marginally unreal, because Earth is out of reach for good and all.
The elevator stopped. Waiting to enter it and go down was Yoko, clutching a thick wad of computer printouts.They exchanged greetings, and Parvati walked forward across the floor of the computer-room. It had been the bridge too, when the ship was in flight, and someone had draped cloths over the astrogation inputs.
She frowned at that; it was new since she last came up here. It was an irrational deed, in the sense that it was superfluous—everyone knew that the flight-controls were there, but no longer for use.
Who did it? Who acted on the principle, “If you can’t see it, maybe it will go away?”
Over the past few days, since the progress meeting, it seemed that an infinite multitude of such trivial—but irrational—facts had been accumulating in the corner of her memory which stored them until they generated a suggestive pattern. Ordinarily, when she had gathered so many, she settled down to puzzle over them whenever she had the chance. At present, however, she was curiously reluctant to face them.
If she had found herself alone up here, she might nonetheless have attempted the job immediately: punched the computer-activation code which alerted those sections of the memory stocked with information about human aberrations, and tossed every petty irritation she could think of into a heap from which the computers might have drawn some conclusions.
But she was not alone. Seated before the section of the input board which dealt with his own speciality, Tai Men was studying a printout with such concentration he did not realise she had come in until she spoke to him.
Then he jerked and glanced over his shoulder. “Oh—morning, Parvati. How are things with you?”
“So-so. But better than with you, to judge by the expression you’re wearing.” She unlocked a chair with a touch on its back, slid it across the smooth metal floor to a spot where she could conveniently talk to him, and released the switch so that it stayed put.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” the biologist said unhappily.“Ah—has it been showing very much, these past few days?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘very much.’ But it has been showing,” Parvati said candidly.
Tai Men sighed. “Yes, I thought so. And it isn’t good for morale, is it? But what I’ve run into is a pretty good excuse for paranoia, I guess … See here!” He turned the printout he was holding so that she could read it, and indicated one particular section of it with a stubby forefinger.
“It’s a bit too specialised for me to follow,” Parvati admitted after a few seconds. “Can you spell it out in lay terms?”
“Well, you know something about the basic techniques of fractionation, separating nearly but not quite identical biological compounds so that they can be individually analysed?”
“I know it can be done, and I’d recognise the equipment for doing it, but I wouldn’t care to attempt it myself.”
“Don’t blame you.” Tai sighed again, more heavily. “On the kind of scale which we realised would be necessary here, you need the most advanced mass fractionator ever designed, a Shlovsky-Har. It’s about nine feet by twelve—that’s because of the long distances the compounds need to be stretched out over—but … Well, say you poured in a bucketful of effluent from a dyeworks, containing a gram of chlorine phthalocyanine contaminated with a thousand molecules of copper phthalocyanine. Inside half an hour it would not only deliver the dye, and the water separately, but tell you what you’d got and how much of it. We had one. Because it was big we had
only
one. And I don’t have to say what became of it, do I?”
“Aboard the
Pinta?”
“Of course. Consequently we’re having to make do with time—wasting, repetitious, unreliable alternatives.”
“Looking for native sources of ascorbic acid?”
Tai hesitated. He said finally, “No. I appreciate whatAbdul
The elevator stopped. Waiting to enter it and go down was Yoko, clutching a thick wad of computer printouts.They exchanged greetings, and Parvati walked forward across the floor of the computer-room. It had been the bridge too, when the ship was in flight, and someone had draped cloths over the astrogation inputs.
She frowned at that; it was new since she last came up here. It was an irrational deed, in the sense that it was superfluous—everyone knew that the flight-controls were there, but no longer for use.
Who did it? Who acted on the principle, “If you can’t see it, maybe it will go away?”
Over the past few days, since the progress meeting, it seemed that an infinite multitude of such trivial—but irrational—facts had been accumulating in the corner of her memory which stored them until they generated a suggestive pattern. Ordinarily, when she had gathered so many, she settled down to puzzle over them whenever she had the chance. At present, however, she was curiously reluctant to face them.
If she had found herself alone up here, she might nonetheless have attempted the job immediately: punched the computer-activation code which alerted those sections of the memory stocked with information about human aberrations, and tossed every petty irritation she could think of into a heap from which the computers might have drawn some conclusions.
But she was not alone. Seated before the section of the input board which dealt with his own speciality, Tai Men was studying a printout with such concentration he did not realise she had come in until she spoke to him.
Then he jerked and glanced over his shoulder. “Oh—morning, Parvati. How are things with you?”
“So-so. But better than with you, to judge by the expression you’re wearing.” She unlocked a chair with a touch on its back, slid it across the smooth metal floor to a spot where she could conveniently talk to him, and released the switch so that it stayed put.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” the biologist said unhappily.“Ah—has it been showing very much, these past few days?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘very much.’ But it has been showing,” Parvati said candidly.
Tai Men sighed. “Yes, I thought so. And it isn’t good for morale, is it? But what I’ve run into is a pretty good excuse for paranoia, I guess … See here!” He turned the printout he was holding so that she could read it, and indicated one particular section of it with a stubby forefinger.
“It’s a bit too specialised for me to follow,” Parvati admitted after a few seconds. “Can you spell it out in lay terms?”
“Well, you know something about the basic techniques of fractionation, separating nearly but not quite identical biological compounds so that they can be individually analysed?”
“I know it can be done, and I’d recognise the equipment for doing it, but I wouldn’t care to attempt it myself.”
“Don’t blame you.” Tai sighed again, more heavily. “On the kind of scale which we realised would be necessary here, you need the most advanced mass fractionator ever designed, a Shlovsky-Har. It’s about nine feet by twelve—that’s because of the long distances the compounds need to be stretched out over—but … Well, say you poured in a bucketful of effluent from a dyeworks, containing a gram of chlorine phthalocyanine contaminated with a thousand molecules of copper phthalocyanine. Inside half an hour it would not only deliver the dye, and the water separately, but tell you what you’d got and how much of it. We had one. Because it was big we had
only
one. And I don’t have to say what became of it, do I?”
“Aboard the
Pinta?”
“Of course. Consequently we’re having to make do with time—wasting, repetitious, unreliable alternatives.”
“Looking for native sources of ascorbic acid?”
Tai hesitated. He said finally, “No. I appreciate whatAbdul
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