Catch the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  "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 Jenkins 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?"

  "If we practice the utmost economy, perhaps two hundred hours. But I may be able to get a jenny repaired—"

  "And burn up our oxygen reserve running it," said Ralph. Then, to Smethwick, "Report."

  "I've tried," the telepath whispered. "I've tried. But there's no contact anywhere. We are alone, lost and alone. But . . ."

  "But?" echoed Ralph.

  "I . . . I'm not sure . . ." Then, suddenly, Smethwick seemed to gain stature, to change his personality almost. Always until now the shyest and most retiring of men, he dominated us by his vehemence. "Don't you have the memories—the memories of the lives you've lived elsewhere, elsewhen? Haven't you any recollection of yourself as Captain Listowel of the Rim Runners, as Commander Listowel of the Federation Survey Service? And the rest of you," he went on, "don't you remember? This isn't the only life—or the only death . . ."

  "Lorn and Faraway . . ." I said softly.

  "Ultimo and Thule . . ." whispered Martha.

  "And the planets of the Eastern Circuit," said Sandra flatly.

  "You remember," cried Smethwick. "Of course you remember. I'm snooping now. I admit it. You can do what you like to me, but I'm snooping. I'm peeping into your minds. And it all adds up, what I can read of your memories, your half-memories. There's the pattern, the unbreakable pattern. All the time, every time, it's been just the seven of us—aboard Flying Cloud, aboard Aeriel, and now aboard Thermopylae . . .

  "There's the pattern . . . we've tried to break free from it, but we've never succeeded. But we have changed it—every time we have changed it—and we can change it again. Whether for better or for worse I cannot say—but it can hardly be for worse now."

  Ralph was looking at Sandra—and once, I knew, the way that she was looking back at him would have aroused my intense jealousy. "Yes," he said slowly. "I remember . . . hazily . . . even so, wasn't there some trouble with Peter?"

  I was holding Peggy close to me. "There was," I said. "But not anymore."

  "And what about you, Martha?" asked Sandra. "Do you remember?"

  "I do," she said, "but I'm perfectly happy the way things are now. Both David and I are happy—so happy, in fact, that I don't welcome the idea of euthanasia . . ."

  "Go on," urged Smethwick. "Go on. Remember!"

  "I made a rocket," muttered Peggy hesitantly. "Didn't I?"

  "And I mixed a batch of solid fuel," I supported her.

  "No," contradicted Doc. "I did."

  "Some bastard did," stated Ralph, looking rather hostile.

  "Too right," said Sandra. "And whoever it was put us in the jam that we're in now. I was quite happy as catering-officer-cum-third-mate of Flying Cloud, and quite happy as captain of Aeriel, and I rather resent finding myself chief officer of a dismasted derelict, with only a few days to live."

  "You might have been happy," I told her, "but you must admit that the way things were aboard Aeriel did not, repeat not, contribute to my happiness."

  "My marriage to you was a big mistake," she said.

  "Wasn't it just!" I agreed. "On my part! I should have known better. Give a woman a position of authority and she at once abuses it. 'I'm the captain, and I sleep with whom I bloody well please. See?' "

  "I resent that," said Sandra.

  "Resent away," I told her, "if it makes you any happier. Resenting seems to be your specialty, darling."

  "But you were such a bloody lousy cook," she said.

  "Like hell I was!" I flared. "I'm a bloody good cook, and you know it. Aeriel ate a damn sight better than Flying Cloud ever did."

  "I suppose," she said, "that you mixed gunpowder in with your curry."

  "You wouldn't know the difference," I sneered.

  "Who would?" she sneered back.

  "I think his curry is good," said Peggy loyally.

  "You would," snapped Sandra.

  "The rocket!" Claude was screaming. "The rocket!"

  I told him what to do with the rocket, tail fins and all. I said to Sandra, "It's high time that we got things sorted out. You behaved very shabbily. Even you must admit that. I've nothing against Ralph—in fact I think that's he's more to be pitied than blamed. But if it hadn't been for the way that you carried on aboard both Flying Cloud and Aeriel there wouldn't have been any rockets. There wouldn't have been any misguided attempts to break the light barrier."

