We Have Fed Our Sea

11

Nakamura noted in the log, which he had religiously maintained, the precise moment when the Cross blasted from the dead star. The others had not even tried to keep track of days. There was none out here. There was not even time, in any meaningful sense of the word — only existence, with an unreal impression of sunlight and leaves and women before existence began, like an inverted prenatal memory.

The initial minutes of blast were no more veritable. They took their posts and stared without any sense of victory at their instruments. Nakamura in the control turret, Maclaren on the observation deck feeding him data, Sverdlov and Ryerson watchful in the engine room, felt themselves merely doing another task in an infinite succession.

Sverdlov was the first who broke from his cold womb and knew himself alive. After an hour of poring over his dials and viewscreens, through eyes bulged by two gravities, he ran a hand across the bristles on his jaw. “Holy fecal matter,” he whispered, “the canine-descended thing is hanging together.”

And perhaps only Ryerson, who had worked outside with him for weeks of hours, could understand.

The lattice jutting from the sphere had a crude, unfinished look. And indeed little had been done toward restoring the transceiver web; time enough for that while they hunted a planet. Sverdlov had simply installed a framework to support his re-fashioned accelerator rings, antimagnetic shielding, circuits, and incidental wires, tubes, grids, capacitors, transformers… He had tested with a milliampere of ion current, cursed, readjusted, tested again, nodded, asked for a full amp, made obscene comments, readjusted, retested, and wondered if he could have done it without Ryerson. It was not so much that he needed the extra hands, but the boy had been impossibly patient. When Sverdlov could take no more electronic misbehavior, and went back into the ship and got a sledge and pounded at an iron bar for lack of human skulls to break, Ryerson had stayed outside trying a fresh hookup.

Once, when they were alone among galaxies, Sverdlov asked him about it. “Aren’t you human, kid? Don’t you ever want to throw a rheostat across the room?”

Ryerson’s tone came gnatlike in his earphones, almost lost in an endless crackling of cosmic noise. “It doesn’t do any good. My father taught me that much. We sailed a lot at home.”

“So?”

“The sea never forgives you.”

Sverdlov glanced at the other, couldn’t find him in the tricky patching of highlight and blackness, and suddenly confronted Polaris. It was like being stabbed. How many men, he thought with a gasp, had followed the icy North Star to their weird?

“Of course,” Ryerson admitted humbly, “it’s not so easy to get along with people.”

And the lattice grew. And finally it tested sound, and Sverdlov told Nakamura they could depart.

The engine which had accelerated the Cross to half light speed could not lift her straight away from this sun. Nor could her men have endured a couple of hundred gravities, even for a short time. She moved out at two gees, her gyros holding the blast toward the mass she was escaping, so that her elliptical orbit became a spiral. It would take hours to reach a point where the gravitational field had dropped so far that a hyperbolic path would be practicable.

Sverdlov crouched in his harness, glaring at screens and indicators. That cinder wasn’t going to let them escape this easily! He had stared too long at its ashen face to imagine that. There would be some new trick, and he would have to be ready. God, he was thirsty! The ship did have a water-regenerating unit, merely because astronautical regulations at the time she was built insisted on it. Odd, owing your life to some bureaucrat with two hundred years of dust on his own filing cabinets. But the regenerator was inadequate and hadn’t been used in all that time. No need for it: waste material went into the matterbank, and was reborn as water or food or anything else, according to a signal sent from the Lunar station with every change of watch.

But there were no more signals coming to the Cross. Food, once eaten, was gone for good. Recycled water was little more than enough to maintain life. Fire and thunder! thought Sverdlov, I can smell myself two kilometers away. I might not sell out the Fellowship for a bottle of beer, but the Protector had better not offer me a case.

A soft brroom-brroom-brroom pervaded his awareness, the engine talked to itself. Too loud somehow. The instruments read O.K., but Sverdlov did not think an engine with a good destiny would make so much noise. He glanced back at the viewscreens. The black sun was scarcely visible. It couldn’t be seen at all unless you knew just where to look. The haywired ugliness of the ion drive made a cage for stars. The faintest blue glow wavered down the rings. Shouldn’t be, of course. Inefficiency. St. Elmo’s fire danced near the after end of the assembly. “Engine room to pilot. How are we making out?”

“Satisfactory.” Nakamura’s voice sounded thin. It must be a strain, yes, he was doing a hundred things manually for which the ship lacked robots. But who could have anticipated — ?

Sverdlov narrowed his eyes. “Take a look at the tail of this rig, Dave,” he said. “The rear negatron ring. See anything?”

