Part 16 (1/2)

There had been important changes made around him. He knew this the moment he started to come out of sleep. Opening his eyes a groggy second or two later, he realized that he was in a new bedroom, much like his old one but different in detail and bigger.

”s.h.i.+p...s.h.i.+p, where am I? What's happened?” ”You have been moved during your sleep into a new accommodation, Bart. There is no cause for alarm.”

He got up and dressed and ate and eliminated as usual. The walls of this room were metal, and its door was thicker, as he saw when it opened for him to go out.

”Why did you move me, s.h.i.+p?”

”Some of the people were attempting to reach you, to rouse you from sleep at the wrong time. They meant well but it was necessary to prevent their interference.”

His door opened into a corridor he had never seen before, leading off in one direction only. It bent sharply several times and was interrupted by two sets of heavy doors that opened as Bart drew near and closed immediately after he had pa.s.sed.

He found himself coming back into the peopled area of the s.h.i.+p from a new direction near the biology lab. The first folk to see him dropped what they were doing and ran to give him a glad welcome.

”I told you he'd be here on schedule!” cried Mal, pounding Bart joyfully on the back. No club in Mai's hand this time.

”s.h.i.+p was just taking good care of him, that's all!” Sigrid pulled him in for a big hug against her heavy bosom.

Later her learned that an intensive effort had been made to ”rescue” him from the machines, set him free from his long sleeps. The attempt had collapsed, foolishly, and no one wanted to talk about it. Then everyone had grown a little worried about Bart and all were glad to see him still coming back, if only for a day each year.

Gray was spreading in the hair of the happy crew around him, and several of the male heads were nearly bald. Many of the people looked a little fatter and squintier than when he had seen them last. They gave him a big lunch that was almost a birthday party.

Thirty-seven.

Galina and Solon took him on a tour of their biology lab, which was much enlarged and changed since he had seen it last, with cages holding white rats and hamsters, raised from genetic material obtained from the s.h.i.+p's stores.

”Do you think the long sleeps are harming me?” Bart asked when he had a chance.

”Harming you physically? No, I doubt it.” Galina looked at him thoughtfully. ”It takes an enormous amount of energy and a great deal of control equipment to keep a human being in such a sleep; even a s.h.i.+p like this couldn't do it for very many people at a time. It's not just freezing in the ordinary sense, you know. Even the orbital electrons within your body's atoms are kept from moving...but don't worry about the physical danger of it, that's extremely small.”

She was anxious to resume the biology lessons, and they went on a thorough tour of the lab.

”We haven't been able to get any human genetic material from the s.h.i.+p to work with. Still, in theory it should be possible for us to produce a new human generation here, starting with just ordinary cells from our own bodies. Did I ever tell you anything about cloning cells?”

”No.”

”I will. Anyway, it hasn't worked out yet. We're not sure if the s.h.i.+p is interfering in some subtle way, or if there are simply problems we're not aware of.”

They showed Bart ma.s.ses of tissue growing in gla.s.s jars. But they had never been able to get the tissue to differentiate properly into all the organs that had to grow in concert to make a person. It looked to Bart as if they hadn't yet even come close to achieving that.

Here and there old colored tapes were stuck to the walls and overhead, but the game they represented seemed to have been utterly abandoned.

The only compet.i.tion Bart heard about today was in raising the best food plants and flowers.

Thirty-eight.

It was depressing to see Helsa now dragging herself around like an invalid, her arms grown thin and her ankles puffy. Others told Bart that Galina suspected some slow, incurable disease. Then they turned the talk to brighter things.

”There's a lot of card playing going on now, Bart,” Sharon informed him.

”Card playing?”

”Poker, whist, bridge,” said Ranjan. ”We'll show you. They're old games we dug out of the s.h.i.+p's records. Then we've also tried two new ways to get through the barriers to reach the control regions of the s.h.i.+p, but neither has worked.”

”We haven't really tried them yet,” Fuad objected.

”Well, we've run them on the computer,” Lotis put in.

”Bah, I tell you, the s.h.i.+p is still using that computer against us-”

”No, I keep tellingyou,” argued Ranjan ”we've got it blocked off now against any possibility of the s.h.i.+p's gaining access-”

”So you think! I don't agree.” The argument was heated, but still showed no sign of coming to blows.

Thirty-nine.

Today there was a prayer meeting, more elaborate in ceremony but less intense in feeling than the last one Bart had attended. He noted that people's clothing, which they now made largely for themselves, was growing more elaborate too, and more voluminous; it covered more of their sagging bodies, and distracted attention from them.

Bart also noticed that a softer, more comfort-able type of chair had been manufactured some-how and was now in general use. The legs didn't look as if they could be unscrewed.

Forty.