We Have Fed Our Sea Part 3

TheCross was approaching the black star in a complex spiral curve, the re-sultant of several velocities and two accelerating vectors, which would become a nearly circular orbit seven hundred fifty thousand kilometers out.

He started to awareness of time when Ryerson came up the shaftway rungs. "Oh," he exclaimed.

"Tea, sir," said the boy shyly.

"Thank you. Ah . . . set it down there, please . . . the reg-ulations forbid entering this turret during blast without in-quiring of the-No, no. Please!" Nakamura waved a hand, laughing. "You did not know.

There is no harm done."

He saw Ryerson, stooped under one and a half gravities, lift a heavy head to the foreign stars. The Milky Way formed a cold halo about his tangled hair. Nakamura asked gently, "This is your first time in extrasolar s.p.a.ce, yes?"

"Y-yes, sir." Ryerson licked his lips. The blue eyes were somehow hazy, unable to focus closer than the nebulae.

"Do not-" Nakamura paused. He had been about to say, "Do not be afraid," but it might hurt. He felt after words. "s.p.a.ce is a good place to meditate," he said. "I use the wrong word, of course.

'Meditation,' in Zen, consists more of an at-tempt at identification with the universe than verbalized thinking. What I mean to say," he floundered, "is this: Some people feel themselves so helplessly small out here that they become frightened. Others, remembering that home is no more than a step away through the transmitter, become care-less and arrogant, the cosmos merely a set of meaningless numbers to them.

Both att.i.tudes are wrong, and have killed men. But if you think of yourself as being apart of everything else-integral-the same forces in you which shaped the suns do you see?"

"The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d," whispered Ryerson, "and the firmament showeth His handiwork . . . It is a terri-ble thing to fall into the hands of the living G.o.d."

He had not been listening, and Nakamura did not under-stand English. The pilot sighed. "I think you had best return to the observation deck," he said. "Dr. Maclaren may have need of you."

Ryerson nodded mutely and went back down the shaft.

I preach a good theory, Nakamura told himself.Why can I not practice it? Because a stone fell from heaven onto Sarai, and suddenly father and mother and sister and house were not. Because Hideki died in my arms, after the universe had casu-ally tortured him. Because I shall never see Kyoto again, where every morning was full of cool bells. Because I am a slave of myself And yet,he thought,sometimes I have achieved peace. And only in s.p.a.ce.

Now he saw the dead sun through a viewscreen, when his ship swung so that it transitted the Milky Way. It was a tiny blackness. The next time around, it had grown. He wondered if it was indeed blacker than the sky. Nonsense. It should reflect starlight, should it not? But what color was metallic hydrogen?

What gases overlay the metal? s.p.a.ce, especially here, was not absolutely black: there was a certain thin but measurable neb-ular cloud around the star. So conceivably the star might be blacker than the sky.

"I must ask Maclaren," he murmured to himself. "He can measure it, very simply, and tell me. Meditation upon the concept of blacker than total blackness is not helpful, it seems." That brought him a wry humor, which untensed his muscles. He grew aware of weariness. It should not have been; he had only been sitting here and pressing controls. He poured a cup of scalding tea and drank noisily and gratefully.

Down and down. Nakamura fell into an almost detached state. Now the star was close, not much smaller than the Moon seen from Earth. It grew rapidly, and crawled still more rap-idly around the circle of the viewscreens. Now it was as big as Batu, at closest approach to Sarai. Now it was bigger. The rhythms entered Nakamura's blood. Dimly, he felt himself become one with the ship, the fields, the immense interplay of forces. And this was why he went again and yet again into s.p.a.ce. He touched the manual controls, a.s.sisting the robots, correcting, revising, in a pattern of unformulated but bodily known harmonies, a dance, a dream, yielding, controlling, un-selfness, Nirvana, peace and wholeness.

Fire!

The shock rammed Nakamura's spine against his skull. He felt his teeth clashed together. Blood from a bitten tongue welled in his mouth. Thunder roared between the walls.

He stared into the screens, clawing for comprehension. The ship was a million or so kilometers out. The black star was not quite one degree wide, snipped out of an unnamed alien con-stellation. The far end of the ion accelerator system was white hot. Even as Nakamura watched, the framework curled up, writhed like fingers in agony, and vaporized.

"What's going on?"Horror bawled from the engine room.

The thrust fell off and weight dropped sickeningly. Nakamura saw h.e.l.l eat along the accelerators. He jerked his eyes around to the primary megameter. Its needle sank down a tale of numbers. The four outermost rings were already de-stroyed. Even as he watched, the next one shriveled.

It could not be felt, but he knew how the star's vast hand clamped on the ship and reeled her inward.

Metal whiffed into s.p.a.ce. Underloaded, the nuclear system howled its anger. Echoes banged between shivering decks.

"Cut!" cried Nakamura. His hand slapped the pilot's master switch.

THE silence that fell, and the no-weight, were like death.

Someone's voice gabbled from the observation deck.

Automatically, Nakamura chopped that interference out of the intercom circuit. "Engineer Sverdlov," he called. "What hap-pened? Do you know what is wrong?"

