Tau zero (10 page)

"So you and I terminated a relationship which had become unsatisfactory."

"You made plenty of others!" she flared.

"For a while. Till I found Ai-Ling. Whereas you've taken to sleeping around again."

"I have normal needs. I've not settled down . . . committed myself—she gulped—"like you."

"Nor I, except that one does not abandon a partner when the going gets bad." Reymont shrugged. "No matter. As you implied, we're both free individuals. It wasn't easy, but I've finally convinced myself it's not sensible or right to carry a grudge because you and Fedoroff exercised that freedom. Don't let me spoil your fun after you go off watch."

"Nor I yours." She brushed violently at her eyes.

"As a matter of fact, I'll be occupied till nearly the last minute. Since I wasn't allowed to deputize, I'm going to ask for volunteers."

"You can't!"

"I wasn't actually forbidden. I'll brace a few men, in private, who're likely to agree. We'll constitute ourselves a stand-by force, alerted to do whatever we can that's needed. Do you mean to tell the captain?"

She turned from him. "No," she said. "Please go away."

His boots clacked off down the corridor.

Chapter 8

Everything that could be done had been. Now, spacesuited, strapped into safety cocoons that were anchored to the beds, the folk of Leonora Christine waited for impact. Some left their helmet radios on so they could talk with their roommates; others preferred solitude. With head secured, no one could see another, nor anything except the bareness above his faceplate.

Reymont and Chi-Yuen's quarters felt more cheerless than most. She had stowed away the silk draperies that softened bulkheads and overhead, the low-legged table she had made to hold a Han Dynasty bowl with water and a single stone, the scroll with its serene mountain-scape and her grandfather's calligraphy, the clothes, the sewing kit, the bamboo flute. Fluorolight fell bleak on unpainted surfaces.

They had been silent awhile, though their sets were tuned. He listened to her breath and the slow knocking of his own heart. "Charles," she said finally.

"Yes?" He spoke with the same quietness.

"It has been good with you. I wish I could touch you."

"Likewise."

"There is a way. Let me touch your self." Taken aback, he had no ready reply. She continued: "You have always held most of you hidden. I don't imagine I'm the first woman to tell you so."

"You aren't." She could hear the difficulty he had saying it.

"Are you certain you weren't making a mistake?"

"What's to explain? I've scant use for those types whose chief interest is their grubby little personal neuroses. Not in a universe as rich as this."

"You never mentioned your childhood, for instance," she said. "I shared mine with you."

He snorted out a kind of mirth. "Consider yourself spared. The Polyugorsk low-levels weren't nice."

"I've heard about conditions there. I never quite understood how they came about."

"The Control Authority couldn't act. No danger to world peace. The local bosses were too useful in too many ways to higher national figures to be thrown out. Like some of the war lords in your country, I imagine, or the Leopards on Mars before fighting got provoked. A lot

of money to be had in the Antarctic, for those who didn't mind gutting the last resources, killing the last wildlife, raping the last white wilderness—" He stopped. His voice had been rising. "Well, that's all behind us. I wonder if the human race will do any better on Beta Three. I rather doubt it."

"How did you learn to care about such things?" she asked mutedly.

"A teacher, to begin with. My father was killed when I was young, and by the time I was twelve, my mother had nearly finished going down the drain. We had this one man, however, Mr. Melikot, an Abyssinian, I don't know how he ended up in our hellhole of a school, but he lived for us and for what he taught, we felt it and our brains came awake. ... I'm not certain if he did me a favor. I got to thinking and reading, and that got me into talking and doing, and that got me into trouble till I had to skip for Mars, never mind how. . . . Yes, I suppose it was a favor in the long run."

"You see," she said, smiling in her helmet, "it isn't hard to take off a mask."

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I'm trying to oblige you, no more."

"Because we may soon be dead. That tells me something about you also, Charles. I begin to see the why of things, the man behind them. Why they say you were honest but tightfisted with money in the Solar System, to name a trivial detail. Why you're often gruff, and never try to dress well though it would look good on you, and hide that posses-siveness of yours behind a 'Go your own way if you don't want to go mine' that can be really freezing, and—"

"Hold on! A psychoanalysis, from a few elementary facts about when I was a kid?"

