The Rolling Stones (7 page)

“It’s not subject to vote.”

Hazel said, “The deuce it ain’t!”

“Pipe down, Mother. Time was, when the senior male member of a family spoke, everybody did what he—”

“Roger, if you think I am going to roll over and play dead—”

“I said, ‘pipe down.’ But everybody in this family thinks it’s funny to try to get around Pop. Meade sweet-talks me. The twins fast-talk me. Buster yells until he gets what he wants. Hazel bullies me and pulls seniority.” He looked at his wife. “You, too, Edith. You give in until you get your own way.”

“Yes, dear.”

“See what I mean? You all think papa is a schnook. But I’m not. I’ve got a soft head, a pliable nature, and probably the lowest I.Q. in the family, but this clambake is going to be run to suit me.”

“What’s a ‘clambake’?” Lowell wanted to know.

“Keep your child quiet, Edith.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’m going on a picnic, a
wanderjahr.
Anyone who wants to come along is invited. But I refuse to deviate by as much as a million miles from whatever trajectory suits me. I bought this ship from money earned in spite of the combined opposition of my whole family; I did not touch one thin credit of the money I hold in trust for our two young robber barons—and I don’t propose to let them run the show.”

Dr. Stone said quietly, “They merely asked where we were going. I would like to know, too.”

“So they did. But why? Castor, you want to know so that you can figure a cargo, don’t you?”

“Well—yes. Anything wrong with that? Unless we know what market we’re taking it to, we won’t know what to stock.”

“True enough. But I don’t recall authorizing any such commercial ventures. The
Rolling Stone
is a family yacht.”

Pollux cut in with, “For the love of Pete, Dad! With all that cargo space just going to waste, you’d think that—”

“An empty hold gives us more cruising range.”

“But—”

“Take it easy. This subject is tabled for the moment. What do you two propose to do about your educations?”

Castor said, “I thought that was settled. You said we could go along.”

“That part is settled. But we’ll be coming back this way in a year or two. Are you prepared to go down to Earth to school then—and stay there—until you get your degrees?”

The twins looked at each other; neither one of them said anything. Hazel butted in: “Quit being so offensively orthodox, Roger. I’ll take over their educations. I’ll give them the straight data. What they taught me in school durn near ruined me, before I got wise and started teaching myself.”

Roger Stone looked bleakly at his mother. “You would teach them, all right. No, thanks, I prefer a somewhat more normal approach.”

“‘Normal!’ Roger, that’s a word with no meaning.”

“Perhaps not, around here. But I’d like the twins to grow up as near normal as possible.”

“Roger, have you ever met any normal people? I never have. The so-called normal man is a figment of the imagination; every member of the human race, from Jojo the cave man right down to that final culmination of civilization, namely me, has been as eccentric as a pet coon—once you caught him with his mask off.”

“I won’t dispute the part about yourself.”

“It’s true for everybody. You try to make the twins ‘normal’ and you’ll simply stunt their growth.”

Roger Stone stood up. “That’s enough. Castor, Pollux—come with me. Excuse us, everybody.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Sissy,” said Hazel. “I was just warming up to my rebuttal.”

He led them into his study, closed the door. “Sit down.”

The twins did so. “Now we can settle this quietly. Boys, I’m quite serious about your educations. You can do what you like with your lives—turn pirate or get elected to the Grand Council. But I won’t let you grow up ignorant.”

Castor answered, “Sure, Dad, but we do study. We study all the time. You’ve said yourself that we are better engineers than half the young snots that come up from Earth.”

“Granted. But it’s not enough. Oh, you can learn most things on your own but I want you to have a formal, disciplined, really sound grounding in mathematics.”

“Huh? Why, we cut our teeth on differential equations!”

Pollux added, “We know Hudson’s Manual by heart. We can do a triple integration in our heads faster than Hazel can. If there’s one thing we
do
know, it’s mathematics.”