"No. No." A groan. But at least the man lived. "Somehow the the ion streams . . . seem to have . . .

gotten diverted.

The focusing fields went awry. The blast struck the rings-but it couldn't happen!"

Nakamura hung onto his harness with all ten fingers.I will not scream, he shouted.I will not scream.

"The 'caster web seems to be gone, too," said a rusty machine using his throat. His brother's dead face swam among the stars, just outside the turret, and mouthed at him.

"Aye." Sverdlov must be hunched over his own viewscreens. After a while that tingled, he said harshly: "Not yet beyond repair. All ships carry a few replacement parts, in case of meteors or-We can repair the web and transmit ourselves out of here."

"How long to do that job? Quickly!"

"How should I know?" A dragon snarl. Then: "I'd have to go out and take a closer look. The damaged sections will have to be cut away. It'll probably be necessary to machine some fit-tings. With luck, we can do it in several hours."

Nakamura paused. He worked his hands together, strength opposing strength; he drew slow breaths, rolled his head to loosen the neck muscles, finally closed his eyes and contem-plated peace for as long as needful. And a measure of peace came. The death of this little ego was not so terrible after all, provided said ego refrained from wishing to hold Baby-san in its arms just one more time.

Almost absently, he punched the keys of the general com-puter. It was no surprise to see his guess verified.

"Are you there?" called Sverdlov, as if across centuries. "Are you there, pilot?"

"Yes. I beg your pardon. Several hours to repair the web, did you say? By that time, drifting free, we will have crashed on the star."

"What? But-"

"Consider its acceleration of us. And we still have inward radial velocity of our own. I think I can put us into an orbit before the whatever-it-is force has quite destroyed the acceler-ators. Yes."

"But you'll burn them up! And the web! We'll damage the web beyond repair!"

"Perhaps something can be improvised, once we are in orbit. But if we continue simply falling, we are dead men."

"No!" Almost, Sverdlov shrieked. "Listen, maybe we can re-pair the web in time. Maybe we'll only need a couple of hours for the job. There's a chance. But caught in an orbit, with the web melted or vaporized . . . do you know how to build one from raw metal? I don't!"

"We have a gravitics specialist aboard. If anyone can fashion us a new transmitter, he can."

"And if he can't, we're trapped out here! To starve! Better to crash and be done!"

Nakamura's hands began to dance over the keyboard. He demanded data of the instruments, calculations of the com-puters, and nothing of the autopilot. For no machine could help steer a vessel whose thrust-engine was being unpredict-ably devoured. This would be a manual task.

"I am the captain," he said, as mildly as possible.

"Not any more!"

Nakamura slapped his master switch. "You have just been cut out of the control circuits," he said.

"Please remain at your post." He opened the intercom to the observation deck. "Will the two honorable scientists be so kind as to stop the engineer from interfering with the pilot?"

FOR a moment, the rage in Chang Sverdlov was such that blackness flapped before his eyes.

When he regained himself, he found the viewscreens still painted with ruin. Starlight lay wan along the frail network of the transceiver web and the two sets of rings which it held together. At the far end the metal glowed red. A few globs of spattered stuff orbited like lunatic fireflies. Beyond the twisted burnt-off end of the system, light-years dropped away to the cold blue glitter of a thousand crowding stars. The dead sun was just discernible, a flattened darkness. It seemed to be swelling visibly. Whether that was a real effect or not, Sver-dlov felt the dread of falling, the no-weight horrors, like a lump in his belly.

He hadn't been afraid of null-gee since he was a child. In his cadet days, he had invented more pranks involving free fall than any two other boys. But he had never been cut off from home in this fashion.

Krasna had never been more than an interplanetary flight or an interstellar Jump away.

And that cookbook pilot would starve out here to save his worthless ship?

Sverdlov unbuckled his harness. He kicked himself across the little control room, twisted among the pipes and wheels and dials of the fuel-feed section like a swimming fish, and came to the tool rack. He chose a long wrench and arrowed for the shaftway. His fury had chilled into resolution:I don't want to kill him, but he'll have to be made to see reason. And quickly, or we really will crash!

He was rounding the transmitter chamber when decelera-tion resumed. He had been going up by the usual process, grab a rung ahead of you and whip your weightless body beyond. Suddenly two Terrestrial gravities s.n.a.t.c.hed him.

He closed fingers about one of the bars. His left arm straightened, with a hundred and ninety kilos behind. The hand tore loose. He let go the wrench and caught with his right arm, jamming it between a rung and the shaft wall. The im-pact smashed across his biceps. Then his left hand clawed fast and he hung. He heard the wrench skid past the gyro housing, hit a straight dropoff, and clang on the after radiation shield.

Gasping, he found a lower rung with his feet and sagged for a minute. The right arm was numb, until the pain woke in it. He flexed the fingers. Nothing broken.

But he was supposed to be in harness. Nakamura's calcula-tions might demand spurts of ten or fifteen gravities, if the accelerators could still put out that much. The fear of being smeared across a bulkhead jolted into Sverdlov. He scrambled over the rungs. It was nightmarishly like climbing through glue. After a thousand years he burst into the living quarters.

