For the first forty-eight hours of the voyage, Heywood Floyd could not really believe the comfort, the
spaciousness - the sheer extravagance of Universe's living arrangements. Yet most of his fellow
passengers took them for granted; those who had never left Earth before assumed that all spaceships
must be like this.
He had to look back at the history of aeronautics to put matters in the right perspective. In his own
lifetime, he had witnessed - indeed, experienced - the revolution that had occurred in the skies of the
planet now dwindling behind him. Between the clumsy old Leonov and the sophisticated Universe lay
exactly fifty years. (Emotionally, he couldn't really believe that - but it was useless arguing about
arithmetic.)
And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners. At the beginning of
that half-century, intrepid aviators had hopped from field to field, begoggled and windswept on open
chairs; at its end, grandmothers had slumbered peacefully between continents at a thousand kilometres
an hour.
So he should not, perhaps, have been astonished at the luxury and elegant decor of his stateroom, or
even the fact that he had a steward to keep it tidy. The generously sized window was the most startling
feature of his suite, and at first he felt quite uncomfortable thinking of the tons of air pressure it was
holding in check against the implacable, and never for a moment relaxing, vacuum of space.
The biggest surprise, even though the advance literature should have prepared him for it, was the
presence of gravity. Universe was the first spaceship ever built to cruise under continuous acceleration,
except for the few hours of the mid-course 'turnaround'. When her huge propellant tanks were fully
loaded with their five thousand tons of water, she could manage a tenth of a gee - not much, but enough
to keep loose objects from drifting around. This was particularly convenient at mealtimes - though it took
a few days for the passengers to learn not to stir their soup too vigorously.
Forty-eight hours out from Earth, the population of Universe had already stratified itself into four
distinct classes.
The aristocracy consisted of Captain Smith and his officers. Next came the passengers; then crew - noncommissioned
and stewards. And then steerage...
That was the description that the five young space scientists had adopted for themselves, first as a
joke but later with a certain amount of bitterness. When Hoyd compared their cramped and jury-rigged
quarters with his own luxurious cabin, he could see their point of view, and soon became the conduit of
their complaints to the Captain.
Yet all things considered, they had little to grumble about; in the rush to get the ship ready, it had
been touch and go as to whether there would be any accommodation for them and their equipment. Now
they could look forward to deploying instruments around - and on - the comet during the critical days
before it rounded the Sun, and departed once more to the outer reaches of the Solar System. The
members of the science team would establish their reputations on this voyage, and knew it. Only in
moments of exhaustion, or fury with misbehaving instrumentation, did they start complaining about the
noisy ventilating system, the claustrophobic cabins, and occasional strange smells of unknown origin.
But never the food, which everyone agreed was excellent. 'Much better,' Captain Smith assured them,
'than Darwin had on the Beagle.'
To which Victor Willis had promptly retorted:
'How does he know? And by the way, Beagle's commander cut his throat when he got back to England.'
That was rather typical of Victor, perhaps the planet's best-known science communicator - to his fans -
or 'pop-scientist' - to his equally numerous detractors. It would be unfair to call them enemies;
admiration for his talents was universal, if occasionally grudging. His soft, mid-Pacific accent and
expansive gestures on camera were widely parodied, and he had been credited (or blamed) for the revival
of full-length beards. 'A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to
hide.'
He was certainly the most instantly recognizable of the six VIPs - though Floyd, who no longer
regarded himself as a celebrity, always referred to them ironically as 'The Famous Five'. Yva Merlin could
often walk unrecognized on Park Avenue, on the rare occasions when she emerged from her apartment.
Dimitri Mihailovich, to his considerable annoyance, was a good ten centimetres below average height; this
might help to explain his fondness for thousand-piece orchestras - real or synthesized -but did not
enhance his public image.
Clifford Greenburg and Margaret M'Bala also fell into the category of 'famous unknowns' - though this
would certainly change when they got back to Earth. The first man to land on Mercury had one of those
pleasant, unremarkable faces that are very hard to remember; moreover the days when he had
dominated the news were now thirty years in the past. And like most authors who are not addicted to talk
shows and autographing sessions, Ms M'Bala would be unrecognized by the vast majority of her millions
of readers.
Her literary fame had been one of the sensations of the forties. A scholarly study of the Greek
pantheon was not usually a candidate for the best-seller lists, but Ms M'Bala had placed its eternally inexhaustible
myths in a contemporary space-age setting. Names which a century earlier had been
familiar only to astronomers and classical scholars were now part of every educated person's world
picture; almost every day there would be news from Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Titan, Japetus - or even
more obscure worlds like Carme, Pasiphaë, Hyperion, Phoebe...
Her book would have been no more than modestly successful, however, had she not focused on the
complicated family life of Jupiter-Zeus, Father of all the Gods (as well as much else). And by a stroke of
luck, an editor of genius had changed her original title, The View from Olympus, to The Passions of the
Gods. Envious academics usually referred to it as Olympic Lusts, but invariably wished they had written it.
Not surprisingly, it was Maggie M - as she was quickly christened by her fellow passengers - who first
used the phrase Ship of Fools. Victor Willis adopted it eagerly, and soon discovered an intriguing historical
resonance. Almost a century ago, Katherine Anne Porter had herself sailed with a group of scientists and
writers aboard an ocean liner to watch the launch of Apollo 17, and the end of the first phase of lunar
exploration.
'I'll think about it,' Ms M'Bala had remarked ominously, when this was reported to her. 'Perhaps it's
time for a third version. But I won't know, of course, until we get back to Earth...'
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