End of Exile e-3

by Ben Bova

  And, he realized, he had to see Magda.

  It was night. Everyone was asleep. Linc stood by the astrogation computer and watched all the unsleeping, hard-working instruments of the bridge. The whole ship is at my fingertips. All mine. Just as though nobody else existed.

  In three more hours they would all be awake and clustered here at the bridge while the rocket engines roared briefly to life. A few seconds to thrust, that was all that was needed for this first course correction. A quick burn that would swerve them away from Baryta’s glaring hot grasp.

  The difference between life and death.

  She won’t come to see it happen, he knew. She’ll stay in her little shrine and wail for me to come to her.

  He paced the length of the bridge once. Then twice. Abruptly he strode to the hatch and pushed it open. For the first time in many months, he went back to the living area.

  It seemed strange to be walking down the old corridor again. His home, for most of life. But now it looked old, worn, and tired, somehow different than Linc remembered it. The walls were stained and discolored. The floor was scuffed and dull.

  He passed the big double doors of the farm section. How many lifetimes ago had he repaired the pump that Peta had damaged? How much had happened since then!

  Linc found himself slowing down as he neared Magda’s door. He glanced up and saw a long-dead TV camera’s eye staring blindly out of the ceiling. I could fly that and watch the corridor from the bridge, he thought idly.

  He finally got to her door, hesitated, then tapped on it lightly.

  “Come in Linc,” came Magda’s muffled voice.

  The room was the same. The walls glowed dimly. The strange sky shapes shone across the ceiling. Magda sat on the bunk, her face deep in shadow, as Linc stepped in and let the door slide shut behind him.

  “How did you know it was me?” he asked. She pushed her hair back away from her face with a graceful hand.

  “I’m the priestess. I can see things that other people can’t see.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Besides,” she said, “who else would it be? I knew you’d come sooner or later. And probably while everyone else was asleep.”

  H e crossed the tiny room in three strides and sat on the floor, at her feet.

  “You don’t sleep?” he asked.

  “Not very much, anymore.”

  From this close he could see, despite the room’s dimness, that her face was even more gaunt and hollowed than his own.

  “I’ve got the ship running smoothly now,” Linc said.

  She looked down at him and let one hand rest on his shoulder. “Yes, I know.” Her hand felt cold through the thin fabric of his shirt. She seemed tense, almost afraid.

  “We’ll be able to make it to the new world.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You could help us—”

  “I have helped you,” Magda said.

  Linc stared up at her. “You have? How? By meditating? A few hours with a screwdriver would have been more help.”

  “Don’t joke about serious things,” Magda said softly. “I’ve helped you by staying here and fasting, concentrating, meditating—and by preventing Monel from stopping your work.”

  “Monel couldn’t—”

  “Monel tried to rouse all the people against you,” Magda said. “But Slav and his farmers refused to follow him. Thanks to the priestess.”

  Linc didn’t understand. “What? Are you saying…?”

  It was difficult to see her face in the shadows. Magda seemed to be staring off somewhere in the darkness. “Ever since you went to the Ghost Place,” she explained, “Monel has tried everyday to make me say that you are evil, and you must be stopped. I have not said it. Slav asked me for guidance, and I told him that he should not fear you, or the Ghost Place.”

  “But you told me—” Linc didn’t bother finishing the sentence. None of it made any sense to him.

  Magda went on, “You are such children, all of you. You each want to be the mighty leader, the one who gives orders, who decides what must be done. You know you’re right. Monel knows you’re wrong. At least Slav doesn’t pretend to know everything, he asks the priestess for guidance.”

  Shaking his head, Linc asked, “I thought you believed—”

  Her hand tightened on his shoulder. “The priestess is always in command. Monel thinks he’s the leader; he’s a fool. You think you can save us all from death; you’re a fool, too. I am the leader here, and all of you do as I wish. I am letting you try to fix the machines because you might be right about them. I am letting Monel think he’s giving orders to everyone because then I can make him give the orders that I want him to give.

  “When you tried to overthrow everything we have believed all our lives, even the power of the priestess, I used Monel to balance your new power. When Monel wanted to stop your work in the Ghost Place and have you cast out, I used Slav to balance him. You men do all the struggling and I remain the priestess, the real leader, the one who brings Jerlet’s wisdom into the lives of the people.”

  Linc felt stunned. “You’ve been playing us against each other?”

  Magda’s voice smiled. “Of course. I’ve been directing all of you ever since I became priestess. Before that time, even when we were children, I could make any one of you do almost anything I wanted to.”

  “But you didn’t want me to fix the machines in the bridge.”

