A Life For The Stars Read online

  This order was not executed without a good deal of renewed shouting and struggling, during which Lutz looked back down at his papers, as obviously harmless a critter as a skunk which had just happened upon a bird's egg and was wondering if it might bite, his small hands moving tentatively. When the noise was over, he said:

  "I hope your luck was better, Frad. How about it, sonny? Have you got a trade?'

  "Yes," Chris said hesitantly. "Astronomy."

  "What? At your age?" The city manager stared at Haskins. "What's this, Frad, another one of your mercy projects? Your judgment gets worse every day."

  "It's all news to me, boss," Haskins said with complete and obvious honesty. "I thought he was just a scratcher. He never said anything else to me."

  The city manager drummed delicately on the top of his desk. Chris held his breath. His claim was ridiculous and he knew it, but he had been able to think of nothing else to answer which would have had a prayer of interesting the boss of a nomad city. Insofar as he had been able to stay awake past dusk, Chris had read a little of everything, and of his reading he bad retained best the facts and theories of history; but Haskins had cautioned him to espouse something which might be useful aboard an Okie city, and plainly it didn't qualify. The fragments of economics he had picked up from his father might possibly have been more useful had there been more of them, and those better integrated into recent history, but his father had never been well enough to do that job since Chris had reached the age of curiosity. He was left with nothing but his smattering of astronomy, derived from books, most of which had been published before he was born, and from many nights spent lying on his back in the fields, breathing clover and counting meteors.

  But he had no hope that it would work. A nomad city would need astronomy for navigation, primarily, a subject about which he knew nothing indeed he lacked even the rudimentary trigonometry necessary to approach it. His knowledge of the parent subject, astronomy, was purely descriptive, and would become obsolete the minute Scranton was far enough away from the Sun to make the constellations hard to recognize which in fact had probably happened already.

  Nevertheless, Frank Lutz seemed to be a little bit baffled, for the first time. He said slowly:

  "A Lakebranch kid who claims he's an astronomer! Well, at least it's newt Frad; you've let the kid sell you a hobby. If he ever got through grammar school I'll eat your tin hat, paint and all."

  "Boss, I swear 1 never heard a word of all this until now." "Hmm. All right, sonny. Name the planets, going outward from the Sun."

  That was easy, but the next ones would surely be harder. "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Proserpina."

  "You left out a few didn't you?"

  "I left out about five thousand," Chris said, as steadily as he could manage. "You said planets not asteroids or satellites."

  "All right, what's the biggest satellite? And the biggest asteroid?"

  "Titan, and Ceres."

  "What's the nearest fixed star?"

  "The Sun."

  The city manager grinned, but he did not seem to be much amused. "Oho. Well, it won't be, not much longer. How many months in a lightyear?"

  "Twelve, just like any other year. A lightyear isn't a measure of time, it's a measure of distance the distance light travels in a year. Months don't have anything to do with it. You might as well ask how many weeks there are in an inch."

  "There are fifty-two weeks to the inchor it'll seem like that, once you're as old as I am." Lutz drummed on the desk again. "Where'd you get all this stuff? You won't pretend you had any schooling in Lakebranch, I hope?"

  "My father taught almost all his life at the University, till it was shut down," Chris said. "He was the best there was. I got most of it from him. The rest I read about, or got from observation, and paper and pencil."

  Here Chris was on firm ground, provided only that be allowed one lie: the substitution of astronomy for economics. The next question did not bother him in the least, for it was thoroughly expectable:

  "What's your name?"

  "Crispin deFord," he said reluctantly..

  There was a surprised guffaw from the remainder of the audience, but Chris did his best to ignore it. His ridiculous name had been a burden to him through so many childhood fights with the neighbors that he was now able to carry it with patience, though still not very gladly. He was surprised, however, to see Haskins raising his bushy bleached eyebrows at him with every evidence of renewed interest What that meant, Chris had no idea; the part of his brain that did his guessing was almost worn out already.

