“Probably not.” Glengarth shrugged. “We’ve had no time for observation, but it looks too far off for its gravity to matter.”
“A giant star?” Weakly, Stecker mopped at his sweat-bright face. “Wouldn’t a giant be massive enough?”
“Of course, but I take that for a spectral type G2. A twin of our own sun. But not our sun, not in that blazing swarm.”
“So what?” Hinch shuffled away from the elevator, the glasses in his hand, his black eyes stabbing at the screens, at Stecker, at Glengarth. His words were a shrill demand. “We ain’t no cryin’ babies. I want to know.”
“So do I.” Glengarth took a moment to control his temper. “Evidently we did enter the gravity well of something massive enough to get us out of quantum mode, but I haven’t found it.”
“A black hole?” Stecker cringed from the midnight sky. “Do you think …”
His hoarse whisper died.
“Possibly.” Glengarth nodded. “Though I see no accretion disk. That’s the luminous plasma that many black holes gather. If it is a black hole with no disk around it, we’ll never see it. We do have a possible clue in its effect on our motion. That, however, is something that will be difficult or maybe impossible to measure, since we have no nearby reference points.”
“Then get us out of danger!” Trembling, Stecker seized Glengarth’s arm. “Move!”
With more force than he intended, Glengarth twisted free.
“Sir, how would you do that?”
“Bleedin’ idiot!” Hinch shrieked. “Shoot us out. The same way you shot us here.”
“Get at it!” Stecker rapped. “Now!”
“No way, sir.”
“No way?” Hinch echoed. “Why the hell no way?”
Running the Mission, he and Stecker had learned to work in tandem. “Surely, Mr. Glengarth.” Stecker’s tone was smoother. “You’re said to be a competent quantum engineer. Get us back into quantum mode and find a likely planet.”
“Sir.” Glengarth raised his hand. “If you understood—”
“We understand the bleedin’ shit you got us into.” Hinch shook a scrawny fist. “If you want to keep your bleedin’ job, get us out. I mean now!”
“Cool it, Jake.” Stecker pulled him back and spoke more quietly to Glengarth. “Sir, we do respect your spacemanship. I know we can’t afford to quarrel, but the ship’s loaded with emergency survival equipment. You’ve got teams of expert technicians.” His tone grew sharper. “So take us back into quantum wave propulsion, or tell me why you can’t.”
“If you really don’t know, here’s why.” Bleakly, Glengarth grinned. “Remember the takeoff, how we sat waiting in the pit till the bunker crew fired us out. Very much like a bullet out of a gun. We couldn’t bring the gun, and the laws of motion still apply.”
“Huh?” Stecker’s jaw sagged.
“Remember Newton’s laws. Action equals reaction. We can’t get back into quantum mode without an external launch facility embedded in some object massive enough to absorb the takeoff reaction. A planet or at least a large asteroid. Something I don’t see.”
“If we can’t get out—” Stecker gulped. “What then?”
“Hard to say.” Glengarth turned to scan the green-and-amber–winking consoles. “We can’t plan anything till we know where we are.”
“When—” Stecker mopped his face and peered into the starlit darkness. “When will that be?”
“We want action,” Jake Hinch growled. “Action now!”
“Listen, Mr. Hinch.” Glengarth swung to him, speaking bluntly. “We’re competent. We know space navigation. We have trained astronomers aboard, and expert computer software. Give us time to do what we can.”
“If a bleedin’ black hole stopped us—” Shrill with panic, Hinch grabbed Stecker’s shoulder. “I’ve heard the Fairshare line about black holes. The gravity will grab us. Tear us into dust and gas. Suck us into nowhere.”
“It could.” Glengarth nodded. “If it is a black hole.”
“Better hope it is!” Hinch snarled through his ragged beard like a hungry wolf. “That ought to be quick and painless. Anything else, and we’re left to drift in this black hell till the food’s all gone and hungry men are prowlin’ the wreck for human game.”
“Please!” Glengarth spread his hands. “Gentlemen, please!”
