©1995 D. A. Houdek

No reproduction or distribution without consent of the author

19,876 words  

"Adjustments" is a prequel to "Gandharvas." The story is science fiction.

Adjustments

by

D. A. Houdek

It wasn’t the work Joshua minded so much as the audience.  As he set the brakes of the John Deere B, he avoided looking around.  The Barrier wasn’t always operating perfectly.  Turning the fuel switch toward the smaller tank, he took the tractor out of gear and shoved the throttle forward halfway.  Then he climbed down between the huge tires to the ground.  The Adjusters had once tried to make him work barefoot, but he’d stubbornly clung to his work boots.  The sharp hay stubble would have cut his feet to shreds without them.  And, he argued, anyone who could have afforded a tractor could have afforded shoes. 

Joshua jerked his right foot up abruptly as a sharp stalk stabbed his foot anyhow.  Their compromise had been to insist his shoes were worn, with holes in the sole of one.  Cursing the Adjusters under his breath, Joshua went around to the side of the tractor.  This was the part that got the most reaction from his audience.  As he grasped the big, green flywheel on the side of the John Deere, he glanced out of the corner of his eye toward the hayfield’s edge.  Sure enough, the Barrier was shimmering today. 

A rusty barbed wire fence in the tall grass and weeds at the edge of the mown hay marked the “property line”.  Beyond it stretched a long field of corn, its rows of waving stalks appearing to be about knee-high to Joshua.  “Knee-high by the Fourth of July,” his father always cheerfully said, and Joshua always gritted his teeth.  This was the “neighbor’s” land and they were never to go onto it.  Joshua snorted softly to himself.  They weren’t to go onto it because they couldn’t.  Some days the illusion was perfect and Joshua felt as he used to as a child, that he was truly out in the country, working one field out of the endless stretch of fields that checkered northern Minnesota.  Sometimes he’d stand still, looking out across the sweep of land, forests and fields, baking beneath the cobalt sky, breathe in the humid air and be grateful for his life. 

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            Most of the time, lately, was like today.  The neighboring corn field quivered, and ghosting through the Barrier he could make out flashes of the watching crowd.  Glimpses of them came to him intertwined with the corn.  There must be a school group at the Center today for he saw faces that appeared to be about his own age.  Those boys — and girls, he added dryly — would likely be graduating in another year or so.  He ought to be among them, preparing for the future, not stuck here wrestling with ancient farm equipment while hoards of his peers gawked at him.  Turning his back to them, he reached into the pocket of his bib overalls and pulled out his April ‘42 issue of Astounding.  It was the only one he had left, the others had vanished one night.  This one had been hidden in the hayloft.  It was a pretty good cover picture, showing a spaceship in a forest.  He preferred to think of ships among the stars, with himself as the steely-jawed hero, but the story was good.

With the bitterness swelling in him, Joshua gave the tractor’s flywheel an extra hard yank.  The engine sputtered to life.  Even over the unmuffled chugging of the John Deere, he could hear the cheering filtering through the Barrier.  Audio was down today too, he thought as he climbed onto the bright green behemoth, flipped off the two brakes, and started the beast in motion.  Behind the tractor the hayrake, a leftover from horse-drawn days, creaked into motion.  The dried hay began to roll up into long, fat windrows behind them, ready for the bailer after another day of drying. 

A glance at the Barrier showed it firming up again, the illusion restored, but Joshua could sense the crowd at the Preservationist Center growing bored with his show and drifting away.  Well they should, he thought, as the tractor and rake crept around the hayfield.  They could go off to see other things, other eras.  He had to stay here, hour after hour, all day long in the sweltering heat, raking this hay.  It wasn’t a show to Joshua.  It was his life.

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            Twilight colored the sky in rose and gold by the time Joshua finished helping his father with the chores.  Dumping the last bucket of water into the pigs’ trough, Joshua gave his favorite pig, Epsilon, a quick scratch on the back, then hurried toward the house. 

Ma clanged the dinner bell vigorously.  Sourly, Joshua wondered if anyone in this era actually used one of those obnoxious things.  Still, the table she spread was worth tolerating a little racket.  A huge chunk of roast pork, surrounded by potatoes and carrots, sat in the center of the table.  The aroma made Joshua’s mouth water.  There were also dishes of radishes, beets, mashed turnips, pale green leaves of the new lettuce, and a big bowl of gravy. 

Sitting down at the table, Joshua promptly drained his glass of milk and went to the icebox for more.  The icebox handle jammed.  Joshua waited impatiently for a few seconds before he tried it again.  The illusion was supposed to be that the latch was finicky and sometimes needed a few tries before it opened, but Joshua knew the momentary delay was caused by the hidden machinery processing the new milk father had just brought in.  He couldn’t remember when he’d begun to suspect that, but a covert disassembly of the icebox a year ago had confirmed it. 

Joshua knew he’d probably get a reprimand from the Adjusters for waiting those few seconds rather than continuing to try to coax the fussy latch.  Ma gave him a frown as she passed by on her way to the stove to put a pie in to bake while they ate dinner.  They were always so afraid he’d say or do the wrong thing, break the illusion. 

Too bad, he thought, feeling grumpy as he sat down to the table.  Though the location of the monitors in the house were supposed to be a secret, Joshua thought he had identified them all, and so always angled his chair so that — he hoped — they couldn’t see him eat. 

Then he waited for the inevitable prayer and blessing on the meal.  He sneaked a peek at Ma’s two younger kids, his step-brother and sister, Matt and Laura.  Laura was peeking too.  She stuck her tongue out at him.  Joshua bit his lip so he wouldn’t grin.  They looked the part, he couldn’t help thinking.  Heck, he wasn’t even sure if they knew the setup yet, or if they believed that this really was 1948 and that old John Deere B was only fifteen years old, not one hundred and seventy-five years old.  Both kids had been too little when they came here to remember the outside world.  Now, in her print, flour sack dress, her dark red hair hanging in two stiff braids, nine-year-old Laura looked the very epitome of an old-time farm girl.  She’d spent the day, he knew, working on her embroidery and playing with her county fair lamb.  Matt was even younger, with a shockingly  bright red thatch of hair and a permanent cowlick.  Or, perhaps, the Adjusters thought a cowlick was necessary to the scene and made Matt’s hair that way. 

Father’s lengthy prayer ended, as always, with, “…and God bless President Truman and the good ol’ U. S. of A.”  There was a stirring as everyone reached for the food, piling their plates high.  Joshua concentrated on his food, wondering if those outside ate so well.  Probably not, he had to concede.  His memories of the before time were vague, those of a young boy, but he recalled scanty portions stripped of all the “bad things”.  Mostly the food had been stripped of taste.  Something good had come of Father taking on this job and marrying his step-Ma.  They both were happy here, as were Matt and Laura, at least for now.  It was only Joshua who couldn’t wait until he was old enough to decide for himself what kind of life he wanted.  Dousing the roast pork in the thick gravy, he took a bite and stared at the calendar, trying to convert the 1948 dates into 2105 dates.  He’d be seventeen in just one more week.  One more year and one more week and he’d be free.  He could hold out that long.  Not having any choice in the matter made it easier. 

Above them the bare lightbulb above the table flashed twice.  Joshua scarcely noticed.  Faulty electricity was part of the scene.  If the power went out entirely they’d be expected to drag out the old kerosene lanterns and spend the evening talking about how great that modern convenience electricity was.  Then they’d gather around the piano and Ma would play all the old songs and they’d have to sing along.  Still, it did provide a nice break from those dreadful old radio programs they usually listened to.  Joshua wasn’t deceived by any of it, he knew that the people in 1948 really spent their evenings watching television.  He remembered that from a trip to the Center when he was Matt’s age.  Some Adjuster must have decided those were Anachronisms and banned them.   

“Joshua,” Father’s deep voice boomed above the clatter of china and silverware.  He looked up.  Father’s eyes were twinkling in that way he always had when there was to be some new addition to the farm. 

“Yes, Father?”

Father’s strong, work-worn hand pointed up at the electric light.  “They flashed that to let us know they’re running a replay of another night, and we can talk freely for now.”

“Charles!” Ma snapped.  With her eyes she gestured toward Matt and Laura who listened and watched with wide eyes. 

“Oh,” Father huffed, looking at the children.  “Quite right.  Go up to your rooms now.  Stay there until you’re called.”

Even as they stood, Matt complained, “But Pa, I’m not done eatin’ yet.” 

“Well…  Take the cookie jar with you.”

Joshua watched as the children moved at near light speed to comply with this unusual order, snatching up the big, ceramic cookie jar as they ran.  He listened as their footsteps raced up the creaking stairs.

Father turned back to him.  “Now then…” he started.

Joshua cut him off.  “You mean the monitors are off?” he demanded. 

“Yes, but…”

Knowing how rare such situations were, Joshua hurried to say what he wanted.  “I’ll be eighteen in just a year and a week I’ll be already behind the others when I get to college and it will be hard enough to get into the space sciences without a real education and if you could just let me…”

“Son!  Son!” his father interrupted.  “Slow down.  I know how badly you want to go out to space.  That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”  He smiled and looked smug.  Ma smiled back at him and Joshua suddenly felt wary.  He remembered those smiles when they announced that they’d taken fully subsidized roles as Preservationists.  That decision had trapped him here for the last seven years and all but destroyed his best chance of making it into the space services. 

Father went on proudly.  “You see, son.  I do know how you want to go to space, and though we could keep you here on the farm until you’re eighteen, we’re not going to do that.”

Joshua stood up, whooping in delight.  “I can go?!”

The smug grin widened.  “We’re all going.  Joshua, your Ma and I have decided to take the whole family into space.”

His excitement draining away into suspicion, Joshua said, “Huh?”

“We’re migrating to a new planet.”

Joshua left the house as quickly as he could.  His head buzzed and he thought he might retch up that wonderful dinner.  They’d decided to colonize.  A new world had just opened up around Delta Pavonis that was Earth-like to well beyond the ninetieth percentile, moreover it had a climate and landscape much like northern Minnesota over most of one of its hemispheres.  Trained farmers like his family were just the sort who could make a go of a place like that.  The Colonial Service sought people like them on prime planets; people who could produce an excess and turn some profit for them fairly quickly — say in a generation or two — rather than going there and getting their silly selves killed right off, or starving because they didn’t know a cow’s teat from a wheat field. 

Joshua stumbled toward the dark barnyard.  Leaning against the fence, he ignored the swarm of mosquitoes as best he could and stared at the stars.  If Father had told him this seven years ago he’d have been exhilarated.  Going through space to tame a brand new world would have thrilled his ten-year-old soul.  Often he’d imagined himself as a space pioneer, standing on a hillside looking over land no one had ever seen before, while his spaceship rose into the starry night. 

Now…  Now, Joshua had seen, had lived first hand, the kind of endless toil it took to keep a farm alive even in this well-tamed, cultivated land.  There’d be no tractor to chug along helping with the work.  Colonists didn’t have machinery that depended on even that pathetic level of technology for maintenance.  Nope, Father had told him, the Adjusters would be taking the old John Deere away tonight and delivering the horses.  The calendar would be set back fifty years, maybe more, and they’d get a chance to really practice for their new lives.

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            Their new eternity, Joshua thought bleakly.  Heck, it wasn’t the work, Joshua didn’t mind hard work.  It was the time.  Colonizing was a one-way trip.  Ships didn’t return to take the eighteen-year-olds back to Earth to college and the space academies.  Ships didn’t come back to the colonies at all, not for a generation or more.  He’d be an old man before he saw another ship, another chance to chase his dream… and then he’d be too old to pursue it.

Surely they couldn’t make him go.  He was almost seventeen.  One more year and he’d be a free citizen, free to choose for himself what life he wanted.  For the sake of one little year they couldn’t take away his whole life?  Could they?

Joshua looked up, toward the stars.  They shimmered along the Barrier and he wasn’t sure he was seeing the projected stars, or lights from the apartment tower next door shining through it.  He looked higher yet, up to where the Barrier thinned and melded with the real sky.  It wasn’t a perfect 1948 sky.  The light from the city spilled over, dimming the crisp perfection of the stars.  Still, he could see them, could see the hazy whiteness of the Milky Way, the vivid constellations of the zodiac.  He wished he could see the glint of sunlight off the mammoth bulk of Terra Two station, but it was too far off in its synchronous orbit, and at this latitude it would be below the edge of the Barrier anyhow.  Besides, the Adjusters would never allow that Anachronism to shine in Joshua’s sky. 

