Panglor

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  Once they had a program worked out for reaching the higher orbit of the station, they settled back to pass the time. They expected to reach the station in twenty hours. Panglor had trouble relaxing, though; the whole situation surrounding the station bothered him. Finally he voiced his confusion. "You know, I wonder where this station was originally, anyway. If the discontinuity existed then, why didn't they know anything about it?"

  Alo plucked at her lip. "Seems to me," she said—and stopped and leaned forward to key a question into the library computer. Reading the results, she nodded. "Yah, the station used to be in a solar orbit a couple of hundred million kilometers farther in. The planet, of course, wasn't known at all, mainly because it's not a planet. I expect it was probably far enough away from the waystation not to be detected, but close enough to snare an occasional ship that got flung in its direction. Depending on what orbit or position it held relative to the sun, the trajectory angles of the ships that didn't make it would have seemed pretty random as the waystation moved around the sun."

  Panglor frowned more deeply. "How many ships did they lose?"

  Shrugging, Alo said, "Enough, over the long run, that people got spooked, and the system was getting a bad reputation. My teacher Urula used to say that they were crazy, superstitious fools—but I guess they weren't, after all. So when they talked about building the D3 station—and D1 was getting pretty old, anyway—a lot of people said, as long as we're going to put a new station over there, and it can do the work of this station, too, well, let's just close down and get the hell out of here before anything weirder happens. And that's what they did. Most of them moved to D3, but some of them went to other places. Took a couple of years to clear the whole population out."

  Panglor chewed his lip. "And since then, the station has been drawn out toward the discontinuity, or the discontinuity has moved closer to the station."

  "Maybe both," said Alo.

  Panglor shook his head, thinking that if anyone had told him all this a month ago, he'd have laughed in the idiot's face.

  * * *

  Panglor napped a while, and later took the watch. Alo curled up in the second pilot couch. "Pangly," she said, "do you still mean to go back for the others?" She cradled her head in her right arm and looked down at the floor. She looked drowsily thoughtful and, Panglor thought, vulnerable. He stirred uneasily. How attached was he growing to this girl . . . or woman?

  "What do you figure?" he said, locking and unlocking the fingers of both hands.

  "Don't want to figure," she mumbled. "Just want to know."

  He gestured awkwardly. "Well, we said we would."

  Alo nodded sleepily. Her mussed hair obscured her face. "Think we can land and take off from that place twice?"

  "Sure," he said huskily. He cleared his throat. The truth was, he wasn't all that sure—and he was even less sure that there was a way to get Deerfield out of the zone.

  Alo murmured, "Okay," and then she was asleep.

  Panglor felt LePiep's gentle, encouraging touch; she was following him with her eyes, from Tiki's lap. The Kili was completely relaxed. "Burr-illl," he said, smiling in imitation of the human expression. Panglor wondered if LePiep had conveyed to him, somehow, what had transpired. Certainly, at least, she had touched Tiki with feelings of peace reflecting Panglor's. Yeah, they'd be going back down to the planet.

  * * *

  Right on schedule, the station grew from a twinkling bit of silver to a respectable, if silent-looking, space station. It was stable, not tumbling; clearly some systems were still functioning on board. Panglor switched on the com and instructed Alo to monitor it, in the unlikely event that they were challenged by a guardian, either human or robot.

  They circled the station, inspecting. The structure appeared intact; at least, there was no external damage. Panglor brought the Cur to the most centrally located docking port and stopped just shy of the hangar doors. "How are we going to get inside?" Alo said. He glanced at her ruefully. He had just thought of the same question, but he hadn't thought of an answer yet. Normally there would be crews inside to operate the docking facilities.

  "Must be a way," Alo said. "Figure they left things in case they wanted to return some day. So how would they plan on doing it?"

  "Go over in a suit, probably," said Panglor. "We only have the one suit, though. I'd better go see if I can get in through a personnel lock, and then try to find the main controls."

  "You mean leave me to fly the ship in?" asked Alo with a twinkle in her eye.