  “True. I was afraid for you. And afraid that if you succeeded, it would ruin my power and the people’s belief in Jerlet. But when I realized that I couldn’t stop you, I decided it was foolish to resist. This way, you counterbalance Monel’s power. And Slav and his farmers have become a third power, in between the two of you.”

  Sagging against the edge of the bunk, Linc said, “I just can’t believe it. You can’t play with people’s lives like that. No one can. You just think—”

  “Why do you think you came here tonight?” Magda asked.

  “Why do I think…? I came here because we’re going to light off the rockets tomorrow for the first course change, and I’d like you to be there.”

  “No, that’s not why you came.” And her hand gripped his shoulder hard. “Linc, I summoned you. I called you. That’s why I knew who it was when you knocked.”

  He puffed out a disgusted breath of air.

  “I know you don’t believe me.” Magda’s voice was so quiet that he could barely hear her. “But you might at least ask why I called you.”

  “All right: why?”

  “Because I have a terrible fear. Your rockets are not going to work tomorrow. We’re all going to plunge into the yellow star and be burned… or… something terrible is going to happen.”

  “Don’t be silly.” But her hand was a claw biting into his shoulder now. “Magda, everything’s checked out. The computer—”

  “Don’t tell me what machines say!” she snapped. “I know something is wrong. And I need you to help me find out exactly what it is.”

  “Need me?”

  She nodded and closed her eyes. “I have to touch you, feel your vibrations, to find out what’s wrong.”

  He stared up at her. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

  But she was no longer listening to him. Her fingers were digging deeply into his shoulder. Her eyes glittered, but she was staring at empty shadows. Her entire body was shaking spasmodically.

  Magda’s mouth worked, tried to form words, but no sounds came out. Despite himself, Linc felt drawn into her spell. “What is it? What do you see?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He waited. The minutes stretched tautly. Still she seemed possessed by something invisible.

  Then she sagged and nearly collapsed against him. Linc got to his knees and held her.

  “Magda, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She was cold with sweat. “I…trouble—” she gasped weakly. “Trouble with the engines—”

  “What kind of trouble? What will go wron
g?”

  “I don’t know… couldn’t see.”

  He held her tightly, his mind racing. Foolishness! You’re letting yourself get caught up in this whole superstitious nonsense. But his own inner voice asked, What could go wrong?

  Where could a failure happen? The answer: Anywhere.

  “But what’s the most likely way that a failure could happen?” he asked himself. And the answer flashed into his mind like an explosion. “If someone tampered with the engines…or the connections between the astrogation computer and the controls… or—”

  Magda stiffened in his arms. She pulled away and stared into Linc’s eyes.

  “Monel,” she whispered.

  18

  Monel was. not in his room.

  Linc and Magda raced down the corridor and banged on his door. When there was no answer, they pushed it open. No one was there.

  “There’s a hundred places he could be,” Linc said.

  “What should we do?” Magda’s eyes were wide with fear.

  He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go to the bridge.”

  Linc tried to force himself to think calmly as they ran toward the bridge. But his mind was a hopeless jumble of fears, hatred, darting wild thoughts.

  He didn’t even realize that the bridge was totally new to Magda. He just made his way to the main computer desk and plunked himself down in the chair. With one hand he waved Magda to the empty chair beside him, with the other he switched on the computer screen.

  “Show me the locations of the main rocket thrusters, the control systems, and all the links between them and the bridge,” he commanded.

  A series of diagrams flashed onto the screens that lined the wall above the curving desk. The areas that Linc asked about were circled with bright colors.

  “How could Monel know where these are?” Magda wondered, staring at the screens.

  “Somebody told him,” Linc snapped. “Rix… the guard that stayed here to help us. A traitor. That overfed, rat-faced… he’s been telling Monel everything, I’ll bet.”

  Linc hauled himself out of the computer desk chair and hurried over to another station. He punched buttons madly and studied the pictures that the screens there showed: TV camera views of a half-dozen different parts of the ship. All empty.

  He spun around and faced Magda. “We’ll have to search everyplace where he might be.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  Linc glanced at the computer’s countdown timer. “A little more than two hours until the rockets fire.”

  “How can we search…”

  But Linc was already at the communications desk. “Everybody. …wake up!” he bellowed into the pin-sized microphone that projected from the desk top. “Slav, Cal, Hollie, get up. and report to the bridge at once. Emergency! We need everybody up here right away.”

  In less than five minutes they staggered in, sleepy, puzzled, surprised. Linc quickly told them what had happened.

  There were nearly four dozen people standing around as Linc said:

  “I don’t think he could get much farther than the second level, upstairs. The computer has shown us where the vital areas are. He must be in one of those places. We’ve got just about two hours to find him. I want you to move in teams of at least six people each. No telling how many of his guards are with him.”

