We Have Fed Our Sea Part 4

"Neither will I," said Maclaren.

"Virtually the whole system is destroyed. Fifty meters of it have vanished. The rest is fused, twisted, short-circuited; a miracle it continued to give some feeble kind of blast, so I could at least find an orbit."

Nakamura laughed. Maclaren thought that that high-pitched, apologetic giggle was going to be hard to live with, if one hadn't been raised among such symbols. "We carry a few spare parts, but not that many."

"Perhaps we can make some," said Maclaren.

"Perhaps," said Nakamura. "But of course the accelerators are of no importance in themselves, the reconstruction of the web is the only way to get home . . . What has the young man Ryerson to say about that?"

"Don't know. I sent him off to check the manifest and then look over the stuff the ship actually carries.

He's been gone a long time, but-"

"I understand," said Nakamura. "It is not easy to face a death sentence when one is young."

Maclaren nodded absently and returned his gaze to the scribbled data sheets in one hand. After a moment, Nakamura cleared his throat and said awkwardly: "Ah . . . I beg your pardon . . . about the affair of Engineer Sverdlov-"

"Well?" Maclaren didn't glance up from the figures. He had a lot of composure of his own to win back.

The fact is,he thought through a hammer-beat in his tem-ples,I am the man afraid. Now that there is nothing I can do, only a cold waiting until word is given me whether I can live or must die . . .I find that Terangi Maclaren is a coward.

Sickness was a doubled fist inside his gullet.

"I am not certain what, er, happened," stumbled Nakamura, "and I do not wish to know. If you will be so kind . . . I hope you were not unduly inconvenienced-"

"No. It's all right."

"If we could tacitly ignore it. As I think he has tried to do. Even the best men have a breaking point."

I always knew that there must one day be an end to white sails above green water, and to wine, and to masks, and a woman's laughter. I had not expected it yet.

"After all," said Nakamura, "we must work together now."

"Yes."

I had not expected it a light-century from the home of my fathers. My life was spent in having fun, and now I find that the black star has no interest at all in amusing me.

"Do you know yet what happened?" asked Nakamura. "I would not press you for an answer, but-"

"Oh, yes," said Maclaren. "I know."

BENEATH a sc.r.a.pheap of songs and keels, loves and jokes and victories, which mattered no longer but would not leave him, Maclaren found his brain working with a startling dry clarity. "I'm not sure how much we can admit to the oth-ers," he said. "Because this could have been averted, if we'd proceeded with more caution."

"I wondered a little at the time." Nakamura laughed again. "But who would look for danger around a . . .

a corpse?"

"Broadened spectrum lines mean a quickly rotating star," said Maclaren. "Since the ship was not approaching in the equatorial plane, we missed the full Doppler effect, but we might have stopped to think. And tripled lines mean a Zeeman splitting."

"Ah." Nakamura sucked in a hiss of air. "Magnetism?"

"The most powerful b.l.o.o.d.y magnetic field ever noticed around any heavenly body," said Maclaren.

"Judging from the readings I get here, the polar field is . . . ph, I can't say yet. Five, six, seven thousand gauss-somewhere on that order of magnitude. Fantastic! Sol's field is only fifty-three gauss. They don't ever go much above two thousand. Except here."

He rubbed his chin. "Blackett effect," he went on. The stead-iness of his words was a faintly pleasing surprise to him. "Magnetic field is directly related to angular velocity. The rea-son no live sun has a field like this dead thing here is that it would have to rotate too fast. Couldn't take the strain; it would go whoomp and scatter pieces of star from h.e.l.l to tiffin." An odd, perverse comfort in speaking lightly: a lie to oneself, per-suading the subconscious mind that its companions were not doomed men and a black sun, but an amorous girl waiting for the next jest in a Citadel tavern. "As this star collapsed on itself, after burning out, it had to spin faster, d' you see? Con-servation of angular momentum. It seems to have had an un-usual amount to start with, of course, but the rotational speed is chiefly a result of its degenerate state. And that same super-density allows it to twirl with such indecent haste. You might say the bursting strength is immensely greater."

"Yes," said Nakamura. "I see."

"I've been making some estimates," said Maclaren. "It didn't actually take a very strong field to wreck us. We could easily have been protected against it. Any ion-drive craft going close to a planet is-a counter-magnetic circuit with a feedback loop-elementary. But naturally, these big ships were not meant to land anywhere. They would certainly never approach a live sun this close, and the possibility of this black dwarf having such a vicious magnetism . . . well, no one ever thought of it."