Gentlemen, he thought, wasn’t quite the word.
“Jake, you’d better leave us.” Stecker waved Hinch into the elevator. “You’re no pilot. I hope Mr. Glengarth can fly us somewhere. I want to let him try.”
Seven
Securing the ship for takeoff, the search crew had come upon the blood and broken glass on the gym floor and opened the escape hatch. Mondragon staggered out, dazzled by the lights and stiff from huddling so long inside.
“Una bomba?” He shook his head at their questions. “Nunca!”
In his awkward English, he tried to explain himself. He knew nothing of bombs. He had hidden himself only to ride the great bird of space to reach some new world in the sky. Why would he wish to kill the machine that carried them?
They took him down to the brig and told him Captain Stecker would see him. Stecker never did. The jailer brought him water and tofusoya stew. A loud computer voice announced that the ship was entering takeoff mode. The jailer came again with a blindfold and something in a tiny plastic packet.
“Es adiós?” he asked. “Adios al mundo?”
Seeming not to understand, the jailer left before he could find the English. Examining the packet, he found the use of the tiny rubber plugs. Lying on the berth with them in his ears and the blindfold over his eyes, he listened to the countdown with his heart throbbing fast. Was his old dream coming true? They had not thrown him off the ship. The time for that had passed. He was on the shining starbird, on his way to the magic worlds among the stars!
He lay there a long time, listening to the muffled sounds of the ship. At last he heard sirens screaming. He felt the ship quiver and sink. Something clicked. He floated off the bunk, suddenly weighing nothing at all.
“Fun!” Day sailed off her berth. “Real fun!”
She stopped herself against the ceiling and floated slowly back.
“Careful, dear.” Rima caught her ankle to pull her down. “Till you’re more used to it.”
Kip soon felt a little weight returning, enough that he didn’t need the handholds. They sat watching the holoscreen. It stayed empty for a long time, but at last the speaker chimed. First Officer Glengarth was on the holoscreen.
“Ship status report.” His voice was tight, and Kip thought he had a worried look. “We have emerged from wave propulsion with no reported harm. We have now shifted from free fall to rocket mode, moving at point zero four gee while we survey our new surroundings. Further information will follow when possible. That is all.”
His image flickered out.
“That’s all?” Kip looked at his mother. “What about the star that stopped us? Will there be a new planet where we can land?”
“Try not to fret,” she urged him. “Mr. Glengarth will tell us more when he can.” She sighed and spoke again, more softly. “They were old friends, Colin and Gerald. Mr. Glengarth and Captain Alt. And friends of my father. The three of them loved to be together when they could. I’m sure Mr. Glengarth will keep us safe.”
He wondered how sure she really was.
He tried not to sleep, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Mr. Glengarth never came back to the holoscreen with more information. Day slept and woke up and asked if they could go back for Me Me. He got hungry.
“Patience, dear,” his mother said. “People need time to get used to low gee.”
He wanted his Game Box. He got hungrier. Finally the woman in the white cap called them down for brunch in the dining room. It was slabs of something that the man at the counter called starchow on novakelp toast, with syncafe or soya milk.
Day made a face at the milk, but finally gulped it down. She pushed her
tray back and begged again for Me Me.
“It’s not that bad.” Kip ate his hard dry toast and sipped his milk. Not much like real milk, it left a faintly bitter taste in his mouth. “It’s okay,” he told his mother. “Not all that bad.”
“Good for us,” she insisted. “Everything had to be concentrated, to let the ship carry food enough to last us till we can grow our own crops.”
Kip wondered when that would be.
Carlos was in the line of people waiting when they left the room, a stranger with him. They both wore yellow coveralls. A black-capped security man stood close behind them. Carlos’s hurt hand was bandaged. The stranger was grimly silent, but Carlos smiled at Kip and then at Rima, and called, “Qué tal, amigo?”
“Who’s that?” Rima asked when they had gone on. “The prisoner? How could he know you?”
“Carlos,” Kip told her. “He came from Mexico to ride the ship.”