His throat tight, Joshua felt a cold tear slide down his cheek.  Angrily, he swiped it away.  That would do no good.  He’d have to find another way out of this.  He was going to space, that he vowed, but it wasn’t going to be in the hold of a colony ship.

The last nudge of acceleration sent a quiver through the shuttle, then they were in freefall.  Terra Two station was out there, Joshua knew, hovering motionless relative to the shuttle.  He wished he could see it but there were no viewports in the cattlecar class, nor any screens. 

Freefall was a new experience.  When they hadn’t been under acceleration artificial gravity had kept some sense of weight on the passengers.  The passengers who had tested positive in the mandatory pre-screening for freefall sickness grinned happily, tranquilized by the drugs.  Joshua was pleased when he passed the test.  To him it was another indication he was a born spacer, not an earthpiggie, an expression he’d heard a woman use to one of the crew. 

Joshua had stared at the woman in fascination, realizing at once that she was the first genuine spacer he’d ever seen.  Her clothes were a clear Anachronism, out of style even seven years ago, the last time he’d seen current fashions.  That wasn’t what identified her so much as a distinct attitude radiating from her.  Her brazen stance and the condescending way she looked at the earthpiggies said she’d been out on some long jumps. 

As he’d neared her, determined to waylay her with questions about spacing, his father had clamped his hand on his arm and led him down the stairway to the lower level… where the colonists were… the eternal earthpiggies.

Joshua sighed, not even able to feel truly elated at experiencing freefall.  He was still stunned at how quickly and thoroughly his world had been tromped into nothingness.  The courts hadn’t even taken a full day to reject his request for emancipation, still less for his appeals to be placed in foster care on Earth until his eighteenth birthday.  No, the answers kept coming back.  A minor child’s life was the responsibility of his parents.  For the sake of one year, one tiny, scanty, minuscule year, Joshua was to be exiled to world from which there was no parole, no escape. 

On top of it he’d hurt his father.  He was, Joshua knew, only doing what he thought best for his family.  Well, maybe it was best for the other kids, but Joshua knew what he wanted of his life.  This wasn’t it.  He suspected it wouldn’t be enough for Laura either.  They’d spent many a night looking at the stars, talking over the fragments of news that reached them about Goddard and his rockets.  He’d even read her some of the stories from his magazines.

The wait in freefall was long as the other levels of the shuttle were unloaded.  Joshua shifted as well as he could.  Even without weight the cramped seats managed to be uncomfortable.  Locking mechanisms on the seat harnesses — for safety, they said — prevented him from even trying any freefall acrobatics. 

Joshua avoided looking at the rest of his family.  Matt and Laura were confused about what was going on with their big step-brother, he knew, but he didn’t tell them about his efforts to leave the family.  It would just hurt them to realize he’d tried to leave them forever. 

Forever.  The real implications hadn’t hit him until then.  Joshua knew in an abstract way, what pursuing his dream would mean.  No ships went to established colonies.  He wouldn’t see Laura as she grew.  Despite their little brother/sister spats, Joshua really was fond of Laura.  And Matt…  The boy was a born farmer, never so happy as when he was in the barn among the cattle, or weeding the garden.  Even at Matt’s age, Joshua had been daydreaming over the latest information on newly discovered worlds.  Always, always, Joshua had pictured himself as one of the explorers, discovering these new worlds, seeing them from space, not from behind a plow on the wrong side of a horse.

Finally the hatch to their level was opened.  A dozen people with stern faces and matching blue jumpsuits floated down into the compartment.  Joshua studied them with interest.  Their patches said “Station Escorts”.  They surveyed the colonists with expressions Joshua thought of as carefully rehearsed bland.  Each escort attached himself to a family group, releasing their seat harnesses, and fastening the family together by short leashes hooked to the belts at their waists.  Like a string of livestock being led away to the butcher, Joshua thought as their escort hooked the snaps to first Father’s, then Matt’s, then Ma’s, then Laura’s belts.  Joshua was the last in line. 

The escort — Rick, his name badge said, and he couldn’t have been more than a year or so older than Joshua — pulled them along, up to the ceiling and out into the upper decks of the shuttle.  Ma and Matt both drifted along placidly, still calmed by the freefall drugs.  Laura had had only a small dose, and that at Father’s insistence; she’d passed the screening.  All of this had been baffling to Laura and Matt, though Father and Ma had shielded them from most of the strangeness.  To them it was 1948… only in the past month it had become 1889; the electric lights and tractors had gone away without warning.  They’d both been delighted with the horses, but Joshua had spotted Laura staring at the Barrier one day when it was shimmering.  It was the first time he’d ever seen her do that. 

Now she looked around herself, bewildered.  Her braids floated up toward her face and Laura batted at them, the motion sending her jerking at the line. 

Joshua caught her hand.  “Relax, Laura.”  He was surprised at the strength of her grip. 

“I’m scared, Josh,” she whispered.  “Don’t leave me.”

He squeezed her hand.  “It’s all right,” he said, non-committally.

They waited while other groups were slowly pulled out of the shuttle, through a short tunnel, and into Terra Two station.  A tug at his belt came and the family, strung out like balloons on a string, were pulled into the station.  Joshua peered around eagerly.  This was it, the launch point of most deep space flights.  His expression faded.  It was distinctly unimpressive. 

Through the tunnel they came out into a spherical gray chamber, the airlock.  There was an outlet at the opposite side through which the colonists were being funneled.  Their turn finally came to pass through the funnel and into a long corridor.  On the other side the escorts aimed the colonists’ feet toward a red-striped wall.  As he followed along, Joshua found his feet being pulled down toward that wall, soon distinguishable as a floor.  The gravitation grew incrementally as they moved down the corridor until they were walking.  Joshua recognized the sensation, from the shuttle, of the light, inconsistent gravity as being artificially generated. 

A voice behind him made him turn, almost tripping in the low gee as his tether to Laura tightened.  The spacer woman pushed her way out of the airlock and into the corridor. 

“Well, why didn’t you wake me?” she snapped to someone behind her.  “And, no, I don’t need a wrangler,” she added, shaking off a persistent escort. 

Beneath a tangle of frizzy brown hair, the woman’s face was lean and tanned.  She wore a skimpy, faded outfit, and carried only a small pouch slung over one shoulder.  Again, Joshua tried to decide why he was so convinced she was an experienced spacer.

Pushing past the line of colonists, she muttered to Joshua as she passed, “Don’t fall over your feet,” as he fell over his feet.  Joshua blushed and tried to recover but found it hard to get traction.  He made Laura stumble which jerked the line through all the others, earning a black look from their escort. 

“Watch it, kid,” the escort snapped. 

Suddenly Joshua had had enough of being treated like he was part of a not-too-bright herd of cattle.  Why, he thought defiantly, people used to come to watch him work, doing things they couldn’t do.  He bet that escort wouldn’t even know what a John Deere B was, much less be able to figure out how to start it.

Yanking at the tether on his belt, Joshua let it fall.  “I’ll stay close,” he said in answer to the escort’s narrow-eyed questioning look. 

The escort shrugged.  “Have it your way.  Just don’t fall behind.  You get lost in Terra Two and they won’t find you until you’re nothing but a pile of bones.”

“I won’t,” Joshua answered irritably.  He used to build tunnels in the hayloft, piling the haybales this way and that to create a giant three dimensional maze.  Inside the haybale maze it was pitch black.  Joshua never got lost in the maze. 

Through another doorway at the end of the gravity corridor, the family was stopped by the Port of Entry barrier.  Three counters stood at the end of the room, each with a Custom’s officer processing each colonist family.  

Joshua’s family stepped into this larger room and stood in a cluster by their escort, awaiting their turn.  Edging away from the family, Joshua turned to see the spacer woman pause by a counter in an alcove behind him, one he hadn’t noticed before.  A security officer sat behind it, watching the arrivees to the station.  Beyond him was an unmarked door. 

The spacer woman pulled a mylar sack from her pouch and tossed it to the guard.  He caught it easily as it drifted toward him.  It took experience with low gee, Joshua decided, to make an accurate throw like that. 

“I knew you’d be back, Diana,” the guard called as the woman went past him. 

She waved as she disappeared through the door.  A few groups were still ahead of his family, so Joshua edged toward the door. 

“Hey.  You can’t go in there.  Get back to your escort,” the guard said immediately. 

“What’s in there?” he asked, trying to sound young and innocent.  It wasn’t much of a reach, he decided.

“Never mind.  Just get back where you belong.”  The guard’s voice sharpened and Joshua noticed he had hidden the mylar sack.  Joshua glanced at the door once more before slowly going back toward his family.  It wasn’t exactly unmarked, he saw.  A small plaque by the door said it was the “Station Escorts’ Lounge”.  Beneath that someone had scratched “Earthpiggie Wranglers Holding Pen.” 

Waiting behind his family, Joshua scrutinized the room.  The walls and floor were featureless gray save for stripes and markings to tell people where they were to stand and wait.  The ceiling, he noticed with interest, was a high gridwork of exposed piping and beams.  Lights were suspended below this unfinished tangle, leaving the depths of the ceiling in shadow.  The lowest beam was still far too high to reach, but Joshua bet that in this low gee he could leap that high.  Once there…  He was farm boy strong, accustomed to lifting haybales and lugging bucket after bucket of water.  If he got hold of that ceiling, he was sure he could stay there.

First he needed a distraction.  Crowded around him were dozens of other colonist families.  Finding a boy similar to his age and build, and dazed by the drugs, wasn’t too difficult.  So distracted was this boy’s family by a crying baby, that they didn’t notice Joshua release his tether and lead him over to his own family.  Cautiously he took the dangling tether from Laura’s waist and fastened it to the boy.  Then he edged away through the crowded room, getting beyond the guard’s line of sight to that door as best he could. 

It was only a moment before Laura felt a tug at her waist and turned to look, screaming when she saw the stranger fastened to her.  In the commotion that followed Joshua leaped.  His fingertips caught a beam and he pulled himself up.  There was no place to get a foothold so he had to hold himself by his fingers.  He made his way slowly across the ceiling until he was above the alcove. 

It seemed the guard would never leave his post to help the confused families.  Joshua’s fingers grew numb as he clung to the pipes.  Even his lessened weight grew intolerable until he thought he might have to give up and drop back to the floor.  Above the turmoil he heard his father’s voice calling his name, and he caught a glimpse of Laura looking around for her big brother.  His throat tightened when he realized this might be the last time he ever saw her if he succeeded.  He almost let go, but some portion of him was too stubbornly determined to meet his own future on his own terms.  His fingers clung even more tightly to the ceiling. 

Finally the time came.  The guard had moved away.  No one was looking at the alcove.  Joshua dropped to the floor.  It seemed to take forever to fall.  Hitting the floor lightly, he collapsed into a ball, hidden by the guard’s desk.  Creeping toward the door, he stayed low.  He eased it open and shut it behind him. 

Inside he stood.  The room was empty save for some couches.  The lights were dim.  Joshua filled his pockets from some candy and crackers in bowls on the table.  Then he searched the room in minute detail.  That woman had gone in here.  She hadn’t come out.  Joshua was certain she’d gone through here to sneak by Customs, bribing the guard with whatever was in that sack.  Now she was gone and there were no other exits from the room. 

Feeling his way along the walls, he searched for secret doors, hidden catches, anything.  There wasn’t another door.  There had to be another way out.  The ceiling in here was low and quite solid.  She hadn’t gone that way.  Likewise the floor.  That left the vent. 

Joshua stared at the grill and felt the air wafting out of it.  It was big enough for a person.  He gulped.  The hayloft mazes he made could be nothing to what the airducts in this vast space station could be. 

The commotion outside neared.  It wouldn’t take them too long to decide he’d come in here.  Joshua made his decision quickly.  Dropping to his knees he pried off the grate, not surprised when it came off easily.  He eased his way into the vent, feet first.  Pulling the grate into position behind him, he slid away from the opening as the door opened. 

“Not in here,” came the guard’s voice.