He shrugged. "Figure it out yourself, Captain Nakamura. The old H, r, v formula. A proton traveling at three-fourthsc down a hundred-meter tube is deflected one centimeter by a field of seven one-hundredths gauss. We entered such a field at a million kilometers out, more or less. A tenuous but ex-tremely energetic stream of ionized gas. .h.i.t the outermost ac-celerator ring. I make the temperature equivalent of that ve-locity to be something like three million million degrees Absolute, if I remember the value of the gas constant correctly.

The closer to the star we got, the stronger field we were in, so the farther up the ions struck.

"Of course," finished Maclaren in a tired voice, "all these quant.i.ties are just estimates, using simple algebra. Since we slanted across the magnetic field, you'd need a vectoral differ-ential equation to describe exactly what happened. You might find occasion to change my figures by a factor of five or six.

But I think I have the general idea."

"Yes-s-s," said Nakamura, "I think you do."

They hung side by side in dimness and looked out at the eye-hurting bright stars.

"Do you know," said Maclaren, "there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity."

"I am not so sure." Nakamura's reply jarred him a little, by its sober literal-mindedness. "I have known many . . . well, shall I call them unintellectual people . . . who lived happy and useful lives."

"I wasn't referring to that kind of stupidity." Maclaren went through the motions of a chuckle. "I meant our own kind. Yours and mine. We bear the guilt, you know. We should have stopped and thought the situation over before rushing in. I did want to approach more slowly, measuring as we went, and you overruled me."

"I am ashamed," said Nakamura. He bent his face toward his hands.

"No, let me finish. I should have come here with a well-thought-out program in mind. I gave you no valid reasonsnot to establish a close-in orbit at once. My only grumble was that you wouldn't allow me time to take observations as we went toward the star. You were perfectly justified, on the basis of the information available to you-Oh, the devils take it! I bring this up only so you'll know what topics to avoid with our shipmates-who must also bear some of the blame for not thinking-because we can't afford quarrels." Maclaren felt his cheeks crease in a sort of grin. "I have no interest in the guilt question anyway. My problem is strictly pragmatic: I want out of here!"

Ryerson emerged from the living-quarter screen. Maclaren saw him first as a shadow. Then the young face came so near that he could see the eyes unnaturally bright and the lips shaking.

"What have you found, Dave?" The question ripped from him before he thought.

Ryerson looked away from them both. Thickly: "We can't do it. There aren't enough replacement parts to make a f-f-func-tioning . . . a web-we can't."

"I knew that," said Nakamura. "Of course. But we have instruments and machine tools. There is bar metal in the hold, which we can shape to our needs. The only problem is-"

"Is where to get four kilos of pure germanium!" Ryerson screamed it. The walls sneered at him with echoes. "Down on that star, maybe?"

SQUARE and inhuman in a s.p.a.cesuit, Sverdlov led the way through the engineroom air lock. When Ryerson, following, stepped forth onto the ship's hull, there was a mo-ment outside existence.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed for his breath. Alien suns went streaming past his head. Otherwise he knew only blackness, touched by meaningless dull splashes. He clawed after anything real. The motion tore him loose and he went spinning outward toward the dead star. But he felt it just as a tide of nausea, his ears roared at him, the scrambled darks and gleams made a wheel with himself crucified at the hub. He was never sure if he screamed.

The lifeline jerked him to a halt. He rebounded, more slowly. Sverdlov's sardonic voice struck his earphones: "Don't be so jumpy next time, Earthling," and there was a sense of direc-tion as the Krasnan began to reel him in.

Suddenly Ryerson made out a pattern. The circle of shadow before him was the hull. The metallic shimmers projecting from it . . . oh, yes, one of the auxiliary tank attachments. The ma.s.s-ratio needed to reach one-halfc with an exhaust velocity of three-fourthsc is 4.35-relativistic formulas apply rather than the simple Newtonian exponential-and this must be squared for deceleration. TheCross had left Sol with a tank of mercury on either side, feeding into the fuel deck. Much later, the empty containers had been knocked down into parts of the aircraft now stowed inboard.

Ryerson pulled his mind back from the smugness of engi-neering data. Beyond the hull, and around it, behind him, for X billion light-years on all sides, lay the stars. The nearer ones flashed and glittered and stabbed his eyes, uncountably many. The outlines they scrawled were not those Ryerson remem-bered from Earth: even the recognizable constellations, like Sagittarius, were distorted, and he felt that as a somehow ghastly thing, as if it were his wife's face which had melted and run. The farther stars blent into the Milky Way, a single clotted swoop around the sky, the coldest color in all reality. And yet farther away, beyond a million light-years, you could see more suns-a few billion at a time, formed into the tiny blue-white coils of other galaxies.

