Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  We got it down at last to the transom space and dropped it on the after bulkhead. Martha climbed back, with Peggy and myself, into the airscrew motor room; Doc stayed below. While Peggy and I climbed into spacesuits Martha passed the other equipment down to Jenkins—the welding and cutting tools, the can of powder. And then Doc came up, and Peggy and I, armored against cold and vacuum, took his place.

  Over our heads the airtight door slid shut. I heard the faint whirr of the pump that Peggy had installed in the motor room, and realized that the atmosphere was being evacuated from our compartment. I saw the needle of the gauge on the wrist of my suit falling, and watched it continue to drop even when I could no longer hear anything.

  Peggy’s voice in my helmet phones was surprisingly loud.

  She said, “Let’s get moving.”

  It was Peggy who did most of the work. A tool in her hands was an extension of her body—or even an extension of her personality. The blue-flaring torch cut a neat round hole in the bulkhead and then, after I had lifted the circle of still glowing steel away and clear, in the shell plating beyond. This section I kicked out, and watched fascinated as it diminished slowly, a tiny, twinkling star against the utter blackness. Peggy irritably pulled me back to the work in hand. Together we maneuvered the rocket tube into place. It was a tight fit, but not too tight. And then Peggy stitched metal to metal with the delicate precision that an ancestor might have displayed with needle, thread and fine fabric.

  I watched her with something akin to envy—and it was more than her manual dexterity that I envied. She had something that occupied all her attention; I had not. I had time to doubt, and to wonder. At the back of my mind a nagging, insistent voice was saying, No good will come of this.

  I heard Peggy’s satisfied grunt in my helmet phones and saw that the job was finished. She unscrewed the breech of the tube, and flipped it back on its hinge. She picked up a wad of rags, shoved it down the barrel, but not too far down. I managed to get the lid off the powder cannister and handed it to her. She poured the black grains onto the wad. Her guess as to the positioning of it had been a good one; only a spoonful of gunpowder remained in the can. This she transferred to a tubular recess in the middle of the breech block, stoppering it with another scrap of rag. She replaced the block then, gasping slightly as she gave it that extra half-turn to ensure that it was well and tightly home.

  “O.K., Martha,” she said. “You can let the air back in.”

  “Valve open,” Martha’s voice said tinnily from the phones.

  I watched the needle of my wrist gauge start to rise, and heard after a while the thin, high screaming of the inrushing atmosphere. And then the airtight door over our heads opened and I saw Martha and Doc framed in the opening, looking not at us but at what we had done. After a second’s hesitation they joined us in the transom space. Martha helped Peggy off with her helmet; Doc removed mine for me.

  “A neat job,” said Martha.

  “It will do,” said Peggy.

  “I hope,” added Doc, but he did not seem unduly worried.

  “You wire her up,” said Peggy to Martha. “I can’t do it in these damn gloves.”

  “Anything to oblige,” murmured Martha. She handed the double cable that she had brought down with her to Jenkins and started to loosen the thumbscrews on the breech block.

  “I know that I’m only the captain,” said a cold, a very cold voice, “but might I inquire what the hell you’re doing?”

  “We’re going to make this bitch roll and go,” replied Jenkins happily.

  I looked up from the makeshift rocket and saw that Sandra and Listowel were standing in the motor room, looking down at us through the doorway. Sandra was icily furious. Listowel looked mildly interested.

  Sandra’s finger pointed first at Peggy, then at myself. “Spacesuits . . . have you been outside?” she demanded.

  “No,” said Peggy.

  “Don’t worry, skipper,” said Jenkins. “We didn’t lose any atmosphere. We sealed the transom space off before Peggy and Peter went to work, and put the pump on it . . .”

  “But you pierced the hull,” she said with mounting anger.

  “Only a small hole,” admitted Jenkins.

  “This,” she grated, “is too much. Only a couple of weeks out and you’re already space-happy. Burning holes in the pressure plating and risking all our lives. Are you mad?”