  Panglor pushed a thumb back into the corner of his mouth. His face grew warm as he hesitated. "Well, we probably should check out everything we can, first, to see if there's some automatic system on standby."

  They tried. Alo worked the com, transmitting standard approach activation codes, while Panglor searched visually for a manual activator. Neither effort was successful. Finally Panglor, swallowing his reluctance, put Alo at the maneuvering controls and went to the airlock to suit up. He called her through his helmet-com and said, "Okay. You ready there, kid?"

  "Say 'kid' one more time and I'll crash this thing," Alo answered gravely.

  "Right. Sorry. If you're set, I'm going outside now." He opened the airlock, hesitated at the lip, and stepped off. He floated weightless, beyond the ship's grav field. He drifted the few meters to the station, worked his way along its exterior, using the handholds, and peered over the coated white skin, looking for any kind of mechanism, even for a small crew entry port. "Don't see a thing," he said. He turned toward the Cur's sensor-fringe, through which he assumed Alo was watching.

  "Hold it a minute," said Alo, her voice scratchy through the com.

  "What for?"

  There was a pause, then Alo said, "Move about ten meters toward the stern, and then wait. Stay close to the ship."

  "Why?" he asked, but did as she instructed. Then he faced the sensor-fringe again. "Is it a secret?"

  A blue laser beam blinked from the sensor-fringe, striking a small spot beside the hangar doors. The beam flickered several times, with varying time duration and width of focus. The wavelength changed: green, yellow, red . . . invisible.

  The station skin began moving; the hangar door was opening. Panglor roared, "By damn! How did you find that?" He watched, astonished, as the bay doors contracted to their limit, exposing an enormous cavern.

  "Want to come back aboard?"

  Panglor entered the airlock. "You going to tell me?" he asked over the com, as he pulled off the silversuit.

  He stalked to the bridge. "Well?"

  Alo grinned and winked at Tiki. "I spotted that receptor when you went by it. Figured that it would only respond to coherent light, so it was just a matter of finding the right frequency. Want to take the ship in? I have it lined up." Panglor blinked. She had turned the ship expertly, with its nose pointed straight into the hangar. LePiep was curled drowsily atop the console, as though nothing at all had been going on.

  He made a throaty sound. "Think you can handle it?"

  Grinning lopsidedly, Alo touched the controls and moved the ship in.

  The hangar was an enormous deserted warehouse, large enough to hold perhaps six vessels the size of Deerfield. That made it puny compared to facilities at D3, but still awesome and ghostly looking from the Cur's tiny control bay. A few scattered light panels glowed along the walls, chasing back the inky darkness. Alo stopped the ship dead in the gloomy cavern. The question: Was there a functioning airlock docking port? If not, they still faced the problem of getting into the station proper without suits, since the hangar was in vacuum. Using the nightscope, they inspected the hangar walls. There were a number of crossmembers and cargo-access bridges and cranes. Many of the shapes were confusing and hard to identify in the ghostly image.

  "Over there," Panglor said, pointing. A fat cylindrical structure protruded from the wall. It was a docking port with a funny corrugated ring at its end. "See if you can mate her up." He no longer doubted that she could, but it would be a tr
icky maneuver in this hulking old ship.

  Alo encountered problems jockeying sideways, but eventually she had the Cur's airlock aligned perfectly with the docking adaptor. "There might be an automatic system here, or there might not be," Panglor said. Nodding, Alo nudged the ship sideways and made contact. Nothing happened. She flashed the laser, hitting several spots that looked like receptors on the wall. Nothing happened. Then she applied force, snubbing the ship, not too hard, against the docking port. The corrugated endpiece suddenly gave way and conformed like soft putty to the Cur's airlock. The ship stayed in place when she cut the driver; something else was now holding it.

  She turned and bowed. "Not bad," Panglor admitted. "I'll go check the passage."

