We Have Fed Our Sea

7

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, Sverdlov 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 deceleration 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 snatched 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 impact 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 calculations 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 physicist 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 responded. 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 advised.

Sverdlov lumbered toward him. In a shimmery wisp of tunic, the Earthling looked muscular enough, but he probably massed 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 hoarsely.

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, Sverdlov 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. Maclaren rabbit-punched him. Sverdlov went to one knee. Maclaren 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 Earthling: “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 noiseless, and this was only fractional. Sweat prickled 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.