“Is there any other way out?” he heard his father’s voice boom out. 

There was a long pause before the guard answered.  “No.”  Joshua almost chuckled.  The guard knew about this unofficial exit and didn’t want to give it away. 

The door closed, then opened again a minute later.  The guard called softly into the room, “I know you’re in here, boy.  Don’t you dare go through those vents.  You’ll get lost and never find your way out.  You just wait here and I’ll be back for you.”  The door opened and closed again as the guard left.

Joshua tried to decide what to do next.   The guard was right.  The vents were dark, as dark as his haybale tunnels, only Joshua had built them and knew there were exits; exits to light.  Here…  Still, that woman had known the way. 

Sitting still, Joshua tried to think how he could follow her.  The vent went in two directions from where he was.  He felt the metal floor, hoping to find a trace of heat from the woman’s passage, but there was none.  Without hope he felt the other direction and pulled his hand back with a faint coating of dust on it.  In the light spilling through the grate he stared as he brushed it off.  No one had gone that way.  If he was careful he should be able to follow her at each intersection. 

Here began his future among the stars, Joshua thought, in a cramped and dusty air vent.

 It seemed forever before Joshua sensed a change in the blackness.  Each choice of direction was filled with uncertainty, following the most subtle of clues.  At one point the vent went downward for a distance.  Joshua’s stomach turned over several times and he realized he must be passing out of the gravity of that level.  For a few moments up and down were confused.  He pushed on in the direction that had been ‘down’ until he felt a recognizable sense of gravity again.  He must have gone to a lower level.

Something made his nose twitch.

“Bacon?” he said aloud, startling himself with the sound of his voice echoing through the vents.

He sniffed again.  Perhaps he’d gone insane, lost in here for days, for Joshua was certain he smelled frying bacon and eggs, and — he inhaled deeply — yes, it was coffee.  These were familiar smells from breakfast on the farm, where their aroma filled the house before dawn each day.  But in the real world, he was certain, such things were not eaten.  He remembered plainly how that first breakfast on the farm had sealed in his mind the fact that they were in a new, different world. 

Shaking his head, Joshua tried to trace the air currents.  At a four-way intersection he had a momentary attack of panic when he couldn’t find any indication of dust to guide him.  The tantalizing food scents swirled around him in a tangle at this intersection; he couldn’t choose a direction.

Peering hard, he thought he detected a slight lessening of the darkness to his right.  He blinked and couldn’t be sure.  Better than staying here, he thought. 

After one more corner Joshua was certain there was light ahead.  Letting out his breath with a long sigh, Joshua moved faster.  He hadn’t realized how scared he was until then. 

The light grew and was joined by the decided scent of cinnamon rolls baking.  Joshua’s mouth watered and his stomach growled.  He hadn’t eaten since well before leaving Earth.  Digging into his pocket he wolfed down the handful of candy and crackers he’d snatched from the escort’s lounge.  It only served to heighten the gnawing in his middle. 

Sounds joined the light and smells.  There was a clatter of dishes and voices.  Low and distant, more of a feeling in the metal than actual sound, a rumble vibrated.  Rounding a turn, the floor gave way beneath him.  Uncontrollably he slid down a steep incline, a long yelp escaping his throat.  He hit the bottom with a bang, slamming feet first into a grate.  The grate popped open, depositing Joshua unceremoniously on his backside on the floor.

Joshua found himself staring up at the underside of several dishes held in the hands of a waitress.  Her pink lips pursed and her eyes blinked at him, showing shockingly blue lids.  Across the harshly lit room the talk and clatter of utensils ceased and at least fifty pairs of eyes focused on Joshua.  For a span of four heartbeats there was dead silence, then all the men and women resumed eating and talking as though a teenage boy hadn’t just dropped out of the air vent into their midst.  The waitress stared down at him a second longer.  Joshua wanted to crawl under the counter.

“Uh… hel… hello,” Joshua stuttered.  “Ma’am,” he added.

She smiled perfunctorily, stepped over Joshua, and delivered the plates to one of the tables.  Joshua climbed to his feet, rubbing his backside.  He hitched his bib overalls up and looked around, trying to appear nonchalant.  The room was filled with men, and a few women, all wearing dirty, work-worn coveralls and jumpsuits.  The waitresses wore yellow dresses with frilly lace handkerchiefs in the pockets.  To Joshua the room screamed Anachronism so loudly he had to fight that twitchy feeling that came before the Adjusters showed up.

He had to get out of here.  Joshua hadn’t expected to come across this many people.  The colony ship didn’t leave for three days; he had to find a place to hide until then.  Probably the whole station was on alert searching for him.  Though everyone seemed to be ignoring him as thoroughly as if he was invisible, he felt watched.  Maybe it was the past seven years, living life inside the Preservation Barrier. 

Gulping to quell the rumbling of his stomach, Joshua scanned for the exit.  The waitress came back to where Joshua stood, stepping behind the counter. 

“You look like you could use a bite.  Let me fix you something to eat,” she said, examining him with that same bland, but knowing, expression.

Even as his stomach growled “yes!”, he heard himself saying, “Thank you, no, ma’am.  I don’t have any money.”

The bright pink lips twisted in an ironic smile.  “Gee, that’s a surprise,” she commented.  “Tell you what, you can pay for it when you get some money.”

“I do thank you,” Joshua said, “but I couldn’t be beholden.”

The smile flickered somewhere between amused and respectful.  “Well, the offer stands.”  She paused.  “You might want to go right out of the door.”  She pointed in the direction.  “Take the first corridor to your left, it’s a good place to hide.”  Bending below the counter, she glanced at him again.  “Though you might want to reconsider colonizing.  You seem like the perfect type.”

As the cafe doors slid shut behind him, Joshua wondered, somewhat sullenly, what she meant by that last comment.  He was the perfect spacer type, of that he was certain.  He didn’t mean to be a colonist no matter who thought it was the best thing for him. 

He stopped outside the cafe door and gaped.  Before him was an area just about the size of the hayfield, maybe even bigger.  The walls were so far off he couldn’t make out their details.  Huge containers and equipment covered the floor.  With all the flurry of work, and machinery moving about, it all didn’t produce the noise that a single John Deere B did. 

He stepped a little further out onto that huge floor.  Distant klaxons began to howl.  Attention focused on a section of the far wall.  A red light flashed and the floor shook as enormous doors rolled open.  Beyond them Joshua could see another set of doors also opening.  He realized that beyond this lock he was looking into the hold of a cargo ship.  His feet led him involuntarily another step toward the wonder.  This may be his way out.  If he could sneak aboard that ship…

“Hey, kid!” a voice sounded by his ear.

Joshua spun to see a slender man standing beside him.  Cursing himself for letting the stranger get so close unaware, he thought how the old sow Gertrude would have taken a chunk out of his thigh if he’d ever been so inattentive.  A cold shiver down his spine reminded him that more than a little nip was at stake here, if he got caught he’d pay for it with the rest of his life.

Flexing his work-hardened muscles, Joshua stepped back and examined the stranger.  He wasn’t dressed like the others.  His clothes were slick and shiny, not the kind of clothes one would do real work in.  Joshua stole a glance at the man’s hands; saw that they were soft, even more delicate looking than Laura’s, for even her young hands had seen more work than this dandy’s. 

“What can I do for you, sir?” Joshua asked in the polite way he’d been taught. 

A low chuckle bobbed the Adam’s apple in the skinny throat.  “No, son.  It’s what I can do for you.”

Joshua narrowed his eyes.  “What would that be, sir?”  This fellow must not be anyone official or he’d be dragging him back to his family and the colonists’ holding area right now. 

Ducking aside as the smarmy fellow tried to lay his arm across Joshua’s shoulders, Joshua quickly looked around.  No one seemed to be paying any attention to them. 

“Relax, boy,” the man said.  His ingratiating tone was beginning to vex Joshua.  “Let’s take a walk and we’ll talk.”  His voice dropped to a whisper.  “You don’t want to be seen around here.  That’s Customs and Security swarming over that ship.”  He gestured significantly with his eyes toward the activity on the cargo floor.  Joshua wanted to get out of the open anyhow, so he walked beside the stranger.  They went to the left, the opposite direction the waitress had told Joshua to go. 

“I think you’re just the sort of person I’m looking for,” the man said affably.  “What’s your name?”

He hesitated before he answered.  “Joshua.”

“Josh.  Good, good.  Josh, my boy, you can call me Archer.  Think of me as your friend.  I’m guessing you could use one right about now, eh?”

Joshua listened to Archer’s prattle with half his attention, studying his surroundings with the other half.  Reflecting on the air vents that had been so oppressive and confusing at the time, he decided he could retrace his path.  The correct turns had been fairly simple, it was the wrong turns that had made it seem complicated.  Why, he bet he could learn his way around this whole darned space station in no time at all.  That threat about getting lost was just a tale to scare him. 

“…clever young man like you,” Archer flattered him.  Joshua ignored his words and tried to figure out what this character wanted of him.  “Got past Customs without getting registered…  You’re kind of invisible on Terra Two right now, but you can’t get work without registering and that would bring trouble down right on your head…”  Joshua hadn’t thought of that.  The notion sent an uncomfortable lump to the pit of his stomach. 

“…But I think I can help you out a lot, my boy.  And just for you helping me out a little.”

“Doing what?”  Joshua asked flatly.  He didn’t have to question whether some city slicker might take him for a naive hayseed.  He knew he was an innocent country bumpkin.  Heck and gosh darned all mighty!  Sure, he’d been raised on a farm in the 1940s in a world of the twenty-second century, but that didn’t make him either ignorant or stupid.  He’d seen this sort before, during the War years.  While Hitler’s forces were rolling all over Europe, this type of junior quisling was at work on the homefront, running a black-market in rationed goods — goods which farms had in abundance. 

Joshua shook himself.  That had all been a Preservationist act, he knew, but to him it had been completely real.  Certainly the lessons he learned from those pseudo-War years were valid, for now they let him recognize just the sort of snake Archer was. 

“Oh, nothing too difficult.  Deliver a few packages for me.  Maybe meet some friends who’d rather not have Customs paw through all their private things…  Nothing, really.  Just a few favors for friends.” 

With the best gee-whiz smile he used for the monitors when reading an old Astounding, Joshua said, “Golly!  And you’d pay me just for that?” 

A satisfied expression crept over Archer’s face.  “Just for that.  For now.  Now come with me.  We’ll get you out of sight, get some food, and let you clean up, then we’ll get you started on a little project for me involving that ship you were admiring so.”

“I don’t know,” he said as guilelessly as possible.  Inwardly his heart leaped.  This might be a way onto the freighter.  “My pa always said never to take charity.  I couldn’t take advantage of your hospitality that way.” 

Archer’s suppressed his annoyance with obvious effort.  “All right, kid, have it your way.”  He dug in a pocket and pulled out a handful of multi-colored tabs.  “This is station currency — that’s ‘money’, kid.”  He dumped them into Joshua’s hand.  “Consider it an advance on your salary.  Now come with me and I’ll charge you for everything.  Does that suit your sense of pride?”

Grinning, Joshua said, “You betcha.  Put ‘er there.”  He spit on his empty hand and stuck it out toward Archer.  The grimace of disgust on the man’s face brought the first genuine joy to Joshua that he’d felt since Father had announced they were migrating.  Bravely, Archer started to raise his hand.  Joshua closed the distance, clasping it firmly.  Archer freed his hand as soon as quickly as possible, wiping his hand on his pants. 

“Now, let’s…”

“There he is!”

The shout echoed through the cavernous cargo area.  Heads snapped around.  In a flash, Joshua realized he was the subject of that cry.  Across the floor uniformed figures began running in his direction. 

“Sorry,” Joshua snapped to Archer, who was already trying to distance himself from the boy.  Whipping around, Joshua ran. 

Back toward the door of the cafe, he rushed to the enclosed corridor the waitress had recommended.  By the door he dodged a some men and a woman emerging with unhurried ease.  Their faces were a blur as he went by, but his sharp ears heard their comments as they recognized him as the boy who’d dropped into their dinner. 

Coming to a corner, Joshua spared a glance back.  The workers blocked the entire corridor, standing in a casual circle, chatting. 

“Clear the way!” his pursuers shouted, but the workers held their ground, solidly blocking the corridor. 

