BOUNDARY(89)

"This is one of the cabins—the one we are assigning you, Helen, in fact. Or the two of you, if you want to share it. No paparazzi to pester you here, after all." His wide smile was replaced by a caricatured frown of disapproval. "Not that that stopped you, I noticed— harrumph—from living in sin back on Earth."



The "cabin" was actually a two-story apartment, with the bedroom and study upstairs, and living room and small dining room/kitchen downstairs. Multiple fastening loops, velcro pads, and other provisions were made for using the apartment in microgravity. But the construction was based on the fact that, most of the time, the ring would be providing one-third gravity, with "down" towards the outside of the ring.



"The furnishings can be moved around, partitions put in, and so on. The shapes aren't very variable—we only have two types of chairs, for instance—but we've tried to provide lots of options for layout. Basically, it's like very fancy Lego building blocks. You can turn and lock the units into standardized fasteners below, and there are utility hookups laid out in a standard grid pattern that you can take advantage of."



"Me?" Helen shook her head. "Not likely. I'm a paleontologist, not a plumber."



"Well, okay, one of the ship's engineers. You wouldn't want to try doing any of this without training—you hear that, A.J.?—and even with training you wouldn't do it alone. But within some pretty broad limits, you can have a custom living space. Before too long, I don't expect any two cabins to be the same. The engineers even set up mechanisms to make sure balance is maintained, if by some odd chance everyone on one side of the ring likes apartments crowded with lots of furnishings and everyone on the other side likes wide-open spaces."



Again, Helen ignored the fact that Ken was lecturing them on stuff they already knew. She just shook his head and murmured: "It's . . . huge. I never imagined it would seem this big. I mean, abstractly I knew the designs—but they didn't convey the sheer impact of the thing."



A.J. turned away from examining the kitchen setup. "We aren't Napoleonic-era sailors and we're not going to work well cramped into tiny living quarters for a year or more. We need space. And fortunately, space they could give us, since the ship had to be big anyway."



"Can we see the labs?" Helen asked.



Hathaway chuckled. "Have no fear, Dr. Sutter. About half the ring is living space. The other half is for working. We have everything on the ring from full networked information systems to paleontological, biological, chemical, nuclear, and engineering laboratories. Data is stored redundantly in another system in the main body, and we can send backups of critical data to Earth if we need to. We have integrated microfabrication setups for prototyping, tool design and repair, and so on."



Since Ken was clearly not going to be diverted from his determination to reiterate what they already knew, Helen decided it would be polite to indulge him.



"Main control is in the central body, right?"



"The bridge," Hathaway corrected her, clearly preferring the classic terminology. "Yes, it is indeed located in the forward section of Nike's central body. We'll be visiting there too. Shall we go on?"





"Wow."



A.J. was simply staring around, grinning so widely that it looked like his face might split in two. "This is so cool."



Ken tried to look professionally proud, but that comment broke through the feeble attempt. He grinned back like a kid finding his dad had built him a three-story treehouse. "Yeah, isn't it?"



Nike's bridge was arranged in a manner strongly reminiscent of many a fictional space vessel's. It was a long, egg-shaped compartment, with duty stations spaced around the perimeter, and a central dais with a command and control console and chair—a captain's chair, clearly—which could swivel to survey any of the duty stations.



Dominating the bridge, however, was the tremendous viewport, covering most of the "ceiling" area. A span of pure velvet blackness showed through in the dimmed interior lighting, sprinkled with stars and crisscrossed with the argent webwork of the dry dock facilities around Nike.



"That's . . . a hell of a window," Helen said finally. She realized she wasn't as familiar with this part of the ship's design. "Isn't that a weak point in the structure? At least for radiation shielding?"



"Not really. It looks like clear glass, but that's actually transparent composite. It's coated with artificial diamond, and insulated with a foot and a half of optical aerogel with a high radiation shielding coefficient. The back section is similar but coated with an active-crystal matrix which can black it out—makes it reflective on the outside. And of course can be used to enhance anything you see through the port, or override it as a display, like a viewscreen. You actually have similar windows in your cabins; they just aren't open right now, so to speak. Because of the heating effects and the potential danger of people blinding themselves looking at the sun, we're keeping the window controls mostly to ourselves. We'll leave them open in the cabins whenever it's safe, once we're under way. You can always shut them off, though."