the sort to be ordered around. He needed a gentler touch, a bit of praise and persuasion. “So you're fully burdened. You don't anticipate freeing up anyone else for storage?”
“Not until the engines stop firing, no.” 1
“Hmm.”
“Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.
“The comm antenna is another issue. We're already using the whole sail for this, so there's no room left to expand communications. As our distance from Earth increases, we'll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. We
are
supposed to be on our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or nearly.”
“Why so?”
Money shrugged. “Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is asymmetric. With no crew, you don't have to worry about it, and with a thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with statistics. But right now we've got almost as many fax machines as people, and it's getting to be a grind.”
“And here I've been taking them for granted,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Do we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life easier?”
“Yah,” Money said vaguely, “I don't know about that. Talk to your Chief of Stores. She's my main energy customer after propulsion.”
Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man, no longer holding his eye.
“Better?” Money asked him.
“Much,” Peter answered testily. “And don't ask me again for those cooling numbers. I'm on it.”
Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursing and glaring. She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine—the largest one in the ship's habitable compartments—with a bunch of tools and sensors and sketchplates spread out around her.
“Is this a bad time?” Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.
Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her little bubble of a world. “Oh. It's you. Hi.”
“Some trouble here?” he asked.
“The start of some trouble, I think.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “This is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I've run the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.”
“So the machine is slightly broken, and it'll only get worse over time?”
“Right.”
“Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?”
The look she gave him was hard. “I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me say that a print plate doesn't last forever, and the large ones tend to die more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance, it'll last for hundreds of years.”
“And that's what you're doing now? Routine maintenance?”
“I didn't say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes can't replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a snake's head swaying to improve the view.”
“So then,” Conrad said with some relief, “there's no danger of pulling the passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?”
To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic laugh, but good-humored just
“Not until the engines stop firing, no.” 1
“Hmm.”
“Even after that Peter and I, and one or two of the others, will have to stop by occasionally, to check on efficiencies and such. Maybe tweak a parameter here and there, or spec out a new monitoring routine.
“The comm antenna is another issue. We're already using the whole sail for this, so there's no room left to expand communications. As our distance from Earth increases, we'll have to increase transmitter power to maintain our data rate. Or just live with a lower data rate, I guess. We
are
supposed to be on our own. But to answer your question, I think we need another ten days here at half-crew, and probably five or ten more with a single person on part-time watch. Then we can talk about storage. But truthfully, we need to go last. Or nearly.”
“Why so?”
Money shrugged. “Fax machines take a lot of energy. Of course they recover a lot of energy, too, forming chemical bonds and such. But the demand is asymmetric. With no crew, you don't have to worry about it, and with a thousand people sharing one machine, you can project your energy needs with statistics. But right now we've got almost as many fax machines as people, and it's getting to be a grind.”
“And here I've been taking them for granted,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Do we need some kind of rationing or scheduling system? Would that make your life easier?”
“Yah,” Money said vaguely, “I don't know about that. Talk to your Chief of Stores. She's my main energy customer after propulsion.”
Just then, Peter Kolb came back, stepping through the hatch like a new man, no longer holding his eye.
“Better?” Money asked him.
“Much,” Peter answered testily. “And don't ask me again for those cooling numbers. I'm on it.”
Conrad found his Chief of Stores in the aft inventory, cursing and glaring. She was sitting on the floor beside the fax machine—the largest one in the ship's habitable compartments—with a bunch of tools and sensors and sketchplates spread out around her.
“Is this a bad time?” Conrad asked, wincing inwardly because there was no good time to talk to Brenda Bohobe. Not for him, at any rate.
Brenda looked up sharply, as if surprised to find anyone penetrating her little bubble of a world. “Oh. It's you. Hi.”
“Some trouble here?” he asked.
“The start of some trouble, I think.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “This is the fax most of our passengers stored themselves through, and in the last hundred or so, the system logged an increase in energy consumption. I've run the plots, and it looks shallow but exponential.”
“So the machine is slightly broken, and it'll only get worse over time?”
“Right.”
“Wonderful. Have you identified a cause?”
The look she gave him was hard. “I have, yes, thank you. These kind of surges are always related to error correction. Now before you get too excited, let me say that a print plate doesn't last forever, and the large ones tend to die more quickly than the small ones. And this one here has probably got a million tons of throughput left before it gives up the ghost. With proper maintenance, it'll last for hundreds of years.”
“And that's what you're doing now? Routine maintenance?”
“I didn't say it was routine. There are burned-out faxels which my nanobes can't replace. To avoid molecular defects in the items being printed and stored, error correction has to judder back and forth around these. Like a snake's head swaying to improve the view.”
“So then,” Conrad said with some relief, “there's no danger of pulling the passengers out of storage as cancer-riddled morons?”
To his surprise, Brenda actually laughed at that. She had kind of a sadistic laugh, but good-humored just
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