zero, and the rim is expected to reach .009 gee atone-half revolutions per minute in the first sixty seconds ofoperation. We will hold that spin until balance is complete, when thespin will slowly be raised to two revolutions per minute, giving .15gee on the rim deck.
"All loose components and materials should be secured. All personnelare advised to suit up, strap down and hang on. We hope we won't shakeanybody too much. Mark and counting."
Almost immediately on the announcement came another voice over the comline. "Hold, hold, hold. We've got eighteen hundred pounds of millingequipment going down Number Two shaft to the machine shop, and wecan't get it mounted in less than twenty minutes. Repeat, hold thecountdown."
"The man who dreamed up the countdown was a Brain," Bessie could hearMike muttering over his open intercom, "but the man who thought up thehold was a pure genius."
"Holding the countdown." It was Bessie's official voice. "It is Tminus thirty and holding. Why are you goons moving that stuff aheadof schedule and without notifying balance control? What do you thinkthis is, a rock-bound coast? Think we're settled in to bedrock likeNew York City? I should have known," she muttered, forgetting to flipthe switch off, "my horoscope said this would be a shaky sort of day."
Chad Clark glanced up from his position at the communications consoleacross the bridge from Bessie, to where her shiny black hair, cutshort, framed the pert Eurasian features of the girl that seemed to behanging from the ceiling above him.
"Is it really legal," he asked, "using such a tremendously complicatedchunk of equipment as the Sacred Cow for casting horrible scopes?What's mine today, Bessie? Make it a good one, and I won't report youto U.N. Budget Control!"
"Offhand, I'd say today was your day to be cautious, quiet andrespectful to your betters, namely me. However," she added in aconciliatory tone, "since you put it on a Budget Control basis, I'llask the Cow to give you a real, mathematicked-out, planets and housesproperly aligned, reading.
"Hey, Perk!" Her finger flipped the observatory com line switch. "Haveyou got the planets lined up in your scopes yet? Where are they? TheSacred Cow wants to know if they're all where they ought to be."
Out in the observatory, designed to swing free on the north polar axisof the big wheel, Dr. P. E. R. Kimball, PhD, FRAS, gave a startledglance at the intercom speaker.
"I did not realize that you would wish additional observational databefore the swing began. I am just getting my equipment lined up, inpreparation for the beginnings of the swing, and will be unable togive you figures of any accuracy for some hours yet. Any reading Icould give you now would be accurate only to within two minutes ofarc--relatively valueless." The voice was cheerful, but very precise.
"Anything within half an hour of arc right now would be O.K." Bessie'svoice hid a grin.
"In that case, the astronomical almanac data in the computer's memoryshould be more than sufficiently precise for your needs." There was adry chuckle. "Horoscopes again?"
* * * * *
As Bessie turned back to the control side of her console, she saw ahand reach past her to pick up a pad of paper and pencil from theconsole desk. She glanced around to find Mike leaning over hershoulder, and grinned at him as she began extracting figures from thecomputer's innards for a "plus or minus thirty seconds of arc"accuracy.
Mike sketched rapidly as she worked, and she turned as she heard himmutter a disgusted curse.
"These are angular readings from our present position," he said in anannoyed tone. "Get the Cow to rework them into a solar pattern."
"Yes, sir, Chief Blackhawk, sir. What did you think I was doing?"
"You're getting them into the proper houses for a horoscope. I want asolar pattern. Now tell that Sacred Cow that you ride herd on to giveme a polar display pattern on one of the peepholes up there," he said,glancing at the thirty-six video screens above the console on whichthe computer could display practically any information that might bedesired, including telescopic views, computational diagrams, or eventhe habitats of the fish swimming in the outer rim channels.
The display appeared in seconds on the main screen, and Mike growledas he saw it.
"Have the Cow advance that pattern two days," he said furiously. Then,as the new pattern emerged, "I should have known it. It looks likewe're being set up for a solar flare. Right when we're gettingrolling. It might be a while, though. Plenty of time to check out afew gee swings. But best you rehearse your slipstick jockeys inemergency procedures."
"A flare, Mike? Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm not sure. But those planets sure make the conditionsripe. Look." And he held his pencil across the screen as a straightline dividing the pattern neatly through the center.
"Look at the first six orbits, Jupiter's right on the line. AndMercury won't be leaving until Jupe crosses that line." The "line"that Mike had indicated with his pencil across the screen would have,in the first display shown all but one of the first six planetsalready on the same side of the sun and in the new display, two dayslater, it showed all six of the planets bunched in the 180 deg. arc withEarth only a few degrees from the center of that arc.
"Hadn't thought to check before," he said, "but that's about aspredictable as anything the planets can tell you. We can expect aflare, and probably a dilly."
"Why, Mike? If a solar flare were due, U.N. Labs wouldn't havescheduled us this way. What makes you so sure that means there's asolar flare coming? I thought they weren't predictable?"
"It's fairly new research--but fairly old superstition," Mike said."You play with horoscopes--but my people have been watching the starsand predicting for many moons. I remember what they used to say aroundthe old tribal fires.
"When the planets line up on one side of the sun, you get trouble fromman and beast and nature. We weren't worried about radio propagationin those days, but we were worried about seasons, and how we felt, andwhen the buffalo would be restless.
"More recently some of the radio propagation analysts have beenworrying about the magnetic storms that blank out communications onEarth occasionally when old Sol opens up with a broadside of protons.Surely plays hell with communications equipment.
"Yep, there's a flare coming. Whether it's caused by gravitationalpull, when you get the planets to one side of Sol; or whether it'smagnetism--I just don't know."
"Shucks," she said, "we had a five-planet line-up in 1961; and nothinghappened; nothing at all. The seers--come to think of it, some of themwere Indians, but from India," she added, "not Amerinds--the seers allpredicted major catastrophes and the end of the world and all kinds ofthings, and nothing happened."
"Bessie," Mike's voice was serious. "I remember 1961 as well as youdo. You had several factors that were different then--but you hadsolar flares then. Quite spectacular ones. You just weren't out here,where they make a difference of life or death.
"Don't let anybody hold us too long getting this station lined up andcounted down and tested out. Because we've got things building up outthere, and we may get that flare, and it may not be two days coming,"he finished.
With that the Amerind sprang catlike to a hand-hold on the edge of thecentral tunnel and vanished back towards the engineering station, fromwhich he would control the test-spin of the big wheel.
* * * * *
Bessandra Khamar, educated in Moscow, traced her ancestry back to oneof the Buryat tribes of southern Siberia, a location that had becomeeventually, through the vast vagaries of history, known as the BuryatAutonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
She was of a proud, clannish people, with Mongolian ancestry and aBuddhist background which had not been too deeply scarred by thepolitical pressures from Western Russia. Rebellious of nature, and ofa race of people where women fought beside their men in case ofnecessity, she had first left her tribal area to seek education in themore advanced western provinces with a vague idea of returning tospread--not western ideologies amongst her people--but perhaps some oftheir know-how. This she ha
d found to be a long and involved process;and more and more, with an increase of education, she had grown awayfrom her people, the idea of return moving ever backwards andfloundering under the impact of education.
She had been an able student, though independent and quiteargumentative, with a mind and will of her own that caused a shakingof heads amongst her fellow students.
Having sought knowledge in what, to her, were the western provinces ofher own country, she had delved not only into the knowledge of thingsscientific, but into the wheres and whyfores of the politicalsituations that made a delineation between the