He told her how he had found Carlos in the gym.
“You never reported him?”
“He wasn’t hurting anybody. All he wanted was to come on the ship. He’d cut his hand on the glass, and he was afraid. I felt sorry for him. He has nice eyes.”
“Nice eyes!” Her voice sharpened. “He could have hurt you. He could have been a Fairshare agent, aboard to sabotage the ship. You should have told the officers and told me.”
“I’d promised not to tell.”
“Kip!” she scolded. “You must learn to be careful with strangers.”
He said nothing else, yet he felt glad Carlos was with them on the ship.
Back in the cabin, they waited again for Mr. Glengarth to come on the holoscreen with further information. It never happened. Missing Captain Cometeer and his friends in the Legion of the Lost, Kip thought perhaps ship security would return his Game Box. Rima let him go down to ask for it. Gone three hours, he finally brought it back.
“I had a good visit with Carlos,” he told her. “I like him.”
“That stowaway?” She frowned.
“He’s okay,” he tried to persuade her. “Still a prisoner, but not locked up. In spite of his hurt hand, he’s working in the supply room. My Game Box was dead when they found it for me. Carlos fixed it.”
“Fixed it? How?”
“He knows about computers. He said the wave conversion caused a static surge that had garbled the access command. He rewrote the command. Now it works just fine. And he asked about you.”
“Me?”
“Remember those Fairshare pickets outside the gate? Carlos says he doesn’t belong to Fairshare and never understood it. He was standing with them there because he had no badge to let him inside. He saw you when we came through and he wanted to know how you were. When I told him you were my mother, he said I was very lucky.”
“Kip, please!” She glanced at Day and dropped her voice. “Mr. Glengarth called while you were out. I asked about the prisoners in yellow coveralls. He says a bomb was found on the ship. It could have killed us all. He doesn’t know who brought it, but those two prisoners are the suspects.”
“It wasn’t Carlos!” Kip felt distressed. “He told me he’s in trouble because one of the pickets helped him get aboard. But he’s nice. He certainly wouldn’t want to bring a bomb and kill himself. Or anybody else. You saw that other prisoner. I don’t like his eyes. I think he did it.”
“Not likely.” Firmly, she shook her head. “He’s Jonas Roak, the clearance inspector. He’s had the job for years. He has a good record. They found some Fairshare document on the Mexican. Security thinks he was a Fairshare agent hired to plant the bomb.”
“So why was he hiding, still on the ship.”
“He seems not to know much English. They think he got lost aboard. Panicked and hid. You know he’s an illegal alien. Already a criminal when he came on the ship.”
“Mom! Maybe Carlos was an alien back on Earth, but we’ll all be aliens now. I know he was poor, but he’s a brave man. All he wants is to explore the stars like Captain Cometeer. That’s why he stowed away—”
“You don’t know him and don’t want to know him.” Impatience lifted her voice. “He could be dangerous. I want you to avoid him.”
He was glad when the holoscreen chimed.
Glengarth came on the screen, smiling bleakly.
“Status update.” The stubble on his face had grown darker, and he forgot to hold the smile. “Thanks to the astro team, we’ve discovered the massive object that pulled us out of quantum mode.”
His image vanished, and a field of stars filled the screen. A dark point in the middle of it swelled slowly into a circular blot. At first it looked utterly black, but dull red pockmarks began to appear as it grew, and then faint narrow cracks the color of fire.
“There you see it,” his tired voice ran on. “A black dwarf star. If you’re wondering what a black dwarf is, stars are born when gravity collapses clouds of gas and dust. If a new star is big enough, the heat of collapse sets off a nuclear reaction—the fusion of hydrogen into helium—that will make it shine.
“This star was too small to keep the hydrogen burning, but it’s still hot under the crust. It must have come close. Dr. Andersen thinks that its hydrogen did burn once, ignited by the gravitational collapse and the fission of unstable elements. It may even have warmed its planets before it died. If it had planets. We’re searching now, but they’re lost in the dark, even if they’re here. Maybe impossible to find.”