  "Check that, somebody," the city manager said. "We've got a couple of people left over from the S. U. faculty, at least. By Hoffa, Boyle Warner was a Scranton prof, wasn't he? Get him up here, and let's close this thing out"

  "What's the matter, boss?" Haskins said, with a broad grin. "Running out of trick questions?"

  The city manager smiled back, but again the smile was more than a little frosty. "You could call it that," he said, with surprising frankness. "But we'll see if the kid can fool Warner."

  "The ole bassar must be good for something," somebody behind Chris mumbled. The voice was quiet, but the city manager heard it; his chin jerked up, and his fist struck a sudden, terrible blow on the top of his desk.

  "He's good for getting us where we're going, and don't you forget it! Steel is one thing, but stars are another we may never see another lie or another ingot without Boyle. Next to him we're all puddlers, just like that redneck. And that may go for the kid here, too."

  "An, boin, don't lay it on. What can he know?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out," Lutz said, in a white fury. "What do you know about it? Anybody here know what a geodesic is?"

  Nobody answered.

  "Red, do you know?"

  Chris swallowed. He knew the answer, but he found it impossible to understand why the city manager considered it worth all this noise.

  "Yes, sir. It's the shortest distance between two points."

  "Is that all?" somebody said incredulously.

  "It's all there is between us and starvation," Lutz said. "Frad, take the kid below and see what Boyle says about him; on second thought, I don't want to pull Boyle out of the observatory, he must be up to his eyebrows in course corrections. Get to Boyle as soon as he's got some free time. Find out if there ever was any Professor deFord at S. U; and then get Boyle to ask the kid some hard questions. Real hard. If he makes it, he can be an apprentice. If he doesn't, these are always the slag heaps; this has taken too long already."

  CHAPTER THREE: "Like a Barrel of Scrap"

  Even a city which has sloughed off its slums to go space flying has hidey holes, and Chris had lost no time in finding one of his own. He had located it with the simple instinct of a hunted animal going to ground.

  Not that anybody was hunting for him not yet. But something told him that it would be only a matter of time. Dr. Boyle Warner, the city's astronomer, had been more than kind to him, but he had asked hard questions all the same; and these had revealed quickly enough that

  Chris's knowledge of astronomy, while extraordinary in a youngster with no formal education worth mentioning, was too meager to be of any help to Dr. Warner or of any use to the city.

  Dr. Warner signed him on as an apprentice anyhow, and so reported to the city manager's office, but not without carefully veiled misgivings, and an open warning:

  "I can think of very little for you to do around the observatory that would be useful, Crispin, I'm sorry to say. If I so much as set you to work sweeping the place, one of Frank Lutz's henchmen would find out about it sooner or later; and Frank would point out quite legitimately that I don't need so big a fellow as you for so light a task as that. While you're with me, you'll have to appear to be studying all the time."

  "I will be studying," Chris said. "That's just what I'd like."

  "I appreciate that," Dr. Warner said sadly. "And I sympathize. But Crispin, it can't
last forever. Neither I nor anyone else in Scranton can give you in two years the ten years of study that you've missed, let alone any part of what it took me thirty more years to absorb. I'll do my best, but that best can only be a pretense and sooner or later they'll catch us at it."

  After that, Chris already knew, would come the slag heaps hence the hidey hole. He wondered if they would send Dr. Warner to the slag heaps too. It didn't seem very likely, for the frail, potbellied little astrophysicist could hardly last long at the wrong end of a shovel, and besides he was the only navigator the city had. Chris mentioned this guardedly to Frad Haskins.

  "Don't you believe it," Frad said grimly. "The fact is that we've got no navigator at all. Expecting an astronomer to navigate is about like asking a chicken to fry an egg. Doc Warner ought to be a navigator's assistant himself, not a navigator-in-chief, and Frank Lutz knows it. If we ever run across another city with a spare real navigator to trade, Frank could send Boyle Warner to the slag heaps without blinking an eye. I don't say that he would, but he might."

