Refuge

Chapter 14. Stars Again

Derec looked up at the ship in relief and wonder. “I can’t believe we made it,” he said.

“We haven’t gotten in yet,” said Ariel, edgily.

He approached and inserted his ID tab into the slot. After a moment, it opened. “Of course,” he murmured. “R. David gave us compatible IDs.”

The ship was a Star Seeker, identical, or nearly so, to the one they’d left in orbit around Kappa Whale. On the ground, it was clumsy getting around inside it, but that was normal. They climbed slowly to the bow control room.

Ariel climbed easily-like Derec, not pushing it-and he was relieved to see that she was gaining strength day by day. He himself felt better after last night’s sleep than he had in weeks, but knew that his reserves were still very low. The acceleration seat was a relief after the climb.

“Checklist, please,” he said, depressing the Ship key and speaking to the air. The ship obediently displayed a checklist on a visor, and they went over it carefully. Some items had to be checked personally, most importantly, food. Ariel reported with concern that that was a low item.

“Only a few imperishables,” she said, “a few packages of radiation-preserved foods and some cans.”

Derec hesitated. That could be serious.

“What do you think?”

“I’d say take the chance,” Ariel said. “The TBI must be going mad over our disappearance. If they do a computer check, they may wonder about this Spacer ship. Don’t tell me they don’t watch carefully every takeoff and landing.

“Of course they wouldn’t be able to interfere; Earthers had little control over their own port, as they owned few ships. Still, if he and Ariel started shopping for food-

“Right. We’ll go.”

When they requested clearance it was readily given, and Derec primed the jets and goosed the micropile. The tubes burst into muffled thunder. He switched to air-breathing mode as soon as they had a little speed, and took an economical high-G trajectory into space. In minutes, the great blue world was off to one side.

“Which way?” Ariel asked.

There was a slight technical advantage in aiming one’s ship toward one’s objective, since intrinsic velocity was unaltered by passage through hyperspace. But the adjustment could be made at the other end.

“Straight out,” he said. “I’m not exactly afraid of pursuit, but-”

“Right. “

“Straight out” was in the direction Earth was traveling. Ariel calculated their fuel and Derec elected to use twenty percent. He liked a lot of maneuvering reserve. The bum wasn’t long, and when it was over, Earth had not altered much. It was more aft of them, and only a bit smaller. Now, though, there was a wall of delta-V between them and it: in order to catch them, any ship would have to match their change of velocity -their delta-V.

“We’ve got time to kill,” Derec said, feeling tired. Reaction weighed him down even in the absence of gravity.

“Think we should rig the condenser?” Ariel asked.

The thought of the excursion in a space-suit made him feel even more tired. Then he thought: Of course, Ariel can do it. She’s not sick any more.

She was still weak, though, despite her rapid recovery. And he himself was not up to it.

“It’s only for a week or two,” he said. “I think the ship can handle it. It’s only for two people, also.”

Ariel nodded. “Listen,” she said. “How do you feel? You seem better after your sleep, but you’re still sick. Just knowing what’s going on inside hasn’t cured you.”

That was true. “I feel tired at the moment. Why?”

“I want to talk about Robot City. I want to talk to you about everything we went through together, right back to the control room of Aranimas’s ship, before Rockliffe Station.”

She looked at him, her eyes big and intent. “I want all the help you can give me to recover my memory.”

That he could understand. “Of course, I’llbe glad to help. I just wish I could be more helpful.”

Ariel opened her mouth, closed it, her face pink. “Derec…” she said. “I…Derec, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more about yourself-about us. But I couldn’t! I couldn’t tell you I had amnemonic plague. And I-I can’t talk about us-from before. I’m not sure of my memories-I’ve lost so much, and I don’t know how much I can trust of what I have now. I’m sorry-but it’s just too uncertain-and too painful.”

Illness can make a person’s mind preternaturally clear. This was a girl who had been exiled and disinherited for having contracted a hideous disease. “Of course.”

Her feeling for him was obvious-the attraction, the repulsion, pain and pleasure intertwined in memories he didn’t share. Memories that now she couldn’t trust.

“No need to apologize,” he said gently. “There’s been nothing between us since Aranimas’s control room. Your previous memories, real or unreal, are of a different and forgotten person-whose name I don’t even know.”

She managed a weak smile. “True, that-person is forgotten. It’s true. You are a different person. Derec-do you mind if I don’t tell you your-his-name? I’m not sure I really do know it. Besides, it’s easier for me to think of you as Derec-”

Derec suppressed a sharp, small pain. His lack of a past was an emptiness that was always with him. “Of course I don’t mind,” he said. “Some things are more important than others. You are more important to me than any memory.”

And that was certainly true.

“Oh, Derec!” Ariel plunged at him, grappled him in a bearhug that sent them wheeling, laughing, through the air of the little ship, colliding with the bulkheads and the control board. Fortunately, the hoods were down over the control sections.

