We Have Fed Our Sea

6

Forward of the ’casting chambers, “above” them during acceleration, were fuel deck, gyros, and air renewal plant. Then you passed through the observation deck, where instruments and laboratory equipment crowded together. A flimsy wall around the shaftway marked off the living quarters: folding bunks, galley, bath, table, benches, shelves, and lockers, all crammed into a six-meter circle.

Seiichi Nakamura wrapped one leg casually around a stanchion, to keep himself from drifting in air currents, and made a ceremony out of leafing through the log-book in his hands. It gave the others a chance to calm down, and the yellow-haired boy, David Ryerson, seemed to need it. The astrophysicist, Maclaren, achieved the unusual feat of lounging in free fall; he puffed an expensive Earth-side cigarette and wrinkled his patrician nose at the pervading smell of an old ship, two hundred years of cooking and sweat and machine oil. The big, ugly young engineer, Sverdlov, merely looked sullen. Nakamura had never met any of them before.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said at last. “Pardon me, I had to check the data recorded by the last pilot. Now I know approximately where we are at.” He laughed with polite self-deprecation. “Of course you are all familiar with the articles. The pilot is captain. His duty is to guide the ship where the chief scientist — Dr. Maclaren-san in this case — wishes, within the limits of safety as determined by his own judgment. In case of my death or disability, command devolves upon the engineer, ah, Sverdlov-san, and you are to return home as soon as practicable. Yes-s-s. But I am sure we will all have a most pleasant and instructive expedition together.”

He felt the banality of his words. It was the law, and a wise one, that authority be defined at once if there were non-Guild personnel aboard. Some pilots contented themselves with reading the regulations aloud, but it had always seemed an unnecessarily cold procedure to Nakamura. Only… he saw a sick bewilderment in Ryerson’s eyes, supercilious humor in Maclaren’s, angry impatience in Sverdlov’s… his attempt at friendliness had gone flat.

“We do not operate so formally,” he went on in a lame fashion. “We shall post a schedule of housekeeping duties and help each other, yes? Well. That is for later. Now as to the star, we have some approximate data and estimates taken by previous watches. It appears to have about four times the mass of Sol; its radius is hardly more than twice Earth’s, possibly less; it emits detectably only in the lower radio frequencies, and even that is feeble. I have here a quick reading of the spectrum which may interest you, Dr. Maclaren.”

The big dark man reached out for it. His brows went up. “Now this,” he said, “is the weirdest collection of wave lengths I ever saw.” He flickered experienced eyes along the column of numbers. “Seems to be a lot of triplets, but the lines appear so broad, judging from the probable errors given, that I can’t be sure without more careful… hm-m-m.” Glancing back at Nakamura: “Just where are we with relation to the star?”

“Approximately two million kilometers from the center of its mass. We are being drawn toward it, of course, since an orbit has not yet been established, but have enough radial velocity of our own to—”

“Never mind.” The sophistication dropped from Maclaren like a tunic. He said with a boy’s eagerness, “I would like to get as near the star as possible. How close do you think you can put us?”

Nakamura smiled. He had a feeling Maclaren could prove likable. “Too close isn’t prudent. There would be meteors.”

“Not around this one!” exclaimed Maclaren. “If physical theory is anything but mescaline dreams, a dead star is the clinker of a supernova. Any matter orbiting in its neighborhood became incandescent gas long ago.”

“Atmosphere?” asked Nakamura dubiously. “Since we have nothing to see by, except starlight, we could hit its air.”

“Hm-m-m. Yes. I suppose it would have some. But not very deep: too compressed to be deep. In fact, the radio photo-sphere, from which the previous watches estimated the star’s diameter, must be nearly identical with the fringes of atmosphere.”

“It would also take a great deal of reaction mass to pull us back out of its attraction, if we got too close,” said Nakamura. He unclipped the specialized slide rule at his belt and made a few quick computations. “In fact, this vessel cannot escape from a distance much less than three-quarters million kilometers, if there is to be reasonable amount of mass left for maneuvering around afterward. And I am sure you wish to explore regions farther from the star, yes-s-s? However, I am willing to go that close.”

Maclaren smiled. “Good enough. How long to arrive?”

“I estimate three hours, including time to establish an orbit.” Nakamura looked around their faces. “If everyone is prepared to go on duty, it is best we get into the desired path at once.”

