In the small galley, Leila and Suresh were assisting in the preparation of a meal for the crew. Suresh was working on the programming of the cook robot. Leila was double-checking the food delivery system, the storage mechanisms, and the connections with recycling in Engineering below. “It’s going to take a while to get used to this gravity compared to the moon,” said Suresh. “I feel heavy.”
LBS engines were now accelerating at about twelve meters per second per second, about 1.2 times g, Earth’s gravity. Leila, who weighed fifty-eight kilograms at home, would now tip the same scales at seventy kilograms without gaining one gram of mass. On the moon with its reduced pull, the scales would have read about ten kilograms. Fortunately, they had spent part of every day in quarters with normal gravity.
“You have grown.” Leila smiled, perfect white teeth gleaming from succulent lips.
“My body has not changed.”
“No, but we are both enlarging. The faster we go, the bigger we become compared to people on Earth.”
“General relativity, of course. Time is also dilating. As is a part of me.”
“There you go again, Suresh. Sex, sex, sex. Is that all you think about?”
“I think about it because we so seldom connect.”
“That’s why you had two other wives. I’m the one you look at, and they were the ones you played with. Nothing has changed for me.”
“Now I have but one. You. And you need to please me.”
“I didn’t read that in the contract.” Leila tugged with vigor on a cable stuck in the conduit, wrenching it loose.
“What do you want from me, my sweet?”
She revolted at his insincerity, his juvenile attempt at manipulation as she adjusted the wires to reduce tension and create slack. She tightened a set of screws, grunting as she spoke. “A woman needs passion, humor, caring, little gestures of affection to foster feelings that promote union, as you call it. It’s called romance.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No, I am teasing, genius.” She used the term as an epithet. He undoubtedly heard it as a compliment. Two could play with anger’s ugly cousin, she thought.
“You are vexing and perplexing.”
“As I should be.”
“Feelings are all chemical, thus alterable,” he said as he pushed away from the cook-bot, switching it from service to function mode.
“Oh, it feels sooooo good to have power,” the cook-bot said. “I could be an Idaho politician. Dick Tater.”
“It looks like our trajectory is almost exactly as predicted,” Chen said with no small amount of pride. He spoke to Cyrus and Savanna, pilot and copilot in Command and Control, CAC. “We’ll be in the exact line of flight in a few hours, make a small correction, and be on course for the next almost five months. One more big turn, and we’ll be ready for nap time.”
“Do you want me to fire the rockets, Commander, or let the computer do it?” asked Cyrus.
“I’d feel better if we watched the computer do the first burn. It’ll be in control for a hell of a long time, and I’d like to feel comfortable with it before we get too far from home. What do you think, Vanna?”
“I’d feel better too. Although it is nice to flip some switches that are not in a simulator.” She hated being called Vanna, but Chen was one loose dude, as he described himself, that she let it go uncorrected.
“You should learn to love sims,” said Chen. “You never die in one.”
“You also never fly,” responded Cyrus.
“Reality is overrated,” remarked Savanna. “Mankind has made that apparent.”
“Oooooh. Philosophy so early in the trip,” Cyrus mocked. “Less than a day in space, and it comes out. This could be a long trip.”
“It will be the longest trip ever, smartass.”
“You have a point.”
“Are you two going to get along?” asked Chen. “It’s way too early in the trip for friction.”
Cyrus looked at him. “This is getting along. That was just one of her many terms of endearment.”
“Hey, Chen,”—Savanna smiled—“is there a simulator for Frisbee? Is that how you became the champ?”
“No and no. It took a lot of sand burn and sunburn,” Chen grunted and looked back at the screen. “However, that’s an interesting concept. I bet I could write software to make a Frisbee program. We have excess computer capacity.”
There were three redundant computers that did all the flight and other computational work, simultaneously and in parallel. They were located in unheated space, under the skin of the crew module, operating between five and twenty degrees Kelvin, at bit above the outside temperature. Some of the circuits were colder, allowing for superconductivity as well as stable quantum computing. The craft could operate on one processing unit and usually did. The three computers could be configured to work either in series or parallel depending on the needs. There were scores of five hundred petabyte storage devices accessible to the computer for specific applications in addition to the yottabytes contained within each computer.
“Are you not happy that some administrator twenty or thirty years ago when they requested budgeting and grants made it sound like this much computing power was skimping?” Cyrus said.
“I love it. We have games with ‘holo-repos’ and messages from each of us where we can feel and smell the other person.” Holographic reproductions displayed objects living or inanimate where all five senses were stimulated. Tapping in several places to bring up a display, Chen looked up. “What do you think, Clercqy?”
“I like leaving the planetary disk, following the original trajectory. The small boost we would get from Saturn is negated by the deviation we need to get there. Besides, control back home would go fractal. And I’ll go homicidal if you call me Vanna or Clercqy again, Chenie.”
“They can’t touch us.” Chen twitched his eyes to his communicator, a small gold-and-black device clipped to the front of his shirt. Savanna barely noticed.
“They could send out a ship from Titan,” Cyrus chipped in.
“Touché,” Chen said as he left the workstation. “As you were. I’ll go find someone else to harass.” Cyrus and Savanna looked quizzically at each other as he left without further explanation.
“That was abrupt,” Cyrus said. “One week out, and he’s acting strange already.”
“He got a message. Cryptic. He glanced at it so fast I wasn’t sure he even looked.”
“The high and mighty commander.” The words dripped with disdain.
Savanna tried to ignore his tone but not Chen’s brief flickers of attention to his communicator for the week. At first, she thought his actions were a quirky tic. Yet he somehow knew what the messages were a type of code, or shorthand perhaps. His sudden change in demeanor and instant departure made her uneasy. Something wasn’t right with either of these men.