We Have Fed Our Sea

by Poul Anderson

  "I didn't mean to turn you into a weeping post," he said. And he thought: The hell I didn't. I fed you your psychological medicine right on schedule. Though perhaps I did make the dose larger than planned.

  "I am unworthy," said Nakamura. "But it is an honor."

  He stared outward, side by side with the other man. "I try to reassure myself with the thought that there must be beings more highly developed than we," he said.

  "Are you sure?" answered Maclaren, welcoming the chance to be impersonal. "We've never found any that were even com­parable to us. In the brains department, at least. I'll admit the Van Mannen's abos are more beautiful, and the Old Thothians more reliable and sweet tempered."

  "How much do we know of the galaxy?"

  "Um-m-m . . . yes."

  "I have lived in the hope of encountering a truly great race. Even if they are not like gods—they will have their own wise men. They will not look at the world just as we do. From each other, two such peoples could learn the unimaginable, just as the high epochs of Earth's history came when different peoples interflowed. Yes-s-s. But this would be so much more, because the difference is greater. Less conflict. What reason would there be for it? And more to offer, a billion years of separate experience as life forms."

  "I can tell you this much," said Maclaren, "the Protectorate would not like it. Our present civilization couldn't survive such a transfusion of ideas."

  "Is our civilization anything so great?" asked Nakamura with an unwonted scornfulness.

  "No. I suppose not."

  "We have a number of technical tricks. Doubtless we could learn more from such aliens as I am thinking of. But what we would really learn that mattered—for this era of human his­tory lacks one—would be a philosophy."

  "I thought you didn't believe in philosophies."

  "I used a wrong word. I meant a do—a way. A way of. . an attitude? That is what life is for, that is your ‘Why'—it is not a mechanical cause-and-effect thing, it is the spirit in which we live."

  Nakamura laughed again. "But hear the child correcting the master! I, who cannot even follow the known precepts of Zen, ask for help from the unknown! Were it offered me, I would doubtless crawl into the nearest worm-hole."

  And suddenly the horror flared up again. He grabbed Mac­laren's arm. It sent them both twisting around, so that their outraged senses of balance made the stars whirl in their skulls. Maclaren felt Nakamura's grip like ice on his bare skin.

  "I am afraid!" choked the pilot. "Help me! I am afraid!"

  They regained their floating positions. Nakamura let go and took a fresh cigarette with shaking fingers. The silence grew thick.

  Maclaren said at last, not looking toward the Saraian: "Why not tell me the reason? It might relieve you a bit."

  Nakamura drew a breath. "I have always been afraid of space," he said. "And yet called to it also. Can you under­stand?"

  "Yes. I think I know."

  "It has—" Nakamura giggled. "Unsettled me. All my life. First, as a child I was taken from my home on Earth, across space. And now, of course, I can never come back."

  "I have some pull in the Citadel. A visa could be arranged."

  "You are very kind. I am not sure whether it would help. Kyoto cannot be as I remember it. If it has not changed, surely I have, yes-s-s? But please let me continue. After a few years on Sarai, there was a meteor fall which killed all my family except my brother. A stone from space, do you see? We did not think of it that way, then. The monastery raised us. We got scholarships to an astronautical academy. We made a voyage together as cadets. Have you heard of the Firdawzi disaster?"

  "No, I'm afraid not." Maclaren poured smoke from his mouth, as a veil against the cosmos.

  "Capella is a GO star like Sol, but a giant. The Firdawzi had been long at the innermost planet of the system, a remote-controlled survey trip. The radiations caused a metal fatigue. No one suspected. On our cruise, the ship suddenly failed. The pilot barely got us into an orbit, after we had fallen a long way toward Capella. There we must wait until rescue came. Many died from the heat. My brother was one of them."

  Stillness hummed.

  "I see," said Maclaren at last.

  "Since then I have been afraid of space. It rises into my consciousness from time to time." Maclaren stole a glance at Nakamura. The little man was lotus-postured in midair, save that he stared at his hands and they twisted together. Wretch­edness overrode his voice. "And yet I could not stop my work either. Because out in space I often seem to come closer to oneness . . . that which we all seek, what you have called understanding. But here, caught in this orbit about this star, the oneness is gone and the fear has grown and grown until I am afraid I will have to scream."

  "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.

  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—"

  "See anything else?" Sverdlov glanced uneasily at the megameters. He did not have a steady current going down the accelerators, it fluctuated continually by several per cent. But was the needle for the negatron side creeping ever so slowly downward?

  "No. No, I can't."

  "Should'a put a thermocouple in every ring. Might be a very weak deflection of ions, chewing at the end-most till all at once its focusing goes blooey and we're in trouble."

  "But we tested every single—And the star's magnetic field is attenuating with every centimeter we advance."

  "Vibration, my cub-shaped friend. It'd be easy to shake one of those jury-rigged magnetic coils just enough out of align­ment to—Hold it!"

