"O.K., gimme another microamp one-second test."
"Try shifting Number Two a few centimeters forward," said Ryerson.
"You crazy?" snorted Sverdlov. Yes, I suppose we're all a bit crazy by now. "Look, if the deflected stream strikes here, you'll want to bend it down like so and—"
"Never mind." Ryerson could not be seen to move, in the bulk of his armor, but Sverdlov imagined him turning away with a contemptuous shrug. It took several minutes of tinkering for the Krasnan to realize that the Earthling had visualized the interplay of forces correctly.
He swallowed. "You were right," he emitted.
"Well, let's get it reassembled," said Ryerson coldly.
Very good, Earth snob, sir. Sverdlov attacked the coils for several more minutes. "Test blast." Not quite. Try another setting. "Test blast. Repeat." That seemed to be it. "Give me a milliamp this time . . . A full amp . . . hm-m-m." The current had flowed too short a time to heat the ring, but needles wavered wildly.
"We're still getting some deflection," said Sverdlov. "Matter of velocity distribution. A certain small percentage of the particles have abnormal velocities and—" He realized he was crouched under Ryerson's hidden eyes babbling the obvious. "I'll try sliding this one a wee bit more aside. Gimme that vernier wrench—So. One amp test blast, please."
There was no further response from the instruments. Ryerson let out a whistling sigh. "We seem to have done it," he said.
We? thought Sverdlov. Well, you handed me a few tools!
Aloud: "We won't know for sure till full thrust is applied."
"Of course." Ryerson spoke hesitantly. Sverdlov recognized the tone, it was trying to be warm. Ryerson was over his fit of temper.
Well, I'm not!
"There isn't anything to be done about that except to try it and see, is there?" went on the Earthling.
"And if we still get significant deflection, drag on our suits and crawl back here—maybe a dozen times? No!"
"Why, that was how we did it before."
"I'm getting awfully hungry," said Sverdlov. Suddenly it flared out of him. "I'm sick of it! I'm sick of being cooped up in my own stink, and yours, I'm sick of the same stupid faces and the same stupid remarks, yes, the same stars even! I've had enough! Get on back inside. I'll stay here and watch under acceleration. If anything goes wrong, I'll be right on the spot to fix it."
"But—"
Nakamura's voice crackled above the mutter of stars. "What are you thinking of, Engineer Sverdlov? Two gravities would pull you off the ship! And we're not maneuverable enough to rescue you."
"This life line is tested for two thousand kilos," said the Krasnan. "It's standard procedure to make direct high-acceleration checks on the blast."
"By automatic instruments."
"Which we haven't got. Do you know the system is fully adjusted? Are you so sure there isn't some small cumulative effect, so the thing will quit on you one day when you need it the most?"
Maclaren's tone joined in, dry and somehow remote: "This is a curious time to think about that."
"I am the engineer," said Sverdlov stiffly. "Read the ship's articles again."
"Well," said Nakamura. "Well, but—"
"It would save time," said Ryerson. "Maybe even a few days' worth of time, if the coils really are badly maladjusted."
"Thanks, Dave," said Sverdlov clumsily.
"Well," said Nakamura, "you have the authority, of course. But I ask you again—"
"All I ask of you is two gravities' worth of oof for a few seconds," interrupted Sverdlov. "When I'm satisfied this ring will function properly, so we won't have to be forever making stops like this, I'll come inside."
He hooked his legs about the framework and began resetting the instruments clamped onto it. "Get on back, Dave," he said.
"Why . . . I thought I would—"
"No need to."
"But there is! You can't read every dial simultaneously, and if there's work to be done you'll need help."
"I'll call you if I want you. Give me your tool belt." Sverdlov took it from reluctant hands and buckled it around himself. "There is a certain amount of hazard involved, Dave. If I should be unlucky, you're the closest approximation to an engineer the ship will have. She can't spare both of us."
"But why take any risk at all?"
"Because I'm sick of being here! Because I've got to fight back at that black coal or start howling! Now get inside!"
AS he watched the other blocky shape depart him, Sverdlov thought: I am actually not being very rational, am I now? But who could expect it, a hundred light-years from the sun?
As he made ready, he puzzled over what had driven him. There was the need to wrestle something tangible; and surely to balance on this skeleton of metal, under twice his normal weight, was a challenge. Beyond that, less important really, was the logic of it: the reasons he had given were sound enough as far as they went, and you could starve to death while proceeding at the pace of caution.