Impact jarred Ryerson's feet. He stood erect, his bootsoles holding him by a weak stickiness to the plastic hull. There was just enough rotation to make the sky move slowly past his gaze. It created a dim sense of hanging head down; he thought of ghosts come back to the world like squeaking bats. His eyes sought Sverdlov's vague, armored shape. It was so solid and ugly a form that he could have wept his grat.i.tude.

"All right," grunted the Krasnan. "Let's go."

THEY moved precariously around the curve of the ship. The long thin frame-sections lashed across their backs vibrated to their cautious footfalls. When they reached the lattice jutting from the stern, Sverdlov halted. "Show you a trick," he said. "Light doesn't diffuse in vacuum, makes it hard to see an object in the round, so-" He squeezed a small plastic bag with one gauntleted hand. His flashbeam snapped on, to glow through a fine mist in front of him. "It's a heavy organic liquid. Forms droplets which hang around for hours before dissipating. Now, what d' you think of the transceiver web?"

Ryerson stooped awkwardly, scrambled about peering for several minutes, and finally answered: "It bears out what you reported. I think all this can be repaired. But we'll have to take most of the parts inboard, perhaps melt them down-re-ma-chine them, at least. And we'll need wholly new sections to replace what boiled away. Have we enough bar metal for that?"

"Guess so. Then what?"

"Then-" Ryerson felt sweat form beneath his armpits and break off in little globs. "You understand I am a graviticist, not a mattercasting engineer. A physicist would not be the best possible man to design a bridge; likewise, there's much I'll have to teach myself, to carry this out. But I can use the operating manual, and calculate a lot of quant.i.ties afresh, and well . . . I think I could recreate a functioning web.

The tuning will be strictly cut-and-try: you have to have exact resonance to get any effect at all, and the handbook a.s.sumes that such components as the distortion oscillator will have precise, standardized dimensions and crystal structure. Since they won't-we have not the facilities to control it, even if I could remember what the quant.i.ties are-well, once we've rebuilt what looks like a workable web, I'll have to try out different combinations of settings, perhaps for weeks, until well, Sol or Centauri or . . . or any of the stations, even another s.p.a.ceship . . . resonates-"

"Are you related to a Professor Broussard of Lomonosov Academy?" interrupted the other man.

"Why, no. What-"

"You lecture just like he used to. I am not interested in the theory and practice of mattercasting. I want to know, can we get home?"

Ryerson clenched a fist. He was glad that helmets and dark-ness hid their two faces. "Yes," he said. "If all goes well. And if we can find four kilos of germanium."

"What do you want that for?" Sverdlov asked.

"Do you see those thick junction points in the web? They are, uh, you might call them giant transistors.

Half the lattice is gone: there, the germanium was simply whiffed away. I do know the crystallo-chemical structure involved. And we can get the other elements needed by cannibalizing, and there is an alloying unit aboard which could be adapted to manufac-ture the transistors themselves. But we don't have four spare kilos of germanium aboard."

Sverdlov's tone grew heavy with skepticism: "And that bal-loon head Maclaren means to find a planet?

And mine the stuff?"

"I don't know-" Ryerson wet his lips. "I don't know what else we can do."

"But this star went supernova!"

"It was a big star. It would have had many planets. Some of the outermost ones . . . if they were large to start with may have survived."

"Ha! And you'd hunt around on a lump of fused nickel-iron, without even a sun in the sky, for germanium ore?"

"We have an isotope separator. It could be adapted to . . . I haven't figured it out yet, but-For G.o.d's sake!" Ryerson found himself screaming. "What else can we do?"

"Shut up!" rapped Sverdlov. "When I want my earphones broken I'll use a hammer."

He stood in a swirl of golden fog, and the gray-rimmed black eye of the dead star marched behind him.

Ryerson crouched back, hooked into the framework and waiting. At last Sverdlov said: "It's one long string of ifs. But a transistor doesn't do anything a vacuum tube can't." He barked a laugh. "And we've got all the vacuum we'll ever want. Why not design and make the equivalent electronic elements? Ought to be a lot easier than-repairing the accelerators, and scouring s.p.a.ce for a planet."

"Designthem?" cried Ryerson "And test them, and rede-sign them, and-Do you realize that on half rations we have not quite six months' food supply?"

