Into the Slave Nebula by John Brunner Page B

it?”
    “You’re from Newholme, aren’t you?”
    “Of course. This is a Newholmer ship you’re flying with.”
    “What’s it like on Newholme? I mean, what’s it
really
like? What makes it a different kind of place to live from Earth?” Horn was struggling to sit up, his face almost the color of the undigested android staple he had thrown up.
    “That’s kind of a funny question,” Dize said slowly. “Don’t they teach galactography in Earthside schools?”
    Horn made a vague gesture. “That’s not what I want to know, the kind of thing they teach in schools. You can’t find out about what interests me—whatever it is that marks off the people of one world from those of another. I don’t mean the clothes they wear or the food they liketo eat. I don’t mean anything you can make lists or take solidos of. That’s why I told my grandfather I wanted to get off Earth, because I suddenly needed to know things which no one could tell me back there.”
    “Is that the truth you’re telling me—that you
wanted
to come off Earth? It wasn’t just what I heard talk of, a row with your grandfather?” Dize cocked his head suspiciously.
    “My asking for the money to leave Earth with was what started the row.”
    “Ah-hah,” Dize nodded.
“I
get. Might have guessed, come to that. I never met your grandfather, but we specialize in shipping his robots out for him, and I always pictured him as the kind of guy who thinks Earth is the whole of the universe.”
    “I promise you I’m not,” Horn said weakly.
    “All right, I believe you. But you look pretty sick right now. You stretch out and catch some sleep like I told you. Later on you’ll have all the time in the galaxy to answer that question of yours.”
    After that, things weren’t nearly as bad as he’d expected; Dize’s affectation of gruffness gradually gave way to a sort of rough, rather patronizing, friendliness, and the process accelerated as he discovered that Horn was genuinely anxious not to be a nuisance and to do his best. Every now and then a trace of weary contempt for soft-handed Earthmen who were used to having everything done for them by machinery did still climax in a bout of vivid cursing, but this was invariably followed by a quick, economical and easily understood lesson in whatever technique Horn was finding troublesome, so that there was never a second recurrence of the same problem.
    “Well, I can say this for you, Horn,” he admittedgrudgingly three days out from Earth. “You’re not stupid. Just ignorant is all. And I guess you can’t help that, can you?”
    Horn felt himself flushing. Under Dize’s guidance he was carrying out a check of the hull plates to make sure they were screening free-space radiation properly; heavy cosmics could play merry hell with the delicate electronic balance in a robot brain. He said, “Well—ah—this sort of job doesn’t turn up too much on Earth these days.”
    “You mean you’d turn the whole thing over to automatics and just monitor them from a central instrument board?” Dize suggested.
    “Yes, I guess that’s what I’d have expected,” Horn nodded.
    “It’s exactly what they do do aboard Earth’s luxury liners. And we could certainly do the same—after all, we build our own ships, and automatic radiation detectors are kid stuff compared to interstellar engines. But I wouldn’t like it. And there’s the start of an answer to that question you put to me just after we lifted.”
    Horn looked briefly blank, then caught himself. “Oh! I was asking how Newholmers differed from—from Earth-siders, wasn’t I?”
    “Right.” Dize perched on a handy crate and began to stuff a large foul-smelling pipe with some herbal mixture whose scent Horn had at first found pungent and irritating, but was growing adjusted to. “Why wouldn’t we like it? Well, what would we do with our time during the trip?”
    Horn recalled Dordy’s sour remark about sitting in an android barracks and