And below it all, he thought, was a dark wish he did not understand. Li-Tsung of Krasna would have told him to live at all costs, sacrifice all the others, to save himself for his planet and the Fellowship. But there were limits. You didn't have to accept Dave's Calvinism—though its unmerciful God seemed very near this dead star—to swallow the truth that some things were more important than survival. Than even the survival of a cause.
Maybe I'm trying to find out what those things are, he thought confusedly.
He crawled "up" till his feet were braced on a cross-member, with the terminal accelerator ring by his right ankle but the electroprober dial conveniently near his faceplate. His right hand gripped a vernier wrench, his left drew taut the life line. "Stand by for blast," he said into his radio. "Build up to two gees over a one-minute period, then hold it till I say cut."
Nothing happened for a while except the crawling of the constellations as gyros brought the ship around. Good boy, Seiichi! He'd get some escape distance out of even a test blast. "Stand by," it said in Sverdlov's earphones. And his weight came back to him, until he felt an exultant straining in the muscles of shoulder and arm and leg and belly; until his heart thudded loud enough to drown out the thin crackling talk of the stars.
The hull was above him now, a giant sphere upheld on twin derricks. Down the middle of each derrick guttered a ghostly blue light, and sparks writhed and fountained at junction points. The constellations shone chill through the electric discharge.
Inefficient, thought Sverdlov. The result of reconstruction without adequate instruments. But it's pretty. Like festival fireworks. He remembered a pyrotechnic display once, when he was small. His mother had taken him. They sat on a hired catamaran and watched wonder explode softly above the lake.
"Uh," grunted Sverdlov. He narrowed his eyes to peer at the detector dial. There certainly was a significant deflection yet, when whole grams of matter were being thrown out every second. It didn't heat up the ring very much, maybe not enough to notice; but negatrons plowed through terrene electron shells, into terrene nuclei, and atoms were destroyed. Presently there would be crystal deformation, fatigue, ultimate failure. He reported his findings and added with a sense of earned boasting: "I was right. This had to be done."
"I shall halt blast, then. Stand by."
Weightlessness came back. Sverdlov reached out delicately with his wrench, nipped a coil nut, and loosened the bolt. He shifted the coil itself backward. "I'll have this fixed in a minute. There! Now give me three gees for about thirty seconds, just to make sure."
"Three? Are you certain you—"
"I am. Fire!"
It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man. Maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who happened to live somewhere else. Oh, come off it, he told himself, next thing you'll be teaching a Humane League kindergarten.
The force on him climbed, and his muscles rejoiced in it. At t
hree gees there was no deflection against the ring or was there? He peered closer. His right hand, weighted by the tool it still bore, slipped from the member on which it had been leaning. Sverdlov was thrown off balance. He flung both arms wide, instinctively trying not to fall. His right went between the field coils and into the negatron stream.
Fire sprouted.
Nakamura cut the drive. Sverdlov hung free, staring by starlight at his arm. The blast had sliced it across as cleanly as an industrial torch. Blood and water vapor rushed out and froze in a small cloud, pale among the nebulae.
There was no pain. Not yet. But his eardrums popped as pressure fell. "Engine room!" he snapped. A part of him stood aside and marveled at his own mind. What a survival machine, when the need came! "Emergency! Drop total accelerator voltage to one thousand. Give me about ten amps down the tube. Quick!"
He felt no weight, such a blast didn't exert enough push on the hull to move it appreciably. He thrust his arm back into the ion stream. Pain did come now, but in his head, as the eardrums ruptured. One minute more and he would have the bends. The gas of antiprotons roared without noise around the stump of his wrist. Steel melted. Sverdlov prodded with a hacksaw gripped in his left hand, trying to seal the spacesuit arm shut.
He seemed far away from everything. Night ate at his brain. He asked himself once in wonderment: "Was I planning to do this to other men?"
When he thought the sleeve was sealed, he withdrew it. "Cut blast," he whispered. "Come and get me." His airtanks fed him oxygen, pressure climbed again inside the suit. It was good to float at the end of a life line, breathing. Until he began to strangle on his own blood. Then he gave up and accepted the gift of darkness.
NOW, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds. Tamara had been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if space itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in space. On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.
A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was small protection. But she would not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.
She said to herself, drearily: "I would stay here even then, except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don't know which would be worse!"
There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with herself. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David's unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not yet . . . so far it was only sickness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoarse grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehensible readings aloud—his island and his sea and his language lessons!
For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!
She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor's daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of graciousness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her husband's father. This was her family now.
But.
Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smashing at heaped boulders with a violence that shivered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin. Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.