  It could hardly be argued that Haskins knew his boss, and after only one look of his own at Lutz, Chris was more than ready to agree. Officially, Chris continued to occupy the single tiny room at the university dormitory to which he had been assigned as Dr. Warner's apprentice, but he kept nothing there but the books that Dr. Warner lent him, the mathematical instruments from the same source, and the papers and charts that he was supposed to be working on; plus about a quarter of the rough clothing and the even rougher food which the city had issued him as soon as he had been given an official status. The other three quarters of both went into the hole, for Chris had no intention of letting himself be caught at an official address when the henchmen of Frank Lutz finally came looking for him.

  He studied as hard in the hole as he did in the dormitory and at the observatory, all the same. He was firmly determined that Dr. Warner should not suffer for his dangerous kindness if there was anything that Chris could possibly do to avoid it. Frad Haskins, though his visits were rare he had no real business at the university detected this almost at once; but he said only:

  "I knew you were a fighter."

  For almost a year Chris was quite certain that he was making progress. Thanks to his father, for example, he found it relatively easy to understand the economy of the city probably better than most of its citizens did, and almost certainly better than either Frad Haskins or Dr. Warner. Once aloft, Scranton had adopted the standard economy of all tribes of highly isolated nomad herdsmen, to whom the only real form Of wealth is grass: a commune, within which everyone helped himself to what be needed, subject only to the rules which established the status of his job in the community. If Frad Haskins needed to ride in a, cab, for instance, he boarded it, and gave the Tin Cabby his social security number but if, at the end of the fiscal year, his account showed more cab charges than was reasonable for his job, he would hear about it. And if he or anyone else took to hoarding physical goods no matter whether they were loaves of bread or. lock washers, they could not by definition be in anything but short supply on board an Okie city he would do more than hear about it: The penalties for hoarding of any kind were immediate and drastic.

  There was money aboard the city, but no ordinary citizen ever saw it or needed it. It was there to be used exclusively for foreign trade that is, to bargain for grazing rights, or other privileges and, supplies which the city did not and could not carry within the little universe bounded by its spindizzy field. The ancient herdsmen had accumulated gold and jewels for the same reason. Aboard Scranton, the equivalent metal was germanium, but there was actually very little of it in the city's vaults; since germanium had been the universal metal base for money throughout this part of the galaxy ever since space flight had become practical most of the city's currency was paper the same "Oc dollar" everyone used in trading with the colonies.

  All this was new to Chris in the specific situation in which he now found himself, but it was far from new to him in principle. As yet, however, he was too lowly an object in Scranton to be able to make use of his understanding; and remembering the penury into which his father had been driven, back on Earth, he was far from sure that he would ever have a use for it.

  As the year passed, so also did the stars. The city manager, according to Haskins, had decided not to cruise anywhere inside "the local group" an arbitrary sphere fifty lightyears in diameter, with Sol at its center. The planetary systems of the local group had been heavily settled during the great colonial Exodus of 23752400, mostly by people from Earth's fallen Western culture who were fleeing the then worldwide Bureaucratic State. It was Lutz's guess quickly confirmed by challenges received by Scranton's radio station that the density of older Okie cities would be too high to let a newcomer into competition.

  During this passage, Chris busied himself with trying to identify the stars involved by their spectra. This was the only possible way to do it under the circumstances, for of course their positions among the constellations changed rapidly as the city overtook them. So did the constellations themselves, although far more slowly.

  It was hard work, and Chris was often far from sure his identifications were correct. All the same, it was impressive to know that those moving points of light all around him were the almost legendary stars of colonial times, and even more impressive to find that he had one of those storied suns in the small telescope. Their very names echoed with past adventure: Alpha Centauri, Wolf 359, RD4deg4048', Altair, 61 Cygni, Sirius, Kruger 60, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Only a very few of these, of course, lay anywhere near the city's direct line of flight indeed, many of them were scattered "astern" (that is, under the keel of the city), in the imaginary hemisphere on the other side of his home Sun. But most of them were at least visible from here, and the rest could be photographed. The city, whatever Chris thought of it as a home, had to be given credit for being a first-class observatory platform.