  “No,” stated Doc. “And when you find out what it’s about you’ll be pleased.”

  “Pleased? I shall be pleased all right. I shall roll on the deck in uncontrollable ecstasy. And I’ll have your guts for a necktie, and then I’ll boot you out of the airlock without spacesuits. I’ll—”

  “Be reasonable, Sandra,” admonished Listowel rashly.

  “Reasonable? I am being reasonable. All these officers have work that they should be doing, instead of which I find them engaged in some fantastic act of sabotage . . .”

  “Sandra,” I put in, “I can explain.”

  “You? You ineffectual puppy!” I saw with shock that there was a pistol in her hand. “Come up out of there, all of you. That is an order.” She turned to her companion. “Commander Listowel, as captain of this vessel I request your aid in dealing with these mutineers.”

  “But—” I began.

  “Drop whatever you’re doing,” she snapped, “and come up.”

  “Better do as she says,” grumbled Peggy. She picked up her welding torch.

  “Just let us tell you what it’s all about, skipper,” pleaded Jenkins, edging towards the power point into which the torch was plugged.

  “No,” said Sandra flatly.

  “But . . .” murmured Peggy, her voice trailing off.

  There was the sharp click of a switch and the torch flared blindingly. I realized Peggy’s intention, but too late. As I tried to wrest the tool from her hands (but why? but why?), the metal casing of the firing chamber was already cherry red.

  I felt rather than heard the whoomph of the exploding powder . . .

  Chapter 16

  Her body against mine was warm and resilient, yielding—and then, at the finish, almost violently possessive. There was the flaring intensity of sensation, prolonged to the limits of endurance, and the long, long fall down into the soft darkness of the sweetest sleep of all.

  And yet . . .

  “Sandra . . .” I started to say, before my eyes were properly focused on the face beside mine on the pillow.

  She snapped back into full consciousness and stared at me coldly.

  “What was that, Peter? I’ve suspected that . . .”

  “I don’t know, Peggy,” I muttered. “I don’t know . . .”

  I don’t know, I thought. I don’t know. But I remember . . . what do I remember? Some crazy dream about another ship, another lightjammer, with Sandra as the captain and myself as catering officer and Ralph as some sort of outsider. And I was married to Sandra in this dream, and I’d lost her, and I was trying to win her back with Peggy’s help. There was something about a solid fuel rocket . . .

  “What is it, Peter?” she asked sharply.

  “A dream,” I told her. “It must have been a dream . . .”

  I unsnapped the elastic webbing that held us to the bunk and floated away from it and from Peggy to the center of the cabin. I looked around me, noting details in the dim light, trying to reassure myself of its reality, of our reality. It was all so familiar, and all so old. The ghosts of those who had lived here, who had loved here and hated here, generation after generation, seemed to whisper to me, This is Thermopylae. This is all the world you have ever known, ever will know . . .

  It was all so unfamiliar.

  And Peggy . . .

  I turned to look at her as she lay on the bed, still held there by the webbing, the bands startlingly white against her golden skin. She was real enough. Her naked beauty was part of my memories—all my memories.

  “Peter,” she said. “Peter, come back.”

  From nowhere
a tag of poetry drifted into my mind, and I murmured,

  “. . . and home there’s no returning.

  The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down

  and combed their hair.”

  It made an odd sort of sense.

  Thermopylae—the last stand of the Spartans, back in the early dawn of Terran history; Thermopylae—one of the great windjammers that sailed Earth’s seas; Thermopylae—the last stand of the Spartacists . . .

  “Come back,” she called pleadingly.

  “I’m here,” I told her. “I’m here. It was just that I had a little trouble getting myself oriented.”

  Stretching my right leg I was just able to touch the bulkhead with the tip of my big toe, and I shoved gently. I drifted back in the general direction of the bed. Peggy extended her arm and caught me, pulled me to her.