“What’s going on?” one asked coolly and Joshua sent a quick mental blessing their way before he turned and ran again.

The corridor grew narrower and dimmer.  First it curved to the left, then to the right.  It rose in a slow incline, then went down a flight of stairs.  All along the way Joshua kept a sharp lookout for the “corridor to the left” the waitress had mentioned, but never saw it.  It seemed he was running down a dead-end with no outlet. 

The gravity surged, sending him bobbing uncontrollably upward.  Flailing his arms and legs, he sought anything stable.  Once he regained the floor he went more slowly for a time, almost skating along rather than running.  He hardly seemed to weigh anything.

Joshua skidded to a halt at a truly perplexing sight.  A stairway climbed the wall in front of him, then twisted in a corkscrew leading to the ceiling off to the right.  Everything in him told him that he couldn’t climb those bizarre stairs, but hollow shouts reverberated down the passageway behind him spurring him onward against all reason.  He took the first two steps slowly.  On the third a wave of dizziness swept over him and he realized the gravitation had changed with each step.  More quickly, but still dubiously, he climbed the stairs, finding that the “floor” he had been running on had now become a “ceiling”.  With a laugh, Joshua dashed onward.

Two hours later Joshua was certain he was lost.  To evade his pursuers he’d taken a side passage, then another off of that, then another.  He’d passed through half a dozen of the odd gravity twists so that he didn’t know which was the real “up”, if there even was such a thing in this three-dimensional labyrinth.  He could make out the outline of doorways off the corridor at many points but none would open for him.  Whenever he saw or heard someone, he ducked away. 

Eventually his pace slowed to a walk.  Despite his weight being not more than a third of his Earth weight, he was still tired, and very thirsty.  Even hunger had been shunted off in favor of thirst.  He considered that at this moment he’d gladly trade all his hopes for the future and harness himself to the backside of a plow-horse forever just for one swallow of warm water from a muddy puddle. 

Nothing to be done, he told himself, but go on.  That’s what you did when the crops failed and the sow crushed all her piglets and the equipment broke and there was no money to fix it.  You went on. 

Joshua didn’t know how long he’d trudged through the madman’s puzzle that was Terra Two station.  He’d known the station was big, but that knowledge was a pale thing next to the reality.  Feeling light-headed, Joshua slumped back against one of the doorways, thinking he’d rest, just for a moment. 

He didn’t know how long he slept when he felt a prodding at his side.

“Just a minute more, Father,” he muttered without opening his eyes. 

The prodding continued.  Forcing his gummy eyes open, Joshua peered upward.  A lean female shape stood over him.  Tanned legs stretched to tattered, faded shorts.  He continued looking up, blushingly over her scantily clad top to the bemused face crowned by a tangled crown of sun-bleached hair. 

“It’s you,” he croaked.  It was the spacer woman… Diana, the guard had called her.

With her hands on her hips, Diana stared down at him.  “Are you following me?” she demanded.

Joshua struggled to his feet.  He was surprised to find he was a bit taller than she was.  “Uh…  In a manner of speaking, ma’am,” he managed.

She chuckled.  “Well, you found me.”  She studied him, frowning.  “You’re a mess.  Come with me.”

Following her down the corridor, Joshua swallowed several times to moisten his throat.  “Excuse me, miss,” he called.  Diana turned toward him with an eyebrow raised as a questionmark.  “Is there somewhere I could get a drink of water, please?”

She gestured him to follow again.  Glancing back, she commented, “I don’t recall the last time someone called me ‘miss’, or even ‘ma’am’.  In fact, I don’t think anyone ever has.  Where are you from?”

“Minnesota,” he rasped.

“Hmmph.  Me too.  I don’t recall your kind of manners there.”

“I’m from 1948.”

“Huh?”

“Preservationists, ma’am.”

“Stick to ‘miss’,” she said.  “It doesn’t sound as old as ‘ma’am’.  Here we are.”

Joshua watched as Diana stopped in front of a doorway.  He’d seen others marked with this symbol, but hadn’t known what it had meant.  The small marking was of wavy lines with little droplets above and little stick people bent into positions that seemed rather obscene to Joshua.  Diana dug in the tight pocket of her shorts, pulling out one of the colored money chips. 

“Wait,” he said.  “I have some of those.”

Staring at him oddly, Diana selected one of his blue chips and fed it into a narrow slot by the picture symbol.  The door slid rapidly aside.

“Hurry up.  It doesn’t stay open long,” Diana said, urging Joshua into the small chamber ahead of her.  The door closed behind her. 

The smell of water was in the air.  Joshua sniffed gratefully.  A sink with a faucet was in front of him, cups in a dispenser above it.  He flipped on the faucet and yanked at the cups.  Nothing happened.  He turned to Diana with a puzzled look.

“Nothing’s free on Terra Two,” she intoned.  “Not even the water.  Use a red chit.”

With the tiny chunk of red plastic fed into the appropriate slot, Joshua finally got some water and a cup.  He gulped it down gratefully, refilled and drank some more.  With his remaining splash of water he wiped his face with his hands.  Seeing nothing to dry them with he used his overalls.

Diana snorted indelicately.  “That didn’t help much.”

“The vents were dirty.”

“You did follow me.  You owe the guard a bribe, I’ll wager.  Though from what I’ve been hearing, it will take more bribes than you have money to cool down this place.  They’re hot to get you, kid.”

“My name is Joshua,” he said, feeling glum. 

“I’m Diana Lindquist,” she told him.  “Where’d you get station chits?  Not something most colonists can get their hands on, not even some station folk — they prefer everyone used their credit accounts.”

Joshua gave her a quick rundown of what happened to him since diving into the airvents after her.  She shook her head. 

“Archer’s a bad fellow,” she said.  Then she added something that made Joshua’s heart do a double beat.  “Being on the wrong side of his bunch is likely to get you killed.  Your best bet might be to turn yourself in and hide out on that colony.”

Under Diana’s instructions his pile of colored money chits diminished again as he took a shower and had his clothes cleaned.  While the hot, soapy water jetted down on him, Joshua considered his options.  It was a short reflection, not even lasting as long as the shower’s wash cycle.  He simply had no options. 

Goll ding it!  He just couldn’t crawl back with his tail tucked between his legs.  He’d set out to be a spaceman and he was going to, no matter who said what.  Maybe he’d find a way to sneak back into that freighter.  Or, and he withheld this as cherished, if unlikely, fantasy, maybe they’d all decide they’d made a mistake and the space agencies would come to him, begging him to join their service.  He’d be standing so tall and proud in his fine uniform as...

“Yow!”  Joshua leaped backward as the steamy rinse water suddenly turned ice cold then sputtered to a stop.  “Ow,” he added when he bounced too high in the low gravity and banged his head on the ceiling. 

“You all right?” Diana’s voice called. 

“Fine,” he muttered as the drier came on.  Moments later Diana handed him his clothes over the door.  She’d seemed amused that he wouldn’t undress in front of her.  He was pleased to find his clothes clean, dry and neatly folded for him.  For some reason, though, the processor had put neat creases in the front of his bib overalls.  It looked absurd, Joshua thought, but he felt much better, other that the serious hollow spot in his stomach.

“You look better,” Diana said as he stepped out of the shower dressing room.  She stared at the crease in his overalls, commenting that she must have hit the wrong controls on the processor.  He stared at her too.  In the interim she’d cut her hair off, leaving a sleek, short style. 

“I couldn’t get a comb through it,” she shrugged.

It seemed the best thing he could do was follow Diana.  She hadn’t turned him in yet, and had taught him a thing or two about Terra Two. 

She asked, “You want to get something to eat?”

“You bet,” he said, his bleak mood lifting considerably just at the thought.  “It’s been ages since I ate.”

“Me too.  I think I drank most of my meals the last two days on Earth,” she said thoughtfully.  “Caribbean rum, mostly.  Turns out sailboats make me as sick as freefall does.  Well,” she added briskly, “That’s the last of that.  I’m never going down to that wretched planet again.” 

She turned down a dim passageway, scuttling up the wall in an improbable move that Joshua realized, when he tried to follow, was the result of another direction shift in the gravitation.  His head spun as he tried to convince his confused equilibrium that this new “down” was the same one they’d been using before.  Diana cursed under her breath, using words Joshua had never heard before, as she skittered and bounced crossing another one of the gravity changes. 

“I hate artificial gravity,” she muttered through gritted teeth. 

“Where are we going?” Joshua ventured to ask. 

“A place I know.  We can get something to eat, and drink, there.  It’s called the Escher and it’s sort of… exclusive.”

Uneasily, Joshua asked, “Miss Diana, will there be lots of other people there?”

She paused and her hazel eyes twinkled at him.  “Don’t worry.  No one at the Escher will turn you in.” 

The corridors became less maintained, less official, in appearance, Joshua decided was the best way to describe it.  The lighting was intermittent.  At points the floor was uneven, with piping and ducts bisecting the floor.  Diana took the obstacles with practiced ease, but Joshua put too much muscle into a couple of his leaps and banged his head.

“Mass and weight aren’t the same,” Diana said, laughing at him.

Diana stopped at what looked to Joshua like an abyss.  She poised at the edge and grinned at Joshua.  He peered down into  the darkness and couldn’t discern a bottom.  Discretely, he moved back a few steps.  Noticing the mocking smile on Diana’s face, he blushed, but moved no closer to the pit. 

“I think it goes all the way to the outer hull of the fifth western radial arm,” she said.  Joshua wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded big. 

“We have to jump,” she added.  He stared at her, wondering when his companion had gone mad.  From the glitter in her eyes he knew she must be teasing him…  Maybe.

“Yes, Miss Diana.  After you,” he said gallantly, letting his own grin spread to match hers.

With a chuckle, she said, “I like you.”  Her face grew serious and she told him, “This part is tricky, but just the first time.  Mainly you have to be convinced in your own mind that you can do it, and do it easily.”  She pointed across the void to the far wall, from which stretched another corridor, the floor of which was rotated almost one hundred and eighty degrees from the one on which they stood.  “We’re at about one-third gee here with that,” she pointed, “as down.  That wall is down over there, but it’s more like a half gee, so you’ll hit harder than you’ve been.  In the middle, over the shaft, you’re in freefall.  What you have to do…”

She sprang into the void, still talking.  Joshua gasped. 

“…is have enough velocity to carry you through the zero gee spot until the next gravity field picks you up.”  In the middle she twisted herself around, pointing her feet at the far wall.  She landed, collapsing only slightly to absorb the force of impact.  “Turn in the middle to get pointed the right way.”

It took all of Joshua’s Minnesota farmer stoicism to get him to take that leap.  The feeling of weight plunging so abruptly to the falling sensation of zero gravity caught him by surprise, confusing him as to which way to aim his feet.  Flailing, he tried to turn, then felt a slight pull that rapidly grew stronger.  He’d over estimated his turn and landed unceremoniously on his bottom on the “floor”.

It was an ungraceful move, but Joshua felt an unexpected surge of pride.  By golly, he was a spaceman.

Looking up at Diana for approval, he heard her chuckle.  “Not bad.  You’ll do it perfectly the next time.”  She started down the corridor.  With a last glance at the chasm he’d conquered, Joshua hurried to catch up. 

“How many don’t make it?” he had to ask, had to know how great a risk he’d just conquered.

“Oh.  I kind of lied to you,” she admitted.  “You can’t fall down that shaft, the fields are all the wrong way.  The worst you can do is bang yourself up a little landing, or maybe get yourself stuck in the freefall area.  No problem getting out of that, not like in vacuum, you can push against the air.”

Joshua didn’t have time to thoroughly digest that before she said, “Here we are,” and pushed aside an unmarked door.  “The Escher,” she announced.

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            Stepping inside, Joshua stared about in astonishment.  For all the strange things he’d seen done with artificial gravity this day, the Escher topped them all, and then some. 

A tree grew from the ceiling into a large open area.  People clung to the upper branches, floating effortlessly in mid-air.  Some swooped and played in the air by them.  Chairs and tables were attached to floors, walls, and ceiling at every conceivable angle and attitude.  Stairs climbed walls, some ending in empty space, others turning back onto themselves.  No one section of wall or floor was large, but the total amount of space was enormous, for no surface, nor area that had no surface, was wasted.  People were scattered about the room, some alone, but most in pairs or small clusters.  He noticed two people talking who were upside-down relative to each other.

