Chapter 18 Chapter 16 The Captain's Table

The arrival of such a special passenger disrupted the originally tight-knit small world of the Goliath.The crew, however, readily adapted.At 18:00 every day, all crew members will gather in the captain's cabin for dinner.If everyone is evenly spread out on six walls in zero gravity, the captain's cabin can comfortably accommodate at least 30 people.Most of the time, though, the working area on the ship maintains lunar gravity, so there's no avoiding a floor—it's too crowded for more than eight people. The semi-circular dining table, which was only opened at mealtimes, surrounded the automatic galley and was only big enough for seven people, with the captain in his honor.One more person creates unavoidable difficulties, and every time someone has to eat alone.After a fairly moderate debate, it was decided to take turns in alphabetical order—not by real name, but by nickname.Poole took a while to get used to: "big" (first mate), "life" (medicine and life support systems), "stars" (orbit and navigation), "propulsion" (stacking and power), "chips" (Computers and Communications) and "The Screw" (Structural Engineering).

During the ten-day journey, listening to the stories, jokes and whining of his fellow shipmates, Poole learned more about the solar system than he had during his few months on Earth.The crew are clearly happy to have a new (and perhaps quaint) guy as an earnest one-man audience, but the more imaginative stories are less accessible to Poole. However, sometimes it's hard to know where to draw the line.Nobody really believes in the existence of "golden asteroids" and it's generally dismissed as a 24th century hoax.But what about at least a dozen reliable sightings of Mercury's ion clusters over the past 500 years?

The simplest explanation is: It's all about ball lightning, which is also responsible for so many "UFOs" on Earth and Mars.Some eyewitnesses swear that during the close encounters "they" showed some kind of purpose, even attempt.Nonsense, skeptics respond: That's nothing but electrostatic gravity! This inevitably led to discussions about other life in the universe, and Poole found himself (not for the first time) defending his age of extreme gullibility and suspicion, even though, as a child, "Aliens are on your way." Beside” craze has cooled, but even in the 2020s NASA is still plagued by people who claim alien visitors have made contact with them, and even abducted them.Their delusions are exacerbated by the incitement and exploitation of the media.This whole syndrome was finally classified in the medical literature as "Adamski's delusion".

The discovery of TMA1 paradoxically ended this ridiculous farce.Because it proves that there are intelligent beings out there, but apparently they haven't cared about humans for millions of years.A handful of scientists have argued that life forms beyond the bacterial level are such an "unnecessary" phenomenon that humans are alone, if not in the entire universe, but at least in the galaxy. TMA1 made them speechless and convinced. The crew of the Goliath were more interested in the technology of Poole's day than in politics and economics.And especially fascinated by the revolution that took place at the time: the harnessing of vacuum energy sounded the death knell of the fossil fuel age. The smoggy cities of the 20th century and the garbage, greed and macabre environmental disasters of the oil age are too difficult for them to photograph.

"Don't blame me!" Poole shot back playfully after a round of criticism. "Anyway, look at the mess the 21st century has created." There was a unanimous "What do you mean?" "Well, once the so-called 'Age of Unlimited Power' hits the road and everyone has millions of kilowatts of cheap, clean energy - you know what happened!" "Oh, you mean the 'heat crisis,' but it worked out later." "At the last minute - you covered half the Earth with mirrors to bounce the sun's heat back into space. Otherwise, Earth would be as charred as Venus by now."

While the crew knew so little about the history of the third millennium, Poole surprised them with his knowledge of events centuries after his own time (thanks to his intensive education in Star City).Still, Poole noted with satisfaction that they were familiar with Discovery's logbook, which has become one of the classic records of the space age.The way they looked at it, Poole thought it was like looking at a Viking saga; he often had to remind himself that he lived in a time between the Goliath and the first ships to cross the Atlantic. "On your 86th day," Xing Xing reminded him at dinner on the 5th day, "you once passed asteroid 7794 at a distance of less than 2,000 kilometers, and you even sent a probe to it, remember?"

"Of course I do," replied Poole, somewhat impulsively. "For me, that was less than a year ago." "Oh, sorry. Tomorrow we'll be closer to number 13445, want to see it? With autopilot and fixed frames, we should have a 10 millisecond launch window." One hundredth of a second!A few minutes aboard Discovery was blood-fueled, and now, it's happening 50 times faster... "How big is 13445?" Poole asked. "30 x 20 x 15 meters." Xing Xing replied, "It looks like broken bricks." "Sorry, we don't have small bullets available," Push said. "Did you ever think that 7794 would fight back?"

"Never thought about it. But it provides a lot of useful information for astronomers, so it's worth the risk... Anyway, it seems that there is no need to worry about a hundredth of a second. Anyway, thank you." "I understand. Seeing one asteroid is seeing them all—" "Not really, Chip. When I was on Eros—" "You've said it a dozen times—" Poole turned a deaf ear to their discussion.His mind went back 1,000 years to the only exciting moment in Discovery's mission, before the final cataclysm.Although both he and Bowman knew that No. 7794 was just a big rock without air and life, it didn't affect their feelings.It was the only solid matter they could come across on this side of Jupiter, and they looked at it like sailors on a long voyage round unlandable shores.

No. 13445 slowly turned from one end to the other, and you can see the mottled and messy light and shadow scattered on the surface.Sometimes it shone like a far window, like the exposed crystalline facets of crystalline matter, glinting in the sunlight... He remembered, too, the growing excitement as they waited to see if he had aimed correctly.It is not easy to hit such a small target; especially when it is 2,000 kilometers away and moving at a relative speed of 20 kilometers per second. Then, against the dark part of the asteroid, there was a sudden burst of blinding light.The little pure uranium 238 bullet hit it at the speed of a meteor.In a fraction of a second, all of its kinetic energy is converted to heat.A cloud of blinding white gas was blasted into space as Discovery's cameras recorded rapidly fading spectral lines, capturing what the hot atoms revealed.Hours later, astronomers on Earth learned for the first time what the asteroid's crust was made of.Although not too much of a surprise, a couple of bottles of champagne were opened as well.

Captain Chandler himself rarely participated in democratic discussions at the dinner table.He seemed content to watch the crew relax and express their feelings in such an informal atmosphere.There is only one unwritten rule: no discussion of business matters is allowed during meals, and if there are technical or operational problems, they must be resolved elsewhere. Poole was surprised (and somewhat shocked) to discover how superficial the crew's knowledge of the Goliath's systems was.The questions he asked should be easy to answer, but they all told him to check the memory bank on the ship.But it didn't take long for him to realize that the thorough training he had received in his day was no longer possible. Spaceship control involved too many complex systems for one to be able to specialize in.When facing their own instruments, experts only need to know what it is, not why it is.Reliability relies on tireless automatic detection, and human intervention is likely to do more harm than good.

Fortunately, neither was needed for this trip: with the new sun, Tai Kai, entrenched in the sky in front of him, it was already the most uneventful journey any shipowner could dream of.