“Not even a cup of tea first?” grumbled Sverdlov.

Nakamura nodded at Maclaren and Ryerson. “You gentlemen will please prepare tea and sandwiches, and take them to the engineer and myself in about ninety minutes.”

“Now, wait!” protested Maclaren. “We’ve hardly arrived. I haven’t even looked at my instruments. I have to set up—”

“In ninety minutes, if you will be so kind. Very well, let us assume our posts.”

Nakamura turned from Maclaren’s suddenly mutinous look and Sverdlov’s broad grin. He entered the shaftway and pulled himself along it by the rungs. Through the transparent plastic he saw the observation deck fall behind. The boat deck was next, heavy storage levels followed, and then he was forward, into the main turret.

It was a clear plastic bubble, unshuttered now when the sole outside illumination was a wintry blaze of stars.

Floating toward the controls, Nakamura grew aware of the silence. So quiet. So uncountably many stars. The constellations were noticeably distorted, some altogether foreign. He searched a crystal darkness for Capella, but the bulge of the ship hid it from him. No use looking for Sol without a telescope, here on the lonely edge of the known.

Fear of raw emptiness lay tightly coiled within him. He smothered it by routine: strapped himself before the console, checked the instruments one by one, spoke with Sverdlov down the length of the ship. His fingers chattered out a computation on a set of keys, he fed the tape to the robot, he felt a faint tug as the gyros woke up, swiveling the vessel into position for blast. Even now, at the end of acceleration to half light-speed and deceleration to a few hundred kilometers per second, the Cross bore several tons of reaction-mass mercury. The total mass, including hull, equipment, and payload, was a bit over one kiloton. Accordingly, her massive gyroscopes needed half an hour to turn her completely around.

Waiting, he studied the viewscreens. Since he must back down on his goal, what they showed him was more important than what his eyes saw through the turret in the nose. He could not make out the black sun. Well, what do you expect? he asked himself angrily. It must be occulating a few stars, but there are too many. “Dr. Maclaren,” he said into the intercom, “can you give me a radio directional on the target, as a check?”

“Aye, aye.” A surly answer. Maclaren resented having to put his toys to work. He would rather have been taking spectra, reading ionoscopes, gulping gas and dust samples from outside into his analyzers, every centimeter of the way. Well, he would just have to get those data when they receded from the star again.

Nakamura’s eyes strayed down the ship herself, as shown in the viewscreens. Old, he thought. The very nation which built her has ceased to exist. But good work. A man’s work outlives his hands. Though what remains of the little ivory figures my father carved to ornament our house? What chance did my brother have to create, before he shriveled in my arms? No! He shut off the thought, like a surgeon clamping a vein, and refreshed his memory of the Cygnus class.

This hull was a sphere of reinforced self-sealing plastic, fifty meters across, its outside smoothness broken by hatches, ports, air locks, and the like. The various decks sliced it in parallel planes. Aft, diametrically opposite this turret, the hull opened on the fire chamber. And thence ran two thin metal skeletons, thirty meters apart, a hundred meters long, like radio masts or ancient oil derricks. They comprised two series of rings, a couple of centimeters in diameter, with auxiliary wiring and a spidery framework holding it all together — the ion accelerators, built into and supported by the gravitic transceiver web.

“A ten-second test blast, if you please, Engineer Sverdlov,” said Nakamura.

The instruments showed him a certain unbalance in the distribution of mass within the hull. Yussuf bin Suleiman, who had just finished watch aboard the ship and gone back to Earth, was sloppy about… no, it was unjust to think so say that he had his own style of piloting. Nakamura set the pumps to work. Mercury ran from the fuel deck to the trim tanks.

By then the ship was pointed correctly and it was time to start decelerating again. “Stand by for blast … Report … I shall want one-point-five-seven standard gees for—” Nakamura reeled it off almost automatically.

It rumbled in the ship. Weight came, like a sudden fist in the belly. Nakamura held his body relaxed in harness, only his eyes moved, now and then a finger touched a control. The secret of judo, of life, was to hold every part of the organism at ease except those precise tissues needed for the moment’s task — Why was it so damnably difficult to put into practice?