"Oh no, no. That would be ridiculous, I agree. But a bit of understanding, from the way you told them. A wolf in search of a den."

"Enough!"

"Of course. I'm happy that you— No further, not ever again, unless you want." Chi-Yuen's figure of speech evidently lingered in her consciousness, for she mused: "I miss animals. More than I expected. We had carp and songbirds in my parents' house. Jacques and I had a cat in Paris. I never realized till we traveled this far, how big a part of the world the rest of the animal creation is. Crickets in summer nights, a butterfly, a hummingbird, fish jumping in the water, sparrows in a street, horses with velvet noses and warm smell— Do you think we will find anything like Earth's animals on Beta Three?"

The ship struck.

It was too swiftly changing a pattern of assault too great. The delicate dance of energies which balanced out acceleration pressures could not be continued. Its computer choreographers directed a circuit to break, shutting off that particular system, before positive feedback wrecked it.

Those aboard felt weight shift and change. A troll sat on each chest and choked each throat. Darkness went ragged before eyes. Sweat burst forth, hearts slugged, pulses brawled. That noise was answered by the ship, a metal groan, a rip and a crash. She was not meant for stresses like these. Her safety factors were small; mass was too precious. And she rammed hydrogen atoms swollen to the heaviness of nitrogen or oxygen, dust particles bloated into meteroids. Velocity had flattened the cloud longitudinally, it was thin, she tore through in minutes. But by that same token, the nebulina was no longer a cloud to her. It was a well-nigh solid wall.

Her outside force-screens absorbed the battering, flung matter aside in turbulent streams, protected the hull from everything except slowdown drag. Reaction was inevitable, on the fields themselves and hence on the devices which, borne outside, produced and controlled them. Frameworks crumpled. Electronic components fused. Cryogenic liquids boiled from shattered containers.

So one of the thermonuclear fires went out.

The stars saw the event differently. They saw a tenuous murky mass struck by an object incredibly swift and dense. Hydromagnetic forces snatched at atoms, whirled them about, ionized them, cast them together. Radiation flashed. The object was encompassed in a meteor blaze. During the hour of its passage, it bored a tunnel through the nebulina. That tunnel was wider than the drill, because a shock wave spread outward—and outward and outward, destroying what stability there had been, casting substance forth in gouts and tatters.

If a sun and planets had been in embryo here, they would now never form.

The invader passed. It had not lost much speed. Accelerating once more, it dwindled away toward remoter stars.

Chapter 9

Reymont struggled back to wakefulness. He could not have been darkened long. Could he? Sound had ceased. Was he deafened? Had the air puffed out of some hole into space? Were the screens down, had gamma-colored death already sleeted through him?

No. When he listened, he made out the familiar low beat of power. The fluoropanel shone steadily in his vision. The shadow of his cocoon fell on a bulkhead and had the blurred edges which betokened ample atmosphere. Weight had returned to a single gee. Most of the ship's automata, at least, must be functioning. "To hell with melodrama," he heard himself say. His voice came as if from far off, a stranger's. "We've got work."

He fumbled with his harness. Muscles throbbed and ached. A trickle of blood ran over his mouth, tasting salty. Or was that sweat? Nichevo. He was operational. He crawled free, opened his helmet, sniffed—slight smell of scorch and ozone, nothing serious—and gusted one deep sigh.

The cabin was a mare's nest. Dresser drawers had burst open and scattered their contents. He didn't notice particularly. Chi-Yuen hadn't answered his queries. He waded through strewn garments to the slight form. Slipping off his gauntlets, he unlatched her faceplate. Her breathing sounded normal, no wheeze or gurgle to suggest internal injuries. When he peeled back an eyelid, the pupil was broad. Probably she had just fainted. He shucked his armor, located his stun pistol, and strapped it on. Others might need help worse. He went out.

Boris Fedoroff clattered down the stairs. "How goes it?" Reymont hailed.

"I am on my way to see," the engineer tossed back, and disappeared.

Reymont grinned sourly and pushed into Johann Freiwald's cabin half. The German had removed his spacesuit too and sat slumped on his bed. "Raus mit dir," Reymont said.

"I have a headache like carpenters in my skull," Freiwald protested.