The black star vanished, but he came back on the screen to say that more news would follow when there was any news.
“Suppose they do find a planet.” Anxiously, Kip looked at his mother. “That star won’t warm it. What good would it be?”
“Wait.” She shrugged, looking as tired as Glengarth. “Let’s wait and see.”
They waited.
She wanted to forget Carlos Mondragon, but Kip was curious. When a man came on the screen to talk about a training class for low-gravity activity, she let him go down to inquire about it. He went by the security desk to ask about Carlos.
“The Mex stowaway?” The black woman shrugged. “Gone.”
He asked where.
“The computer lab,” she said. “He understands computers.”
“I know,” Kip said. “He fixed my Game Box.”
“He got a bug out of our own computer system.” Her smile seemed friendly. “The takeoff had played tricks with computers all over the ship. When the astro team learned what he’d done for us, they got Mr. Glengarth to release him to them.”
His mother would like Carlos better, Kip thought, if she ever got to know him.
Day was asleep when he got back from the training class. When she woke still pining for Me Me, Rima took her down to the rec room. Kip went back through the Game Gate to rejoin the Legion in a daring raid to rescue a captured comrade from the evil queen of the Diamond Planet.
Rima and Day came back, and they watched the holoscreen. It was still a flat gray blank when the dining-room manager called them down for another meal of the concentrates they must learn to like. She introduced two men who joined them at the table and lifted their cups of syncafe to greet her.
Andy Andersen was a red-headed, pink-skinned giant who was going to lead the landing team if they ever found anywhere to land. Tony Cruzet was a tiny, owlish man with a lean brown face and gold-rimmed glasses. The Mission astronomer, he had picked the target galaxies for many Mission flights. They both looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and they sat in moody silence till Kip and Day went to stand in line for soyasweet snowfoam.
“Bitch of a thing,” Cruzet muttered to Rima then. “Stecker’s drunk or in a total funk or likely both. Locked up in his cabin with that Jake Hinch. They’ve got empty bottles and broken dishes scattered over the deck. Hinch finally looked out when I knocked. Asked if I knew a willing woman.”
He made a dismal shrug.
“A tough time for Mr. Glengarth.” Andersen scowled, shaking tofucream into his syncafe. “Sixty hours in the dome wit
h no sleep except what he’s got dozing in his seat. Doing what he can to keep a lid on panic while he looks for anywhere to go.”
“A landing site?” Rima asked. “A planet?”
“We’ve all been on the search team, but we don’t know if there is a planet. Hell of a job, here in the dark. If we don’t find something …”
Stirring his syncafe, Andersen splashed it on the table, then mopped at the spill and forgot to go on.
“So?” she prompted him. “The outlook?”
“Not good,” he muttered. “If you want the truth, it’s a no-win game. Planets would be invisible, if the star has planets. We know for sure there’s nothing in radar range. The star’s rotation might have been a clue to the orbital plane where planets ought to be, but the dwarf doesn’t rotate. Not fast enough to tell us anything.”
He shook his head and mopped again at the brown splash on the table.
“And what if we find ’em?” Cruzet blinked at her unhappily. “Even if we do stumble onto some dirty snowball, what can you do with it?”
Day and Kip came back with their snowfoam before she had to answer.
The message gong woke her late that night.
“Dr. Virili?” the second officer called from the control dome. “A new situation. Mr. Glengarth wants all team leaders here in twenty minutes.”
Eight
Glengarth, feeling punch-drunk with fatigue, had left Sternberg, the second officer, to carry on the planet search while he took a break in his cabin. He came to the door when Andersen knocked, rubbing his eyes and asking a hopeful question.
“Found anything?”
“Maybe.” Andersen shrugged. “Nothing we can see, not that we have light to see anything. But we do have a computer readout that seems to show the gravity pull of some planetary massive object. Not yet identified, but I thought you’d want to know.”
“I’ll be right up.”
“Coffee?” Andersen grinned at the aroma filling the room. “Real coffee?”
The Black Sun Page 5