sincere but noisy idealist.
Lieutenant Selby had arrived at Mizar's enclosure, Surgenor remembered, literally hanging onto his current girl-friend's neck with one arm while his free hand gripped a heavy cane. To someone ignorant of the traditions it would have seemed a ludicrous sight, but any girl anywhere would have been outraged if her space officer escort had offered to walk beside her in any other way. That was one of the traditions which were really appreciated by presentable young officers of Selby's type. When he had crossed streets, Surgenor knew all traffic stopped for him, and with no bad-tempered hooting, either. And on crowded public transport well dare he offer his seat to anyone, no matter how many female strap-hangers surrounded him.
Tradition.
Space personnel nowadays were as healthy as anyone, but that had not always been so. Thirty years ago the drive reactors had been shockingly inefficient, a trip of one year was considered short and shipboard conditions—to put it kindly—were hellish. Marked atrophication of the main motor muscles resulted, also eye conditions due to improper filtering of raw sunlight, and very often sterility because of faulty shielding on the pile.
Nowadays people could not forget the time when a spaceman just back from a voyage was the most heroic and pitiful sight in the world.
It was funny, and rather awe-inspiring, how the whole thing had come about. In the late nineteen-sixties when, last as usual, the United Kingdom was in a position to put up its first manned satellite, it fell to the Navy—which still maintained a force of supersonic fighters operating from carriers—to supply the pilot for the vehicle. Other ascents were made, culminating in the one which circumnavigated the Moon, and all were piloted by Naval officers. And so it was that a service which was newer than tomorrow became part of one whose proud history and traditions stretched back for centuries. Then, with the return of the first ship to reach Mars after a voyage lasting two and a quarter years, it began to develop traditions which were uniquely its own.
Conditions were much better now, though. It was the psychological rather than the physical health that was in danger these days. But a spaceman was still considered a very special person, and officers like young Selby still got a kick out of carrying a cane and hanging a cheek-to-cheek stranglehold on a girl in public.
SELBY had the course in his hand and was on the point of handing it back to the Captain when Surgenor, with careful casualness, intercepted it. With the figures in his hand Surgenor paused and looked questioningly at the Captain's position, then he said "Yes, sir." and passed the paper directly to the Pilot, Lieutenant Kelso. You'll never carry this off, dammit! Surgenor told himself furiously, you were nearly stuttering just then ... But the two other occupants of the control-room had not noticed anything, apparently. He gave an inconspicuous sigh of relief.
Kelso and Selby were engaged on making course corrections with the utmost speed and efficiency, so as to impress the new Captain. The pilot rotated the gyros while the Astrogator, his eye to the finder which was part periscope and part sextent, called out figures. Watching them covertly, Surgenor thought, What a pair of opposites ...
To Selby the Captain was definitely not the chummy type. A disciplinarian, cold, stern and distant, was how the astrogator saw him, Surgenor knew. With creases in only the right places on his coveralls and cap just so, and with an aura of calm authority and competence radiating from his whole personality. The tradition-soaked mind of Selby had certain fixed ideas of how a spaceship captain should look and behave, and Surgenor knew that their present Captain was Selby's ideal.
The ship's Pilot, on the other hand, was a more complicated person.
Kelso was a realist; he thought that he could see through the Captain. That business of the skipper taking a back seat and allowing him to handle the takeoff, for instance. That was an incredibly rare occurrence, because newly-appointed Captains usually wanted to do everything themselves for the first few months and their Pilots especially became little more than passengers. This Captain had acted differently and, although Lieutenant Kelso suspected that the whole thing was just a means to gain his loyalty and support—that in some obscure fashion he was being suckered by the Captain—he still appreciated being allowed to handle that takeoff. That, no matter what the reason behind it, had been a very real professional compliment.
AT THE moment Surgenor knew that both Kelso and Selby—the latter especially since his course had been returned to him for execution without being given the usual checkover by the Captain—were solidly and wholeheartedly behind the skipper. They swore by him in all the languages they knew. Surgenor hoped profoundly that they would stay that way.
Looking at the empty Captain's position—empty to Surgenor, that was—he found his mind slipping back to that small room in Woomera's Space Medicine building, to another empty chair and to a Captain's Interview the like of which had never been seen before, for the simple reason that it had been conducted without a Captain ...
Unaware that they had been the subjects of a radical hypno-conditioning process that was both subtle and fantastically thorough, the crew of Mizar had arrived one by one, supposedly for their interview with the new captain. To Surgenor and the other naval psychologists present, Kelso, Murchison and Selby had chatted, talked shop and discussed their technical qualifications with the thin air above an empty swivel chair. But to those crew members that chair had not been empty, just as at the present moment the Captain's couch in Mizar's control-room was not empty ...