  He resuited and passed cautiously from the airlock into the mating tunnel. The tunnel was clear and lighted and, best of all, pressurized with safe-testing air. He cracked his helmet seal and took a breath. Stale, but breathable. Returning to the airlock, he unsuited and dressed again. "Seems fine," he called with a surge of excitement. Exploring a long-deserted space station appealed to his sense of adventure.

  Alo and Tiki joined him, bringing LePiep. Alo sighed when they entered the station proper. "Let's do this fast, okay?" she said. "This reminds me too much of D3."

  Deflated, Panglor shrugged and moved ahead, gesturing for the others to follow.

  * * *

  For several hours, they roamed through the engineering and control sections of the station. A fine, almost oily layer of dust coated everything. Many of the station's systems had been left operational; the vital core systems, such as life-support and electrical power, were running at a minimal automatic level, powered by sunlight collectors. The systems possessed a degree of self-repair capability, but generally the machinery still running was simply of long-life design, and had been running untouched since the station was closed half a century ago.

  The control room for the foreshortening field generators they found, finally, three levels up from the main engineering deck. Panglor and Alo examined the instrument panels carefully. Tiki stood nearby, keeping watch on LePiep; apparently he knew nothing of such technical matters. After a while, Panglor began to feel that he and Alo didn't, either. The foreshortening field systems were on, according to the instrument consoles—including both the collapsing-field and capture-field generators. But the collapsing-field was nowhere in evidence. Panglor was trying to puzzle out why this might be so, while Alo worked over some of the main panels to look for a malfunction.

  "Now, we know the capture-field's working all right," he said. "And the relays to the collapsing-field are all closed, and the telemetry says there's power going through—but we don't know how much power the thing takes. We know we've got some solar collectors in solar orbit, so that's where the juice is coming from." He clacked his teeth together and picked up the ou-ralot. "What do you think. Peep?"

  "Hluuu," LePiep mourned, wiggling in his arms. Her eyes turned wet.

  "Pangly, check the capacitance circuit for me on the third panel?" asked Alo, from behind a bank of gear.

  Panglor sucked against his teeth and did as she asked. He was impressed by the technical checks she was running—no question about that—but he didn't think it was the way to find the problem. Something told him it would have to be reasoned out. "What'd you find?" he grunted.

  "It's okay," said Alo quietly.

  "Trouble is, too much of this outfit is scattered across half the solar system, and the station isn't even in the same orbit it used to be in. Collectors, power relays, generators—we can't get at most of it."

  "It's all metered and if we just check through the metering systems, we ought to find the problem," came Alo's voice. She had moved farther down.

  "But we don't know the values. How much power is this thing supposed to pull, anyway?"

  Alo's voice came back: "We know what the capture-field pulls, right? And it works."

  "Yeah, but do they both draw the same?"

  For a moment, she didn't answer. Then she reappeared, disheveled and sweaty. "Don't they?" she demanded.

  He thought a moment. "Not sure," he admitted. "It seems to me, maybe they don't. I think maybe the collapsing-field draws more, does more of the work." He scratched his head. "Actually, I think it draws a lot more."

  "We're in trouble then. There's no more power coming out of the solar units. That's all there is."

  They stared at each other. Alo's eyes were sharp and angry. "You mean there's no way to up the power?" he asked.

  She tugged at her hair, which was becoming very ratty. "There must be a way."

  He thought about it, and shook his head. "No."

  "There must be."

  He thought again, and shook his head again. "I don't think so."

  Alo fumed. She curled her lip and went back to the panels. For two more hours she worked. Panglor sometimes worked with her and sometimes stood with Tiki, who looked dejectedly cross-eyed. Alo became more and more frustrated. Finally she barked at Panglor, who had taken a break to play with LePiep. "You know, maybe if you helped a little instead of doing that, we'd get this thing fixed, you know!"

  Panglor stopped what he was doing, which was picking up LePiep by her front paws. He fixed Alo with a hard gaze. The ou-ralot suddenly became still, her emanations cold. "I don't think so," he said. He patted LePiep to reassure her and sat down, defeated, beside Tiki.

