Polaris

TWENTY

By any reasonable definition of a star, Ramses was dead. Collapsed. Crushed by its own weight. Its nuclear fires were long since burned out. But its magnetic field had intensified. It was a trillion times stronger than Rimway’s. Or Earth’s. It was throwing out vast torrents of charged particles.

Most of the particles escaped along magnetic field lines. They came off the surface in opposite directions from the north and south magnetic poles. Which meant there were two streams, accounting for the two light cones. They were necessarily narrow at the source, but they got wider as they moved out into space. It was those streams, more or less anchored on a wildly rotating body, that produced the lighthouse effect. But Ramses was a lighthouse spinning so swiftly and so wildly that even the beams of light got confused.

“That’s why the cones are twisted at intervals,” I told Alex. “Ramses spins like a maniac, and the light cones are millions of kilometers long. But the particles can only travel at light speed, so they become spirals.” I’d been punching data into the processing unit and was starting to get results. “Okay,” I said, “we’re not in orbit. But we’re going to go right through the circus.”

The link dinged. Transmission from Arapol. It was a bit like awaiting sentence.

I activated it. A short dumpy man appeared up front. “Belle-Marie, this is Arapol.

Emergency unit Toronto is on the way. Forward situation and location to us for relay to rescue vessel. Radio transmissions are negative your area. Too much interference from Ramses. ETA Toronto nine hours from time of transmission this message. Do not go near the pulsar. I say again, do not approach the pulsar. ”

“Nine hours,” said Alex. “Call him back. Tell him that’s not good enough.”

“Alex,” I said, “they could get here during the next ten minutes, and they wouldn’t be able to find us in time.” With radio transmissions wiped out by the pulsar, it could take weeks.

I wasn’t feeling very well. “Me neither,” said Alex. “You don’t think any of that radiation’s getting in, do you?”

I’d been watching the numbers. Radiation levels outside were still rising, would continue to rise as long as we kept getting nearer the pulsar. But they weren’t yet close to being a problem. “No,” I said, “we’re fine.” But my head was starting to spin, and my stomach was sliding toward throw-up mode.

“Good.” He looked terrible. “Back in a minute.” He released himself from his harness and pulled himself out of the chair.

I watched him stagger toward the hatch. “Be careful.”

He left without answering.

The washroom door closed. A few minutes later, when he came back, he still looked pale. “I wonder,” he said, “if they did something to life support, too?”

I ran an environment check. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear it. But something’s wrong.”

I saw nothing on the status boards. No evidence of a radiation leak. The ship was holding steady. What was making us sick? “Alex,” I said, “I’m going to shut everything down for a minute.” He nodded, and I killed the power. The lights went off. And the fans. And gravity. Backup lamps blinked on. We drifted silently through the night.

And there it was. “Feel it?” I asked.

“Something,” he said.

It had a rhythm. Like a tide rolling in and out.

“Are we tumbling?”

“No. It’s more like a pulse. A heartbeat.”

I wished I knew more about pulsars. We’d done a segment on them at school, but I never expected to go anywhere near one. Nobody ever goes near one. My kabba cup was a small metal container with a straw. I removed the cup from its holder and released it.

In the zero-gee environment, it floated away, drifting toward the open hatchway.

It disappeared out into the common room. I repeated the experiment with a metal clip.

It also went out through the hatch.

“What are you doing?” asked Alex.

“Just a moment.” I tried a handkerchief. Held it out. Let it go. It went nowhere.

Just floated there at arm’s length. So we had two metal objects that had gone aft, and a handkerchief that simply stayed adrift.

“Which tells us what?” asked Alex.

I brought the systems back up, turned the lights on, but left the gravity off. “The magnetics are screwed up.” I got grip shoes out for both of us so we could get around.

Then I gave myself a crash course on pulsars.

After an hour or so, and several trips to the washroom to throw up, I thought I knew what was happening. The axis of the magnetic field was well off the spin axis of the pulsar. More than thirty degrees. The plane of our vector almost aligned with the spin axis. So the magnetic field, as far as we were concerned, was off center.

Ramses was also oscillating, and it was strong. The magnetic forces were rocking the ship.

Alex made an animal sound. “I’m not following.”

“We’re getting eddy currents in the hull. They keep changing our orientation.

We have too much movement in too many directions.”