Lingering in the vicinity of Earth for a week was a risky business on several counts, Derec thought, but he had not wanted to bum more fuel unless he had to. Refueling was, in one sense, no problem: the rocket simply heated reaction mass with the micropile and flung it aft at very high velocity. Almost any kind of mass would do, and powdered rock in water-a slurry-was a very good reaction mass. It could be gotten almost anywhere. Water was next best; the ship was equipped to handle slurry, and the pumps could deal easily with water. These items were readily available in space or on planets.

There might not be time to stop and spend ten hours refueling, though. And they could well find themselves in a system with abundant fuel for them, but lacking the reserve fuel necessary to maneuver to it.

Ariel was a competent pilot herself, and had been traveling on her own for some time-Derec didn’t know how long-before being captured by Aranimas. And she was more reckless than he.

“If we’re going to spend all this time drifting, why don’t we do it in safety-at Kappa Whale? Or off Robot City?”

“If we’re pursued, we’ll bum more,” Derec said. “That would mean we’d have to bum still more at Robot City to lose our intrinsic velocity.”

“I think we should hurry,” she said. “Derec, I’m not happy about your condition. I don’t think you’re getting better. Every now and then you go off into a sort of fugue.”

It was true that occasionally the monitor opened, and the chemfets festering in his bloodstream droned an emotionless report into his mind about having overcome this or that difficulty or achieved this or that milestone of their growth. He supposed all this would mean much to Dr. Avery. To him it meant nothing, but he was not able to tune out the reports.

“At least I don’t go into convulsions anymore,” he said. The one incident was all there had been, but Ariel was obviously still frightened by the memory. He was glad he hadn’t been able to see himself. “You occasionally have-fugues, I guess, in an even more literal sense-yourself.”

She nodded. “I see you do the same thing-I suppose you still have flashes of memory, when memories return, so vividly that you are there.”

“Usually when I’m asleep, and I lose most of them,” Derec said.

Her memories were returning in a massive way, compared to his own. She wasn’t getting anything like a coherent account of her past life, of course, merely a chunk here and a chunk there. Like pages of a book torn out and scattered by the wind, here a leaf caught by a tree, there one against a house.

Four days out from Earth, with the mother planet a mere blue-green brilliant star behind them, now getting closer and closer to Sol, Derec and Ariel agreed that it was safe to open the hyperwave. They called Wolruf and Mandelbrot at Kappa Whale, but got no answer.

“Can you shift the elements so it broadcasts on the same wavelengths as the Keys to Perihelion do?” Ariel asked.

He had told her their deduction about the failure of the hyperwave aboard Dr. Avery’s other Star Seeker; she had been in such a feverish state that it hadn’t registered with her at the time.

Derec shook his head somberly. “It calls for precision tools and a fairly lengthy research effort. First, just to determine what broadcasts the Keys spray their static on.”

“Ship static wavelengths, perhaps?”

“Perhaps…Likely, in fact.” Hyperwave static was a fact of life, one the usual hyperwave link was designed to ignore. “But when did you even hear of a hyperlink designed to pick up static?”

Ariel smiled faintly, shook her head.

A week out from Earth, they started calculating the Jump to Kappa Whale.

“It hasn’t been too long,” said Ariel. “Wolruf’s food will hold out, of course, and so will their energy. The micropile is good for years yet. They’ve a sufficient supply of fuel to do what little maneuvering they may require. They could Jump out of Kappa Whale and back to avoid pursuit, if they have to.”

“So they should still be there. Where would they go, without us, if they acquired star charts?”

Ariel couldn’t guess.

Charts were one of the first things he and Ariel had checked for when they had entered the ship. There was a complete set, and if there hadn’t been, they could have requested a copy from Control. One would have been beamed to them immediately, without a question.

“It’s easier to calculate a single Jump for Kappa Whale,” he said. “But it definitely isn’t safer.”

Ariel calculated three Jumps, and Derec almost agreed. “The trouble is, Kappa Whale is nearly behind us. Your first Jump turns us in hyper, which is possible, but it’s a strain on the engines. I suggest we Jump to Procyon, which is near enough to our line of flight, and do a partial orbit about it, burning to bring us out on direct line for the first of your Jumps.”

She bit her lip and said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m too reckless. I think it’s because I had a sheltered childhood. I never got hurt much when I was a kid.”

Derec grinned. “I have to admit that in my few short months of life I’ve acquired a healthy respect for the laws of chance.”

Their first approximations done, all that remained was to put final figures into the computer and let it solve the equations of the Jump. They needed to know their correct speed and direction with some accuracy, so they would know what to expect when they landed in Procyon’s arms.

Ariel bent to the instruments while Derec fumble-fingeredly tried to set up the computer for their first Jump.

After a long time, he said, “ Ariel, can you handle this? I can’t seem to concentrate, and my fingers are made of rubber.”