Then, as now, the Captain that the crew saw and spoke to had no actual existence. He was an hallucination—three different hallucinations, in fact. Kelso saw his Captain as a sharp, shrewd, hard-headed individual, a know-it-all who really did know it all. Murchison's ideal was the soft-spoken, easy-going type, and Selby saw something of a Captain in the romantic tradition, a sort of cross between Captain Bligh and Horatio Hornblower. But in each case the individual members of the crew saw a Captain who inspired in them the maximum amount of confidence, loyalty, and respect of which they were capable.
And Surgenor's chief duty—the one which was not listed against his name—was to keep the crew from discovering this deception. He, who possessed none of the technical abilities usual with the post, was the real Captain of Mizar. And the successful completion of his pet project demanded that he at all times act only the part of First Lieutenant, second-in-command to a figment of his own devising ...
"SHIP ON course. One half-G thrust, sir," Kelso announced suddenly, with a glance towards the Captain's position.
This was the point, Surgenor thought, where he should exert his authority just a little. He put a sarcastic edge to his tone and said, "I suppose we'll hit what we're aiming at, Selby?"
The Astrogator laughed. "Yes, sir. Eventually." To him the question had obviously been a huge joke.
A joke ...!
Surgenor had trained himself, when faced with an unusual or inexplicable reaction to what should be normal stimuli, to do and say nothing until the explanation appeared. He did that now, but his mind was working furiously. Back at Woomera the authorities concerned with the economics rather than the romance of spaceflight were becoming worried over the quantities of reserve reaction mass being used by ships making drastic and wasteful course corrections. Over a distance of thirty or forty million miles a small navigational error could become a very big thing indeed, and could cause a severe drain on the ship's safety reserve of working fluid. The time to correct faults was at the earliest possible moment, and Surgenor's ambition was to have a nice, smooth trip with neither excitement nor minor blemish—such as fuel wastage—to mar it.
But junior officers did not laugh when their First Lieutenant made pointed remarks about their astrogation—not like that, anyway, as though sharing some secret joke.
Shelving the problem temporarily—it was high time he got busy with his main job—Surgenor twisted around to face the Captain's couch. Careful now, he warned himself, don't act nervous, or stammer, or lick your lips. He said crisply, "Lieutenants Kelso and Selby have the first watch, sir. Permission for Lieutenant Murchison and myself to go below?" He waited just long enough for permission to be granted, then spoke into the intercom telling Murchison that he was relieved. While Selby moved to bring the power room repeaters under his eye Surgenor unstrapped and stood up.
The expression 'going below' merely meant that he was off-duty and not that he had to go to his cabin or the wardroom; normally it was in order for a relieved officer to remain in the control-room and chat. Surgenor, however, was going to see that the expression was taken literally on this voyage. At the descending ladder he turned and spoke again:
"There's—ah—no need for you to stay here, sir. I think you should get your head down for a while. And have I permission to speak to you, sir, in your cabin?"
He had a glimpse of raised eyebrows from Selby and the Pilot at his temerity in practically ordering the Captain out of his own control-room. That, Surgenor admitted, had been a risk, but they were probably expecting him to be well and truly told off about it when he got to the Captain's cabin, so there would be no harm done.
THE WARDROOM occupied the level immediately below the control-room, and underneath that the galley and the cabins of Kelso, Murchison and Selby. On the deck below that again were the cabins of the Captain and First Lieutenant, the water recovery unit and the Binder, after which the ship was a mass of fuel tanks, cargo space and plumbing to the stern stabiliser fins. It was when Surgenor was about to enter his cabin that he met Murchison on the way up.
"If you're going up to. the control-room," Surgenor said lightly, "don't."
"Why not?" Murchison's tone was not annoyed, just mildly curious.
"The Captain says only watch-keeping officers are to be in the control-room,"' Surgenor replied. "Q.R., A.I. and all that. Social gatherings are to be confined to the wardroom."
"I didn't think the Captain was regulation minded," said Murchison equably. A slow smile grew around his mouth and he added, "New Captains have to be strict for a while, or they don't feel like Captains. I'm going to read a book."
The Engineer Officer was Surgenor's smallest worry, he thought as he entered his cabin and sat awkwardly on the spring hammock. Murchison's isolated position while on duty and his appetite for massive tomes on nuclear physics when off were the reason for that. Definitely, Murchison should not be a major problem, but the same could not be said for Kelso or Selby—especially not Kelso and Selby together.