Roger Stone shook his head sadly. “You can count on your fingers but you can’t reason. You probably think that the interval from zero to one is the same as the interval from ninety-nine to one hundred.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Is it? If so, can you prove it?” Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it into his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of the fields of mathematics invented thus far by the human mind. “Let’s see you find your way around that page.”

The twins blinked at it. In the upper left-hand corner of the chart they spotted the names of subjects they had studied; the rest of the array was unknown territory; in most cases they did not even recognize the names of the subjects. In the ordinary engineering forms of the calculus they actually were adept; they had not been boasting. They knew enough of vector analysis to find their way around unassisted in electrical engineering and electronics; they knew classical geometry and trigonometry well enough for the astrogating of a space ship, and they had had enough of non-Euclidean geometry, tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to get along with an atomic power plant.

But it had never occurred to them that they had not yet really penetrated the enormous and magnificent field of mathematics.

“Dad,” asked Pollux in a small voice, “what’s a ‘hyper-ideal’?”

“Time you found out.”

Castor looked quickly at his father. “How many of these things have
you
studied, Dad?”

“Not enough. Not nearly enough. But my sons should know more than I do.”

It was agreed that the twins would study mathematics intensively the entire time the family was in space, and not simply under the casual supervision of their father and grandmother but formally and systematically through I.C.S. correspondence courses ordered up from Earth. They would take with them spools enough to keep them busy for at least a year and mail their completed lessons from any port they might touch. Mr. Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master.

“Now, boys, about this matter of cargo—”

The twins waited; he went on: “I’ll lift the stuff for you—”

“Gee, Dad, that’s swell!”

“—at cost.”

The twins suddenly looked cautious. “How do you figure ‘cost’?” Castor asked.

“You figure it and I’ll check your figures. Don’t try to flummox me or I’ll stick on a penalty. If you’re going to be businessmen, don’t confuse the vocation with larceny.”

“Right, sir. Uh…we still can’t order until we know where we are going.”

“True. Well, how would Mars suit you, as the first stop?”

“Mars?” Both boys got far-away looks in their eyes; their lips moved soundlessly.

“Well? Quit figuring your profits; you aren’t there yet.”

“Mars? Mars is fine, Dad!”

“Very well. One more thing: fail to keep up your studies and I won’t let you sell a tin whistle.”

“Oh, we’ll study!” The twins got out while they were ahead. Roger Stone looked at the closed door with a fond smile on his face, an expression he rarely let them see. Good boys! Thank heaven he hadn’t been saddled with a couple of obedient, well-behaved little nincompoops!

When the twins reached their own room Castor got down the general catalog of Four Planets Export. Pollux said, “Cas?”

“Don’t bother me.”

“Have you ever noticed that Dad always gets pushed around until he gets his own way?”

“Sure. Hand me that slide rule.”

BICYCLES AND BLAST-OFF

T
HE
Rolling Stone
WAS MOVED

over to the space port by the port’s handling & spotting crew—over the protests of the twins, who wanted to rent a tractor and dolly and do it themselves. They offered to do so at half price, said price to be applied against freightage on their trade goods to Mars.

“Insurance?” inquired their father.

“Well, not exactly,” Pol answered.

“We’d carry our own risk,” added Castor. “After all, we’ve got assets to cover it.”

But Roger Stone was not to be talked into it; he preferred, not unreasonably, to have the ticklish job done by bonded professionals. A spaceship on the ground is about as helpless and unwieldy as a beached whale. Sitting on her tail fins with her bow pointed at the sky and with her gyros dead a ship’s precarious balance is protected by her lateral jacks, slanting down in three directions. To drag her to a new position requires those jacks to be raised clear of the ground, leaving the ship ready to topple, vulnerable to any jar. The
Rolling Stone
had to be moved thus through a pass in the hills to the port ten miles away. First she was jacked higher until her fins were two feet off the ground, then a broad dolly was backed under her; to this she was clamped. The bottom handler ran the tractor; the top handler took position in the control room. With his eyes on a bubble level, his helmet hooked by wire phone to his mate, he nursed a control stick which let him keep the ship upright. A hydraulic mercury capsule was under each fin of the ship; by tilting the stick the top handler could force pressure into any capsule to offset any slight irregularity in the road.

