We Have Fed Our Sea

8

Silence and no-weight were dreamlike. For a reason obscure to himself, Maclaren had dimmed the fluoros around the observation deck, so that twilight filled it and the scientific apparatus crouched in racks and on benches seemed to be a herd of long-necked monsters. Thus there was nothing to drown the steely brilliance of the stars, when you looked out an unshuttered port.

The star hurtled across his field of view. Her eccentric orbit took the Cross around it in thirty-seven minutes. Here, at closest approach, they were only half a million kilometers away. The thing had the visual diameter of three full Moons. It was curiously vague of outline: a central absolute blackness, fading toward deep gray near the edges where starlight caught an atmosphere more savagely compressed than Earth’s ocean abyss. Through the telescope, there seemed to be changeable streaks and mottlings, bands, spots, a hint of color too faint for the eye to tell… as if the ghosts of burned-out fires still walked.

Quite oblate, Maclaren reminded himself. That would have given us a hint, if we’d known. Or the radio spectrum; now I realize, when it’s too late, that the lines really are triplets, and their broadening is Doppler shift.

The silence was smothering.

Nakamura drifted in. He poised himself in the air and waited quietly.

“Well?” said Maclaren.

“Sverdlov is still outside, looking at the accelerators and web,” said Nakamura. “He will not admit there is no hope.”

“Neither will I,” said Maclaren.

“Virtually the whole system is destroyed. Fifty meters of it have vanished. The rest is fused, twisted, short-circuited; a miracle it continued to give some feeble kind of blast, so I could at least find an orbit.” Nakamura laughed. Maclaren thought that that high-pitched, apologetic giggle was going to be hard to live with, if one hadn’t been raised among such symbols. “We carry a few spare parts, but not that many.”

“Perhaps we can make some,” said Maclaren.

“Perhaps,” said Nakamura. “But of course the accelerators are of no importance in themselves, the reconstruction of the web is the only way to get home… What has the young man Ryerson to say about that?”

“Don’t know. I sent him off to check the manifest and then look over the stuff the ship actually carries. He’s been gone a long time, but—”

“I understand,” said Nakamura. “It is not easy to face a death sentence when one is young.”

Maclaren nodded absently and returned his gaze to the scribbled data sheets in one hand. After a moment, Nakamura cleared his throat and said awkwardly: “Ah… I beg your pardon… about the affair of Engineer Sverdlov—”

“Well?” Maclaren didn’t glance up from the figures. He had a lot of composure of his own to win back.

The fact is, he thought through a hammer-beat in his temples, I am the man afraid. Now that there is nothing I can do, only a cold waiting until word is given me whether I can live or must die… I find that Terangi Maclaren is a coward.

Sickness was a doubled fist inside his gullet.

“I am not certain what, er, happened,” stumbled Nakamura, “and I do not wish to know. If you will be so kind… I hope you were not unduly inconvenienced—”

“No. It’s all right.”

“If we could tacitly ignore it. As I think he has tried to do. Even the best men have a breaking point.”

I always knew that there must one day be an end to white sails above green water, and to wine, and to masks, and a woman’s laughter. I had not expected it yet.

“After all,” said Nakamura, “we must work together now.”

“Yes.”

I had not expected it a light-century from the home of my fathers. My life was spent in having fun, and now I find that the black star has no interest at all in amusing me.

“Do you know yet what happened?” asked Nakamura. “I would not press you for an answer, but—”

“Oh, yes,” said Maclaren. “I know.”

Beneath a scrapheap of songs and keels, loves and jokes and victories, which mattered no longer but would not leave him, Maclaren found his brain working with a startling dry clarity. “I’m not sure how much we can admit to the others,” he said. “Because this could have been averted, if we’d proceeded with more caution.”

“I wondered a little at the time.” Nakamura laughed again. “But who would look for danger around a… a corpse?”

“Broadened spectrum lines mean a quickly rotating star,” said Maclaren. “Since the ship was not approaching in the equatorial plane, we missed the full Doppler effect, but we might have stopped to think. And tripled lines mean a Zeeman splitting.”

“Ah.” Nakamura sucked in a hiss of air. “Magnetism?”