"I do," said Sverdlov. "I feel it in my belly right now." He muttered a few obscenities. "All right, then. I'll go along with the plan. Though if that clotbrain of a Nakamura hadn't-"

"He did the only thing possible! Did youwant to crash us?"

"There are worse chances to take," said Sverdlov. "Now what have we got, but six months of beating our hearts out and then another month or two to die?" He made a harsh noise in the radiophone, as if wanting to spit. "I've met Sarai settlers before. They're worse than Earthlings for cowardice, and nearly as stupid."

"Now, wait-" began Ryerson. "Wait, let's not quarrel-"

"Afraid of what might happen?" jeered Sverdlov. "You don't know your friend Maclaren's dirty-fighting tricks, do you?"

The ship whirled through a darkness that grew noisy with Ryerson's uneven breathing. He raised his hands against the bulky robot shape confronting him. "Please," he stammered. "Now wait, wait, Engineer Sverdlov." Tears stung his eyes. "We're all in this together, you know."

"I wondered just when you'd be coming up with that cliche," snorted the Krasnan. "Having decided it would be oh, so amus-ing to tell your society friends, how you spent maybe a whole month in deep s.p.a.ce, you got me yanked off the job I really want to do, and tossed me into a situation you'd never once stopped to think about, and wrecked us all-and now you tell me, We're all in this together!' "Suddenly he roared his words: "You mangy son of a muckeating c.o.c.kroach, I'll get you back- not for your sake, nor for your wife's-for my own planet, d'you hear? They need me there!"

It grew very still. Ryerson felt how his heartbeat dropped down to normal, and then still further, until he could no longer hear his own pulse. His hands felt chilly and his face numb. A far and terrified part of him thought,So this is how it feels, when the G.o.d of Hosts lays His hand upon a man, but he stared past Sverdlov, into the relentless white blaze of the stars, and said in a flat voice: "That will do. I've heard the story of the poor oppressed colonies before now. I think you yourself are proof that the Protectorate is better than you deserve. As for me, I never saw a milli of this supposed extortion from other planets: my father worked his way up from midshipman to captain, my brothers and I went through the Academy on merit, as citizens of the poorest and most overcrowded world in the universe. Do you imagine you know what compet.i.tion is? Why, you blowhard clodhopper, you wouldn't last a week on Earth. As a matter of fact, I myself had grown tired of the struggle. If it weren't for this wretched expedition, my wife and I would have started for a new colony next week. Now you make me wonder if it's wise. Are all colonials like you-just barely brave enough to slander an old man when they're a safe hundred light-years away?"

Sverdlov did not move. The slow spin of theCross brought the black star into Ryerson's view again. It seemed bigger, as the ship swooped toward periastron. He had a horrible sense of falling into it.Thou, G.o.d, watchest me, with the cold ashen eye of wrath. The silence was like a membrane stretched close to ripping.

Finally, very slow, the ba.s.s voice came. "Are you prepared to back up those words, Earthling?"

"Right after we finish here!" shouted Ryerson.

"Oh." A moment longer. Then: "Forget it. Maybe I did speak out of turn. I've never known an Earthman who wasn't an enemy of some kind."

"Did you ever try to know them?"

"Forget it, I said. I'll get you home. I might even come around one day and say h.e.l.lo, on your new planet. Now let's get busy here. Our first job is to start the accelerators operat-ing again."

The weakness which poured through David Ryerson was such that he wondered if he would have fallen under gravity.Oh, Tamara, he thought,be with me now. He remembered how they had camped on a California beach . . . had it all to themselves, no one lived in the deserts eastward . . . and the gulls had swarmed around begging bread until both of them were helpless with laughter. Now why should he suddenly remember that, out of all the times they had had?

WHEN the mind gave up and the mathematics became a blur, there was work for Maclaren's hands.

Sverdlov, and Ryerson under him, did the machine-tool jobs; Naka-mura's small fingers showed such delicacy that he was set to drawing wire and polishing control-ring surfaces. Maclaren was left with the least skilled a.s.signment, least urgent be-cause he was always far ahead of the consumption of his prod-uct: melting, separating, and re-alloying the fused salvage from ion accelerators and transceiver web.

But it was tricky in null-gee. There could not be any signifi-cant spin on the ship or a.s.sembly, out on the lattice, it would have become too complicated for so small a gang of workers. Coriolis force would have created serious problems even for the inboard jobs. On the other hand, weightless melt had foul habits.

Maclaren's left arm was still bandaged, the burn on his forehead still a crimson gouge.