go that far,” I said.
He nodded. “Neither do ours. So I immediately bought an Indian elephant. They’re the kind, back on the Home planet, that you can find tame and easy to handle. They’re also the wrong kind. The only reason I didn’t head right back with it is that I was having trouble figuring out how to carry it in the Crucis. Even an Indian elephant weighs about six tons. At least, mine did. In itself, that’s not a very big load, but the trip back would take a good many months of subjective time, and of course elephants eat on subjective time. And how they eat! The food I carried would weigh the same as the elephant.
“I wondered how elephants would like weightlessness, so I took my Indian elephant up on a little jaunt around Earth’s satellite. The Moon, they call it. Elephants don’t like weightlessness at all.” He paused, and signaled the bartender for another drink. “I hope you never have to clean up after a space-sick elephant,” he said darkly.
“That meant that I’d have to put spin on the Crucis for the entire trip back to Penguin. It’s hard enough to try to navigate in hyperspace with spin on your ship, but that wasn’t the worst of it. An elephant is a tremendous amount of off-center load for a ship with a large fraction of a one-gee spin on it. Too much load even to think about handling. Even though I couldn’t come up with an answer, right off hand, I went ahead and turned in my Indian elephant on an African model. Beulah was her name, and she was a husky girl. She weighed in at just a little more than eight tons.”
I waved my whisky glass at Captain Hannah. “But I don’t see your problem,” I said. “If you put the elephant on one side and his food on the other, there wouldn’t be any off-balanced load, would there?”
“Not until the food was eaten, anyway,” said the skipper witheringly, and I subsided with a fresh drink.
“Beulah was kind of cute, for all of her tonnage,” said the skipper. “She had two enormous tusks, and a pair of ears like wings, and a nose that was longer than her tail. But she was mighty friendly, after she got to know me. She’d pick me up and carry me around, if I asked her to. And she’d eat right out of my hand. She turned out to be even tamer than the Indian elephant. All I had to do was figure out how to carry her.
“For a starter, I figured like you said, to have Beulah on one side of the cargo compartment, and her chow on the other. Then I calculated to have my own supplies on the other two sides of the space, so that I could move them away from her as her food stocks got smaller, and hold the balance that way. That wasn’t enough, of course, so I built a couple of water tanks on the opposite side of the ring from Beulah.
“As you know, not much can be done about moving water around in a space ship—it’s got its own cooling chores to perform—but every little bit helped. Finally, I jockeyed the master computer and the auxiliary computer down and ran them on tracks, so I could slide them around to compensate for Beulah’s appetite. Some lead slugs brought the auxiliary’s weight up equal to the master’s, and they also brought my total load up to the absolute maximum that I could carry.
“It was almost enough. But a miss is as good as a mile, for a space ship. I was stuck, and there didn’t seem to be a thing I could do about it. Even if I could have carried more weight it wouldn’t have helped. Any more mass in the cargo compartment would have thrown the c.g. too far aft.” He beckoned for more rhial.
“So what did you do?” I prompted. “You did say that you carried the elephant, didn’t you?”
“Sure. Like I said, a Delta class freighter can do almost anything. Beulah gave me the answer herself. If you’ve ever lived with an elephant, one thing becomes clear mighty fast. They’re a mighty efficient machine for converting fodder into elephant droppings. So I made a bin on the opposite side of the compartment from Beulah, and let her gradually fill it while she ate me out of balance. The weight of the—what’s a nice word for it?—was just enough to let me keep the whole setup in dynamic balance.”
“Compost heap?” I suggested dreamily, picturing the arrangement in my mind. There was poetry in it. Or was it poetic justice that I had in mind?
“That’s it,” said Captain Hannah. “Compost heap. Well, I started the journey with the ship full and Beulah and the compost heap empty. I finished pretty much the other way around. I suppose it sounds easy, but it wasn’t.
“I started off with Beulah chained down in the middle of the compartment, and everything stacked around her. She didn’t want me to leave when I went up to the bridge to take off, and hollered as piteously as you can imagine. But I couldn’t have a nurse for her—mahout, they call them. I couldn’t spare the weight. Or the salary, for that matter. She was chained down, so she couldn’t move around and upset the balance.
“After chemical take off, we slid into parking orbit as sweet as you please. I hurried down to shift the load around. I didn’t want to stay weightless any longer than I had to, because I remembered that sick Indian elephant—and Beulah outweighed him by almost two tons, and had a larger stomach to match. Of course, the Indian elephant had gone into orbit on a full belly, and I hadn’t let Beulah have a bite to eat for hours. It made a difference, let me tell you.
“Beulah made trouble in her own way, though. As soon as I got within reach, she grabbed me with that long nose of hers, and wouldn’t let go. She didn’t hurt me or anything like that; she just wanted company in her misery. I couldn’t coax her with food. The very thought of food made her shudder.
“I couldn’t reach her chains to cut her loose, and I couldn’t reach the radio to call for help. If it hadn’t been for the Ionosphere Guard, I might have starved to death. I’d hired the parking orbit for twelve hours, and when I was still in it after that time, Port Control started to holler. I could hear them on my loud speaker, but I couldn’t answer them. So the Ionosphere Guard finally sent up a small craft with a lieutenant and a three-man crew in it to see what was wrong.
“Those sailors were good. They didn’t even look surprised; they just went to work as if they handled elephants in space every day. They drove four lines through the ring bolts I’d welded in the spin-deck, cast Beulah loose and hauled her over to her new spot as neat as you please.
“Then, no nonsense, the lieutenant ordered Beulah to let loose of me. She did, too.
“After that they left, stopping for just one drink of my good bourbon. I didn’t drink rhial then.
“I wirelessed Port Control my penalty fees and another twelve hour’s hire in the orbit, and started shifting the load. I was working on an empty stomach, and Beulah still didn’t feel hungry, so she didn’t remind me that I hadn’t eaten. I almost collapsed before I got the job done.
“Then I put spin on, which made Beulah comfortable at last, and tried to juggle the ship into a hyper-trajectory, still without stopping for food or sleep. It didn’t take long before Beulah started squalling for supper. After I fed her I had to adjust balance all over again. By that time I was pushing my new twelve-hour limit, and I didn’t give much of a damn any more. I just counted to ten and pushed the button. Then I turned in and slept until Beulah started squalling for breakfast. I ignored her until I ate about three squares in a row, then I fed her and adjusted balance. After that I checked my trajectory.
“It was the best I’ve ever made in twenty-four years of jumping. It was beautiful.
“So I turned back in again and slept until Beulah woke me for lunch. I didn’t know it at the time, but Beulah was eating for two. That possibility probably should have occurred to me earlier, what with the name ‘Beulah’, but you can’t think of everything, and there I was, the