“The most powerful bloody magnetic field ever noticed around any heavenly body,” said Maclaren. “Judging from the readings I get here, the polar field is… ph, I can’t say yet. Five, six, seven thousand gauss — somewhere on that order of magnitude. Fantastic! Sol’s field is only fifty-three gauss. They don’t ever go much above two thousand. Except here.”

He rubbed his chin. “Blackett effect,” he went on. The steadiness of his words was a faintly pleasing surprise to him. “Magnetic field is directly related to angular velocity. The reason no live sun has a field like this dead thing here is that it would have to rotate too fast. Couldn’t take the strain; it would go whoomp and scatter pieces of star from hell to tiffin.” An odd, perverse comfort in speaking lightly: a lie to oneself, persuading the subconscious mind that its companions were not doomed men and a black sun, but an amorous girl waiting for the next jest in a Citadel tavern. “As this star collapsed on itself, after burning out, it had to spin faster, d’ you see? Conservation of angular momentum. It seems to have had an unusual amount to start with, of course, but the rotational speed is chiefly a result of its degenerate state. And that same super-density allows it to twirl with such indecent haste. You might say the bursting strength is immensely greater.”

“Yes,” said Nakamura. “I see.”

“I’ve been making some estimates,” said Maclaren. “It didn’t actually take a very strong field to wreck us. We could easily have been protected against it. Any ion-drive craft going close to a planet is — a counter-magnetic circuit with a feedback loop — elementary. But naturally, these big ships were not meant to land anywhere. They would certainly never approach a live sun this close, and the possibility of this black dwarf having such a vicious magnetism… well, no one ever thought of it.”

He shrugged. “Figure it out yourself, Captain Nakamura. The old H, r, v formula. A proton traveling at three-fourths c down a hundred-meter tube is deflected one centimeter by a field of seven one-hundredths gauss. We entered such a field at a million kilometers out, more or less. A tenuous but extremely energetic stream of ionized gas hit the outermost accelerator ring. I make the temperature equivalent of that velocity to be something like three million million degrees Absolute, if I remember the value of the gas constant correctly.

The closer to the star we got, the stronger field we were in, so the farther up the ions struck.

“Of course,” finished Maclaren in a tired voice, “all these quantities are just estimates, using simple algebra. Since we slanted across the magnetic field, you’d need a vectoral differential equation to describe exactly what happened. You might find occasion to change my figures by a factor of five or six. But I think I have the general idea.”

“Yes-s-s,” said Nakamura, “I think you do.”

They hung side by side in dimness and looked out at the eye-hurting bright stars.

“Do you know,” said Maclaren, “there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity.”

“I am not so sure.” Nakamura’s reply jarred him a little, by its sober literal-mindedness. “I have known many… well, shall I call them unintellectual people… who lived happy and useful lives.”

“I wasn’t referring to that kind of stupidity.” Maclaren went through the motions of a chuckle. “I meant our own kind. Yours and mine. We bear the guilt, you know. We should have stopped and thought the situation over before rushing in. I did want to approach more slowly, measuring as we went, and you overruled me.”

“I am ashamed,” said Nakamura. He bent his face toward his hands.

“No, let me finish. I should have come here with a well-thought-out program in mind. I gave you no valid reasons not to establish a close-in orbit at once. My only grumble was that you wouldn’t allow me time to take observations as we went toward the star. You were perfectly justified, on the basis of the information available to you — Oh, the devils take it! I bring this up only so you’ll know what topics to avoid with our shipmates — who must also bear some of the blame for not thinking — because we can’t afford quarrels.” Maclaren felt his cheeks crease in a sort of grin. “I have no interest in the guilt question anyway. My problem is strictly pragmatic: I want out of here!”

Ryerson emerged from the living-quarter screen. Maclaren saw him first as a shadow. Then the young face came so near that he could see the eyes unnaturally bright and the lips shaking.

“What have you found, Dave?” The question ripped from him before he thought.

Ryerson looked away from them both. Thickly: “We can’t do it. There aren’t enough replacement parts to make a f-f-functioning… a web — we can’t.”

“I knew that,” said Nakamura. “Of course. But we have instruments and machine tools. There is bar metal in the hold, which we can shape to our needs. The only problem is—”

“Is where to get four kilos of pure germanium!” Ryerson screamed it. The walls sneered at him with echoes. “Down on that star, maybe?”