  "So it's all my fault," she said sarcastically.

  "Of course," I told her.

  "And that refugee from a bicycle shop, to whom you happen to be married at the moment, has nothing at all to do with it. Oh, no. And neither has the incompetent pill peddler who mixed the first batch of powder. And neither have you, who mixed the second. But, as far as I'm concerned, what
really rankles is this. I don't mind all this switching from one time track to another—after all, variety is the spice of life. What I do object to is being the victim of the blundering machinations of the same bunch of dimwits every bloody time. It's too much. Really, it's too much."

  "My heart bleeds for you," I said. "Let me suggest that on the next time track you get you to a nunnery. Preferably a Trappist one. If there are such institutions."

  Her face was white with passion. Her hand flashed out and caught me a stinging blow across the mouth. My feet lost their magnetic contact with the deck and I floated backwards, fetching up hard against the bulkhead.

  Peggy, her voice bitter, said, "You deserved that."

  "No," said Martha. "No. Everything has been Sandra's fault."

  "Pipe down," ordered Ralph. "Pipe down, all of you. And you, Malcolm, please refrain from making any more slanderous attacks on my wife."

  "My wife," I said.

  "Not in this continuum," he corrected me. "But what happened in the alternative Universes has a certain bearing upon our present predicament. Thanks to your otherwise unpardonable outburst, we can remember now—"

  "And about bloody well time you did," said Claude.

  "We can't all be perfect," stated Ralph, with mild sarcasm. "Even so, we can try. We know the way out now—and, this time, we're all of us involved. All of us. We must break the light barrier once more, and the only way that we can do it is by giving this wagon that extra push. Has anybody any suggestions?"

  Martha said slowly, "We must have been close to Lume 1 when the meteors hit us. But the impact was at right angles to our trajectory . . ."

  "Work it out by the parallelogram of forces," Ralph told her. "If you really want to, that is. But we have the Doppler log—it's still working—and that gives us the answer without any fooling around with slipsticks. Even though we are a dismasted derelict we're still bowling along at a good rate. But it'll take more than a powder-fuelled rocket to give us the boost."

  "There's the reserve oxygen," I said.

  "And there's plenty of alcohol," added Jenkins.

  "And Peggy's a plumber in this incarnation," said Sandra, rather nastily.

  "So . . ." said Ralph.

  Chapter 18

  It was dark outside and, despite the heating units and insulation of our suits, bitterly cold. Astern of us was the dull-glowing Galactic lens, a monstrous ember in the black ash of the ultimate night. Ahead of us, flaring with an unnatural steely brilliance, was one of the distant island nebulae. But we were in no mood for astronomical sight-seeing. Almost at once our attention was caught and held by the horrible tangle of twisted wreckage that extended all the way from the stern, where we were standing, to the stem of the huge ship, standing out sharply and shockingly in the harsh glare of our working lights: the buckled spars, the vast, disorderly expanse of tattered sail and snapped cordage, the rent and battered shell plating. But we did not look long, nor did we want to. There was work to do—burning and welding, man-handling the massive pipe sections into place, heating and beating the twisted plating of the stern so that it conformed, more or less, to our plans.

  Peggy took charge—and it was Peggy, too, who did most of the work. A tool in her hands was an extension of her body—or, even, an extension of her personality. She stitched metal to metal with the delicate precision that an ancestress might have displayed with needle, thread and fine fabric. I watched her with envy, and it was not only her manual dexterity that I envied. She was so sure of herself, so certain. And I was not certain. Oh, I had no doubts that this was the only way out of our predicament—but once we had won through to an alternative time track should we be any better off? In Thermopylae we had achieved what seemed to be a stable grouping, like paired with like, but would it, could it last?

  I looked at Peggy, and I hoped with all my heart that it would.

  I heard her satisfied, peculiarly feminine grunt in my helmet phones. She said flatly, "That's that."

  "Even so," murmured Ralph doubtfully, "will it hold?"

  "Long enough," she told him cheerfully. "Long enough. After all, Ralph, this isn't the first time . . ."