The principle of divide and rule, Surgenor thought sardonically; or more accurately, divide and avoid gossip, comparisons and eventually friction. It was imperative for Surgenor's purpose that he keep the crew apart, doubly so that not more than one at a time aired their problems with the Captain. Traditionally the Captain held himself aloof—took his meals in his own cabin and so on—so that part of it should not be too difficult. But Surgenor was thinking of the time fifty hours hence when Mizar would no longer be in powered flight. Then there would only be one watch-keeping officer needed in the control-room, and when that one was himself the other three would be free to get together and talk anywhere in the ship ...
Chapter Two
SURGENOR felt restive. There were books which he could study, or the ship was still within receiving distance of Earth commercial broadcasts if he wanted relaxation that way, but he could not settle to either. Half angrily, he reached across and switched on the cabin intercom. It was much too early to be doing this, he knew—three or four days at least should have been allowed for the situation on board to stabilise itself—but the uncharacteristic reaction of Selby a few minutes ago had Surgenor puzzled.
The intercom in Surgenor's cabin was not standard equipment, the difference being that it could be switched on without the fact of its being in operation registering on the indicator light at the other end of the line. He hunched forward, prepared in the manner of all eavesdroppers to hear a certain amount of ill about himself.
"... Stupid, d'you think, or just ignorant?"
The voice was quick, impatient, high-pitched. Selby.
"It must be ignorance," Kelso's voice replied more slowly. "Nobody could be stupid enough to practically order a Captain out of his own control-room." There was a pause. "But Lieutenant-Commanders, Space, have no right being ignorant. It's peculiar. We happened to shake hands, you know, just before he took me in for the Captain's Interview. He ... didn't know how."
There was an unusally long period of silence then Selby, strangely subdued, said, "If he's ignorant—real ignorant, I mean—how will that affect the other business?"
"I'm hoping it won't," Kelso replied quietly. "The Captain, theoretically, is supposed to be absolutely in the dark about these things: he turns a blind eye, but for various reasons cannot be involved directly. An uninformed or over-zealous First Lieutenant makes things more difficult. But not impossible. We'll just have to see that he stays ignorant."
"Good!" said Selby with returned enthusiasm. "I was worried there for a while. We'll just have to do something this trip, and no excuses. Last time it was Captain Ellis going sour on us, and the time before that I was the ignorant one—the ship will be getting a bad name! So let's plot a little sedition, eh?"
"Lieutenant Selby," said Kelso, suddenly authoritative, "don't be so blasted eager! We have eight months, maybe more, to think of something, so keep your eyes on your panel and—"
Surgenor switched off at that point, he had heard enough. Then he thought deeply for several minutes.
So the crew thought their First Lieutenant ignorant. He smiled at the thought; they did not know how right they were. Surgenor did not possess one-tenth of the technical knowledge necessary to a space officer, but he was hoping to keep that fact hidden from the others. This ignorance referred to something else entirely, and he thought he knew now what it was.
The handshake, the password, the secret recognition signals ...
WHEN SURGENOR'S project had been approved and he had been transferred into the Service, the Naval psychologists had told him to expect something like this. Maintaining mental and physical health in a ship in space—a highly-artificial environment comparing unfavourably with the worst of Earth's penal institutions—called for a rather special type of man, and even then it was necessary to bring certain stabilising influences to bear. These included the traditions and strict discipline of the Service, and the fantastic amount of responsibility and technical competence placed on and required of its Captains. But for a long time now there had been another influence at work. Apparently a sort of secret society had grown up among the space-going personnel—its existence was known, but nothing else. However, no official cognizance had been taken of it—certain high Naval authorities plus the Service psychologists had decided that it was an added stabilising influence and that anything which helped maintain the sanity and efficiency of space officers was not to be risked by an official investigator, especially an influence so juvenile, melodramatic and obviously innocent as this.
Maybe Surgenor would find himself being inducted into this secret society during the voyage, and maybe not. If he was, then he did not want to eavesdrop on the little secrets and seditions of the organisation now in case his reactions when he came to be initiated were not convincing. He smiled to himself, looked at his watch, then got up quickly. It was time he relieved Selby in the control-room so as to allow the astrogator to prepare dinner.
On the way up he realised that he still did not know the reason for Selby's joking acceptance of his crack about the other's astrogational ability. But that would probably make itself clear with time. Certainly there could hardly be a connection between secret societies and bad navigation.
AFTER he had given orders to prepare the meals, Surgenor decided to lay a little more groundwork for the voyage ahead. He added, "The Captain, as is customary, will be taking all meals in his cabin. He has asked that I take them to him and not Lieutenant Selby or anyone else. Also, if anyone wants to see him on either a technical or personal matter, they must arrange it through me, and see him only one at a time—he was very particular about the last."
Surgenor softened his tone slightly and went on, "So it looks to me as if we are going to be allowed to run the ship pretty much as we like—the Captain will only take a hand if we make a muck of something. But if we do, God help us!"'