“Well, whatever. Can we do anything about it?”

“No. But the good news is that it’s slowing us down.” The hull was warm. “It’s heating up,” I said.

“Praise be!” Alex looked delighted. “We get a break! Enough that the Toronto will be here before we go into the soup?”

“No. Unfortunately not. But it’s going to give us”-I tapped a key and studied the result-“another two hours.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that helps. It’s just two extra hours to be sick.”

Then he brightened. “Wait a minute. How about the shuttle? It’s got a full tank. Why don’t we use it to clear out? Leave the ship?”

I’d already considered it and discarded the idea. “Its hull is too thin. If we go out in that, we’d be fried in about two minutes.”

“Then how about transferring its fuel? To the mains? Can we do that?”

“Different kind of fuel. And not enough to do any good anyhow.”

“So what do we have left, Chase?” he asked.

“Actually, the shuttle might come in handy. It uses a superconductor system during launch. And we’ve got some spare wire for it in cargo.”

“How does that help us?”

“Superconductors, at least some of them, don’t like external magnetic fields. It’s the way glide trains work. You turn it on, and it automatically removes itself from a region of high field strength to low field strength. It’s called the Meissner Effect.”

“So we are going to-”

“-Do a little electrical work.”

We had about sixty meters of superconducting wire in storage. We brought it out and cut it in half. We took one segment to cargo, which was located beneath the bridge, to the point farthest forward in the ship. We fastened it to the leading bulkhead with magnetic staples. “In a spiral,” I told him, adding, “I think.”

“You’re not sure, Chase?”

“Of course I’m not sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to take over-”

“No. I’m sorry. I wasn’t criticizing. Listen, get us clear of this, and you get a bonus.”

“Thank you.”

“You can name the bonus.”

We took the rest of the wire back into the engine room, at the aft end of the ship, and put it up the same way, on the rearmost bulkhead. “Now,” I said, “we need current, the more the better. And a sink.”

He frowned. “A washbasin?”

“No. A place to put the electricity after it runs through the coils.”

He stood there, looking puzzled.

The gravity control was our best bet. Artificial gravity requires substantial power, and the system has robust cells, which would be sufficient to absorb the dump.

“Why do we need to drain the power?” he asked.

“Because superconductors are a bit different from ordinary circuits. It’s easy to get the current going, but to shut it down, we need a place that can drain it off.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m glad one of us knows this stuff.”

“Alex,” I said, “this is all theory to me. I may be missing something. But it has a decent chance to work.”

Over his shoulder I could see one of the monitors. The light cones flickered across the screen. They were velvet blue. Lovely. Almost enticing.

The quantum drive uses a slide control device to monitor and regulate the power feed.

After we had the coil in place, I removed it, and collected the backup unit from storage. I wired each spiral into one of the slide controls and connected the controls to the AG generator. “Center position,” I told Alex, “is neutral. No power. Up, the current runs clockwise; down is counterclockwise. When it’s powered up, it should make the ship a large magnet, with north at the bow and south at the tail. Or vice versa.”

“Or vice versa? You don’t know?”

It was as if by explaining it, I gained real control over events. Describe the procedure, and it has to be so. “We need to align our north to the pulsar’s south. And our south to its north. If we can do that, the magnetic field will push us clear.”

“Good. That seems simple enough.”

“Okay. Hang on.” We belted down, and I put the pulsar on the navigation screen.

“First step: Line up.”

I used the alignment thrusters to turn Belle around. Get us angled parallel with the north-south axis of the pulsar. Tail up, nose down. When I had it as close as I could get it, I prepared to initiate step two.

“What’s step two?” he asked.

“Activate.”

I pushed the sliders up. Current flowed into the system. The ship lurched.

I was thrown sharply against the harness. Then shaken. Up and down, back and forth. Lots of stops and jolts. It was like being on one of those three-dimensional bumper rides in an amusement park, where the bumper car takes you ahead and bangs to a stop and takes you ahead again and bangs to another stop. Except this was serious stuff. We were tossed every which way, jerked back, forth, and sideways, thrown relentlessly against the harnesses. “No!” I screamed.

Alex was telling me to shut it down. It felt as if Belle was coming apart. I switched off the power, and it stopped.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe the current needs to go the other way.”

We tried it, with a similar result.

