Flight of Exiles

6

The bridge crackled with excitement.

Larry stood at his usual post, behind the curving bank of desk consoles and the seated technicians who operated them. Viewscreens flickered, showing every part of the ship, the pulsebeat of every system.

For an instant the whole bridge was silent, the silence of tense expectation. Everyone was holding his or her breath; the only sounds were the faint whispering of the air fans and the slight electrical murmur of the consoles.

Larry stood rooted behind one of the techs, watching a viewscreen on her console that showed the long glistening cylinders of four automated rocket probes. A red numeral 10 glowed on the screen, down on its lower right corner.

“Still holding at minus ten seconds,” the tech muttered.

Another tech, at the next desk, added, “All systems still in the green.”

On the desk just to the left of where Larry stood was a viewscreen display of a computer-drawn star map. Dozens of pinpoints of light were scattered across it. Off to one side of the screen, one of the pinpoints was blinking. This represented their target, the major planet of Alpha Centauri. It was moving across the screen, heading for a dotted circle drawn in the middle of the map.

Larry watched the map. The blinking dot reached the circle and stopped there.

“Acquisition,” said the tech at that console. “We’re in the launch window.”

The numerals on the picture of the probes began to tick downward: nine, eight, seven…

“Launchers primed and ready.” A light on a console went from amber to green.

“…six, five…”

“Probes on internal power.”

“…four, three, two…”

“Hatch open.”

Larry could see that the metal hatch in front of the probes had slid away, revealing the stars outside.

“…one, zero.”

“Launch!”

The four cylinders slid smoothly away and disappeared in an eyeblink into the darkness of space.

“Radar plot,” a voice said crisply. “On course. Ignition on schedule— All four of ’em are on their way.”

Larry didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out in a long, relieved sigh. The technicians whooped triumphantly, turned to each other with grins and handshakes and backpoundings. The girls got kissed.

“They’re off and running,” one of the techs said to Larry. Neither of them knew where the phrase had come from, but it sounded right for the occasion.

He stood in the center of the celebrating crew, smiling happily. In another month we’ll have Hose-up data on the planet. Then we can decide logo into orbit or fly past and head out-system.

They were all standing around him now, clapping him on the back and laughing with him.

Larry threw up his hands. “Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with it. You guys launched the probes. I just stood back and watched you. You deserve all the congratulations, not me.”

They milled around for a few minutes more, before Larry finally said, “Okay, okay, you got off a good launch. Now how about the regular duty crew getting back to their stations. Don’t want to give the computer the impression it can run the ship by itself, do you?”

They grumbled light-heartedly, but -most of the techs returned to their desks. The few extra people who had been present for the launch drifted away from the bridge, out the two hatches at either end of the curving row of consoles.

Satisfied that everything was going smoothly, Larry went over to his own seat along the back wall of the bridge and relaxed in it. But not for long.

Dr. Loring pushed his way past the last of the departing launch techs and entered the bridge. Larry suppressed a frown as the old man stood there momentarily, fat and wheezy and blinking, peering at the console screens.

He knows no one’s allowed up here without permission unless he’s a member of the working crew!

Loring turned his frog-eyed face toward Larry. “Ah, there you are,” he said, and lumbered over to Larry’s seat. “Congratulations, I was watching on the intercom. The launch seemed to go quite smoothly.”

Larry got up slowly from his chair. “Thanks. But… you know that the bridge is off limits for non-crew personnel.”

Loring waved a chubby hand in the air. “Oh, yes, of course. I apologize. But I, ah… I have other reasons for looking you up.” He glanced around at the techs, who were all busily at work with their backs to him. “Ahh… could we step into your office for a moment? This is rather delicate.”

There were times when Dr. Loring amused Larry, and other times when the old man exasperated him. This was one of the latter times. Stay cool, he told himself. After all, he is practically a father to you. He thinks he’s got a right to butt in.

Nodding, Larry led Dr. Loring through the door in the middle of the bridge’s back wall. It opened onto a short corridor that linked the bridge with the computer center. Off to one side of this hallway was Larry’s office. They stepped inside and Larry passed his hand over the light switch. The infrared sensor in the switch detected his body warmth and turned on the overhead light panels.

