Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network by E. Foner (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📗

Somebody had made a real effort to clean up the bay, though they couldn’t do much to make the badly scratched deck plates look any better. Colorful bunting was strung along the bulkheads and from the ceiling, and a portable audio/visual system with a holographic projector had been set up on a raised platform at the front of the bay. There were a few folding chairs available for older audience members, but the attendees mainly sat on the floor or stood to the sides.

The audience burst into applause as theme music swelled from the speakers, and Georgia found herself clapping just as enthusiastically as the rest of them. The presenters on stage were all dressed in colorful Colony One uniform tops, which were copied from the same old Earth television show that supplied the music. When the initial round of enthusiasm waned, a grey-haired woman tapped an insignia on her chest that apparently served as a microphone, and just managed to announce, “Space. The fi—” before she was drowned out by the audience shouting the rest of the well-known line.

The reporter found herself tempted to cover her ears with her hands to block out all of the noise that followed. When the cheering and hooting finally ran its course and the presenter launched into her introduction, the lack of subsequent interruptions made Georgia suspect that she had witnessed a clever strategy to let the attendees vent their pent-up emotions so they would calm down and pay attention.

“Welcome to the Colony One traveling roadshow, as we like to call it, and I want to take a moment to clear up any misconceptions,” the speaker began. “We are not a cult, the doors are not locked, and we encourage you to use the facilities if nature calls. We won’t be accepting any money, so please don’t offer. Our mission is to collect contact information and pledges from everybody who is interested in supporting the acquisition and fitting-out of a colony ship capable of sustaining four to six million humans and their livestock in space while searching for a habitable world.”

Something like a flash of gold came arcing out of the crowd and hit the stage near the woman. Georgia flinched, wondering if it was an attack. But the presenter just smiled and said, “Please keep your jewelry on as well. This reminds me of the time I was on a Drazen open world and a local human farmer tried to present us with a pair of breeding goats. He had the right idea for colony ship livestock, but in life, as in comedy, timing is everything. Here to speak to you about timing, my colleague, Dollyman.”

The audience gave a polite round of applause as a tall man wearing a sports jacket with two extra sleeves sewn across the chest moved to the front of the platform. The new speaker had a tab in his hand, and he used it to activate the holographic projector. A Dollnick colony ship filled the space above the stage, spinning on its axis just as it would to create weight for the inhabitants on a mission.

“I don’t have a clue why they call me Dollyman,” the presenter began, eliciting a laugh from the attendees, “but I can tell you that I often feel like the luckiest man in the galaxy. A little over thirty years ago I left Earth as a contract worker for a janitorial job that promised good benefits. What nobody had told me was that I would be one of the first humans employed in Prince Drume’s orbital shipyards. By the end of my contract, I’d pushed a sonic broom over every square centimeter of a Dollnick colony ship under construction.”

The hologram slowly swiveled by ninety degrees, so that most of the audience was now seeing a flat end of the cylindrical vessel. Dollyman continued tapping away on his tab, and layers of the hologram vanished, one after another until all that was left resembled a spoked wheel without a tire.

“What you’re looking at is a single section of a Dollnick colony ship without the decks,” the presenter continued. “There’s no cut-and-dried rule for how many sections a ship can have, though I’ve been told there’s a theoretical limit beyond which the center of gravity begins to create structural complications. The spoke-and-hub design is common to practically all large space structures that host biologicals, including Stryx stations, because a multiple-deck centrifuge is the only practical way to create so-called ‘artificial gravity’ in space. But my goal here isn’t to get into the physics of space construction, which I’m hardly qualified to discuss in any case. Does anybody want to guess how long it takes a Dollnick construction crew to complete a section from this stage?”

“A year,” somebody called out.

“A decade,” a different voice chipped in.

“Five and a half years,” a mathematically oriented person ventured, splitting the difference between the first two guesses to maximize his chances of being closest to the correct answer.

“What if I told you the longest guess was off by more than an order of magnitude?” Dollyman said.

“What’s an order of magnitude?” a youngster in the front row asked.

“A factor of ten.”

“You mean it takes less than a year?”

“Actually, construction of a single section takes several times a hundred years, and while Dollnicks live longer than that, it’s not unusual for a shipyard worker to pass an unfinished construction job along to his son. Of course, an orbital shipyard like Prince Drume’s can build a large number of sections at the same time, that’s just a question of available workers and materials. The point is, from soup to nuts, building a Dollnick colony ship may take a thousand years.”

Georgia heard gasps from the crowd around her, and she had the odd feeling that a good deal of the air had just been sucked