CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“What the devil is Korwin trying now?” Charlene spoke through clenched teeth. She hung on to the arms of her chair as the Argo shook from end to end in spasms that couldn’t be predicted or resisted.
“More of the same.” Sy sat next to her in the control room, his eyes fixed on the banks of displays. “My guess is that he’s pogoing us over a range of at least five gees. But I doubt if he’s accomplishing a thing.”
The crew was again in N-space, where they could tolerate considerable acceleration. Most had gone to their own quarters or the control room, where they could strap in securely while Dan Korwin, aft in the engine room, drove the ship at full power toward the distant spark of Urstar. One gee, two gees, and on up to an off-the-charts acceleration that left everyone feeling flattened. The ship should have been racing toward its destination. Previous attempts to fly closer had been useless, while an attempt to turn the ship and fly away from Urstar had been just as ineffective; the Argo could rotate on its axis, like some great beast impaled on a spit, but all other movement was denied. The acceleration abruptly ended and Korwin’s frustrated voice came over the ship’s central address. “All right. Screw it. I guess that’s all for today.” Sy ran his eyes over the monitors. “Same as before. Hefty acceleration, but according to the sensors we’ve moved not a single millimeter. Hm. I wonder.” Gus Eldridge, one of the communications specialists who had been skeptical of Dan Korwin’s efforts from the start, heard Sy’s comment. He grunted and said, “Of course we haven’t moved. This is — what? — the eighth day of trying? And while he’s accelerating the ship like that, nobody else can do a damned thing. How long do we give him before we tell him to stop fooling himself?”
Charlene could see Eldridge’s point. The Argo might be unable to move, but most of the scientist crew had plenty to keep them busy. According to the observers at X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths, the space around Urstar crackled with high-frequency energy. If the intensity estimates were anywhere close to correct, the ship would have been forced to halt of its own accord before ever reaching the outermost gas giant; otherwise, the field intensities around the hull would have melted the Argo. Sy had argued, with typical perverse logic, that the ship had been halted to prevent its destruction.
That still left the big question: What to do, when they could neither approach Urstar nor escape from it? Charlene, breathing easy now that the violent and intermittent acceleration was over, gazed at the display of the static external scene. She muttered, “Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
She had been talking to herself, but Emil Garville as usual had his eye on her. He moved closer and said sharply, “What was that?”
She smiled at him and shrugged. “Nothing. I’m showing my age, that’s all. Old words — the man who wrote them was dead hundreds of years before the first person flew in space.”
“Flew in Earth-space?”
“Yes, flew in Earth-space. I keep telling you that I’m old, but you don’t seem to want to believe me.”
“You’re only old objectively, not subjectively. Say it again.” Emil listened closely as she recited the words, then nodded. “I don’t know what had happened to them and their ship, but it certainly applies to us. We’re stuck. Unless something changes, we’ll have to go into T-state before we run out of supplies.” “Something has been changing. But not the sort of thing we’re hoping for.” “JN?”
Charlene nodded wearily. “I’ve talked to Sy about what we should do. He thinks we have to declare the Director incompetent to remain in control, and have someone else take over.”
“Take over and do what?” Emil waved a hand around the control room. “I agree that JN is deteriorating fast, and she spends most of the time in her cabin sitting and doing nothing. But if she were her old self, what could she do? Urstar is only a few light-days away, but in terms of our getting there it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. We’re stuck.”
Sy, as usual, had been listening without comment while he sat busy with his own experiments. Now he said, “We may be stuck, but we’re not going to be on our own much longer. Unless something changes, we’re going to have visitors.” He posted the tiny image on his hand-held unit to the main display. For some reason of his own he had been observing the region around Urstar at the wavelength of the cosmic background radiation. Logic and experience insisted that close to a star there would be nothing to be seen at such wavelengths. The batlike Pipistrelles and the wispy lattice webs of the Gossameres, residents of deep space, were only found light-years away from fierce stellar radiation. Except, apparently, here. On the display, three fuzzy bat shapes were visible, together with a hint of a gauzy rectangle of silvery lines.
“Doppler insists there’s nothing out there,” Sy said. “I’ve tried active radar, and I’m getting zero returns at all wavelengths. But I’ve also been monitoring the increase in apparent size of their outlines. That shows they’re moving at a constant rate. If they keep it up, they’ll reach the Argo this evening.” Charlene tried, unsuccessfully, to see any increase in the size of the shapes on the display. She said, “We can’t run, and we can’t hide. What do we do?” “We inform the Director of the situation.” Emil shook his head at Charlene and Sy’s perplexed expressions. “I know how you feel. But we’re just three people, among a crew of thirty-eight. Until we discuss this with the others, and they all agree — which I’m not sure they will — JN is still the leader of this expedition. We tell her what we know, we give her our best advice, and we listen to what she says. And unless it’s off-the-wall stark staring lunacy, we do what she says. It’s a rule that’s even older than the poetry that Charlene was quoting a few minutes ago: On a ship, you can have only one captain.” * * *
It was an unnerving experience to stare out of the Argo’s observation ports and see nothing there but the ruddy glow of Urstar. And then, moments later, glance across at the displays showing the same region of space at microwave wavelengths, and watch the black bat-shapes creeping steadily closer. Charlene had spoken to no one else about Sy’s discovery, but somehow the word had spread. During the early evening the crew members had wandered one by one into the main control room, to take up their assigned seats. There was very little conversation. Everyone was waiting.
Judith Niles was the last to arrive. Her face was haggard, and her eyes were wide and lacked focus. Her right pupil was twice the size of her left. To Charlene, however, the most disturbing change was also on the face of it the least significant. From their very first days in S-space, JN had always made a point to cover her bald scalp with a wig. Today, either through oversight or conscious decision, she had omitted to do so. Her scalp, smooth and white and with the faint lines of long-ago surgery tracing across the cranium, was more shocking to Charlene than the possibility of the coming alien contact. Coming, and coming soon. The intangible wisps of the Pipistrelles loomed large in the displays. No one on the Argo could do anything to slow their approach. On the other hand, the Pipistrelles were so insubstantial, so little different from the void itself, any danger from them seemed like a product of overexcited human imagination.
And yet, in the final minutes as those three dark shapes converged on the space-locked Argo, no one in the dim-lit control room could find anything to say. The three Pipistrelles swept on, closer and closer. At microwave wavelengths their winged shapes blocked out half the sky. On their final approach the wings curled around, as though to encompass the helpless ship. “Any second now.” Sy’s calm voice sounded clearly through the hushed chamber. “Closing — closing — contact.”