Larry gestured to the webchair and sat himself behind his desk. Loring sat down with great caution, lowering his weight onto the fragile-looking chair very slowly. The plastic squeaked.

“What’s the matter?” Larry asked.

“It’s about Dan Christopher,” Dr. Loring said, looking troubled.

Larry waited for the old man to add something else. When he didn’t, but merely sat there looking unhappy, Larry urged, “Well? What about Dan?”

“And Valery.”

Larry automatically tried to hide the jolting shock that went through him. Idiot! What are you afraid of? She loves you.

Patiently, he asked Dr. Loring, “Okay, what about Dan and Valery?”

Shaking his head, Dr. Loring said, “She’s seen him a couple of times since the fire. Had dinner with him…alone.”

“I know that.”

“I told her that I didn’t think it was right; nothing can come of it but trouble.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me? Val’s told me about it already. We’re not keeping secrets from each other. There’s nothing wrong with her having dinner with old friends—”

“He still wants her, you know.”

“I know.” I remember how I felt when she was promised to him.

“He’s asked her not to marry you until after we’ve decided about the Centaurian planet.”

Larry nodded again.

“He’s going to cause trouble.”

Larry’s patience was starting to wear thin. “Look, Dr. Loring, I know how Dan feels. I know he’s trying to gain control of the Council and have me pushed out. But you’ve got to remember that he and I were friends for a long time and …”

“He believes,” Dr. Loring said, his voice rising to interrupt Larry, “that the fire in the cryosleepers was no accident. He thinks his father was deliberately killed. Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“That’s right.”

“By whom? Who’d do such a thing? Why?”

Dr. Loring almost smiled. “You see, there are some things that you don’t know. Valery’s been afraid to tell you everything, for fear that it would cause more trouble between you and Dan. But I wormed it out of her. She can’t keep secrets from her father!”

“Why in hell would Dan think his father was murdered? What possible reason could there be?”

Shrugging, Loring replied, “I happen to_ know that he has a computer technician digging through the oldest memory cores on the ship for some special instructions that his father fed into the computer—apparently when the voyage first began. Perhaps even before the voyage started, when the ship was still in orbit around Earth.”

Larry sank back in his chair.

“Take my word for it,” Loring insisted, shaking a stubby finger in the air, “Dan is dangerous. I think he’s unbalanced … insane. And he’s determined to get his own way—with the ship, with Valery, with everything. That means he’s got to get rid of you, one way or another.”

Dan Christopher’s job aboard the ship was in Propulsion and Power.

Trained from childhood in physics and electrical engineering, Dan watched over the ship’s all-important hydrogen fusion reactors, the thermonuclear power plants that provided the ship’s rocket thrust and electrical power. Using the same energy reactions as the stars, the fusion reactors were small enough to fit into a pair of shielded blisters up on level seven—the innermost ring of the ship, closest to the hub. Small, yet these reactors had enough power in them to drive the ship across the light-years between the stars and to provide all the electrical power needed by the ship and its people for year after year after year.

The fusion reactors were like miniature suns. Inside each heavy egg-shaped radiation shield of lead and steel was a tiny, man-made star: a ball of glowing plasma, a hundred million degrees hot, held suspended in vacuum by enormously powerful magnetic fields. Deuterium—a heavy isotope of hydrogen—was fed into the fusion plasma almost one atom at a time. Energy came out, as the deuterium atoms were fused into helium. The same process that powers the sun, the stars—and hydrogen bombs.

There was enough energy in the fusion reactors to turn the entire ship into a tiny, glowing star—for an explosive flash of a second.

In theory, the reactors were expected to be quiet, almost silent. And the energy converters that changed the heat of the fusion plasma into electricity were supposed to be virtually silent too.

Yet as Dan prowled down along the metal catwalk that hung over one of the reactors, he could feel through the soles of his slippered feet the low-frequency growl of a star chained to a man’s command. The metal floor plates vibrated, the air itself seemed to be heavy with the barely audible rumbling of some unseen giant’s breathing.

Dan leaned over the catwalk’s flimsy railing and peered down at the work crew on the floor below. The railing could be flimsy because the gravity factor at level seven was only one-tenth of Earth-normal g. The ship’s designers had put the heaviest equipment in the areas where weight was almost negligible. People had to live at full Earth g, so that the living quarters were down in the outermost wheel, level one. But the big equipment was up here, where a man could haul a five-hundred kilo generator by himself, if he had to.