The wall to the right had an opening through which he could see the floor was moving, rotating against the rest of the place.  Diana was trying to pull him toward that section.  Stepping through the opening onto the red carpeted floor there, Joshua found himself lighter, but more stable.  The twitchy inconsistencies of the artificial gravity no longer vexed him. 

Diana flopped down into a chair, sighing with obvious relief.  “God, I hate artificial gravity,” she moaned, rubbing her stomach. 

“I thought spacers could stand anything like that,” Joshua said, thinking of the stories he’d read. 

“Not this one.  This section here,” she gestured around them, “is picking up centrifugal gravity from a different section.  The Escher is sort of at the joining point of three or four different sections of Terra Two.”

“Won’t, uh, won’t I be found here?  It’s awfully public,” he asked reluctantly.  No one seemed to be looking at them, but he felt as though eyes were probing into him.

“I don’t think the Escher’s even on the maps.  I’ve never seen anyone official in here.  Everyone here is a spacer of some sort.  Independents, that is, from freighters and private ships.  Not a one would turn you in for any price.  The stuffies over in the Corps and the Service have their own places, wouldn’t demean themselves coming here. 

“Most people here are Scouters,” she added, giving him a sidelong glance as if measuring his reaction to the news.

Joshua didn’t know how to react.  He was relieved that he was safe here, probably safe, that is.  But he’d never heard of Scouters, and told her as much.  While the table placed great mounds of food in front of him, and drinks before her, Diana told him of the Scouters.  They explored space and discovered planets for bounty, operating independently of any government or organization.  It attracted the misfits of space, as she called them, the ones who couldn’t take the regimentation and restriction of the other services.  They weren’t of lesser ability, she hastened to add.  Most had rejected the Services, not the other way around. 

Scouters went into the heart of danger, plunging off into the great unknown on missions of exploration and discovery.  They didn’t colonize, they didn’t organize, they didn’t do anything but “the fun part.” 

The more she told him, the more Joshua became convinced that the Scouters were for him.  They went out in small crews, only eight to ten per ship.  They’d explore one or two star systems, then return to Earth, to Terra Two to report what they’d found. 

“Why don’t they do more than that, once they’re out so far?” he asked.

“The point is to get the information back to Earth as quickly as possible.  And ‘quickly’ isn’t really too possible when you’re dealing with interstellar distances,” she explained.  “Our best communications travel at the speed of light, making it twenty years or more for information to make it back here from the radius we’re out to now.”

“But the ships don’t take that long.  How much faster than light do they go?” he asked.

Diana looked pained.  “They don’t go faster than light,” she said firmly.  “Get that idea out of your head.  What they do is…  It’s hard to explain in words.”  She stopped and chuckled.  “I recall having this very conversation myself at about your age, only I was on the asking end.  The twistor ships bypass the speed of light.  Oh, to be sure, we use standard reaction propulsion for most of it.”

“Rockets?”

The pained expression turned into a grimace.  “Rockets don’t go to the stars,” she said coldly, then grinned.  “Sorry, I just went through this with my family back on Earth.  Earthpiggies of magnitude one, they are, and it hurts me to say that of my own genetic relations.  It hurts to say they’re genetic relations, for that matter.  Anyhow, we accelerate as close as we can get to the speed of light — which really isn’t very close — then the twistor takes over and we use a different aspect of space to transit to another point.”

She paused, taking a big gulp of her drink and a few bites out of a dish of fried rice Joshua hadn’t touched.  It had taken some time but he was beginning to get full.  A contented feeling spread from his middle outward, and he thought a nap might be a fine thing about now. 

“That’s a dreadful description,” Diana continued.  “I can’t say I really understand it all myself, though numerous physicists have tried to get through to me.  I can do the math,” she said thoughtfully, “but the applications seem to go right beyond me.”  She shook her head.  “Anyhow, someone told me once that we really shouldn’t have this technology yet.  A really brilliant guy — who was actually a woman — without proper training or credentials was reading about twistors and spinors and space-time and such, old stuff a couple of twentieth century physicists, Rindler and Penrose, I think, came up with.  Then she made this massive, staggering, astonishing leap from that to a way to duck around, past, or under the light speed barrier.  It’s really technology that shouldn’t be more than a half-baked theory for another century or more.”

“An Anachronism,” Joshua said, suddenly understanding with perfect clarity what she meant.

“That’s right.  Our ships, our weapons, our communications… none of them really match the level of the twistor drive, but   here we are, not ready, but still heading out to the stars.”

She met his eyes steadily in a way that made him suddenly uncomfortable. 

“Are you ready to go?” she asked in a whisper.

Slowly, sensing the solemnness of the moment, he nodded.

“Not even half of Scouter crews return,” she said, still low.  “One third of the ships never come back and we never know what happened to them.  Of those who do return, those who find and survey new planets, lose anywhere from twenty to eighty percent of the crews.

“Still ready?”

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            He swallowed and thought of his family.  Father only wanted what he thought was best for him.  That’s what he thought he was doing when he took Joshua out of the world of 2105 and brought him up on a farm in the 1940s.  That’s what he thought he was doing when he decided to take Joshua from that life to another world entirely.  Joshua realized then that his father’s timing hadn’t been coincidental.  Father had planned the family’s migration just before Joshua legally became his own man and could chose a different course for his life, this course.  Damn it all, Joshua thought the curse boldly.  He loved his father, but this was his life, not Father’s.  Something new burned inside Joshua then, not the defiance of a thwarted child, nor foolish dreams from which he must be protected, but a pride and certainty that would not be quenched or denied.

“I am ready,” he said.

Diana smiled.  “Then I think I know someone who can help you.”

“So, you want it to be a spaceman, eh?”

Joshua squirmed under the intense scrutiny of the large man’s gaze.  Like many of the people Joshua had seen on the station, Robert Chou didn’t appear to be of any particular race, but showed characteristics of many.  Though the face was alien to his Preservationist world, Joshua decide that with bibs and a seedcorn cap, Chou would have looked the perfect northern Minnesota farmer.  Diana said he was meeting the Director of the Scouters, head man on Terra Two.  Joshua expected someone with the softness of the Adjusters.

“Yes, sir,” Joshua answered. 

“And what qualifications, or special knowledge, do you have?  What areas have you studied?  Why should we take you?” the man asked, taking in Joshua’s farmer garb as he did, with an ill-concealed look of scorn.

Joshua’s life swept over him in a rush and he realized he had nothing, knew nothing, that that could benefit any spacer, nor anyone in this century.  He’d even had to have a strange woman teach him how to use the outhouse.  He, Joshua, was an Anachronism in his own time, his own world.

As he miserably talked of the things he knew; tractors and crops, how to shear a sheep, and milk a cow — all valuable skills in a century long vanished into history — Joshua realized that colonizing was probably the only thing he could do.  No spacers would be able to use him without years more training.

Joshua finished by adding stubbornly, “I’ve read most of the Astounding Stories from the Forties, and I just can’t go back to live in the past when the future I’ve read about is right here.”

Chou’s stern expression vanished.  “I like you.  And unlike you, I have the advantage of having seen your personal profile.  You’d never have been told this, but you’re in the top two percent.”

“Of what?”

He spread his hands.  “Of people.  Even in that environment you were pressed into, you managed to expand your mind and your dreams.  Yet I think you’d never fit in properly with the rest of society — and you know you don’t fit into colonists’ way of life.  So where does that leave you?”

“I’m going to space,” he repeated.

“Good.  Would you like to be a Scouter?”

He stared at the man.  He glanced at Diana who grinned. 

“Why, yes, sir!  But…”

“Wait now,” Chou hastened, dampening Joshua’s eagerness only a touch.  “We know you have the general interest and potential, but we’re neither baby-sitters, nor an agency for coddling misfits.”

Diana choked.

“Well, we don’t coddle them,” Chou said.  “Scouters are misfits, but they’re misfits uniquely suited to the type of exploration and discovering we do.  That means not only aptitude, but training.  You don’t have the training, not even slightly, but I think you have the aptitude.  For one thing, you’re used to working independently.  In fact your personality profile indicates you don’t like crowds, like a lot of space around you, which was actually a given, or your father would never have been allowed to take you into a Preserve like that.  In our business it’s vital.  Yet you have no qualms about confined spaces.  That’s also important, for despite having millions of square kilometers of emptiness around you, you’ll be inside a very small ship.  We’ll test you further, but I’m personally sure that you’re in no way one of the Lower Ninety-eight.”

At his blank expression, Diana interrupted with, “Only two percent of the population is suited to spacing, by intelligence and temperament, and a dozen other characteristics.  We call the rest, the earthpiggies huddling under the atmosphere, the Lower Ninety-eight.”

Joshua’s mouth twitched in grim amusement.  “Two percent is the amount Father said were suited to farming, that the rest couldn’t stand the uncertainty, nor the freedom and all the risks that true freedom has.”

Chou leaned back, thoughtfully biting his lower lip.  “I know right now you’re upset with your father for trying to force you into life as a colonist, but I hope someday you’ll see more in him.”  He leaned forward and his black eyes bore into Joshua.  “My father was a farmer, too.  And it may be odd for you to realize, but some of the same characteristics that make a good spacer make a good farmer.  Despite subsidies and all the other snares the government laid to take away their independence, farmers have always been fiercely free, free enough to work completely for themselves, and by themselves, not dependent on anyone.  That kind of freedom is dangerous and it can be unpleasant and uncomfortable.  But, by God, it’s free, and that’s how spacers — Scouters in particular — must want to be.”

Chou’s words warmed Joshua, the way he’d felt that first Fourth of July after the Great War ended.  It made him want to stand up and sing, or shake his fist at the heavens and dare it to send its worst.  Yes, he’d be a spacer, and though his father may never know it, he’d be honoring him by it too. 

“Why’d you do this for me?” Joshua asked of Diana as she lead him through another secretive maze in Terra Two.  They were on their way to a Scouter ship, his ship.  The search for him was hotter, even the sanctity of the Escher had been violated.  Chou decided that Joshua couldn’t hide on the station even the three days until the colony transport went out, so was rushing the next Scouter departure.

“Passing a favor forward,” Diana answered.  “Someone did the same for me a long time ago.”  She looked at him searchingly.  “You’ll have to decide for yourself if it was a favor or not.”

Joshua thought of that fifty percent of Scouters who didn’t return, of his own marginal qualifications, and quietly asked, “Is the phrase ‘cannon fodder’ still in use?”

She nodded.  “We call ‘em Red Shirts.”  Punching the airlock controls, Diana stood aside so Joshua could go through, to his new life, to new worlds.  The motives didn’t matter.  He knew either Diana or Chou would willingly take his place on this mission if needed, but they’d go, as he did, knowing the risks.  It didn’t bother him.  They boys who went ashore at Omaha Beach had faced worse odds. 

In return for the danger, Joshua was getting the stars.

“Do something for me,” he said as he stepped into the lock.  Pulling the tattered magazine from his bibs, he handed it to Diana.  “Give this to Laura for me.”

The Scoutship Tordre accelerated out from Terra Two station a little more than a day later.  Proudly surveying his cabin was Ship’s Services Assistant Joshua Gustoffson.  He stood in the tiny space feeling himself grow heavier by the minute.  He’d expected the acceleration in this interstellar ship to be exhilarating and breathtaking — literally breathtaking —, like the five gee catapult launch out of atmosphere of the shuttle up to Terra Two.  He expected a bone-crushing, teeth-jarring, boisterous ride out from Earth on this ship’s powerful torch.  This acceleration was somewhat less boisterous than the kitten frolicking around his ankles. 

Not daunted by the placid acceleration, building gradually to a less than awe-inspiring one gee, Joshua gave the kitten a pat, then set about settling into his new home.  From his new pouch he unpacked his belongings.  It only took a few minutes as he owned little, and the cabin was roughly the size of a farrowing pen.