"You offered to be in our squad. I thought you were a man."

Freiwald gave Reymont a resentful glance but was stung into motion.

The constable's recruits were busy for the next hour. The regular

spacemen were busier yet, inspecting, measuring, conferring in hushed tones. That gave them little chance to feel pain or let terror grow. The scientists and technicians had no such anodyne. From the fact that they were alive and the ship apparently working as before, they might have drawn happiness . . . only why didn't Telander make an announcement? Reymont bullied them into commons, started some making coffee and others attending to the most heavily bruised. At last he felt free to head for the bridge.

He stopped to look in on Chi-Yuen, as he had done at intervals. She was finally aware, had unharnessed but collapsed on her mattress before getting all armor off. A tiny light kindled in her when she saw him. "Charles," she susurrated.

"How are you?" he asked.

"I hurt, and I don't seem to have any strength, but—"

He stripped away the rest of her spacesuit. She winced at his roughness. "Without this load, you should be able to get up to the gym," he said. "Dr. Latvala can check you. No one else was too badly hammered, so it's unlikely you were." He kissed her, a brief meaningless brush of lips. "Sorry to be this unchivalrous. I'm in a hurry."

He went on. The bridge door was closed. He knocked. Fedoroff boomed from within, "No admittance. Wait for the captain to address you."

"This is the constable," Reymont answered.

"Well, go carry out your duties."

"I've assembled the passengers. They're getting over being stunned. They're beginning to realize something isn't right. Not knowing what, in their present condition, will crack them open. Maybe we won't be able to glue the pieces back together."

"Tell them a report will be issued shortly," Telander called without steadiness.

"Shouldn't you tell them, sir? The intercom's working, isn't it? Tell them you're making exact assessments of damage in order to lay out a program for prompt repair. But I suggest, Mr. Captain, you first let me in to help you find words for explaining the disaster."

The door flew wide. Fedoroff grabbed Reymont's arm and tried to pull him through. Reymont yanked free, a judo release. His hand lifted, ready to chop. "Don't ever do that," he said. He stepped into the bridge and closed the door himself.

Fedoroff growled and doubled his fists. Lindgren hurried to him. "No, Boris," she begged. "Please." The Russian subsided, stiffly. They glared at Reymont in the thrumming stillness: captain, first officer, chief engineer, navigation officer, biosystems director. He glanced

past them. The panels had suffered, various meter needles twisted, screens broken, wiring torn loose.

"Is that the trouble?" he asked, pointing.

"No," said Boudreau, the navigator. "We have replacements."

Reymont sought the viewscope. The compensator circuits were equally dead. He moved on to the electronic periscope and put his face inside its hood.

A hemispheric simulacrum sprang from the darkness at him, the distorted scene he would have witnessed outside on the hull. The stars were crowded forward, streaming thinly amidships; they shone steel blue, violet, X-ray. Aft the patterns approached what had once been familiar—but not very closely, and those suns were reddened, like embers, as if time were snuffing them out. Reymont shuddered a little and drew his head back into the cozy smallness of the bridge.

"Well?" he said.

"The decelerator system—" Telander braced himself. "We can't stop."

Reymont went expressionless. "Go on."

Fedoroff spoke. His words fell contemptuous. "You will recall, I trust, we had activated the decelerator part of the Bussard module to produce and operate two units. Their system is distinct from the accelerators, since to slow down we do not push gas through a ramjet but reverse its momentum."

Reymont did not stir at the insult. Lindgren caught her breath. After a moment Fedoroff sagged.

"Well," he said tiredly, "the accelerators were also in use, at a much higher level of power. Doubtless on that account, their field strength protected them. The decelerators— Out. Wrecked."

"How?"

"We can only determine that there has been material damage to their exterior controls and generators, and that the thermonuclear reaction which energized them is extinguished. Since the meters to the system aren't reporting—must be smashed—we can't tell exactly what is wrong."

Fedoroff looked at the deck. His words ran on, more soliloquy than report. A desperate man will rehearse obvious facts over and over. "In the nature of the case, the decelerators must have been subjected to greater stress than the accelerators. I would guess that those forces, reacting through the hydromagnetic fields, broke the material assembly in that part of the Bussard module.