Dan could feel the frail railing tremble in his hands from the reactors’ deep-pitched subsonic song. The reactors themselves were little to look at, just a pair of dull metal domes some twenty meters across: like a brace of eggs lain by a giant robot bird. Off on the other side of level seven was another pair of reactors, and the smaller auxiliary electrical power generators. Between the two blisters housing the big equipment was nestled the control instrumentation and offices for the Propulsion and Power group.

The work crew on the main floor below the catwalk was still trying to get the main generator going. All the repairs had been made, and the generator had been reassembled in its place between the two reactors. But it would still not light off.

As Joe Haller had put it after an exasperating week of working on the generator: “It’s an engineer’s hell. Everything checks but nothing works.”

Dan knew they’d get it going sooner or later. But he couldn’t help wondering why the generator wasn’t working, when all the calculations and tests showed that it should.

Is there a saboteur in Joe’s team? he wondered, watching them work. And if so — why? Who’s behind all this?

“MR. CHRISTOPHER, MESSAGE FOR YOU,” said the computer’s flatly calm voice over the intercom loudspeakers.

Dan reluctantly turned away from the sweating crew beneath him and strode back toward the control area. The magnetized metal foil strips in his slippers clung slightly to the floor plates of the catwalk.

Shutting the door behind him, Dan felt the bone-quivering rumble of the reactors disappear, to be replaced by the higher-pitched hum of electrical equipment monitors, computer terminals, viewscreens. A half-dozen people were seated at monitoring desks, watching the performance of the reactors and generators.

Dan spotted an empty desk, slid into its chair, and touched the phone button. “Dan Christopher here,” he said.

The little desktop viewscreen glowed briefly, then Dr Hsai’s features took shape. The psychotech smiled a polite oriental smile.

“Kind of you to answer my call so quickly,” Dr. Hsai said softly. “I know you must be very busy.”

Dan smiled back. “You’re a busy man, too. What can I do for you?”

Looking slightly more serious, the psychotech replied, “I am concerned that you haven’t kept in touch with us, Mr. Christopher. We have set up three appointments for your examination, and you haven’t shown up for any of them.”

Dan shrugged. “As you said, I’m very busy.”

“Yes, of course. But your health is of primary importance. You cannot perform your exacting tasks if you are in poor health.”

“I feel fine.”

Dr Hsai closed his eyes when he nodded. “Perhaps so. But your condition may not reflect itself in physical symptoms that are obvious to you. You were discharged from the infirmary with the understanding that you would return for periodic examinations.”

Dan could feel the heat rising within him. “Now listen. I am busy. And all you want to do is ask me more stupid questions and probe my mind. I don’t have to allow that. I’m performing my job and I feel fine. There’s no way you can force me to submit to your brain-tinkering!”

“Mr. Christopher!” Dr Hsai looked shocked.

“Let me remind you of something, Doctor,” Dan went on “We’re right now decelerating toward Alpha Centauri. Our reactors are feeding the ship’s main engines on a very, very carefully programmed schedule. This ship can’t take more than a tiny thrust loading—we’re simply not built to stand high thrust, it’d tear us apart.”

“Everyone knows this.”

“Do they? This is a very delicate part of the flight A slight miscalculation or a tiny flaw in the reactors could rip open the ship and kill everybody. I’d suggest that you stop bothering me and let me concentrate on my job. Save your brain-picking for after we’re safely in orbit and the rocket engines are shut down.”

“I am only…”

Dan could sense that the others in the control room had turned to stare at him. But he concentrated on the phone screen. “I don’t care what you are only,” he snapped “And I don’t care who’s trying to find reason to slap me back in the infirmary even if it’s the Chairman himself. I’m going to stay on this job and get it done right. Understand?”

Dr Hsai nodded, his smile gone. “I am sorry to have interrupted your very important work,” he said.

The psychotech gently touched his phone’s switch, and Dan Christopher’s image faded from the screen. Dr Hsai sat in his desk chair for a long moment, eyes closed, mouth pursed meditatively.