Hatching the Phoenix

CHAPTER XI

I had never seen a supernova in real time before —well, how many people have? — but that, at least, was not a disappointment. The show was everything it promised to be. We were hovering in our two ships, a few million kilometers off the prime focus. Hans was taking his orders from Kekuskian now, and He had ditched the Crabber planet for good to concentrate on the star.

Hypatia whispered in my ear that, on his rental, Bill Tartch was pissing and moaning about the decision. He had wanted to catch every horrible, tragic bit, if possible right down to the expressions on the faces of the Crabbers when they saw their sun go all woogly right over their heads. I didn’t. I had seen enough of the Crabbers to last me.

In my main room we had a double display. Hypatia had rigged my ship’s ex­ternal optics so we could see the great mirror and the tiny Phoenix ship, together like toys in one corner of the room, but the big thing was the Crabber star itself as seen from the PhoenixCorp ship. It wasn’t dangerous — Hypatia said. Hans had dimmed it down, and anyway we were seeing only visible light, none of the wide-spectrum stuff that would be pouring out of it in a minute. Even so, it was huge, two meters across and so bright we had to squint to watch it.

I don’t know much about stellar surfaces, but this particular star looked sick to me. Prominences stuck out all over its perimeter, and ugly sunspots spotted its face. And then, abruptly, it began to happen. The star seemed to shrink, as though Hans had zoomed back away from it. But that wasn’t what was going on. The star really was collapsing on itself, and it was doing it fast. “That’s the implosion,” Hypatia whispered to me. While we watched, it went from two meters to a meter and a half, to a meter, to smaller still —

And then it began to expand again, almost as fast as it had shrunk, and became far more bright. Hypatia whispered, “And that’s the rebound. I’ve told Hans to cut back on the intensity. It’s going to get worse.”

It did.

It blossomed bigger and brighter—and angrier—until it filled the room and, just as I was feeling as though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the picture began to break up. I heard Terple moan, “Look at the mirror!” And then I understood what was happening to our image. The little toy PhoenixCorp ship and mirror were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation from the supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp vessels were blazing bright themselves, reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from the gravitational lensing. As I watched, the mirror began to warp. The flimsy sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of plasma, like blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh underneath the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot and glowing.

I thought we’d seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A moment later the image of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn’t any­where near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright as it had been before, but it was still something scary to look at. “What—?” I began to ask, but Hypatia had anticipated me.

“We’re looking at the star from the little camera in the center of the dish now, Klara,” she explained. “We’re not getting shipside magnification from the mirror anymore. That’s gone. I’m a little worried about the camera, too. The gravitational lensing alone is pretty powerful, and the camera might not last much” —she paused as the image disappeared for good, simply winked out and was gone — “longer,” she finished, and, of course, it hadn’t.

I took a deep breath and looked around my sitting room. Terple had tears in her eyes. Ibarruru and Starminder sat together, silent and stunned, and Mark Rohrbeck was whispering to his shipmind. “That’s it,” I said briskly. “The show’s over.”

Rohrbeck spoke up first, sounding almost cheerful. “Hans has all the data,” he reported. “He’s all right.”

Terple had her hand up. “Klara? About the ship? It took a lot of heat, but the dish burned pretty fast and the hull’s probably intact, so if we can get a repair crew out there — “

“Right away,” I promised. “Well, almost right away. First we go home.”

I was looking at Rohrbeck. He had looked almost cheerful for a moment, but the cheer was rapidly fading. When he saw my eyes on him, he gave me a little shrug. “Where’s that?” he asked glumly.

I wanted to pat his shoulder, but it was a little early for that. I just said sym­pathetically, ‘You’re missing your kids, aren’t you? Well, I’ve got a place with plenty of them. And, as the only grown-up male on my island, you’ll be the only dad they’ve got.”