  The terminal starboard coil glowed red Blue electric fire squirted forth and ran up the lattice. The negative megameter dropped ten points and Sverdlov felt a little surge as the ship wallowed to one side from an unbalanced thrust.

  "Engine room stopping blast!" he roared. His hand had al­ready gone crashing onto the main lever.

  The noise whined away to a mumble. He felt himself pitched off a cliff as high as eternity.

  "What's the trouble?" barked Maclaren's voice.

  Sverdlov relieved himself of a few unrepeatable remarks. "Something's gone sour out there. The last negatron accelera­tor began to glow and the current to drop. Didn't you feel us yaw?"

  "Oh, Lord, have mercy," groaned Ryerson. He looked physi­cally sick. "Not again."

  "Ah, it needn't be so bad," said Sverdlov. "Me, I'm surprised the mucking thing held together this long. You can't do much with baling wire and spit, you know." Inwardly, he struggled with a wish to beat somebody's face.

  "I presume we are in a stable orbit," said Nakamura. "But I would feel a good deal easier if the repair can be made soon. Do you want any help?"

  "No. Dave and I can handle it. Stand by to give us a test blast."

  Sverdlov and Ryerson got into their spacesuits. "I swear this smells fouler every day," said the Krasnan. "I didn't believe I could be such a filth generator." He slapped down his helmet and added into the radio: "So much for man the glorious star­conqueror."

  "No," said Ryerson.

  "What?"

  "The stinks are only the body. That isn't important. What counts is the soul inside."

  Sverdlov cocked his bullet head and stared at the other armored shape. "Do you actually believe that guff?"

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to preach or—"

  "Never mind. I don't feel like arguing either." Sverdlov laughed roughly. "I'll give you just one thing to mull over, though. If the body's such a valueless piece of pork, and we'll all meet each other in the sweet bye and bye, and so on, why're you busting every gut you own to get back to your wife?"

  He heard an outraged breath in his earphones. For a mo­ment he felt he had failed somehow. There was no room here for quarrels. Ah, shaft it, he told himself. If an Earthling don't like to listen to a colonial, he can jing-bangle well stay out of space.

  They gathered tools and instruments in a silence that smoldered. When they left the air lock, they had the usual trouble in seeing. Then their pupils expanded and their minds switched over to the alien gestalt. A raw blaze leaped forth and struck them.

  Feeling his way aft along the lattice, Sverdlov sensed his anger bleed away. The boy was right—it did no good to curse dead matter. Save your rage for those who needed it, tyrants and knaves and their sycophants. And you might even wonder—it was horrible to think—if they were worth it either. He stood with ten thousand bitter suns around him; but none was Sol or Tau Ceti. 0 Polaris, death's lodestar, are we as little as all that?

>   He reached the end of the framework, clipped his life line on, and squirted a light-diffusing fog at the ring. Not too close, he didn't want it to interfere with his ion stream, but it gave him three-dimensional illumination. He let his body float out be­hind while he pulled himself squinting-close to the accelera­tor.

  "Hm-m-m, yes, it's been pitted," he said. "Naturally it would be the negatron side which went wrong. Protons do a lot less harm, striking terrene matter. Hand me that counter, will you?"

  Ryerson, wordless and faceless, gave him the instrument. Sverdlov checked for radioactivity. "Not enough to matter," he decided. ‘We won't have to replace this ring, we stopped the process in time. By readjusting the magnetic coils we can com­pensate for the change in the electric focusing field caused by its gnawed-up shape. I hope."

  Ryerson said nothing. Good grief, thought Sverdlov, did I offend him that much? Hitherto they had talked a little when working outside, not real conversation but a trivial remark now and then, a grunt for response . . . just enough to drown out the hissing of the stars.

  "Hello, pilot. Give me a microamp. One second duration."

  Sverdlov moved out of the way. Even a millionth of an am­pere blast should be avoided, if it was an anti-proton current.

  Electric sparks crawled like ivy over the bones of the accel­erator. Sverdlov, studying the instruments he had planted along the ion path, nodded. "What's the potentiometer say, Dave?" he asked. "If it's saying anything fit to print, I mean."

  "Standard," snapped Ryerson.

  Maybe I should apologize, thought Sverdlov. And then, in a geyser: Judas, no! If he's so thin-skinned as all that, he can rot before I do.

  The stars swarmed just out of reach. Sometimes changes in the eyeball made them seem to move. Like flies. A million burning flies. Sverdlov swatted, unthinkingly, and snarled to himself.

  After a while it occurred to him that Ryerson's nerves must also be rubbed pretty thin. You shouldn't expect the kid to act absolutely sensibly. I lost my own head at the very start of this affair, thought Sverdlov. The memory thickened his temples with blood. He began unbolting the Number One magnetic coil as if it were an enemy he must destroy as savagely as possible.