The twins followed the top handler up to his station. “Looks easy,” remarked Pol while the handler tested his gear with the jacks still down.

“It is easy,” agreed the handler, “provided you can outguess the old girl and do the opposite of what she does—only do it first. Get out now; we’re ready to start.”

“Look, Mister,” said Castor, “we want to learn how. We’ll hold still and keep quiet.”

“Not even strapped down—you might twitch an eyebrow and throw me half a degree off.”

“Well, for the love of Pete!” complained Pollux. “Whose ship do you think this is?”

“Mine, for the time being,” the man answered without rancor. “Now do you prefer to climb down, or simply be kicked clear of the ladder?”

The twins climbed out and clear, reluctantly but promptly. The
Rolling Stone,
designed for the meteoric speeds of open space, took off for the space port at a lively two miles an hour. It took most of a Greenwich day to get her there. There was a bad time in the pass when a slight moonquake set her to rocking, but the top handler had kept her jacks lowered as far as the terrain permitted. She bounced once on number-two jack, then he caught her and she resumed her stately progress.

Seeing this, Pollux admitted to Castor that he was glad they had not gotten the contract. He was beginning to realize that this was an esoteric skill, like glassblowing or chipping flint arrowheads. He recalled stories of the Big Quake of ’31 when nine ships had toppled.

No more temblors were experienced save for the microscopic shivers Luna continually experiences under the massive tidal strains of her eighty-times-heavier cousin Terra. The
Rolling Stone
rested at last on a launching flat on the east side of Leyport, her jet pointed down into splash baffles. Fuel bricks, water, and food, and she was ready to go—anywhere.

The mythical average man needs three and a half pounds of food each day, four pounds of water (for drinking, not washing), and thirty-four pounds of air. By the orbit most economical of fuel the trip to Mars from the Earth-Moon system takes thirty-seven weeks. Thus it would appear that the seven rolling Stones would require some seventy-five thousand pounds of consumable supplies for the trip, or about a ton a week.

Fortunately the truth was brighter or they would never have raised ground. Air and water in a space ship can be used over and over again with suitable refreshing, just as they can be on a planet. Uncounted trillions of animals for uncounted millions of years have breathed the air of Terra and drunk of her streams, yet air of Earth is still fresh and her rivers still run full. The Sun sucks clouds up from the ocean brine and drops it as sweet rain; the plants swarming over the cool green hills and lovely plains of Earth take the carbon dioxide of animal exhalation from the winds and convert it into carbohydrates, replacing it with fresh oxygen.

With suitable engineering a spaceship can be made to behave in the same way.

Water is distilled; with a universe of vacuum around the ship low-temperature, low-pressure distillation is cheap and easy. Water is no problem—or, rather, shortage of water is no problem. The trick is to get rid of excess, for the human body creates water as one of the by-products of its metabolism, in “burning” the hydrogen in food. Carbon dioxide can be replaced by oxygen through “soilless gardening”—hydroponics. Short-jump ships, such as the Earth-Moon shuttles, do not have such equipment, any more than a bicycle has staterooms or a galley, but the
Rolling Stone,
being a deep-space vessel, was equipped to do these things.

Instead of forty-one and a half pounds of supplies per person per day the
Rolling Stone
could get along with two; as a margin of safety and for luxury she carried about three, or a total of about eight tons, which included personal belongings. They would grow their own vegetables en route; most foods carried along would be dehydrated. Meade wanted them to carry shell eggs, but she was overruled both by the laws of physics and by her mother—dried eggs weigh so very much less.

Baggage included a tossed salad of books as well as hundreds of the more usual film spools. The entire family, save the twins, tended to be old-fashioned about books; they liked books with covers, volumes one could hold in the lap. Film spools were not quite the same.

Roger Stone required his sons to submit lists of what they proposed to carry to Mars for trade. The first list thus submitted caused him to call them into conference. “Castor, would you mind explaining this proposed manifest to me?”