Mercury fed through pipes and pumps, past Sverdlov’s control board, past the radiation wall, into the expansion chamber and through the ionizer and so as a spray past the sunlike heart of a thermonuclear plasma. Briefly, each atom endured a rage of mesons. It broke down, gave up its mass as pure energy, which at once became proton-antiproton pairs. Magnetic fields separated them as they were born: positive and negative particles fled down the linear accelerators. The plasma, converting the death of matter directly to electricity, charged each ring at a successively higher potential. When the particles emerged from the last ring, they were traveling at three-fourths the speed of light.

At such an exhaust velocity, no great mass had to be discharged. Nor was the twin stream visible; it was too efficient. Sensitive instruments might have detected a pale gamma-colored splotch, very far behind the ship, as a few opposite charges finally converged on each other, but that effect was of no importance.

The process was energy-eating. It had to be. Otherwise surplus heat would have vaporized the ship. The plasma furnished energy to spare. The process was a good deal more complex than a few words can describe, and yet less so than an engineer accustomed to more primitive branches of his art might imagine.

Nakamura gave himself up to the instruments. Their readings checked out with his running computation. The Cross was approaching the black star in a complex spiral curve, the resultant of several velocities and two accelerating vectors, which would become a nearly circular orbit seven hundred fifty thousand kilometers out.

He started to awareness of time when Ryerson came up the shaftway rungs. “Oh,” he exclaimed.

“Tea, sir,” said the boy shyly.

“Thank you. Ah… set it down there, please… the regulations forbid entering this turret during blast without inquiring of the — No, no. Please!” Nakamura waved a hand, laughing. “You did not know. There is no harm done.”

He saw Ryerson, stooped under one and a half gravities, lift a heavy head to the foreign stars. The Milky Way formed a cold halo about his tangled hair. Nakamura asked gently, “This is your first time in extrasolar space, yes?”

“Y-yes, sir.” Ryerson licked his lips. The blue eyes were somehow hazy, unable to focus closer than the nebulae.

“Do not—” Nakamura paused. He had been about to say, “Do not be afraid,” but it might hurt. He felt after words. “Space is a good place to meditate,” he said. “I use the wrong word, of course. ‘Meditation,’ in Zen, consists more of an attempt at identification with the universe than verbalized thinking. What I mean to say,” he floundered, “is this: Some people feel themselves so helplessly small out here that they become frightened. Others, remembering that home is no more than a step away through the transmitter, become careless and arrogant, the cosmos merely a set of meaningless numbers to them. Both attitudes are wrong, and have killed men. But if you think of yourself as being a part of everything else — integral — the same forces in you which shaped the suns do you see?”

“The heavens declare the glory of God,” whispered Ryerson, “and the firmament showeth His handiwork… It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

He had not been listening, and Nakamura did not understand English. The pilot sighed. “I think you had best return to the observation deck,” he said. “Dr. Maclaren may have need of you.”

Ryerson nodded mutely and went back down the shaft.

I preach a good theory, Nakamura told himself. Why can I not practice it? Because a stone fell from heaven onto Sarai, and suddenly father and mother and sister and house were not. Because Hideki died in my arms, after the universe had casually tortured him. Because I shall never see Kyoto again, where every morning was full of cool bells. Because I am a slave of myself

And yet, he thought, sometimes I have achieved peace. And only in space.

Now he saw the dead sun through a viewscreen, when his ship swung so that it transitted the Milky Way. It was a tiny blackness. The next time around, it had grown. He wondered if it was indeed blacker than the sky. Nonsense. It should reflect starlight, should it not? But what color was metallic hydrogen? What gases overlay the metal? Space, especially here, was not absolutely black: there was a certain thin but measurable nebular cloud around the star. So conceivably the star might be blacker than the sky.

“I must ask Maclaren,” he murmured to himself. “He can measure it, very simply, and tell me. Meditation upon the concept of blacker than total blackness is not helpful, it seems.” That brought him a wry humor, which untensed his muscles. He grew aware of weariness. It should not have been; he had only been sitting here and pressing controls. He poured a cup of scalding tea and drank noisily and gratefully.

Down and down. Nakamura fell into an almost detached state. Now the star was close, not much smaller than the Moon seen from Earth. It grew rapidly, and crawled still more rapidly around the circle of the viewscreens. Now it was as big as Batu, at closest approach to Sarai. Now it was bigger. The rhythms entered Nakamura’s blood. Dimly, he felt himself become one with the ship, the fields, the immense interplay of forces. And this was why he went again and yet again into space. He touched the manual controls, assisting the robots, correcting, revising, in a pattern of unformulated but bodily known harmonies, a dance, a dream, yielding, controlling, unselfness, Nirvana, peace and wholeness.