Still, it was his, and it was in an outbound spaceship headed for…  Where were they headed for?  Joshua fumbled for his Book, calling up the page with the Tordre’s mission.  36 Ophiuchi, that was it.  A  trinary some seventeen plus light years out.  “A K2, K1, and a K6.  Don’t hold out much hope,” the Second Mate had told him matter-of-factly.  But they’d drawn an unnamed M4 more or less in the same “neighborhood” that he was more hopeful for.  “It’s scrawny compared to our sun,” the Mate had said, “but you never know.  The universe doesn’t always play by human rules.”

Joshua had nodded knowledgeably and vowed to find out what that conglomeration of letters had meant.  It frightened him to have his ignorance smack him so hard in the face so early in the mission.  He was somewhat uneasy that he might be called upon to perform duties infinitely beyond his non-existent training.  So it was with more relief than anything else he came to realize that his title of “Ship’s Services Assistant” could have as easily been replaced by one of “Dead Weight”, as the Scouters had no official trainees.  Still, he hoped his duties would grow beyond what they currently were. 

Joshua reached down to pat the ship’s new kitten again.  “Before this trip is over, Tasha,” he told the little cat, “I’ll be more than your litterbox steward.”

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Picking up the kitten, Joshua cradled her gently.  They’d just had a new batch of kittens at home.  He’d found them, four fluffy babies, hidden in a nest in the hay the day before they’d left.  He wondered if the new owners would take care of them.  And he hoped they’d scratch Epsilon’s back now and then.  Poor pig.  Though he’d tried to explain why he had to leave, he bet that she was still missing him tonight.

A raw aching in his middle caught Joshua by surprise.  The golden twilight played before his vision, the smells of dinner coming from the house, the land beneath his feet stretching in a broad, unbroken vista to the horizon.  In the winter when the leaves were gone and the cold wind went right through you the barn was still warm, with all the animals greeting him affectionately.  Then in the evening the house was cozy as the family gathered around the kitchen table…

He was homesick, Joshua realized.  He hadn’t expected to be.  Space was always where he’d imagined himself to be.  His proper place was on the deck plates of a ship, like the Tordre, not shoveling out stalls in another century.  Still, as he stroked Tasha, and heard a purr far too big for the tiny kitten, Joshua thought he’d give just about anything for one more evening around the kitchen table, with Laura teasing him and Ma piling more and more good food on his plate. 

Enough, he thought.  Setting the kitten down on the narrow bunk, Joshua took the rest of his things out of the pouch.  The purchases had been exciting to make, though everything was used.  The money had been advanced to him against his share of this mission.  Scouters paid no wages.  What he made would depend on the value of the information they brought back.  Even surveying a star system with no planets earned a little, with the data sold to various science agencies.  The best profit came from finding a world fit for human colonization. 

Joshua’s scanty possessions didn’t even fill one of the compact drawers.  Still, he looked at them with the pride of ownership.  The Book was the best thing he’d gotten.  True, it was old and far out of date, but it was the same kind Diana had and that was good enough for Joshua.  Diana had even dumped her collection of books into its memory, somehow defeating the copy locks.  He hoped there were more of those Anson MacDonald stories, like in his old Astounding.  Heck, he didn’t need to read about spaceships, he was in one!

“I’m a Scouter,” Joshua announced outloud.  And a spaceman, responsible only for a kitten’s litterbox, it may be, but gosh darn it, it was the litterbox of a spaceship’s kitten!

36 Ophiuchi was a bust.  The system held no planets and only such minor scientific interest that Joshua’s share of the sale of the information might be enough to pay for his toothbrush and the new shirt he’d bought, but not the pants. 

Still, Joshua wasn’t disappointed.  He’d crowded eagerly into the Control Room whenever allowed, peering at the viewscreens of the stars or, better yet, out the ship’s single port to get a look at his first new star system.  The old-timers on the ship indulged his enthusiasm in much the same way they did Tasha’s kittenish excesses.  Joshua didn’t mind that either.  In the past year he’d blazed his way into what he needed to learn, reaching the end of differential equations and ready to start on the real mathematics that were used to pilot the Tordre. 

They had been a couple months out from Earth before Joshua realized that the ship was still being actively piloted.  He’d just assumed that they’d pointed in the direction they wanted to go (which he did know enough to realize wasn’t right at the seventeen year old image of 36 Ophiuchi), started accelerating and that was it.  It would have been, Chief Physicist and First Officer Carlita Abkur had explained, if the ship was perfectly balanced, and there were no variations — twitches, she called them — in the propellant (a tank of water that comprised over ninety-five percent of the ship’s mass, and did double service by shielding them from the reactors).  Also there were minor anomalies in space itself; dust clouds, gravitational forces that hadn’t been properly anticipated, even radiation sources that could affect their course.  And 36 Ophiuchi might not turn out to be exactly where they’d expected and so constant measurements, calculations, and corrections were needed. 

“Won’t the computers do that?” he’d asked in all innocence. 

“Only if we tell it to, and tell it properly,” Carlita snapped, her black eyes sparking.  Joshua thought she was unbearably cute and for a time he harbored a mad, hopeless crush on her, though he suspected she was involved with the Captain, and she was probably ten years older than he was — longer than that in years-since-birth.  Carlita had been on the Tordre’s last mission, the one spoken of only in whispers. 

For decades the Tordre had been overdue and presumed lost.  When she’d come in, half the crew was dead or missing, some under circumstances no one would speak of.  Her twistor drive had somehow failed leaving the ship no choice but to come back sub-light.  It had taken thirty years Earth-time, but not as long ship-time.  Carlita had been junior physicist on that cruise, determined to quit the Scouters and marry the fiancee who awaited her back on Earth.  Instead she’d returned to find him a grandfather, long since wed.  She’d stayed on Terra Two the month it had taken to refit the Tordre and send her out again.

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            Studying her, Joshua wondered what it would be like for him to come back to Earth after that much time had slipped away from him.  He gave an inward shrug and turned his attention back to the console before him.  He was already living a century and half from that in which he was raised… and Father, Laura, Ma, and Matt wouldn’t be there anyhow.  They were likely settling in on their new world by now. 

Joshua’s fingers slid gently over the buttons, caressing their shapes.  He’d only been allowed to do dummy runs before.  This time the board was active and he was controlling the ship. 

“Do it,” came the Captain’s command from behind him, and Joshua pressed the switch that fired the drive.  Weight slowly built up, pressing him deeper into the seat. 

“Kill the artificial gravity,” the Captain ordered.  For a frantic moment Joshua couldn’t remember where the control was, though he’d done this a hundred times in practice runs.  Feeling his face flush, he reached for the control.  Even before Carlita called out confirmation, Joshua knew the graviton generators beneath the decking had gone off.  Anybody could have done it, he knew.  Heck, the computer could have been programmed to switch off the gravity when acceleration reached a certain gee force.  He knew how to write such a program himself.  It was easy.  Maybe the other services ran their ships that way, he thought with a Scouter’s pride, but we run our own ships.  There was nothing the Tordre could do that couldn’t be controlled by the manual operation of the humans aboard her.  That is, nothing save the finicky, almost magical — to Joshua, at least — twistor drive, and even the programming of the jump wasn’t left to machines, but was done by humans and only checked by the computers. 

36 Ophiuchi was behind them now.  They were out of orbit and headed into the blackness again, off to another unknown.  Joshua grinned, and Carlita’s eyes glittered back at him. 

“Was it fun?” Captain Kohaya asked.

It wasn’t much, he thought.  He hadn’t calculated the coordinates, hadn’t set the destination.  All he’d done was push the button that made it all ‘go’. 

“Yes, it was,” he answered firmly.

They named the M4 after the ship’s kitten, now grown to a fat, lazy cat.  The star “Tasha” glowed in the darkness the same color as the cat Tasha’s golden eyes.  It appeared no closer, nor brighter, than the countless other stars surrounding it.  Only Tasha would remain fixed in place on the screens, growing a little bigger and brighter each day.  Backing down toward it at one gee, the Tordre would spend nearly six months decelerating to orbit. 

Dozens of cameras peeked over the Tordre’s bulging middle, studying the night for signs of planets.  They used spectography, mass analysis, searched for wobbles in the star’s orbit, everything they had to find a tiny speck of a world that might not exist.  Joshua was assigned the tedious task of taking image after image and comparing each for a point of light that might have moved between one shot and the next.  The painstakingly dull job was not made easier by catly help from Tasha.

“Want to see your namesake?” Joshua asked the cat as he removed her for the tenth time from his viewer.  A moment later Tasha’s fluffy tail again tickled his nose as she purred enthusiastically at him.  With one playful paw she reached out and tapped the switch near Joshua’s hand. 

“Tasha!” he scolded, putting her back on the deck.  “I wasn’t ready for another shot.  The mindless equipment didn’t acknowledge any difference between a command given by a cat’s paw or a human’s hand and a new shot awaited Joshua.  With a sigh he bent over it, flicking the images back and forth.

“Errowt!” Tasha said indignantly and stalked away.  Joshua didn’t notice.  There was…  Maybe it was cat hair on the viewer.  His eyes darted around the Control Room, but found nothing amidst the clutter with which to wipe the screen.  No one else on the ship seemed to share Joshua’s interest in tidiness — or perhaps it was just his farmer’s devotion to endless work — and he’d been too busy the past few weeks for his self-assigned rounds of cleaning.  Frustrated, he spit on the screen and wiped it with his shirt.  Flickering the images again, Joshua held his breath. 

“Yeeooow!” he yelped, in a volume designed to reach above the throbbing roar of an old John Deere. 

“What is it?” came shouts from below.  Footsteps pounded up the narrow stairs from the lower decks. 

Somehow the entire crew, eleven in all, managed to squeeze into Control, all trying to see over Joshua’s shoulders as he demonstrated the minuscule movement.  Carlita hurried to take a spectral reading, while Stevens — whose multiple roles on the ship included geological surveys, piloting, and linguistics, should an alien race ever be encountered — tried to get a mass reading. 

It was several hours, though to Joshua they passed in a flash, before Carlita looked up at him, brushed a wavy wisp of hair from her eyes and smiled.  “Congratulations, Joshua.  Not everyone gets a new planet for their birthday.”

Then Joshua remembered; today was his nineteeth birthday.

The sole planet of the star Tasha orbited close in to the chilly, dim star.  At first they feared it was tide-locked, so tight was the orbit, but as the planet came further out from behind the star a slow rotation was discovered.  The planet’s days would be long and hot, the nights cold.  Still they had not put it outside the criteria for human habitation.  Perfect Earth-like planets were rare and the human race had discovered, once again, not only their own adaptability, but their amazing capacity for changing and adapting an environment to suit their needs. 

“Joshua.”

He looked up from the console where he had Carlita’s data mirrored.  “Yes, Captain.”

Captain Kohaya stood in the cramped entry of Control, chewing the corner of his long mustache thoughtfully.  He ran his finger through the thick layer of dust on the console, stared at the pile of used, crusted cups and plates piled on it.  Joshua swallowed and decided it was time to stand at attention, even though Scouters didn’t tend toward formality. 

“You’ve been spending a lot of time working on piloting, and now on the new planet, haven’t you?”  The Captain’s voice was low and pleasant.  Of course, it had been low and pleasant when he threatened to toss Markir out the airlock for converting the entire crop of hydroponic potatoes into vodka.  Markir had taken him seriously.

“Uh, yes, sir,” Joshua began, “but I’ll get to…”

The Captain waved his hand for silence.  “I’ve been thinking that it’s about time to expand your official duties beyond the catbox.”

“If it’s about the cleaning, sir…”

Silencing him again, the Captain continued, “Much as we’ve appreciated the novelty of a clean ship, the Tordre looks much more like a real Scouter ship now.”  He chuckled.  “No, what I wanted to say is that you’ll be calculating the course change to take us into planetary orbit, and piloting the ship in.”

He nodded once, while Joshua gaped.  Joshua saw Carlita and Stevens grinning at him.  For some reason Joshua remembered the day Father had first let him drive the tractor.  A slow smile spread and he stood straighter. 

“Joshua,” the Captain leaned back in to add.  “You’re still in charge of cleaning Tasha’s box.”

As the Captain disappeared down the spiraling stairs, Joshua let his breath out in a long sigh.  He felt he was back to his proper size, not too big for the small Control Room.