“Well—” The boy’s eyes, dark-rimmed and bloodshot, went heavily after Sverdlov’s pointing finger. “Electrostatic discharge, that blue light—”

“See anything else?” Sverdlov glanced uneasily at the megameters. He did not have a steady current going down the accelerators, it fluctuated continually by several per cent. But was the needle for the negatron side creeping ever so slowly downward?

“No. No, I can’t.”

“Should’a put a thermocouple in every ring. Might be a very weak deflection of ions, chewing at the end-most till all at once its focusing goes blooey and we’re in trouble.”

“But we tested every single — And the star’s magnetic field is attenuating with every centimeter we advance.”

“Vibration, my cub-shaped friend. It’d be easy to shake one of those jury-rigged magnetic coils just enough out of alignment to — Hold it!”

The terminal starboard coil glowed red Blue electric fire squirted forth and ran up the lattice. The negative megameter dropped ten points and Sverdlov felt a little surge as the ship wallowed to one side from an unbalanced thrust.

“Engine room stopping blast!” he roared. His hand had already gone crashing onto the main lever.

The noise whined away to a mumble. He felt himself pitched off a cliff as high as eternity.

“What’s the trouble?” barked Maclaren’s voice.

Sverdlov relieved himself of a few unrepeatable remarks. “Something’s gone sour out there. The last negatron accelerator began to glow and the current to drop. Didn’t you feel us yaw?”

“Oh, Lord, have mercy,” groaned Ryerson. He looked physically sick. “Not again.”

“Ah, it needn’t be so bad,” said Sverdlov. “Me, I’m surprised the mucking thing held together this long. You can’t do much with baling wire and spit, you know.” Inwardly, he struggled with a wish to beat somebody’s face.

“I presume we are in a stable orbit,” said Nakamura. “But I would feel a good deal easier if the repair can be made soon. Do you want any help?”

“No. Dave and I can handle it. Stand by to give us a test blast.”

Sverdlov and Ryerson got into their spacesuits. “I swear this smells fouler every day,” said the Krasnan. “I didn’t believe I could be such a filth generator.” He slapped down his helmet and added into the radio: “So much for man the glorious starconqueror.”

“No,” said Ryerson.

“What?”

“The stinks are only the body. That isn’t important. What counts is the soul inside.”

Sverdlov cocked his bullet head and stared at the other armored shape. “Do you actually believe that guff?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to preach or—”

“Never mind. I don’t feel like arguing either.” Sverdlov laughed roughly. “I’ll give you just one thing to mull over, though. If the body’s such a valueless piece of pork, and we’ll all meet each other in the sweet bye and bye, and so on, why’re you busting every gut you own to get back to your wife?”

He heard an outraged breath in his earphones. For a moment he felt he had failed somehow. There was no room here for quarrels. Ah, shaft it, he told himself. If an Earthling don’t like to listen to a colonial, he can jing-bangle well stay out of space.

They gathered tools and instruments in a silence that smoldered. When they left the air lock, they had the usual trouble in seeing. Then their pupils expanded and their minds switched over to the alien gestalt. A raw blaze leaped forth and struck them.

Feeling his way aft along the lattice, Sverdlov sensed his anger bleed away. The boy was right — it did no good to curse dead matter. Save your rage for those who needed it, tyrants and knaves and their sycophants. And you might even wonder — it was horrible to think — if they were worth it either. He stood with ten thousand bitter suns around him; but none was Sol or Tau Ceti. 0 Polaris, death’s lodestar, are we as little as all that?

He reached the end of the framework, clipped his life line on, and squirted a light-diffusing fog at the ring. Not too close, he didn’t want it to interfere with his ion stream, but it gave him three-dimensional illumination. He let his body float out behind while he pulled himself squinting-close to the accelerator.

“Hm-m-m, yes, it’s been pitted,” he said. “Naturally it would be the negatron side which went wrong. Protons do a lot less harm, striking terrene matter. Hand me that counter, will you?”

Ryerson, wordless and faceless, gave him the instrument. Sverdlov checked for radioactivity. “Not enough to matter,” he decided. ‘We won’t have to replace this ring, we stopped the process in time. By readjusting the magnetic coils we can compensate for the change in the electric focusing field caused by its gnawed-up shape. I hope.”

Ryerson said nothing. Good grief, thought Sverdlov, did I offend him that much? Hitherto they had talked a little when working outside, not real conversation but a trivial remark now and then, a grunt for response… just enough to drown out the hissing of the stars.

“Hello, pilot. Give me a microamp. One second duration.”

Sverdlov moved out of the way. Even a millionth of an ampere blast should be avoided, if it was an anti-proton current.

Electric sparks crawled like ivy over the bones of the accelerator. Sverdlov, studying the instruments he had planted along the ion path, nodded. “What’s the potentiometer say, Dave?” he asked. “If it’s saying anything fit to print, I mean.”