She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm trees under infinitely tall skies.
She remembered David saying wryly: "My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it—Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge—that must be why so many of them have become spacemen in the last several generations. To get away!"
And then, touching her hair with his lips: "But I've found what all of them were really looking for."
It was hard to imagine that David's warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a country. She had always thought of the religion which so troubled him—he first came to know her through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David groped for a God not all iron and hellfire—as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.
Now she saw that Skula's dwellers and Skula's God had come from Skula itself, with winter seas in their veins. David had not been struggling toward normality; he had been reshaping himself into something which—down underneath— Magnus Ryerson thought was not human. Suddenly, almost blindingly, Tamara remembered a few weeks ago, one night when the old man had set her a ballad to translate. "Our folk have sung it for many hundreds of years," he said—and how he had looked at her under his heavy brows.
He hath taken off cross and iron helm,
He hath bound his good horse to a limb,
He hath not spoken Jesu name
Since the Faerie Queen did first kiss him.
Tamara struck a fist into one palm. The wind caught her cloak and peeled it from her, so that it flapped at her shoulders like black wings. She pulled it back around her, shuddering.
The sun was a red sliver on the world's rim. Darkness would come in minutes, so thick you could freeze to death fumbling your way home. Tamara began to walk, quickly, hoping to find a decision. She had not come out today just because the house was unendurable. But her mind had been stiff, as if rusted. She still didn't know what to do.
Or rather, she thought, I do know, but haven't saved up enough courage.
WHEN she reached the house, the air was already so murky she could almost not make out whitewashed walls and steep snowstreaked roof. A few yellow gleams of light came through cracks in the shutters. She paused at the door. To go in—! But there was no choice. She twisted the knob and stepped through. The wind and the sea-growl came in with her.
"Close the door," said Magnus. "Close the door, you little fool."
She shut out all but a mumble and whine under the eaves, hung her cloak on a peg and faced around. Magnus Ryerson sat in his worn leather chair with a worn leather-bound book in his hands. As always, as always! How could you tell one day from the next in this den? The radiglobe was turned low, so that he was mostly shadow, with an icicle gleam of eyes and a dirty-white cataract of beard. A peat fire sputtered forlornly, trying to warm a tea kettle on the hob.
Ryerson put the book down on his lap, knocked out his archaic pipe—it had made the air foul in here—and asked roughly: "Where have you been all day, girl? I was about to go look for you. You could turn an ankle and die of exposure, alone on the ling."
"I didn't," said Tamara. She exchanged her boots for zori and moved toward the kitchen.
"Wait!" said Magnus. "Will you never learn? I want my high tea just at 1630 hours—Now. You must be more careful, lass. You're carrying the last of the Ryersons."
Tamara stopped. There was a downward slant to the ancient brick floor, she felt vaguely how her body braced itself. More nearly she felt how her chilled skin, which had begun to tingle as it warmed, grew numb again.
"Besides David," she said.
"If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?" Magnus began scraping out his pipe.
He did not look at her.
"I don't believe he is dead," she answered.
"The Lunar crew couldn't establish gray-beam contact. Even if he is still alive, he'll die of old age before that ship reaches any star where men have an outpost. No, say rather he'll starve!"
"If he could repair whatever went wrong—"
The muffled surf drums outside rolled up to a crescendo. Magnus tightened his mouth. "That is one way to destroy yourself . . . hoping," he said. "You must accept the worst, because there is always more of the worst than the best in this universe."
She glanced at the black book he called a Bible, heavy on one of the crowded shelves. "Do your holy writings claim that?" she asked. Her voice came out as a stranger's croak.
"Aye. So does the second law of thermodynamics." Magnus knocked his pipe against the ashtray. It was an unexpectedly loud noise above the wind.
"And you . . . and you . . . won't even let me put up his picture," she whispered.
"It's in the album, with my other dead sons. I'll not have it on the wall for you to blubber at. Our part is to take what God sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet."
"Do you know—" Tamara stared at him with a slowly rising sense of horror. "Do you know, I cannot remember just what he looked like?"
She had had some obscure hope of provoking his rage. But the shaggy-sweatered broad shoulders merely lifted, a little shrug. "Aye, that's common enough. You've the words, blond hair and blue eyes and so on, but they make not any real image. Well, you didn't know him so very long, after all."
You are telling me I am a foreigner, she thought. An interloper who stole what didn't belong to me.
"There's time to review a little English grammar before tea," said the old man. "You've been terrible with the irregular verbs."
We Have Fed Our Sea Page 8