Joshua wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.  Glancing over at the environmental controls, he was shocked to see that the temperature was normal.  Scanning his figures again, there was a queasy churning in Joshua’s stomach he couldn’t shake.  This was a relatively simple maneuver, he told himself, not wildly complex like the mathematical mysteries of the twistor transition.  The various space services estimated that fully fifteen percent of lost ships made an error in that transition.  The fifteen percent figure was of no comfort to Scouters, as nearly all losses — ships that vanished without a trace — were theirs.  It meant the percentage of losses was enormously higher for Scouters.  Of course no one really knew what happened to the lost ships.  Maybe they were performing a simple maneuver like this one, Joshua thought.

Nonsense.  Nothing could go wrong here.  He’d not been so arrogant as to trust his own calculations and measurements, but had gone over them with both Stevens and Carlita. 

It was just about time.  They’d cut the drive, dropping into freefall — no artificial gravity on this one.  Using the maneuvering jets, Joshua would jockey the ship into the correct attitude for achieving orbit around the planet, then kick on the main drive again to keep decelerating the ship.  One more maneuver several days away would cut off the main drive at just the right point to match orbital velocities with the planet.  Simple enough, he tried to convince himself. 

Joshua routed the last command to the console, selecting a large, ruby-shaped red button near the top for the control to refire the main drive. 

Carlita strapped herself into her seat.  Joshua had Stevens’ place — Stevens held onto handholds in a corner.  Once the Captain had arrived and strapped into his seat, they were ready.  Tightening his belt, Joshua waited for the Captain to call the commands. 

Nothing happened and the clock was running down.  Joshua glanced back to see the Captain seeming to stare idly at the view screens.  Joshua realized he really was on his own for this one.

Swallowing dryly, Joshua rapped the com button and announced, “All hands, prepare for maneuvering.  Prepare for freefall.”  An oddly hollow sense of satisfaction filled him as he heard his voice echoing throughout the ship.  They really ought to have done a better cleaning before going into freefall, he thought belatedly.  At least he’d seen to Tasha’s zero gee accommodations personally, despite the cat’s vigorous protests.

“Here we go,” he whispered, and began the countdown.  Carlita took up the chant, subtly reminding him that that was the Second’s role.  Joshua was First on this maneuver.  Her lyrical voice steadied him and he focused on the controls and readouts before him.  Sure, maybe the computer could do the whole thing more precisely than he could, but what the heck was the point of having a machine live your life for you, he thought with a combination of farmer/Scouter stubbornness. 

“—four, three, two—” Carlita’s voice cut into his thoughts.  Joshua’s finger poised over the panel.  At zero he firmly pressed the switch.  At once the main drive cut off, leaving the ship in freefall, still plunging toward the star. 

“Within point one seconds of dead-on,” he reported, studying the readouts.  Not bad, well within the tolerances he’d allowed in his calculations.

At the precalculated times, Joshua carefully fired the maneuvering systems, simple reaction jets positioned along the Tordre’s circumference, nudging the ship around so that the main drive pointed at the planet…  Or, rather, where the planet would be when the Tordre arrived. 

Overfiring only once, Joshua gave a slight tap to the opposite jet to bring the Tordre back into alignment, then leaned back with a sigh.  Carlita bent over her controls, taking readings from both the star’s position, the planet’s, and the fixed reference stars they’d been using.  After several anxious moments she turned to Joshua with a smile.

“Right in line,” she announced. 

Only one more thing remained, to fire the main drive.  Rather anticlimactic, Joshua decided.  All that work, all that figuring, for very little…  well, he couldn’t even call it excitement.

Carlita began the next countdown.  Joshua covered the glowing red button with his finger.  At zero he pressed it.  The drive gave no sound, but there was the faintest tremor through the ship and they were pressed gently down into their seats again. 

“Well,” the Captain began, unfastening his lapbelt.  “It looks like…”

Joshua never found out what it looked like, for the drive sputtered.  There were several surges.  The dropping sensation of freefall came, then a quick burst of acceleration, then freefall again.  The Captain bounced upward on the first surge, slamming down to the deck, then floating up again.  Stevens made a wild grab for him then lost his own grip on the handholds when the drive suddenly slammed them with several gees.  Both Stevens and the Captain smashed to the deck. 

As the heavy gee forced pressed them down, Joshua struggled to reach the controls.  With hands like lead he managed to switch the console from his custom setup to the standard one.  Both Carlita and Joshua reached for the control that would cut the drive.  Neither reached it before the drive surged again, then went dead.

Carlita’s fingers danced in freefall as she paged through readouts.  When she turned to Joshua she was pale. 

“The drive is dead.  The reactor is off,” she whispered.

“Off?” Joshua echoed.  That couldn’t happen. 

“Get the Captain and Stevens to the deck while I bring up the gravity generators,” she snapped, her voice recovered and carrying a tone he’d never heard from her before. 

It took several awkward minutes flailing in freefall for Joshua to pull the two floating bodies to the deck.  Stevens started to moan when Joshua touched him, waking fully by the time Joshua had him against the floor.  The Captain’s head bobbed limply and Joshua saw tiny globules of blood drifting away from it.

As soon as the gravitation came up to the point where he could move without bouncing up from the deck, Joshua hurried back to his station. 

Without glancing up, Carlita snapped, “Stevens.  Get over here.  Joshua, get the Captain down to the doctor.”  Rubbing his head, Stevens nudged Joshua aside, already absorbed in his work. 

Though slightly hurt at being dismissed, Joshua realized this problem was beyond his experience.  The uncomfortable thought occurred to him that it might be beyond their experience too.  Maybe this was what happened to lost Scouter ships.  The Tordre had limped back with a down twistor drive once before.  If she vanished everyone would assume that’s what had happened to her.  That wasn’t to be the Tordre’s fate.  They wouldn’t fall into the planet, Joshua decided.  The ship was aimed to where the planet would be if the Tordre was still under power.  No, they were plunging along much too fast.  The planet wouldn’t be there.  They wouldn’t crash into the planet, nor — oh, vainly hopeful thought! — fall into orbit around it. 

Figures and orbital plots raced through Joshua’s mind as he picked up the Captain.  Despite the helpful low gee, Joshua still faced the awkward task of managing the limp mass through cramped doorways, and down the narrow spiral staircase that ran through the center of the ship.  Along the way he brushed off the anxious questions of several of the crew.

There were only four crew levels in the Tordre, thin slices at the top of the large sphere that comprised the ship.  The top was Control.  Below that were the crew quarters — save for those of Joshua’s nominal boss, Giles, a grumpy isolationist who preferred a niche on the cargo deck.  The doctor’s office was on the third level next to hydroponics. 

By the time his feet touched the deck of the third level, Joshua knew the Tordre would fall into orbit around the star.  They wouldn’t plunge to a sudden, fiery death.  Instead they’d be a decaying orbit that would slowly roast them over several hours, maybe a day.  That would be the Tordre’s fate unless they could restart the drive.

Depositing the Captain on the exam table, Joshua took the precaution of fastening a belt around him, in case the ship again went into freefall.

“Doc!” he called as he hurried next door to hydroponics.  The doctor doubled as assistant botanist, and it was among the plants that Joshua found him.  He was stripped bare, in the hot, humid environment, coated in a sheen of sweat. 

Supporting the broken stem of a plant, he clucked, “There, there…”

“Doc,” Joshua called.  The plants were a mess, like a wheatfield after a hailstorm. 

“Doc, the Captain needs you.”

The doctor glared at Joshua accusingly.  “These plants need me too.  That high gee move you did devastated them.”

“The Captain’s hurt,” Joshua insisted.  Darn it!  Carlita said it wasn’t his fault.  Yet the thought that he’d been in charge when the disaster happened nagged at him.  Was this what it was like to be in command?  To have all the worry and guilt, whether you could do anything about it or not?

The doctor dropped the injured plant and hurried toward the door.  “I didn’t think anyone was hurt.  The call to unstrap hadn’t come.  That’s the problem with Captains, always think they’re above their own rules.”

You too, Joshua thought.  An order to unstrap still hadn’t been given.  Joshua followed him as far as the door of the medical office, pausing while the doctor quickly examined the Captain.

“Well?” Joshua asked.

Without looking up, Doc muttered, “Concussion, possibly a skull fracture.  I’ll call when I know.”

Joshua swallowed hard and nodded.  As he ran back through the curving corridor, flying up the stairs barely touching the steps, he tried to spare a few seconds for a prayer, but a sudden idea overwhelmed it.  His brain tried to click through the calculations, but he couldn’t do it without help.  He didn’t know the mass and fuel figures he needed by memory.

At the top of the stairway, Joshua crashed into a clump of people, other crew members whose faces registered only as a worried blur to him.  Shoving his way through them, he slid into the back of the Captain’s chair, panting. 

“Carlita,” he gasped.  She didn’t look up.  Neither did Stevens.  They continued tapping on their panels, muttering to themselves and each other. 

“Carlita,” he repeated.  “I have an idea.”

“What is it?”  Her tone was sharp.  Joshua ignored it.  She was worried too, and it was her responsibility — doubly so, for with the Captain out of commission she was in command.

“The lander,” Joshua said.  “We can use it to slow the ship down, buy some time.”

Carlita’s racing fingers slowed for a moment.  She glanced at Stevens, who shrugged. 

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Maybe.  Work it on the setup in the lounge.”

Joshua nodded to her back, turned and pushed his way through the cluster of people, ignoring their anxious questions.  He tripped as he passed through the between decks gravity anomaly, recovering and landing lightly in front of the door to the lounge.

The lounge was a mess.  Objects and debris that hadn’t been cleaned up or secured had been flung about.  It didn’t really register on Joshua other than as a vague sense that he ought to be cleaning.  Instead he cleared off the chair and the terminal in the corner and sat down.  Without thinking about it he locked his legs around the base of the chair against the surges in the artificial gravity.

From her acceleration cradle, Tasha saw him and howled, demanding to be released.  Joshua didn’t even spare her a comforting word, but immediately began plotting his proposal, forming the equations, asking if it would work. 

Not satisfied with the initial answer, he entered option after option, until he’d exhausted every possibility he could think of.  With a sigh, Joshua leaned back and rubbed his eyes.  It was less than he’d hoped, but maybe better than nothing. 

He stood, only then realizing that the lounge was full, the unoccupied members of the crew — even including Giles — having gathered there.  They stared at him, questions in their eyes, but no one spoke.  Joshua let his gaze drift over them, yet didn’t really see these people whom he had come to know so well over the last two years. 

“Giles,” Joshua said in a harsh, commanding voice.  “Set a detail.  Get this ship cleaned up.”  He spun on his heel and headed toward Control.  It wasn’t until he, the most junior member of the crew, was nearly there that his audacity at issuing orders struck him, and something like cleaning.  They needed something to keep them busy, he knew, and that was all he could think of.

When he arrived in the Control Room he was surprised to see Carlita sitting idly.  Stevens still worked furiously, but she sat still, staring at the screens with their views of the still distant star and planet. 

“Carlita?” Joshua said softly.

She jerked, turned and stared toward him.  “Oh, Joshua.”  Carlita seemed to have forgotten what Joshua had been working on, then she shook herself focused on him.  “Well?”

Joshua took a deep breath and shook his head.  “I can buy us a few days, maybe a week.  And,” it occurred to him to add, “a slower burn-up.”  Moving to her side, he called up his work on her screen.  “The lander doesn’t have enough thrust for the total mass of the Tordre.  It could do it, but it would take more fuel than we have for the lander, and more time than we have.  If we dumped all the mass we have in the water tanks for the main drive I could get us into a orbit that would last a couple years, but…”  He didn’t need to finish the thought.  Even if the Scouters sent out rescue missions — something they’d never done before — no one would even know the Tordre was overdue for over twenty years.  By the time anyone else arrived, they’d have long since fallen into the star. 

“Even if we could fix the main drive in that year or two,” he continued, “without the propulsion mass we’re still going nowhere. 

“I’m sorry,” Joshua finished miserably.  “I tried.”

The glitter in Carlita’s eyes startled him.  She was on the verge of tears.  He never thought she was the type.  With one hand she reached out to Stevens’ arm, stopping his work.

Softly, she said to Joshua, “You didn’t fail.”

The entire crew crowded into the second deck lounge, the largest single room on the Tordre.  Captain Kohaya, looking pale and weak, sat in the most comfortable chair.  All eyes stared at him.

