The Mote In God's Eye

The officers moved silently away from the torpedo room. Lights brightened in the corridors and men hurried back to their action stations or their crowded rest areas. Navy routine continues, Rod thought. Funeral services are part of the Book too. There is a regulation for everything: birth aboard ship, registration of; burial, with or without bodies; and one for captains who lose their ships. The Book demands a court-martial for that one.

"Rod. Wait a minute, Rod. Please."

He stopped at Sally's call. They stood in the corridor while the other officers and crew split around them. Rod wanted to join them, to get back to the solitude of his cabin where no one would ask him what happened aboard MacArthur. Yet here was Sally, and something way inside wanted to talk to her, or just be close to her- "Rod, Dr. Horvath says the Modes have sent ambassadors to meet us at the Crazy Eddie point, but Admiral Kutuzov won't let them aboard! Is that right?"

Damn! he thought. Moties again, Moties- "It's right." He turned away.

"Rod, wait! We've got to do something! Rod, where are you going?" She stared at his back as he walked rapidly away. Now what did I do? she wondered.

Blaine's door was closed but the telltale showed that it wasn't locked. Kevin Renner hesitated, then knocked. Nothing happened. He waited a moment, then knocked again.

"Come in."

Renner opened the door. It seemed strange to walk directly into Blaine's cabin: no Marine sentry on duty, none of the mysterious aura of command that surrounds a captain. "Hi, Captain. Mind if I join you?"

"No. Can I get you anything?" Blaine clearly didn't care one way or another. He didn't look at Renner, and Kevin wondered what would happen if he took the polite offer seriously. He could ask for a drink...

No. Not time to push. Not just yet. Renner took a seat and looked around.

Blaine's cabin was big. It would have been a tower room if Lenin had been designed with a tower. There were only four men and one woman who rated cabins to themselves, and Blaine wasn't using the precious room; he booked to have been sitting in that chair for hours, probably ever since the funeral services. Certainly he hadn't changed. He'd had to borrow one of Mikhailov's dress uniforms and it didn't fit at all.

They sat silently, with Blaine staring into some internal space-time that excluded his visitor.

"I've been going over Buckman's work," Renner said at random. He had to start somewhere, and it probably shouldn't be with Moties.

"Oh? How goes it?" Blaine asked politely.

"Way over my head. He says he can prove there's a protostar forming in the Coal Sack. In a thousand years it'll be shining by its own light. Well, he can't prove it to me, because I don't have the math."

"Um."

"How are you making out?" Renner showed -no indication of leaving. "Enjoying your vacation from duties?"

Blaine finally lifted haunted eyes. "Kevin, why did the kids try to do a reentry?"

"God's eyes, Captain, that's plain silly. They wouldn't have tried anything of the kind." Jesus, he's not even thinking straight. This is going to be tougher than I thought.

"Then you tell me what happened."

Renner looked puzzled, but obviously Blaine meant it. "Captain, the ship was lousy with Brownies-everywhere nobody was looking. They must have got to the lifeboat storage area pretty early. If you were a Motie, how would you redesign an escape craft?"

"Superbly." Blaine actually smiled. "Even a dead man couldn't pass up a straight line like that."

"You had me wondering." Renner grinned, then turned serious. "No, what I mean is, they'd redesign for every new situation. In deep space the boat would decelerate and scream for rescue. Near a gas giant it would-orbit. Always automatic, mind, because the passengers could be hurt or unconscious. Near a habitable world the boat would reenter."

"Eh?" Blaine frowned. There was a spark of life in his eyes. Renner held his breath,

"Yeah, but Kevin, what went wrong? If the Brownies got to the boats they'd have designed them right. Besides, there'd be controls; they wouldn't make you reenter."

Renner shrugged. "Can you figure Out Motie control panels at a glance? I can't, and I doubt that the middies could. But the Brownies would expect them to. Captain, maybe the boats weren't finished, or got damaged in a fire fight."

"Maybe-"

"Maybe a lot of things. Maybe they were designed for Brownies. The kids would have had to crowd in, rip out a dozen fifteen-centimeter Motie crash couches or something. There wasn't much time, with the torpedoes due to go in three minutes."

"Those goddamn torpedoes! The casings were probably full of Brownies and a rat ranch, if anyone had looked!"

Renner nodded. "But who'd know to look?"

"I should have."

"Why?" Renner asked it seriously. "Skipper, there's-"

"I'm not a skipper."