The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [181]
“Then you tell me what happened.”
Renner looked puzzled, but obviously Blaine meant it. “Captain, the ship was lousy with Brownies—everywhere nobody was looking. They must have got to the lifeboat storage area pretty early. If you were a Motie, how would you redesign an escape craft?”
“Superbly.” Blaine actually smiled. “Even a dead man couldn’t pass up a straight line like that.”
“You had me wondering.” Renner grinned, then turned serious. “No, what I mean is, they’d redesign for every new situation. In deep space the boat would decelerate and scream for rescue. Near a gas giant it would orbit. Always automatic, mind, because the passengers could be hurt or unconscious. Near a habitable world the boat would reenter.”
“Eh?” Blaine frowned. There was a spark of life in his eyes. Renner held his breath,
“Yeah, but Kevin, what went wrong? If the Brownies got to the boats they’d have designed them right. Besides, there’d be controls; they wouldn’t make you reenter.”
Renner shrugged. “Can you figure out Motie control panels at a glance? I can’t, and I doubt that the middies could. But the Brownies would expect them to. Captain, maybe the boats weren’t finished, or got damaged in a fire fight.”
“Maybe—”
“Maybe a lot of things. Maybe they were designed for Brownies. The kids would have had to crowd in, rip out a dozen fifteen-centimeter Motie crash couches or something. There wasn’t much time, with the torpedoes due to go in three minutes.”
“Those goddamn torpedoes! The casings were probably full of Brownies and a rat ranch, if anyone had looked!”
Renner nodded. “But who’d know to look?”
“I should have.”
“Why?” Renner asked it seriously. “Skipper, there’s—”
“I’m not a skipper.”
Aha! Renner thought. “Yes, sir. There’s still not a man in the Navy who’d have looked. Nobody. I didn’t think of it. The Tsar was satisfied with your decontamination procedure, wasn’t he? Everybody was. What bloody good does it do to blame yourself for a mistake we all made?”
Blaine looked up at Renner and wondered. The Sailing Master’s face was slightly red. Now why’s he so stirred up? “There’s another thing,” Rod said. “Suppose the lifeboats were properly designed. Suppose the kids made a perfect reentry, and the Moties lied.”
“I thought of that,” said Renner. “Do you believe it?”
“No, but I wish I could be sure.”
“You would be if you knew Moties as well as I do. Convince yourself. Study the data. We’ve got plenty aboard this ship, and you’ve got the time. You’ve got to learn about Moties, you’re the Navy’s heaviest expert on them.”
“Me?” Rod laughed. “Kevin, I’m not an expert on anything. The first thing I’ve got to do when we get back is convince a court-martial—”
“Oh, rape the court-martial,” Renner said impatiently. “Really, Captain, are you sitting here brooding over that formality? God’s teeth!”
“And what do you suggest I brood over, Lieutenant Renner?”
Kevin grinned. Better Blaine irritated than the way he’d been. “Oh, about why Sally’s so glum this afternoon—I think she’s hurt because you’re mad at her. About what you’re going to say when Kutuzov and Horvath have it out over the Motie ambassadors. About revolts and secessions in the colony worlds, or the price of iridium, or inflation of the crown—”
“Renner, for God’s sake shut up!”
Kevin’s grin broadened. “—or how to get me out of your cabin. Captain, look at it this way. Suppose a court finds you guilty of negligence. Certainly nothing worse. You didn’t surrender the ship to an enemy or anything. So suppose they seriously want your scalp and they hang that on you. Worse thing they could do would be ground you. They wouldn’t even cashier you. So they ground you, and you resign—you’re still going to be Twelfth Marquis of Crucis.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“So what?” Renner was suddenly angry. His brows knitted, and one fist clenched. “So what? Look, Captain, I’m just a merchant skipper. All my family’s ever been, and all we ever want to be. I put in a hitch in the Navy because we all do—maybe back home we’re not