Picnic | Page 3

Berliner Weisse from a metal stein, pleased at his witty rejoinder.
"Well," she said thoughtfully, ignoring his sarcasm, "I've been doing some reading in the ship's library. Couldn't we plot our own course back home?"
"That's ridiculous. Without the Explorer software, we don't have a functioning intuition module on the ship. It's impossible to calculate the Folds without one." He was quite definite about it.
"That's not how I understood it," she said. He raised his eyebrows at her. Nancy almost always gave up in the face of firm rejection. It annoyed him that she wasn't accepting his expertise in this area.
"It's very difficult, yes, but I don't think impossible. People used to do it all the time in the olden days. We can link the ship's six brain nodes with Old Bob's two nodes to run the raw calculations. We might have just enough computing power for that. In the meantime, we'll cram to learn the necessary physics. We can supply the 'intuition.' It might even be possible to map the jump before the weekend is over. We could go home without anyone knowing we were lost!"
Jim was surprised by her ambition, and he felt a flicker of hope at the idea of not getting reamed out by his father, but the reality of it was that it was just too hard. Fold Physics gave even the smart kids in class a headache. He was no dummy, but he had no patience for the subject. His aptitude tests had been abysmal. And Nancy was a ditzy blond. He certainly wasn't hanging out with her for her mind.
"I don't know. Some of the Fold algorithms are protected by intellectual property laws. We could get fined by the Patent Enforcement Office." That should shut her down, he thought.
She laughed scornfully. "Oh my god. I can't believe you even said that. The PEO might think it can license recipes, but they haven't installed digital rights management in my brain yet. I'll use whatever algorithms it takes to get home. They'll never know anyway."
What was this? She sounded like she knew what she was talking about. "Ok, maybe it's not impossible, but it's very unlikely. I'm sorry, Nancy. Sunday night is going to come around, and then your parents are going to discover you didn't spend the weekend at Jenny's house, and my parents are going to figure out that I wasn't camping with Sigmund and the guys. Our only hope is that somehow they can track us." He just wanted her to stop talking about getting out of here when clearly it was futile to try. It was bringing him down. And he could think of better things for them to do.
"Somehow?" she said, giving him a queer look. "Don't be so stupid. No one is going to find us."
He almost choked on his beer. What was going on here? Nancy, standing up to him? Calling him stupid?
"The only way we're going to get out of here is by our own effort. Daddy isn't going to save you this time, Jimmy-boy. It would help if you tried contributing to the solution."
All he could do was stare at her with his mouth hanging open.
"Now let's get to work. I'll give you the easier parts, since you're so afraid of thinking."
He suddenly found her a bit intimidating. Little five-foot-five Nancy, scaring him. He decided to go along with her, if for no other reason than he wanted to get on her good side. He was convinced they would be here for a long time, and he didn't want to go without sex the whole time.
She left him in the common room with a study program she had already prepared. He made a good faith effort to learn the material, at least for half an hour, but he quickly lost patience.
He wandered down to the cabin to see what Nancy was doing. Along the way, he noticed she had already connected Old Bob to the ship with patch cables. Jim's family couldn't afford wireless licenses.
She was hard at work at the cabin console. She looked up, smiling. "How's it going, Captain?" Trying to suck up, of course.
"Ok." He tried to sound agreeable, yet tired. "Look, it's been a long day. I think it would be a good idea for us to get some sleep and start fresh in the morning." He wasn't that tired yet, but he thought if they shared the cabin bed...
"Are you kidding? We just started. We won't be sleeping this weekend if we want to get home by Sunday afternoon. Take a stimtab."
He didn't appreciate her tone.
"Stimtabs make me jumpy."
"Go back to work. You haven't even tried," she said crossly, but then softened her tone. "I really need your help with this, Jim."
With that plaintive appeal, he slunk back to the common room. He