"So what did you do?" I asked, when that had sunk in. "If the stem doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few extra hours of night time before they run down."
"Oh," said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, "it was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room. Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours. The plants liked it fine.
"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.
"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to keep the water in place started to break."
"I'd like to know," I said sincerely.
He stared at me in silence for a moment. "Well, it filled the cabin with great solid bubbles of water. Water bubbles will oscillate and wobble like soap bubbles," he went on dreamily, "but of course, they're not empty, like soap bubbles. The surface acts a little like a membrane, so that sometimes two of the things will touch and gently bounce apart without joining. But just try touching one of them. You could drown—I almost did. Several times.
"I got a fire pump—an empty one. You know the kind; a wide cylinder with a piston with a handle, and a hose that you squirt the water out of, or can suck water in with. The way you use it is, you float up on a big ball of water, with the pump piston down—closed. You carefully poke the end of the hose into the ball of water, letting only the metal tip touch. Never the hose. If you let the hose touch, the water runs up it and tries to drown you. Then you pull up on the piston, and draw all the water into the cylinder. Of course, you have to hold the pump with your feet while you pull the handle with your free hand."
"Did it work?" I asked eagerly.
"Eventually. Then I stopped to think of what to do with the water. It was full of minerals and manure and such, and I didn't want to introduce it into the ship's tanks."
"But you solved the problem?"