Fire!

The shock rammed Nakamura’s spine against his skull. He felt his teeth clashed together. Blood from a bitten tongue welled in his mouth. Thunder roared between the walls.

He stared into the screens, clawing for comprehension. The ship was a million or so kilometers out. The black star was not quite one degree wide, snipped out of an unnamed alien constellation. The far end of the ion accelerator system was white hot. Even as Nakamura watched, the framework curled up, writhed like fingers in agony, and vaporized.

“What’s going on?” Horror bawled from the engine room.

The thrust fell off and weight dropped sickeningly. Nakamura saw hell eat along the accelerators. He jerked his eyes around to the primary megameter. Its needle sank down a tale of numbers. The four outermost rings were already destroyed. Even as he watched, the next one shriveled.

It could not be felt, but he knew how the star’s vast hand clamped on the ship and reeled her inward.

Metal whiffed into space. Underloaded, the nuclear system howled its anger. Echoes banged between shivering decks.

“Cut!” cried Nakamura. His hand slapped the pilot’s master switch.

The silence that fell, and the no-weight, were like death.

Someone’s voice gabbled from the observation deck.

Automatically, Nakamura chopped that interference out of the intercom circuit. “Engineer Sverdlov,” he called. “What happened? Do you know what is wrong?”

“No. No.” A groan. But at least the man lived. “Somehow the the ion streams… seem to have… gotten diverted.

The focusing fields went awry. The blast struck the rings — but it couldn’t happen!”

Nakamura hung onto his harness with all ten fingers. I will not scream, he shouted. I will not scream.

“The ‘caster web seems to be gone, too,” said a rusty machine using his throat. His brother’s dead face swam among the stars, just outside the turret, and mouthed at him.

“Aye.” Sverdlov must be hunched over his own viewscreens. After a while that tingled, he said harshly: “Not yet beyond repair. All ships carry a few replacement parts, in case of meteors or — We can repair the web and transmit ourselves out of here.”

“How long to do that job? Quickly!”

“How should I know?” A dragon snarl. Then: “I’d have to go out and take a closer look. The damaged sections will have to be cut away. It’ll probably be necessary to machine some fittings. With luck, we can do it in several hours.”

Nakamura paused. He worked his hands together, strength opposing strength; he drew slow breaths, rolled his head to loosen the neck muscles, finally closed his eyes and contemplated peace for as long as needful. And a measure of peace came. The death of this little ego was not so terrible after all, provided said ego refrained from wishing to hold Baby-san in its arms just one more time.

Almost absently, he punched the keys of the general computer. It was no surprise to see his guess verified.

“Are you there?” called Sverdlov, as if across centuries. “Are you there, pilot?”

“Yes. I beg your pardon. Several hours to repair the web, did you say? By that time, drifting free, we will have crashed on the star.”

“What? But—”

“Consider its acceleration of us. And we still have inward radial velocity of our own. I think I can put us into an orbit before the whatever-it-is force has quite destroyed the accelerators. Yes.”

“But you’ll burn them up! And the web! We’ll damage the web beyond repair!”

“Perhaps something can be improvised, once we are in orbit. But if we continue simply falling, we are dead men.”

“No!” Almost, Sverdlov shrieked. “Listen, maybe we can repair the web in time. Maybe we’ll only need a couple of hours for the job. There’s a chance. But caught in an orbit, with the web melted or vaporized… do you know how to build one from raw metal? I don’t!”

“We have a gravitics specialist aboard. If anyone can fashion us a new transmitter, he can.”

“And if he can’t, we’re trapped out here! To starve! Better to crash and be done!”

Nakamura’s hands began to dance over the keyboard. He demanded data of the instruments, calculations of the computers, and nothing of the autopilot. For no machine could help steer a vessel whose thrust-engine was being unpredictably devoured. This would be a manual task.

“I am the captain,” he said, as mildly as possible.

“Not any more!”

Nakamura slapped his master switch. “You have just been cut out of the control circuits,” he said. “Please remain at your post.” He opened the intercom to the observation deck. “Will the two honorable scientists be so kind as to stop the engineer from interfering with the pilot?”