I went back to my data. Eventually I figured out what had happened. “The magnetic axis at Ramses is thirty degrees off the spin axis,” I told Alex. “I should have realized that would blow the program.”

“Why?”

“When we turned on the power, the ship aligned with the magnetic field, which it was supposed to do. But because it’s thirty degrees off center, the magnetic field kept changing as the pulsar spun. Every three-quarters of a second. That was what banged us around.

“Can we fix it?” Alex asked hopefully. “Try it again?”

“I have no idea how to compensate.”

“So,” he said, “what now?”

We were down to about five hours.

On the Belle-Marie, the shuttle was launched from the starboard side, and the main airlock was to port. That suggested another possibility.

I reactivated the gravity. I also killed the monitors so we didn’t have to watch the two sabers getting brighter and bigger.

The bulkheads were continuing to heat up, and the eddy forces were becoming more pronounced. On the bridge, we developed a drag forward. But if we went back to the washroom, which was located at the rear of the living quarters, the effect went in the opposite direction: Metal objects were pulled farther aft.

A buzzer sounded. I shut it off. “Yellow alert,” I explained. “Radiation.”

Alex nodded, but said nothing. Occasionally I caught him watching me, waiting for me to come up with something. And I sat there while forces that felt like tides dragged and pushed. I tried to put it out of my mind, to concentrate on what we needed to do. The critical point was that magnetic fields do push against one another.

Finally, I thought I had worked out another approach.

“I hope it’s better than last time,” Alex said. He must have seen that the comment was irritating because he immediately apologized.

“It’s okay,” I said. “The first thing we need is some wire.”

“We’ve got plenty of it stapled to the bulkheads. Fore and aft.”

“It’ll be too much trouble to get down. We have some on spools in storage.

Those will be easier to work with.” I released my harness, got cautiously to my feet, and went out into the common room.

This time Alex didn’t ask for an explanation. We went down to cargo and collected four spools of assorted sizes of cable, each sixty meters long. I set one aside.

We unrolled the other three and connected the strands to make a single piece. At one end I stripped off a few centimeters of insulation and attached it to one of the handgrips on the hull of the shuttle, metal to metal.

Then I walked it back and taped about ninety meters of it to the back of the shuttle. That left enough to go up to the bridge and still have some slack. The shuttle was going to go out the door, and when it did I wanted to arrange things so the tape would come loose and the wire unravel. Preferably without fouling.

Simple enough.

Alex collected the fourth spool. I took the remaining eighty meters, and we started topside. I was paying the cable out as we went. But I found myself staring at the airlock that separated the launch bay from the rest of the ship. It would have to be closed before I could launch the shuttle. How was I going to get my wire through a sealed airlock?

I stood there wishing I knew more about electrical circuits.

Okay. All I really had to do was get the charge through.

First I needed an anchor in the shuttle bay, something stout enough to pull the wire free of the tape on the back of the shuttle when it launched, and which could withstand a good yank if need be. There were some storage cabinets along the bulkhead, supported by metal mounts. They looked rugged enough to do the job, so I picked one and secured the cable to it, leaving enough to pass through the airlock and reach the bridge.

That wouldn’t be possible, of course, because I had to close the hatch. So I led the wire from the cabinet mount over to the airlock, just enough to connect the two, cut off the excess, and taped the piece from the cabinet onto the hatch. Metal to metal, again. We went through the airlock, gently closed the hatch, and taped the remaining piece to it, once again ensuring a metal contact.

The remaining cable was just long enough to reach the bridge. I’d intended to tie it into the AG generator, but we didn’t need the same level of power this time. The hypercomm transmitter was sitting there, doing nothing. I connected the line to its power cell. Which meant we had connected a power source with the shuttle. This was the long wire.

We unrolled the final spool. The short wire. I linked it also to the transmitter’s power cell, and we walked it out to the main airlock, which opened off the common room. We did much the same thing we’d done with the hatch on the lower deck. I cut the cable and connected it to the inner door. Then I unwound the rest of it from the spool-there was maybe forty meters left-coiled it on the deck inside the airlock, stripped the insulation from the end, and connected it to the inside of the door.

“We need to put the rest of the wire outside,” I said.

Alex looked from the coil to the outer hatch to me. “We’ll need a volunteer,” he said.

“No. Not like that. We’ll blow it out.”