  “Born in the ship,” she scolded, “raised in the ship, and you still haven’t the sense to put your sandals on . . .”

  “There was that . . . strangeness . . .” I faltered.

  “If that’s what I do to you, my boy, I’d better see about getting a divorce. There’s nothing strange about us. I’m a perfectly prosaic plumber, and you’re a prurient purser, and our names start with a P as well as our ratings, so we’re obviously made for each other. At least, I thought so until just now . . . but when the bridegroom, on his wedding night, starts calling his blushing bride by another woman’s name it’s rather much!” She smiled tantalizingly. “Of course, I had quite a crush on Ralph once—not that he’d ever notice me. Plumbers are rather beneath the captain’s notice. He reminds me so much of my father . . .” Her face sobered. “I wonder what it would be like to live on a real world, a planet, with ample living room and with no necessity to stash parents away in the deep freeze when they’ve lived their allotted span? I wonder if our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, will ever be revived to walk on grass and breathe fresh air . . . I wonder if we shall ever be revived after we’re put away to make room for our children . . .” She reached out for something from the bedside locker—and suddenly her expression was one of puzzlement and disappointment. She whispered, “I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a cigarette to smoke and to wave in the air as I talked . . .”

  I asked, “What is a cigarette?”

  “I . . . I don’t know . . . I think it would be one of those tiny, white smoldering tubes that characters are always playing with in the old films . . . those men and women who played out their dramas on worlds like Earth and Austral and Caribbea, or aboard ships that could cross the Galaxy in a matter of months.” She said intensely, “At times I hate the Spartacists. It was all very well for them, the disgruntled technicians and scientists who thought that they had become the slaves of capital and organized labor—whatever they were—and who staged their futile slave revolt, and built this crazy ship because they hadn’t the money or materials to construct a Mannschenn Drive job—whatever that was. It was all very well for them, the romantic Durnhamites, pushing out under full sail for the Rim Stars—but what about us? Born in this tin coffin, living in this tin coffin and, at the end, put to sleep in this tin coffin—unless we die first—in the hope of a glorious resurrection on some fair planet circling a dim, distant sun. And we’ve never known the feel of grass under our bare feet, never known the kiss of the sun and the breeze on our skins, making do with fans and UV lamps, taking our exercise in the centrifuge instead of on the playing field or in the swimming pool, subsisting on algae and on tissue cultures that have long since lost any flavor they once had. Why, even on Lorn . . .”

  “Even on Lorn?” I echoed.

  “What am I saying?” she whispered. “What am I saying? Where is Lorn?”

  “Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule . . .” I murmured. “And the worlds of the Eastern Circuit—Tharn and Grollor, Mellise and Stree . . . Tharn, with the dirt streets in the towns, and the traders’ stalls under the flaring gas jets as the evening falls, and the taverns with good liquor and good company . . . Mellise, and the long swell rolling in from halfway across the world, breaking on the white beaches of the archipelago . . .”

  “What’s happened to us?” she cried. Then, “What have we lost?”

  “How can we have lost,” I asked, “what we have never known?”

  “Dreams,” she whispered. “Dreams . . . or the alternative time tracks that Claude is always talking about. Somewhere, or somewhen, another Peter and Peggy have walked the white beaches of Mellise, have swum together in the warm sea. Somewhen we have strolled together along a street on Tharn, and you have bought for me a bracelet of beaten silver . . .”

  “Dreams,” I said. “But you are the reality, and you are beautiful . . .” As I kissed her, as my caressing hands wandered over her compliant body, desire mounted. But there was a part of myself holding back, there was a cold voice at the back of my mind that said, You are doing this to forget. You are doing this to forget the worlds and the ships and the women that you have known. And, coldly, I answered myself with the question, Is there a better way of forgetting? And why should one not forget a foolish dream?