“You all know our situation,” he began.  “While, relatively speaking, we have several weeks left, if we don’t recover and maneuver in a day or so, or change our course to put us into orbit, those weeks won’t matter.  We won’t be able to pull out of the star’s gravity.” 

At that moment, Tasha leapt onto his lap, staring at the group with her wide, golden eyes.  Her purr was so loud even Joshua, far to the back, could hear.

“Officer Akbar,” he nodded toward Carlita who, Joshua was surprised to note, looked even worse than the Captain.  Was she sick?  Or just worried?  “Tells me that the main drive can be repaired, but we need more time.  Joshua,” all eyes turned in his direction, “has found a way to give us that time.”  The Captain went on to outline how the lander would be used to slow the ship, buying them — at cost of all the lander’s fuel — the time they needed to repair the main drive.  A long sigh went around the room.  Joshua understood.  They had to trade any chance of landing on the planet, virtually the total purpose of this trip, for life and a return to Earth.  To Joshua it didn’t seem like a bad trade, but still he understood.  A four year investment, with more time than that in relativity slippage, was lost. 

The Captain assigned them roles in the project, which would involve exterior work.  Joshua perked up.  He wanted to get outside the ship, see space in person, but his name wasn’t called.  Stevens would pilot the lander.  Others would assist in the unprecedented docking against the Tordre’s hull, while still others worked out and executed a method to get fuel from the storage tank in the Tordre to the lander’s smaller tank.

“Now, then…” the Captain hesitated.  Joshua saw Carlita shift uncomfortably.  “This just buys us repair time.  Carlita informs me that an adjustment must be made to the reactor unit.”  A murmur swept the room like the air before a thunderstorm, the kind where the sky would turn that wicked purple-green and started dropping tornadoes.  He clenched his hands at his side and fought the uneasy foreboding. 

“I’ll be making the repairs,” the Captain finished, leaving the room in dead silence.

“No,” several said at once. 

The doctor spoke up forcefully, his voice gruff.  “No, I won’t certify it.”

“If I’m well enough to take back command, I’m well enough to do this,” he answered quietly.

Stevens spoke up, “Respectfully, sir.  You don’t have the technical knowledge.  I’ll do it,” he ended in a whisper.

Then Joshua understood.  This was a suicide mission.  If the super-heated water didn’t kill him, the radiation would.  The miracle would be if they only used up one person completing the job.  No, not the Captain.  Stevens was needed to manage the lander, and assist the piloting of the Tordre.  Joshua, on the other hand, came onboard assigned solely to catbox detail.  He’d spent the past six months studying this.  He could do it.  And he was expendable. 

“I’ll go,” he said, surprised that his voice came out in a hoarse whisper.  No one heard him.  Stepping forward, he repeated, “I’ll go.”

He wished they wouldn’t stare.  It was like when the audience behind the Barrier used to stare at him.  Joshua just wanted to go, get it over with, not have anyone say anything, or do anything that might test his resolve.  He wasn’t at all sure that his resolve could stand up to any real test.  He wasn’t ready to die, to trade off the future he’d discovered, to have this star be the last he visited, never to step onto the surface of a new world…

“I’ll do it,” he repeated firmly, shoving all other concerns from his mind.  It was right.  It was necessary.

“Can he…?”  The Captain didn’t address the question to Joshua, but to Stevens and Carlita.  Stevens nodded, his eyes not meeting Joshua’s. 

Carlita spoke up for the first time.  “No.  He can’t, not without me to tell him what to do.  And I won’t tell him.”  She looked up at Joshua, locking her radiant eyes with his for a long moment.  In that moment he wanted nothing more than to give his life for hers, to know she continued to sail the stars because of the sacrifice of his little life.

Carlita broke the gaze, turning to the Captain.  “I’m going,” she said, her voice firm and steady.  “You know I’m the best equipped to do the repair, and as Chief Physicist aboard it’s not only my duty… it’s my privilege.”

They named the planet “Carlita”.  Joshua decided it was an appropriate name, for as he and Stevens maneuvered the Tordre past — not going into orbit, for they dared not shut down the main drive, not when it had been restarted at such a cost — the screens showed a dark and lovely world.  Fiery eruptions shone through the gaseous vapor that made up the planet’s atmosphere.  After an incendiary day, the planet Carlita’s long night frosted the world with intense cold.  No humans would ever live comfortably on Carlita’s world.  No long furrows would be plowed in the soil of her surface.  No human would ever gaze at her horizon and call her “home”. 

Yet, the mission was a success, and not just because they were surviving to return home.  That single, insignificant planet circling its dim, unremarkable star, contained a wealth of minerals beyond any geologist’s wildest fantasy.  The surviving crew of the Tordre would be rich… or as rich as any Scouter ever got.  And, as always, the share that should have belonged to a lost crew member would go back into exploration, back to the stars where that person’s life had been given. 

Joshua strode into Terra Two down the familiar corridor.  He pushed past the confused, dazed, half-sick colonists who had shared the shuttle up from Earth.  In the tangled confusion facing the Custom’s desks, he paused.  Turning to the guard sitting in his alcove, Joshua tossed him a bundle.  It spun slowly in the low gravity, and was caught easily by the guard.

“Homegrown ham,” Joshua called.  “The best in the galaxy.  I owe you one,” he added, smiling at the guard’s baffled expression. 

This time Joshua entered Terra Two the correct way, pausing at the Scouter office only long enough to ask whether Chou was in the Escher.  Using a different route than the first time he’d been here, Joshua found the place unchanged.  Different faces talked and drank, but the place was the same for the passage of years.  Oh, it wasn’t so many years.  Three years to Joshua on the ship had only come out to a bit more than eight years back here.  The old home on Earth hadn’t changed a bit either, but that was the point of a Preservationist reserve.  They’d even found a family whose daughter had long, red braids to live there.  That had brought a twinge of homesickness to Joshua where nothing else had. 

Chou stood by the Escher’s viewport.  He watched the sapphire gem that was Earth slide off to the side of the port, slipping out of sight leaving the star-filled void.  Moving to stand beside him, Joshua watched with him, while the siren’s lure of the stars called to him.  He glanced at Chou.  He looked a bit older, a bit smaller… or maybe Joshua had grown. 

“Hello, Joshua,” the director of the Scouters said.  “Ready to go out again?”

Joshua smiled.  “I’d hoped Diana would be here.  I thought she might like to join me on a little trip.  I’m going to visit the colony at Delta Pavonis.  There are some folks there I want to see.”  Yes, he wanted to see Father, his step-Ma and the kids, Laura and Matt.  He wanted to see them all, but strangely the thought of a freckled, red-haired girl sticking her tongue out at him kept crowding into his mind.  Laura would be at least eighteen by now, twenty by the time he got there.  He wondered if she still liked stars. 

Chou grinned.  “Diana went out on the Verdrehen, about a month after the Tordre left.  They haven’t returned yet.  She wasn’t much for colony worlds anyhow,” he added with a chuckle.  “Maybe you’ll stay there, hmmm?  Once you see the fields and pastures, see the things they’ve built.  I understand it’s a fine world, more beautiful than even Earth.”

Joshua shook his head.  “It’ll be a quick trip, but it’s going to take just about all the money I have.  When I get back I’ll be ready to head out on another Scouter mission.”

Holding out his hand, Chou smiled thoughtfully.  “Well, I won’t hold you to that.  There are worthwhile things other than always heading out into the unknown, always losing friends and shipmates to the endless night.  Once you see a Delta Pavonis sunset you may change you mind and decide your father was right.”

Staring out at the stars, Joshua whispered, “No.  I’ll be back.”

It was late afternoon local time when Joshua walked out from the colony’s main settlement.  Compared to some colonies, the problems here had been minor.  This world seemed determined to give back richly to these new occupants who tilled her soil.  The Colonial Service even set aside room for a space port on the other side of the settlement, with full grain and livestock storage facilities.  This colony would have its link to the stars sooner than any other colony on record, not more than thirty or forty years from now.  Grand things were to come.

For now, such technology was of no use to Joshua.  The only way to reach his family’s homestead was to walk.  Around him stretched forests and fields, a bountiful checkerboard of lush green.  The sun appeared a bit brighter, the air tasted a bit clearer and crisper, than on the farm on Earth.  There were other subtle differences, in the native plant life, in the songs of the birds, but if he shut out those minute things — attributed them to inefficient Adjusters — he felt almost as he did on the best days back home, when the Barrier worked perfectly and he could believe he was alone with no audience watching.  Only here it was real. 

Stretching his arms wide, he stopped in the dirt track, tilted his head back, and savored the heat of the sun baking into his flesh and bones. 

“Aaahhh,” he sighed.  There was no place on a Scoutship where he could reach in all directions like this and not touch a wall or ceiling.  Even as the far horizons of this world called to him, another nagging voice spoke to him, calling him to the even vaster horizons that awaited him beyond the atmosphere, beyond the gravity well.

Opening his eyes, he walked onward.  The house was small, he saw, a log cabin scarcely bigger than their old corncrib used to be.  Still, it looked sound, with a wispy curl of smoke coming from the chimney.  Chickens scratched in the yard and he heard a the plaintive moo of a cow that wanted to be milked. 

A tall man bent over a woodpile, gathering up an armful of wood.  As he stood, Joshua wondered if he had the wrong place.  That wasn’t Father’s stout form.  Then it struck him; Matt.  A lean, well-shaped woman stepped out the door.  Auburn hair hung in waves around her face.

“Laura!” he shouted and ran forward. 

Dinner was all he remembered and more, for Ma and Laura had learned to use indigenous herbs and fruits in their cooking.  It was a meal fit for the prodigal son, indeed.  Leaning back with a satisfied sigh, Joshua stared into the fire and thought that this was a fine place after all. 

Across the table, Laura shyly avoided his gaze though he noticed she listened intently as he told of his adventures with the Scouters.  As Father described their struggle to make this new world give up its bounty, he found himself losing track of the words, as he studied Laura, wondering if she knew she was why he’d come here. 

“I’d like to take a little walk,” Joshua said after the stories had been told.  “Perhaps Laura would come with me, point out the stars in your sky?” 

An enigmatic look passed between Father and Ma.  Joshua realized they knew what he was thinking.  Would they try to hold Laura to the life of their choice as they had once tried to hold Joshua? 

“I’ll go too,” Matt said.

“No, Matt,” Ma said quietly.  “You stay here.”  And so Joshua had his answer. 

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            Laura walked with him beneath the night sky.  They went together, in the silvery light of two tiny, fast-moving moons, through the stand of trees near the house, coming out into the sprawling, open fields.  Side by side they stood beneath the stars of this world.

Pointing upwards, Laura said, “That’s Beta Hydri.  There’s a colony there.”  She pointed higher in the sky.  “Procyon is there.  Down and to the left are Sirius, and there’s the sun.  It’s not very bright from this distance, but Sirius makes it easy to spot.”

As he listened and looked, he thought he heard a longing in her voice, a loving sort of yearning for these distant points of light he so cherished.  Something in the way she moved on the trail through the trees had reminded him a bit of Diana’s impudent manner, but something in her voice now made him think of Carlita.  He looked down to see the starlight glittering in Laura’s eyes, they way it had in Carlita’s.  Laura, though she was a bit like both, was also like neither. 

Joshua realized Laura was staring at him.  From the deep pocket of her dress, she pulled out an object he remembered well.  The magazine was worn, bent and creased. 

“I’ve read it all,” she said, her voice husky.  “Read it until I knew every word.  I knew you were out there, among the stars, having wondrous adventures and exciting times.  Everything worthwhile is out there.  Oh, Joshua, I want that life.  When you go, could you please, please, take me with you?”

Thoughts of Carlita, her atoms scattered around a lonely star, filled him.  Did he want to know he’d given Laura only a chance to die far from home, in the cruel emptiness of space?

The words he’d meant to say froze in his throat.  “This is a good place,” he said instead, “with horizons no one has ever seen.  There are lots of worthwhile things right here.”

“Are you staying?” she asked quietly.

Joshua looked up at the stars again.  Father had been right to come here. 

“No,” he answered.  “I’m going out again.  He stared into Laura’s eyes, gleaming with starlight.  “I just came here to pass along a favor.

The End

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