MACLAREN sat up in one of the bunks. "No further, please," he said.

The deceleration climbed a notch. His weight was iron on Sverdlov's shoulders. He started back into the shaft. "No!" cried Ryerson. But it was Maclaren who flung off bunk harness and climbed to the deck.

The brown face gleamed wet, but Maclaren smiled and said: "Didn't you hear me?"

Sverdlov grunted and re-entered the shaft, both feet on a rung.I can make it up to the bubble and get my hands on Nakamura's throat. Maclaren stood for a gauging instant, as Sverdlov's foot crept toward the next rung. Finally the physi-cist added with a sneer in the tone: "When a technic says sit, you squat . .

. colonial."

Sverdlov halted. "What was that?" he asked slowly.

"I can haul you out of there if I must, you backwoods pig," said Maclaren, "but I'd rather you came to me.

Sverdlov wondered, with an odd quick sadness, why he re-sponded. Did an Earthling's yap make so much difference? He decided that Maclaren would probably make good on that promise to follow him up the shaft, and under this weight a fight on the rungs could kill them both. Therefore-Sverdlov's brain seemed as heavy as his bones. He climbed back and stood slumping on the observation deck. "Well?" he said.

Maclaren folded his arms. "Better get into a bunk," he ad-vised.

Sverdlov lumbered toward him. In a shimmery wisp of tu-nic, the Earthling looked muscular enough, but he probably ma.s.sed ten kilos less, and lacked several centimeters of the Krasnan's height and reach. A few swift blows would disable him, and it might still not be too late to stop Nakamura.

"Put up your fists," said Sverdlov hoa.r.s.ely.

Maclaren unfolded his arms. A sleepy smile crossed his face. Sverdlov came in, swinging at the eagle beak. Maclaren's head moved aside. His hands came up, took Sverdlov's arm, and applied a cruel leverage. Sverdlov gasped, broke free by sheer strength, and threw a blow to the ribs. Maclaren stopped that fist with an edge-on chop at the wrist behind it; almost, Sver-dlov thought he felt the bones crack.

They stood toe to toe. Sverdlov drew back the other fist. Maclaren punched him in the groin. The Krasnan doubled over in a jag of anguish. Mac-laren rabbit-punched him. Sverdlov went to one knee.

Mac-laren kicked him in the solar plexus. Sverdlov fell over and struck the floor with three gravities to help.

Through a wobbling, ringing darkness, he heard the Earth-ling: "Help me with this beef, Dave." And he felt himself dragged across the floor, somehow manhandled into a bunk and harnessed.

His mind returned. Pain stabbed and flickered through him. He struggled to sit up. "That was an Earthman way to fight," he pushed out through a swelling mouth.

"I don't enjoy fighting," said Maclaren from his own bunk, "so I got it over with as soon as possible."

"You-" the Krasnan lifted grotesquely heavy hands and fumbled with his harness. "I'm going to the control turret. If you try to stop me this time-"

"You're already too late, brother Sverdlov," said Maclaren coolly. "Whatever you were setting out to forestall has gone irrevocably far toward happening."

The words were a physical blow.

"It's . . . yes," said the engineer. "I'm too late." The shout burst from him: "We're all too late, now!"

"Ease back," said Maclaren. "Frankly, your behavior doesn't give me much confidence in your judgment about anything."

It rumbled through the ship. That shouldn't be, thought Sverdlov's training; even full blast ought to be nearly noise-less, and this was only fractional. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled his skin. For the first time in a violent life, he totally realized that he could die.

"I'm sorry for what I called you," said Maclaren. "I had to stop you, but now I apologize."

Sverdlov made no answer. He stared up at a blank ceiling. Oddly, his first emotion, as rage ebbed, was an overwhelming sorrow. Now he would never see Krasna made free.

SILENCE and no-weight were dreamlike. For a reason ob-scure to himself, Maclaren had dimmed the fluoros around the observation deck, so that twilight filled it and the scientific apparatus crouched in racks and on benches seemed to be a herd of long-necked monsters. Thus there was nothing to drown the steely brilliance of the stars, when you looked out an unshuttered port.

Thestar hurtled across his field of view. Her eccentric orbit took theCross around it in thirty-seven minutes. Here, at closest approach, they were only half a million kilometers away. The thing had the visual diameter of three full Moons. It was curiously vague of outline: a central absolute blackness, fading toward deep gray near the edges where starlight caught an atmosphere more savagely compressed than Earth's ocean abyss. Through the telescope, there seemed to be changeable streaks and mottlings, bands, spots, a hint of color too faint for the eye to tell . . . as if the ghosts of burned-out fires still walked.

Quite oblate,Maclaren reminded himself.That would have given us a hint, if we'd known. Or the radio spectrum; now I realize, when it's too late, that the lines really are triplets, and their broadening is Doppler shift.

The silence was smothering.

Nakamura drifted in. He poised himself in the air and waited quietly.

"Well?" said Maclaren.

"Sverdlov is still outside, looking at the accelerators and web," said Nakamura. "He will not admit there is no hope."