“He did the only thing possible! Did you want to crash us?”
“There are worse chances to take,” said Sverdlov. “Now what have we got, but six months of beating our hearts out and then another month or two to die?” He made a harsh noise in the radiophone, as if wanting to spit. “I’ve met Sarai settlers before. They’re worse than Earthlings for cowardice, and nearly as stupid.”
“Now, wait—” began Ryerson. “Wait, let’s not quarrel—”
“Afraid of what might happen?” jeered Sverdlov. “You don’t know your friend Maclaren’s dirty-fighting tricks, do you?”
The ship whirled through a darkness that grew noisy with Ryerson’s uneven breathing. He raised his hands against the bulky robot shape confronting him. “Please,” he stammered. “Now wait, wait, Engineer Sverdlov.” Tears stung his eyes. “We’re all in this together, you know.”
“I wondered just when you’d be coming up with that cliché,” snorted the Krasnan. “Having decided it would be oh, so amusing to tell your society friends, how you spent maybe a whole month in deep space, you got me yanked off the job I really want to do, and tossed me into a situation you’d never once stopped to think about, and wrecked us all — and now you tell me, We’re all in this together!’ “Suddenly he roared his words:
“You mangy son of a muckeating cockroach, I’ll get you back — not for your sake, nor for your wife’s — for my own planet, d’you hear? They need me there!”
It grew very still. Ryerson felt how his heartbeat dropped down to normal, and then still further, until he could no longer hear his own pulse. His hands felt chilly and his face numb. A far and terrified part of him thought, So this is how it feels, when the God of Hosts lays His hand upon a man, but he stared past Sverdlov, into the relentless white blaze of the stars, and said in a flat voice:
“That will do. I’ve heard the story of the poor oppressed colonies before now. I think you yourself are proof that the Protectorate is better than you deserve. As for me, I never saw a milli of this supposed extortion from other planets: my father worked his way up from midshipman to captain, my brothers and I went through the Academy on merit, as citizens of the poorest and most overcrowded world in the universe. Do you imagine you know what competition is? Why, you blowhard clodhopper, you wouldn’t last a week on Earth. As a matter of fact, I myself had grown tired of the struggle. If it weren’t for this wretched expedition, my wife and I would have started for a new colony next week. Now you make me wonder if it’s wise. Are all colonials like you — just barely brave enough to slander an old man when they’re a safe hundred light-years away?”
Sverdlov did not move. The slow spin of the Cross brought the black star into Ryerson’s view again. It seemed bigger, as the ship swooped toward periastron. He had a horrible sense of falling into it. Thou, God, watchest me, with the cold ashen eye of wrath. The silence was like a membrane stretched close to ripping.
Finally, very slow, the bass voice came. “Are you prepared to back up those words, Earthling?”
“Right after we finish here!” shouted Ryerson.
“Oh.” A moment longer. Then: “Forget it. Maybe I did speak out of turn. I’ve never known an Earthman who wasn’t an enemy of some kind.”
“Did you ever try to know them?”
“Forget it, I said. I’ll get you home. I might even come around one day and say hello, on your new planet. Now let’s get busy here. Our first job is to start the accelerators operating again.”
The weakness which poured through David Ryerson was such that he wondered if he would have fallen under gravity. Oh, Tamara, he thought, be with me now. He remembered how they had camped on a California beach… had it all to themselves, no one lived in the deserts eastward… and the gulls had swarmed around begging bread until both of them were helpless with laughter. Now why should he suddenly remember that, out of all the times they had had?
10
When the mind gave up and the mathematics became a blur, there was work for Maclaren’s hands. Sverdlov, and Ryerson under him, did the machine-tool jobs; Nakamura’s small fingers showed such delicacy that he was set to drawing wire and polishing control-ring surfaces. Maclaren was left with the least skilled assignment, least urgent because he was always far ahead of the consumption of his product: melting, separating, and re-alloying the fused salvage from ion accelerators and transceiver web.
But it was tricky in null-gee. There could not be any significant spin on the ship or assembly, out on the lattice, it would have become too complicated for so small a gang of workers. Coriolis force would have created serious problems even for the inboard jobs. On the other hand, weightless melt had foul habits. Maclaren’s left arm was still bandaged, the burn on his forehead still a crimson gouge.
It didn’t seem to matter. When he looked in a mirror, he hardly recognized his face. There hadn’t been much physical change yet, but the expression was a stranger’s. And his life had narrowed to these past weeks, behind them lay only a dream. In moments when there was nothing else to do he might still play a quick chess game with Sverdlov, argue the merits of No versus Kabuki with Nakamura, or shock young Ryerson by a well-chosen dirty limerick. But thinking back, he saw how such times had become more and more sparse. He had quit trying to make iron rations palatable, when his turn in the galley came up; he had not sung a ballad for hundreds of the Cross’ black-sun years. He shaved by the clock and hung onto fastidiousness of dress as pure ritual, the way Nakamura contemplated his paradoxes or Ryerson quoted his Bible or Sverdlov thumbed through his nude photographs of past mistresses. It was a way of telling yourself, I am still alive.
There came a moment when Maclaren asked what he was doing other than going through the motions of survival. That was a bad question.
“You see,” he told his mirror twin, “it suggests a further inquiry: Why? And that’s the problem we’ve been dodging all our mutual days.”
He stowed his electric razor, adjusted his tunic, and pushed out of the tiny bathroom. The living section was deserted, as it had been most of the time. Not only were they all too busy to sit around, but it was too narrow.
Outside its wall, he moved through the comfort of his instruments. He admitted frankly that his project of learning as much as possible of the star was three-quarters selfish. It was not really very probable that exact knowledge of its atmospheric composition would be of any use to their escape. But it offered him a chance, for minutes at a time, to forget where he was. Of course, he did not admit the fact to anyone but himself. And he wondered a little what reticences the other men had.
This time he was not alone. Nakamura hovered at an observation port. The pilot’s body was outlined with unwavering diamond stars. But as the dead sun swung by, Maclaren saw him grow tense and bring a hand toward his eyes, as if to cover them.
He drifted soundlessly behind Nakamura. “Boo,” he said.
The other whirled around in air, gasping. As the thresh of arms and legs died away, Maclaren looked upon terror.
“I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t think I’d startle you.”
“I… it is nothing.” Nakamura’s brown gaze held some obscure beggary. “I should not have — It is nothing.”
“Did you want anything of me?” Maclaren offered one of his last cigarettes. Nakamura accepted it blindly, without even saying thanks. Something is very wrong with this lad, thought Maclaren. Fear drained in through the glittering viewport. And he’s the only pilot we’ve got.