“Can we open the outer door without depressurizing the lock?”

“Normally, no. But I can override.” We left the lock and closed the hatch.

“Ready to go,” I told him.

“I hope.”

“I’ll need you to turn on the juice, Alex.”

“Okay.”

He had to sit down on the deck to get access to the power unit. I showed him what to push. Showed him which lamps would come on when we established the circuit.

“All right,” he said. “I got it.”

“What we want to do,” I told him, “is to open the outer door of the main airlock and simultaneously launch the shuttle. The shuttle goes out one side; the air pressure in the lock blows the cable out the other.”

“I’m ready.” We looked at one another for a long moment. “Just in case,” he said, “I’m glad you’ve been part of my life.”

It was the only time I’ve known him to say something like that. My eyes got damp, and I told him I thought we had a good chance. What I really thought, I was trying not to think about. “Okay,” I said, “starting depressurization in the shuttle compartment.”

“Chase, do you think it matters whether I turn on the power now? Or should we wait until everything’s outside?”

“Probably doesn’t matter. But let’s play it safe and wait.”

“Okay.”

“Overriding main airlock restraint. Got a green light.”

“Good.”

“I’m going to bleed a little air out of it.”

“If you think. But make sure there’s enough left to expel the wire.”

I took the pressure down to about seventy percent, warned Alex that I was about to shut off the gravity again, and did so. It would help ensure that the coil in the airlock got blown clear. When the launch bay showed green-vacuum-I opened the launch doors, activated the telescopes, and eased the shuttle out of the ship. Then I opened the main airlock. Moments later, the port-side monitor showed the cable drifting away.

“Looks good so far,” said Alex.

I’d instructed the shuttle’s onboard AI what she was to do. She took the shuttle out slowly while we watched on the monitor. The cable broke clear of the tape and began to pay out.

I gave it a couple of minutes. Then I told Alex to hit the juice.

The outside flux sent charged particles into the shuttle and the cable that was attached to its rear. The shuttle strained toward the pulsar and the cable straightened. The charge came toward the ship along the wire and passed through the open airlock. It circled the cabinet mount and penetrated the hatch on the lower deck. The wire on our side of the hatch picked it up and relayed it to the hypercomm power cell, from which it switched over to the short wire, passed through the main deck hatch, and out the main airlock. A luminous blue arc leaped from the shuttle to the tip of the short wire, connecting them. “What do you think?” asked Alex.

“Circuit is complete,” I said, trying to keep the sheer joy out of my voice. “I think we have a magnetic field.”

We got tossed around again, but it wasn’t nearly as severe as the previous time.

Within moments, I felt a gentle shove upward and to starboard. “We’re getting a course change, Alex.”

“Yes!” he said. “You’re right. No question.” His face broke into a huge smile.

“You’re a genius.”

“Magnetic fields don’t like each other,” I said. “The big one is getting rid of the little one. Had to happen.”

“Of course.”

“I never doubted it would work.”

The push was steady. Up and out. And accelerating. We were riding the wave, baby. Moving at a goofy angle, but who cared as long as it was away from the sabers?

The Toronto needed only five days to find us. It didn’t matter to us. All we cared about was that we knew they were coming.

It was a party cruise. The ship was filled with the cast and director of the musical Cobalt Blue, which had been a huge hit everywhere on Grand Salinas and points west and was currently headed for Rimway. Unfortunately, they did not have fuel available for our thrusters, so we had to go on with them.

The passengers were always looking for reasons to celebrate, and we ranked high. They provided food and alcohol, and we got to see Jenna Carthage, the show’s star, performing “Hearts At Sea.” It’s been a lot of years, but “Hearts At Sea,” which is the second act showstopper, remains a standard. And Alex occasionally refers to it as “our song.”

I should mention that I caught the eye of Renaldo Cabrieri. Alex didn’t care for him, but I liked the guy, and it didn’t hurt my self-confidence to have one of the biggest romantic stars in the Confederacy following me around. He was a bit over the top, but he was a charmer nevertheless. He made sure I always had a drink in my hand. He leered at me, purred in my direction, smiled in the most delightful manner, and just generally misbehaved. At one point, Alex told me it was embarrassing. Me, I thought I was entitled.

First, a dictator. Now a certified heartthrob. I wondered what, or who, was next.