“It might help,” said Maclaren.

Nakamura looked up. He tried to smile. “What do you think?” he asked.

Maclaren blew a meditative cloud of smoke. Now he would have to pick his words with care — and no background or training in the giving of succor-or lose the only man who could pull this ship free. Or lose Nakamura: that aspect of it seemed, all at once, more important.

“I wonder,” Maclaren murmured, “even in an absolutely free society, if any such thing could exist — I wonder if every man isn’t afraid of his bride.”

“What?” Nakamura’s lids snapped apart in startlement.

“And needs her at the same time,” said Maclaren. “I might even extend it beyond sex. Perhaps fear is a necessary part of anything that matters. Could Bach have loved his God so magnificently without being inwardly afraid of Him? I don’t know.”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “I suggest you meditate upon this,” he said lightly. “And on the further fact, which may be a little too obvious for you to have seen, that this is not Capella.”

Then he waited.

Nakamura made a gesture with his body. Only afterward, thinking about it, did Maclaren realize it was a free-fall prostration. “Thank you,” he said.

“I should thank you,” said Maclaren, quite honestly. “You gave me a leg up too, y’ know.”

Nakamura departed for the machine shop.

Maclaren hung at the viewport a while longer. The rasp of a pocket lighter brought his head around.

Chang Sverdlov entered from the living section. The cigar in his mouth was held at a somehow resentful angle.

“Well,” said Maclaren. “How long were you listening?”

“Long enough,” grunted the engineer.

He blew cheap, atrocious smoke until his pocked face was lost in it. “So,” he asked, “aren’t you going to get mad at me?”

“If it serves a purpose,” said Maclaren.

“Uh!” Sverdlov fumed away for a minute longer. “Maybe I had that coming,” he said.

“Quite probably. But how are the repairs progressing outside?”

“All right. Look here,” Sverdlov blurted, “do me a favor, will you? If you can. Don’t admit to Ryerson, or me, that you’re human — that you’re just as scared and confused as the rest of us. Don’t admit it to Nakamura, even. You didn’t, you know so far… not really. We need a, a, a cocky dude of a born-and-bred technic — to get us through!”

He whirled back into the quarters. Maclaren heard him dive, almost fleeing, aft along the shaftway.

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—”