  Her urgent mouth was on mine and her arms were about me, and forgetfulness was sweet and reality was all we need ever ask, and—

  A giant hand slammed us from the bunk, snapping the webbing, hurling against the bulkhead. The single light went out. We sprawled against the cold, metal surface, held there by some pseudo-gravity, hurt, frightened, still clinging desperately to each other. Dimly I heard the incessant shrilling of alarm bells and somewhere somebody screaming. We felt rather than heard the thudding shut of airtight doors.

  The pressure against us relaxed and, slowly, we drifted into the center of the cabin. I held Peggy to me tightly. I could hear her breathing, could feel her chest rising and falling against my own. She stirred feebly.

  “Peggy, are you all right?” I cried. “Darling, are you all right?”

  “I . . . I think so . . .” she replied faintly. Then, with a flash of the old humor, “Do you have to be so rough?”

  There was a crackling sound, and then from the bulkhead speaker issued the voice of Ralph, calm as always, authoratative.

  “This is the captain. We have been in collision with a meteor swarm. Will all surviving personnel report to the control room, please? All surviving personnel report to the control room.”

  “We’d better do as the man says,” said Peggy shakily, “even though it means dressing in the dark . . .”

  IV: JOURNEY’S END

  Chapter 17

  We were in the control room—those of us who had survived.

  We had made our rounds, armored against cold and vacuum. We had seen the results of our collision with the meteor swarm, the rending and melting of tough metal and plastic, the effects of sudden decompression on human flesh. We had seen too much. Speaking for myself, it was only the uncanny half-knowledge that this was only an evil dream that enabled me to keep a hold on my sanity.

  We were in the control room, the seven of us.

  There was Ralph Listowel, acting captain, strapped in his seat before the useless controls. Beside him, anchored to the deck by the magnetic soles of her sandals, stood Sandra, acting mate. And there was David Jenkins, ship’s surgeon, and very close to him stood Martha Wayne, ship’s chronicler. There was Peggy, ship’s plumber. There was Claude Smethwick, always the odd man out. There was myself.

  We had survived.

  We had made our rounds of the stricken Thermopylae and had found no other survivors. All the accommodation abaft officers’ country had been holed, as had been the dormitory, the deep freeze, in which our parents—and their parents, and their parents—had been laid away, in stasis, to await planetfall. But they had never known what had hit them. They were luckier than our generation, for whom there must have been a long second or so of agonised realization, the horror of bursting lungs and viscera, before the end.

  “Report,” ordered Ralph tiredly.

  There was a long silence, which Jen
kins was the first to break. He said, “We suited up, and went through the ship. She’s like a colander. There are no other survivors.”

  “None?” asked Ralph.

  “No, skipper. Do you wish details?”

  “No,” said Ralph.

  “I made rounds with Doc,” said Sandra. “The deep freeze has had it. So has all the accommodation abaft officers’ country. So has most of the accommodation forward of the bulkhead. Second mate, third mate, engineers, catering officer—all dead. Very dead . . .”

  “And outside?” asked Ralph.

  “I saw what I could from the blisters. It’s a mess. Spars buckled. Twenty odd square miles of sail in ribbons . . .”

  “Report,” said Ralph, looking at me.

  I told him, “I’ve been through the farm. We haven’t got a farm any more. The tank room and the tissue culture room were both holed. Of course, the deep frozen, dehydrated tissue cultures will keep us going for some time . . .”

  “If we had air and water they would,” said Jenkins glumly. “But we haven’t.”

  “There are the cylinders of reserve oxygen,” I pointed out.

  “And how do we get rid of the carbon dioxide?” asked the doctor.

  “Chemicals . . .” suggested Peggy vaguely.

  “What chemicals?” he demanded. He went on, “Oh, we can keep alive for a few days, or a few weeks—but we shall merely be postponing the inevitable. Better to end it now, skipper. I’ve got the drugs for the job. It will be quite painless. Pleasant, even.”

  Ralph turned to Peggy. “Report.”

  She said, “The generator room’s wrecked. The only power we have at our disposal is from the batteries.”

  “And their life?”