  How he saw the stars was another matter, and one that was a complete mystery to him. He knew that Scranton was now traveling at a velocity many times that of light, and it seemed to him that under these circumstances there should have been no stars at all still visible in the city's wake, and those to the side and even straight ahead should be suffering considerable distortion. Yet in fact he could see no essential change in the aspect of the skies. To understand how this could be so would require at least some notion of how the spindizzies worked, and on this theory Dr. Warner's explanations were even more unclear than usual ... so much so that Chris suspected him of not understanding it any too well himself.

  Lacking the theory, Chris's only clue was that the stars from Scranton in flight looked to him much as they always had from a field in the Pennsylvania backwoods, where the surrounding Appalachians had screened him from the sky glare of Scranton on the ground. From this he deducted that the spindizzy screen, though itself invisible, cut down the apparent brightness of the stars by about three magnitudes, as had the atmosphere of the Earth in the region where Chris had lived. Again he didn't know the reason why, but he could see that the effect had some advantages. For instance, it blanked out many of the fainter stars completely to the naked eye, thus greatly reducing the confusing multitudes of stars which would otherwise have been visible in space. Was that really an unavoidable effect of the spindizzy field or was it instead something imposed deliberately, as an aid to navigation?

  "I'm going to ask Lutz that question myself," Dr. Warner said, when Chris proposed it. "It's no help to me; in fact, it takes all the fun out of being an astronomer in free space. And there's no time like the present. Come along, Crispin, I can't very well leave you in charge, and the only other logical place for Lutz to see an apprentice of mine is with me."

  It seemed to Chris that nobody aboard Scranton ever said anything officially to him but "Come along," but he went. He did not relish the prospect of seeing the city manager again, but it was probably true that he would be safer under the astronomer's wing than he would be anyplace e
lse; in fact, he was both surprised by, and a little admiring of, Dr. Warner's boldness.

  But if Boyle Warner ever asked the question, Chris never heard the answer.

  Frank Lutz did not believe in making people who came to see him on official business wait in antechambers: It wasted his time as well as theirs, and he at least had none to waste and they had better not have. Nor were there many details of his administration that he thought he needed to keep secret, not now that those who might oppose him no longer had any place to run to. To remind his people who was boss, he occasionally kept the mayor waiting out of earshot, but everyone else came and went quite freely when he held court.

  Dr. Warner and Chris sat in the rearmost benches for Lutz's "court" was actually held in what once had been a courtroom and waited patiently to work their way forward to the foot of the city manager's desk. In the process, the astronomer fell into a light doze; Frank Lutz's other business was nothing to him, and in addition his hearing was no better than usual for a man his age. Both Chris's curiosity and his senses, on the other hand, shared the acuity of his youth, and the latter had been sharpened by almost a lifetime of listening and watching for the rustle of small animals in the brush; and the feeling of personal danger with which Frank Lutz had filled him on their first encounter was back again, putting a razor edge upon hearing and curiosity alike.

  "We're in no position to temporize," the city manager was saying. "This outfit is big the biggest there is and it's offering us a fair deal, The next time we meet it, it may not be so polite, especially if we give it any sass this time around. I'm going to talk turkey with them."

  "But what do they want?" Someone said. Chris craned his neck, but he did not know the man who had spoken. Most of Lutz's advisers were nonentities, in any event except for those like Huggins, who were outright thugs.

  "They want us to veer off. They've analyzed our course and say we're headed for a region of space that they'd had staked out long before we showed up. Now this, let me point out, is actually all to the good. They have a preliminary survey of the area, and we don't--everything ahead of us is all alike, until we've had some experience of it. Furthermore, one of the things they offer in. payment is a new course which they say will take us into an iron bearing star cluster, very recently settled, where there's likely to be plenty of work for us."