we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.
The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at one-half gees.
I went to see her. “Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph-9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.”
“That’s good.”
“Ah, just think of the great things we’ll—”
“William.”
I let it trail off. Never could lie.
“Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bullshit me about getting back to Earth.” She turned her face to the wall.
“I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.
“So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?”
We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr. Wilson.
~~~
“We’re giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.”
“But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.”
“Certainly. For what it’s worth. The Commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.”
I nodded impatiently. “Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.”
“If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,” he said smiling, “you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable—”
“No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.”
“Explain away.”
“We put Marygay into a shell and flood—”
“Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.”
“I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life support hookups can function. The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s just an adaptation of—you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?”
“A little bit, in medical school. My worst courses, after Latin.”
“Do you remember the principle of equivalence?”
“I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?”
“Uh-huh. It means that…there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of—it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.”
“Seems obvious.”
“Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.”
“Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if—”
“Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.”
“All right. I’ll accept that. So?”
“You know Archimedes’ Law?”
“Sure, the fake crown—that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts—”
“Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in—In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.”
“Sure.”
“So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.”
“Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.”
“Why not?” I was tempted to tell him to stick to