She looked at him in concern. “I was afraid you were going off into a fever again.” Twice before on the trip he had had feverish episodes, as the chemfets altered their growth, in turn altering the environment around them: him.

Derec tried to fight off fear. He had no idea yet of the ultimate purpose of the chemfets, and had not been able to “talk” to them. Worse, he had no idea if he was contagious. After that one hug, they had avoided so much as touching each other, for fear that Ariel, too, would be infected with them.

They could well kill him-and might not care if they did.

“Very well,” Ariel said, her voice trembling a little. “Why don’t you take some febrifuge and stretch out? Maybe a nap will bring you out of it.”

It sounded good to him. The febrifuge had helped break the last fever, they thought. He was swallowing the thick liquid carefully, because of free-fall and a slightly swollen throat, when Ariel cried out.

“Yes?” he said, catching his breath and relieved that he had not choked.

“There’s a spaceship closing on us.”

Pursuit from Earth!he thought.

The Star Seeker didn’t have very good detection apparatus, mostly meteor detection. It was this that had flashed an alarm. Meteors, however, do not move very fast. This object was flashing toward them. The detector gave two readings, and Derec finally-through the throb in his head -concluded that their assailant had come up behind a more slowly moving rock.

“We should be able to get some kind of picture,” said Ariel.

“It’s still too far off, I think, for a visual image,” Derec said. He blinked his eyes to bring his vision back to a single focus. “I wish we had neutrino detectors.”

All nuclear power plants gave off neutrinos, and nobody bothers to shield them off. A neutrino reading would give them an estimate of power generating capacity, and thus of ship size. Of course, a battleship and a medium freighter would have similar-sized power plants, but some information would be better than none.

“Heat?”

“It isn’t burning at the moment,” she told him, consulting the bolometer. “It must have spotted us days ago and burned to intercept.”

“Go ahead and enter our Jump in the computer,” he said. It was all he could think of, and it wasn’t much. “How long will that take?”

“Too long,” she said gloomily. “You are right, though. It’s the best bet, especially if that’s an Earth Patrol ship. Derec, it might follow.”

He opened his mouth to say that it didn’t matter, then closed it. “Frost!”

They intended to maneuver at Procyon-they might be in the system a week, during which the bigger ship could hunt them down. Nor would there be any hope of help there.

He grasped at a straw. “Bigger ships need more fuel. If he can’t match our maneuvers-”

“And you call me reckless. Let’s not bet on it, okay?”

“Frost.”

The other pilot wasn’t maneuvering: he was swooping in to intercept their course from behind and to one side. He’d cross their course at a very sharp angle, pull ahead, and brake down, to let them drift into his arms. He was moving quite rapidly relative to them, far faster than the rock he was coming up behind, and would have to burn soon or swoop helplessly by them.

Their options were limited: they could fire their rockets to speed up, they could roll the ship and burn to slow down, or they could Jump. It would take time to set up the computer for that; Jumping blind might not mean certain death, it might merely mean being permanently lost in the vastness of the galaxy -or the galaxies! In hyper, all parts of the normal universe were equidistant.

Or they could roll the ship ninety degrees and turn aside.

Ariel didn’t consider it, and Derec didn’t even think of it. They had spent twenty percent of their fuel to acquire their current velocity. They would retain it no matter how much they pushed “sideways” on their course. It would therefore take another twenty percent of their fuel to turn the ship aside at an angle of a mere forty-five degrees-a negligible turn.

“Call for help?” Ariel asked dubiously.

“He’ll be on us in twenty minutes or less,” said Derec glumly. No help could possibly reach them. “Unless he burns toward us. “

“Unlikely.”

“True.” His head wasn’t working right. The rapidly closing ship wouldn’t want more velocity toward them; it would have to brake down enough as it was, when it passed.

“I think we can assume that no Earth Patrol will fire on us without sufficient reason,” Ariel said. “So I propose that we talk to them as politely as possible, but maintain course and speed. We can burn if necessary, but-”

“You think it’s Earth Patrol?” Derec said, then nodded. “A Spacer wouldn’t shoot, either-”

“A Spacer would be calling us. Face it. Whoever this is, it’s an enemy,” Ariel said.

“We should have a good idea of our course and speed relative to Sol before he reaches near point,” Derec said, nodding in agreement. “We can Jump any time after that now that you have the prob input.”

The enemy spaceship wasn’t going to ram, of course; its point of nearest approach was its “near point” with their course, but the two ships would be farther apart-it would then be ahead of them.

“And we won’t provoke them,” Ariel finished.

“What with?” Derec asked, feeling lightheaded.

“You know what I mean.”

Then Derec had it: “We do have a weapon-”

“Comm!” she cried, at the breaking-crystal sound of the chime.

“I hope it’s not a Spacer ship,” she said, worried, as she opened the channel.

Both of them gasped at the face that appeared in trimensional projection above their board.