Titans of Chaos

So everyone checked my figures. The motivation was simple: You flunk the math problem, the shipmisses the target, we all die.

We did trigonometry and calculus. Victor magnetically opened his layer of clams so we could cleara porthole and take measurements of the planets with binoculars and homemade sextants. We didour figuring on slide rales. You heard me: good old-fashioned slipsticks, those things everyonesays are dead as a dodo. They are easy to make with two sticks, or even two pieces of paper laidside by side. Try making an electronic adding machine with what you have in your knapsack.

Victor had the log tables memorized, and several of the Dukes, Great Kings, and Presidents of theMiddle Air that Quentin could call up teach liberal arts and useful sciences, includingmathematics.

An abacus is pretty easy to make, too, if you have a Telchine boy who can sculpt materials tofine-machine standards with his brain. Vanity and I contributed pearl necklaces and beadedbracelets to the project.

Four days of playing with numbers, and you can get pretty quick with an abacus.

I also staggered the watches, so that not everyone was awake at the same time. It was the onlyprivacy we had, to have some time when the guy who is getting on your nerves is asleep. And yes,Colin did talk after lights out, and Victor did tell him to shut up. Just like in school.

We celebrated at the skew-turn point. One minute of zero gravity, while we howled like monkeysand bounced off the walls, doing fast somersaults and slow cartwheels. Vanity's hair was like apuffball surrounding her head; I was blinded by a blond cloud. Note to female cosmonauts: Shorthair is in fashion.

Then the Nautilus was running prow-backwards, and decelerating toward Mars.

The ship did seem to have some arbitrary limitations. She could drive through space, but not flythrough the air.

Propelled how, by the way? I could see lines of energy reaching from the vessel into thecomplexities of higher dimensions, and see the rippling activity in the strange dreamlandssurrounding Mars, but I could not figure out how the ship moved. But I saw the utility dimmingdangerously toward uselessness, and I knew she could not land under her own power.