Our Climber is a Class IX vessel: 910 gross tonnes combat-loaded at bay of departure; 720 tonnes without crew, fuel, stores, or expendable weaponry. There are few hyper-capable vessels smaller.

Deep probe and attack singleships run 500 to 600 tonnes, boasting a crew of one man.

The 910-tonne limit is an absolute. If the vessel goes over, she has to cut her contraterrene tonnage. Nine-twenty-five is the established book absolute over which Command won't permit a Climb attempt. There's a granite-hard barrier somewhere in the low 930s. Massing above it, a vessel will just sit and hum while the enemy knocks her apart.

The mass limit is why the Commander is displeased with the experimental cannon. The system, with its munitions, masses two tons. That means an equal reduction in fuel or stores. Hardware can't be touched. And Command would squeal like a hog with its balls in a vise if anyone suggested cutting missile inventory.

A Climber is a self-contained weapons system. People are aboard only because the system can't operate itself. Concessions to human needs are kept to a minimum.

You don't know what you can live without, don't know what agonizing decisions are, till you have to pick and choose what to take on patrol.

The other day, watching the Commander pack, I decided I was in for a ripe fly. One change of uniform. One kilo of tobacco, illegal. One thick, old-style book, by Gibbon. Who gives a good goddamn about the Roman Empire? One grim black revolver of equally ancient vintage, quasi-legal. A

curious weapon to carry aboard a vessel with a skin little thicker than mine. Two kilos of genuine New Earth coffee, the cheap stuff, probably smuggled to Canaan by a friend on a Fleet courier. A

liter of brandy, in violation of regs. Fill in the cracks and make up fifteen kilos with fresh fruit. No razor. No comb. None of the amenities expected of a civilized travel kit.

I thought his choices strange. I packed up an almost standard kit, leaving out the dinner jacket and such. He made certain my ten extra kilos were strictly cameras, stilltape, notebooks, and pencils. Pencils because they're lighter man pens.

I see all the old hands conform to the kit pattern set by the Old Man. We'll be up to our ears in fruit.

Our mother ship is one of several floating in a vast bay. The others have only a few Climbers suckered on. Each is kept stationary by a spiderweb of common rope. The ropes are the only access to the vessel. "They don't waste much on fancy hardware." Tractors and pressors would stabilize a vessel in wetdock anywhere else in the Fleet. Vast mechanical brows would provide access.

"Don't have the resources," Westhause says. "'Task-effective technological focus,'" he says, and I can hear the quotes. "They'd put oars on these damned hulks if they could figure out how to make them work. Make the scows more fuel-effective."

I want to hang back and look at the mother, to work out a nice inventory of poetic images. I've seen holoportrayals, but there's never anything like the real thing. I want to catch the flavors of watching hundreds of upright apes hand-over-handing it along with their duffel bags neatly tucked between their legs, as if they were riding very small, limp, limbless ponies. I want to capture the lack of color. Spacers in black uniform. Ships anodized black. The surface of the tunnel itself mostly a dark black-brown, with streaks of rust. The ropes are a sandy tan. Against all mat darkness, in the low-level lighting, without gravity, those lines take on a flat twodimensionality, so all of them seem equally near or far away.

The Commander beckons. "Come along, then. Too late to back out now." He's impatient to get to the ship. That doesn't jibe with his landside attitude, when he wanted nothing to do with another patrol. He's hurrying me because I'm lagging, and his custom is to be the last man to board his ship.

A mother-locked Climber can be entered only through a hatch in the "top" of its central cylinder.

The hatch isn't an airlock. It'll remain sealed through the vessel's stay in vacuum. The ship's only true airlock is at its bottom. That's connected to the mother now. Surrounding it is a sucker ring through which the Climber draws its sustenance till it's released for patrol. Power and water. And oxygen. Through the hatch itself will come our meals, though not prepared. Through that hatch, too, will come our orders, moments before we're weaned.

We linger round the outside of the top hatch while reluctant enlisted men go popping through like corks too small for the neck of a bottle. Some go feet first, some head first, diving behind their duffel. The hatch is a mere half meter in diameter. The men have to scrunch their shoulders to fit. Westhause is explaining the airlock system. "The only reverse flow consists of wastes," he concludes.

"And you give that any significance you want," the Commander mutters. "Shit for shit, I say. Down the hatch, men."

"Whatever happened to your youthful enthusiasm?"

The Commander refuses the bait. He has said too much already. A wrong word falling on an unfriendly ear can flatten a career trajectory. Climber Reel One operates on a primitive level. is a long, long way from Luna Command. The Admiral enjoys near dictatorial powers. The proconsular setup derives logically from the communications lag between Canaan and the centers of power. It's hard to like, but even harder to refute.

Fleet personnel can wish they had a more palatable overlord.

They call the central cylinder the Can. The Can is incredibly cramped, especially in parasite mode, while attached to the mother. Then, artificial gravity runs parallel to the cylinder's axis.

In operational mode, when the Climber provides its own gravity, the Can's walls become floors.

Even then there'll be very little room if everyone is awake at once.

I take one long look around and ask, "How do you keep from trampling each other?"

"Some of the men are in their hammocks all the time. Unless we're in business. Then everybody is on station."

The Can is fifteen meters in diameter and forty meters tall. Doubled pressure partitions separate it into four unequal compartments. Operations Division, the brains of the ship, occupies the topmost level. Immediately below is Weapons. The two divisions share their computation and defection capacity. The third level is Ship's Services. It's the smallest. It contains galley, toilet, primitive laundry and medical facilities, recyling sections, and most importantly, the central controls by which internal temperature is sustained. Below Ship's Services is Engineering.

Engineering's main task is to make the ship go from point A to point B. Their equipment, systems, and responsibilities often overlap with Ship's Services'.

A central structural member, called the keel, runs the length of the cylinder. When the ship is in operational mode the crew will take turns sleeping in hammocks attached to it. That's something to think about. I've never tried extremely low gravity sleep. I hear that it's hard to get a good rest, and dreams become a little crazy.

In parasite mode sleeping arrangements are catch-as-catch-can, with the quickest men hanging hammocks from available cross-members, then negotiating sharing deals with slower shipmates. Some of the places hammocks get slung seem almost too small for mice.

The luxury quarters of any ship, the Ship's Commander's stateroom, here consists of a screened-off section of beam near the entry hatch. He'll share his hammock with the First Watch Officer and Chief Quartermaster. Every hammock will be shared. It takes no imagination to see the potential for havoc in that. It takes some complex shuffling to put three men in one hammock and allow each a reasonable day's ration of sleep. I suspect Command would prefer android crews who need no sleep at all.