  Alo blinked several times. Then she twisted around and worked at the panels again, glaring. Every muscle in her small body was trembling. Ten minutes later she returned and faced them. She looked more at Tiki than at Panglor. "There's no way to make it work. I'm sure now," she said. Her face was as cold as stone.

  "Yah," said Panglor.

  "We're stuck here. We can't go back."

  "Yah."

  Chapter 12

  Depression hung like a fog in the room. Tiki sat silent, erect, eyes crossed so sharply he must have been looking sideways; his brow pulsed nervously. Alo fumed at the floor. Her hair hung limp over her eyes, and her posture suggested a marathoner who had fallen lame just short of the finish. Her eyes smoldered, giving off occasional glints of anger through the curtain of hair. LePiep lay in Panglor's lap, her head hanging over his knee in dejection; every minute or so she sighed loudly.

  Panglor felt as though his heart had dropped out of his chest. The station had been their last hope; now they had no hope. They could stay here, or they could go back to the planet. He had made a promise to Jeebering. But he couldn't think about that now; he couldn't think about anything. He sat staring through half-lidded eyes. Waves of depression from the others washed over him. He stared at the floor, at the tracks they had left in the dust.

  "God damn," he muttered, later, when he had more energy.

  "Kervill mondometzo-brrrr, snik snik, kaffledorf," said Tiki, looking from Alo to Panglor. "Muck muck." Panglor looked at him oddly. "Filge-fick," concluded Tiki.

  "Do you have any idea what he's saying?" Panglor said to Alo.

  "I don't have any idea why we're here!" Alo muttered coldly. "You and your going after that ship!"

  "What do you mean?" he said slowly.

  "I mean, you didn't have to do it. You let those criminals push you around, and now here we are because of it." Her eyes turned bright and steely behind the tangle of hair.

  Panglor felt a flash of anger. He tried to suppress it, but the feelings boiled up anyway. How could this girl—this stowaway!—say that, when she was the one who had no business even being on the Cur in the first place? "Listen!" he growled. "No one asked you to come along, you know!"

  Alo jumped up and glared. "And where would you have been without me copiloting?"

  Blood rushed in his ears. "Where am I now!" he said savagely.

  "Why you—!" Alo cried in fury. "You—you bastard!" Her hair bounced as she yelled, shaking her fist. "I'm not going to help you any more—you can do it yourself! See how far you get!" Whirling, she stormed out of the control room. Her footsteps echoed d
own the corridor and faded.

  "Krilll b-dartz!" Tiki said tremulously. His eyes jumped spastically, and his body went rigid as a statue.

  Bah! thought Panglor. She'll be back.

  LePiep bounded from his lap and streaked across the room to the doorway where Alo had disappeared. "Hyo-lo-lo!" she cried, peering down the corridor. She stood there for several minutes, then slowly walked back to Panglor, head low, radiating severe dismay. She crouched silently at his feet.

  Christ, he thought.

  And the trouble was, she was right. He was to blame for everything that had gone wrong—for their coming to the D1 system in the first place, for Deerfield's coming along after them, for their failure to find a way home. He felt a burning in his chest as he thought about it. What was he supposed to do now, for chrissake?

  He waited, not moving, until the iron band around his lungs eased its grip. He became acutely aware of the whisper of induction-circulated air. Finally he sighed. "Tiki—want to come look for her? For Alo?"

  "Snirrveff," answered the Kili, blinking in response to Alo's name. LePiep responded, too; she jumped into Panglor's lap, then sprang up and out, spreading her wings, and swept in a tight circle around the room. She landed at his feet, then jumped into his arms again, emoting happily.

  They explored the corridor Alo had taken, calling her name, but hearing only their own echoes. They followed the corridor around a bend, through two large archways, and into a high-ceilinged lobby fifty meters long and twenty wide, lighted gloomily by scattered squares on the walls. The chamber was barren. Corridors branched off in every direction except to the right, and on that side a long staircase, perhaps provided for architectural novelty, ascended to a balcony. Panglor thought a moment, then led the way up the staircase. It seemed the sort of direction Alo would take.