“Standard,” snapped Ryerson.

Maybe I should apologize, thought Sverdlov. And then, in a geyser: Judas, no! If he’s so thin-skinned as all that, he can rot before I do.

The stars swarmed just out of reach. Sometimes changes in the eyeball made them seem to move. Like flies. A million burning flies. Sverdlov swatted, unthinkingly, and snarled to himself.

After a while it occurred to him that Ryerson’s nerves must also be rubbed pretty thin. You shouldn’t expect the kid to act absolutely sensibly. I lost my own head at the very start of this affair, thought Sverdlov. The memory thickened his temples with blood. He began unbolting the Number One magnetic coil as if it were an enemy he must destroy as savagely as possible.

“O.K., gimme another microamp one-second test.”

“Try shifting Number Two a few centimeters forward,” said Ryerson.

“You crazy?” snorted Sverdlov. Yes, I suppose we’re all a bit crazy by now. “Look, if the deflected stream strikes here, you’ll want to bend it down like so and—”

“Never mind.” Ryerson could not be seen to move, in the bulk of his armor, but Sverdlov imagined him turning away with a contemptuous shrug. It took several minutes of tinkering for the Krasnan to realize that the Earthling had visualized the interplay of forces correctly.

He swallowed. “You were right,” he emitted.

“Well, let’s get it reassembled,” said Ryerson coldly.

Very good, Earth snob, sir. Sverdlov attacked the coils for several more minutes. “Test blast.” Not quite. Try another setting. “Test blast. Repeat.” That seemed to be it. “Give me a milliamp this time… A full amp… hm-m-m.” The current had flowed too short a time to heat the ring, but needles wavered wildly.

“We’re still getting some deflection,” said Sverdlov. “Matter of velocity distribution. A certain small percentage of the particles have abnormal velocities and—” He realized he was crouched under Ryerson’s hidden eyes babbling the obvious. “I’ll try sliding this one a wee bit more aside. Gimme that vernier wrench — So. One amp test blast, please.”

There was no further response from the instruments. Ryerson let out a whistling sigh. “We seem to have done it,” he said.

We? thought Sverdlov. Well, you handed me a few tools!

Aloud: “We won’t know for sure till full thrust is applied.”

“Of course.” Ryerson spoke hesitantly. Sverdlov recognized the tone, it was trying to be warm. Ryerson was over his fit of temper.

Well, I’m not!

“There isn’t anything to be done about that except to try it and see, is there?” went on the Earthling.

“And if we still get significant deflection, drag on our suits and crawl back here — maybe a dozen times? No!”

“Why, that was how we did it before.”

“I’m getting awfully hungry,” said Sverdlov. Suddenly it flared out of him. “I’m sick of it! I’m sick of being cooped up in my own stink, and yours, I’m sick of the same stupid faces and the same stupid remarks, yes, the same stars even! I’ve had enough! Get on back inside. I’ll stay here and watch under acceleration. If anything goes wrong, I’ll be right on the spot to fix it.”

“But—”

Nakamura’s voice crackled above the mutter of stars. “What are you thinking of, Engineer Sverdlov? Two gravities would pull you off the ship! And we’re not maneuverable enough to rescue you.”

“This life line is tested for two thousand kilos,” said the Krasnan. “It’s standard procedure to make direct high-acceleration checks on the blast.”

“By automatic instruments.”

“Which we haven’t got. Do you know the system is fully adjusted? Are you so sure there isn’t some small cumulative effect, so the thing will quit on you one day when you need it the most?”

Maclaren’s tone joined in, dry and somehow remote: “This is a curious time to think about that.”

“I am the engineer,” said Sverdlov stiffly. “Read the ship’s articles again.”

“Well,” said Nakamura. “Well, but—”

“It would save time,” said Ryerson. “Maybe even a few days’ worth of time, if the coils really are badly maladjusted.”

“Thanks, Dave,” said Sverdlov clumsily.

“Well,” said Nakamura, “you have the authority, of course. But I ask you again—”

“All I ask of you is two gravities’ worth of oof for a few seconds,” interrupted Sverdlov. “When I’m satisfied this ring will function properly, so we won’t have to be forever making stops like this, I’ll come inside.”

He hooked his legs about the framework and began resetting the instruments clamped onto it. “Get on back, Dave,” he said.

“Why… I thought I would—”

“No need to.”

“But there is! You can’t read every dial simultaneously, and if there’s work to be done you’ll need help.”

“I’ll call you if I want you. Give me your tool belt.” Sverdlov took it from reluctant hands and buckled it around himself. “There is a certain amount of hazard involved, Dave. If I should be unlucky, you’re the closest approximation to an engineer the ship will have. She can’t spare both of us.”

“But why take any risk at all?”