  "No," said Sandra, a nasty edge to her voice, "it isn't."

  "That will do," ordered her husband coldly.

  "And now we'll connect up the tanks and bottles," said Peggy.

  We clambered back inside through the rents in the shell plating, back into the wrecked lazaret. Intended for use as a sick bay by the ship's builders, it had become over the generations a storeroom, a repository for things that never had been used, that never would be used, that had been stashed away in the belief that somebody, sooner or later, would find a use for them. We had found the piping there, a fine assortment, large and small bore. Some had been damaged by the meteor swarm, most of it had not been. Finding it saved us both time and labor.

  The oxygen cylinders and the tanks of alcohol, however, we had to lug through the ship from the centrally situated storage compartments. The work was heavy and awkward, but that wasn't the worst part of it. The trouble was that we were obliged to see again the torn, frozen bodies of our late shipmates. And there was that sense of responsibility that was so hard to shake off. If it hadn't been for the pattern, as we were thinking of it, if it hadn't been for the odd design which made it somehow imperative that the seven of us, and only the seven of us, should be attempting to break the light barrier by means of rocket power, would Thermopylae have come to grief? And had we, of our own volition, established the pattern? Or had the pattern existed always, and were we no more than puppets?

  But we worked on. We were still alive, and we had every inducement to stay that way. We convinced ourselves that we were in, but not of, Thermopylae. We felt that we were innocent bystanders involved by blind chance in a catastrophe not of our making, not of our concern. All that concerned us was getting the hell out, and that as soon as possible. My parents, I knew, were among those who had perished when the cosmic debris destroyed the deep freeze. But my parents, I knew with even greater certainty, were solid citizens of Dunedin, capital of the Empire of Waverly, who, without fail, sent me a canned turkey every year in the pious hope that it would arrive at or before Christmas. Then there was the carroty cat Susan. I had known her before I met Peggy. I had known her very well indeed. I had seen her—what was left of her—as I helped lug the oxygen cylinders back aft from the stores. And I told myself, That pitiful, broken body means nothing to me. I have never slept with it. When I was in Flying Cloud, when I was in Aeriel, I never knew anybody catted Susan . . .

  I told myself that.

  But we worked, all of us, fetching and carrying at Peggy's command, sweating in our suits, gasping in the stale air. We watched the makeshift contraption growing as we worked—the alcohol tanks with the oxygen bottles attached to them to drive the fluid into the firing chamber, the other oxygen bottles that would feed directly into the rocket motor. It was a dreadfully inefficient setup, but it didn't matter. Mass ratio didn't worry us. We weren't concerned with escape velocity; all that we wanted was that extra nudge, the push that would drive us faster than light, that would expel us from this continuum in which we didn't belong.

  We worked, stumbling, fumbling automatons, breathing our own stinks, our skin chafed and sore inside our suits. We worked, tired and hungry and thirsty as we were. There was the urgency, there was the feeling that if we failed to meet the deadline we should be marooned here, doomed to die in a little, ruined world not of our making. We worked, half-blinded by the actinic flaring of Peggy's torch, cursing the tools that slipped from our clumsy, gloved hands, cursing each other for carelessness and failure to cooperate.

  But we worked.

  And, astern of us, the target at which the cannon of our jury rocket was aimed, we could see the dull-glowing Galactic lens, the smear of smoky crimson against the darkness. Whatever happened, we all knew, there was no return, ever, to the warmth and light of the center. We belonged on the Rim. Aboard Flying Cloud, aboa
rd Aeriel, aboard Thermopylae—we belonged on the Rim . . .

  "Now," Peggy was saying. "Now. Stand by, all of you . . ."

  "Wait!" Ralph's voice was sharp. "There'll be acceleration. Unless we've secured ourselves we shall fall through the holes in the plating—and that will be the end."

  "Then secure yourselves," said Peggy.

  I shuffled to where she was standing, got one arm around a stanchion, the other around her waist. I saw that the others were similarly disposing themselves. Peggy, with both hands free, opened two valves. From the venturi of the rocket jetted a white vapor. Then her right hand went out to a crude switch—and, abruptly, the white vapor became a torrent of fire.