“Because I’m sick of being here! Because I’ve got to fight back at that black coal or start howling! Now get inside!”

As he watched the other blocky shape depart him, Sverdlov thought: I am actually not being very rational, am I now? But who could expect it, a hundred light-years from the sun?

As he made ready, he puzzled over what had driven him. There was the need to wrestle something tangible; and surely to balance on this skeleton of metal, under twice his normal weight, was a challenge. Beyond that, less important really, was the logic of it: the reasons he had given were sound enough as far as they went, and you could starve to death while proceeding at the pace of caution.

And below it all, he thought, was a dark wish he did not understand. Li-Tsung of Krasna would have told him to live at all costs, sacrifice all the others, to save himself for his planet and the Fellowship. But there were limits. You didn’t have to accept Dave’s Calvinism — though its unmerciful God seemed very near this dead star — to swallow the truth that some things were more important than survival. Than even the survival of a cause.

Maybe I’m trying to find out what those things are, he thought confusedly.

He crawled “up” till his feet were braced on a cross-member, with the terminal accelerator ring by his right ankle but the electroprober dial conveniently near his faceplate. His right hand gripped a vernier wrench, his left drew taut the life line. “Stand by for blast,” he said into his radio. “Build up to two gees over a one-minute period, then hold it till I say cut.”

Nothing happened for a while except the crawling of the constellations as gyros brought the ship around. Good boy, Seiichi! He’d get some escape distance out of even a test blast. “Stand by,” it said in Sverdlov’s earphones. And his weight came back to him, until he felt an exultant straining in the muscles of shoulder and arm and leg and belly; until his heart thudded loud enough to drown out the thin crackling talk of the stars.

The hull was above him now, a giant sphere upheld on twin derricks. Down the middle of each derrick guttered a ghostly blue light, and sparks writhed and fountained at junction points. The constellations shone chill through the electric discharge.

Inefficient, thought Sverdlov. The result of reconstruction without adequate instruments. But it’s pretty. Like festival fireworks. He remembered a pyrotechnic display once, when he was small. His mother had taken him. They sat on a hired catamaran and watched wonder explode softly above the lake.

“Uh,” grunted Sverdlov. He narrowed his eyes to peer at the detector dial. There certainly was a significant deflection yet, when whole grams of matter were being thrown out every second. It didn’t heat up the ring very much, maybe not enough to notice; but negatrons plowed through terrene electron shells, into terrene nuclei, and atoms were destroyed. Presently there would be crystal deformation, fatigue, ultimate failure. He reported his findings and added with a sense of earned boasting: “I was right. This had to be done.”

“I shall halt blast, then. Stand by.”

Weightlessness came back. Sverdlov reached out delicately with his wrench, nipped a coil nut, and loosened the bolt. He shifted the coil itself backward. “I’ll have this fixed in a minute. There! Now give me three gees for about thirty seconds, just to make sure.”

“Three? Are you certain you—”

“I am. Fire!”

It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man. Maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who happened to live somewhere else. Oh, come off it, he told himself, next thing you’ll be teaching a Humane League kindergarten.

The force on him climbed, and his muscles rejoiced in it. At three gees there was no deflection against the ring or was there? He peered closer. His right hand, weighted by the tool it still bore, slipped from the member on which it had been leaning. Sverdlov was thrown off balance. He flung both arms wide, instinctively trying not to fall. His right went between the field coils and into the negatron stream.

Fire sprouted.

Nakamura cut the drive. Sverdlov hung free, staring by starlight at his arm. The blast had sliced it across as cleanly as an industrial torch. Blood and water vapor rushed out and froze in a small cloud, pale among the nebulae.

There was no pain. Not yet. But his eardrums popped as pressure fell. “Engine room!” he snapped. A part of him stood aside and marveled at his own mind. What a survival machine, when the need came! “Emergency! Drop total accelerator voltage to one thousand. Give me about ten amps down the tube. Quick!”

He felt no weight, such a blast didn’t exert enough push on the hull to move it appreciably. He thrust his arm back into the ion stream. Pain did come now, but in his head, as the eardrums ruptured. One minute more and he would have the bends. The gas of antiprotons roared without noise around the stump of his wrist. Steel melted. Sverdlov prodded with a hacksaw gripped in his left hand, trying to seal the spacesuit arm shut.

He seemed far away from everything. Night ate at his brain. He asked himself once in wonderment: “Was I planning to do this to other men?”

When he thought the sleeve was sealed, he withdrew it. “Cut blast,” he whispered. “Come and get me.” His airtanks fed him oxygen, pressure climbed again inside the suit. It was good to float at the end of a life line, breathing. Until he began to strangle on his own blood. Then he gave up and accepted the gift of darkness.