  Magda stayed on the bridge with Linc. He checked every circuit, all the controls, using the computer and the ship’s sensing equipment to tell him if Monel had damaged the rocket engines or their control circuits.

  Linc showed Magda how to work the communications desk, and she began to keep track of the search parties. They could hear the people shouting to one another, thanks to the ship’s built-in microphones and loudspeakers, as they tracked through the corridors and rooms of the first and second levels.

  “Nothing in here.”

  “Hey, I thought I saw… naw, just a shadow.”

  “Look at this! Does this look like wheel tracks?”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. See, he must’ve rolled through that oil stain back there—”

  Linc wished a thousand times each minute that he had fixed the TV cameras in all the corridors so that he could see what they were doing.

  The countdown timer went past the one-hour mark. Forty-five minutes. Thirty.

  “Up here, by the deadlock.”

  Linc hadn’t moved from the checkout desk. The whole rocket system still seemed to be perfectly intact; no damage.

  “Ask them where they are… the ones who’re following those wheel tracks,” he said to Magda, without taking his eyes off the viewscreens.

  She said back to him, “The tracks go into the deadlock up on level two.”

  You-mean airlock, he corrected silently. Then he realized that Magda was working the communications machinery without arguing or complaining and he was glad that he’d kept his mouth shut. If she’s scared to touch the machines, she’s not showing it.

  “WE GOT HIM!” The voice was a triumphant shout.

  “He was in the deadlock, hiding. We got him. We’re bringing him back down to the bridge.”

  Linc realized that he should feel relieved. There was still more than twenty minutes to go before the rockets would fire. But somehow he still felt anxious. What was he doing in there? He glanced over at Magda. She looked apprehensive, too.

  “Still worried?” he asked.

  She nodded. “You?”

  “I’ll feel better when the engines fire okay.”

  Monel was his usual glaring, angry self.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? All of you!” he shouted. He sat huddled in his chair, surrounded by the grinning men and women who had ferreted him out of his hiding place. They had also found all of his guards.

  All except Rix.

  “What were you trying to do?” Linc demanded.

  “Stop you.”

  “By hiding in an airlock?”

  Monel looked disgusted. “By getting your attention away from these damnable machines!”

  The answer didn’t satisfy Linc at all. But before he could say anything, Slav shook Monel by the shoulder roughly.

  “Why don’t you want us to get to the new world? You want us all to die?”

  Monel pulled himself free of the farmer’s heavy hand. “What makes you think that you’ll be able to live on this new world? Because he says so?” He sneered at Linc. “We know we can live on the ship. But this new world of his… who’s ever lived outside the ship?” His thin voice rose to a nerve-racking shrillness. “It’s death to go outside, everyone knows that! The ship is life… everyplace else is death.”

  Linc stepped up in front of him; towering over him. “And what happens when the ship plunges into the yellow sun? That’s certain death!”

  “Who says we’re going to fall into the yellow sun?”- Monel snapped back. “You do! You claim Jerlet told you. But Jerlet never spoke to us about it.”

  Slav frowned down at Monel. “Everybody’s afraid of being eaten by the yellow star. You are, too.”

  With an exasperated flap of his hands, Monel answered, “Of course I’m afraid! But I’d rather take my chances with the yellow star than deliberately leave the Living Wheel. We know it’s death to go outside.”

  “Linc’s been outside,” said Jayna.

  “In his special suit,” Monel countered. “How long could he live out there? Well, Linc—tell them! How long could you live outside in that suit?”

  Linc shrugged. “Many hours. A few days, probably.”

  “But you want us to live outside forever! Don’t you?”

  “Not in space,” Linc said. “Not in outer darkness. On Beryl. On the new world. We’ll live the way our ancestors did on old Earth.”

  “They had to leave old Earth, didn’t they?”

  “TIMECHECK,” the computer’s tape voice called out. “COUNT DOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FIVE MINUTES AND COUNTING.”

  Slav turned to Magda. “What do you say, priestess? Is Linc rig
ht or is Monel? Should we try to leave the ship and live on the new world, or should we stay here?”

  Magda was standing halfway between Linc and Monel. All eyes turned to her.

  “I’ve meditated on this for a long time,” she said, her voice low but strong. “I’ve asked Jerlet for guidance, and tried to feel the inner truth of the problem.”

  “And…?”

  “Linc has shown that our old fears of the machines were probably wrong. He should be allowed to bring us to the new world.”

  The crowd sighed. A decision had been reached.

  “If we were not meant to live there,” Magda went on, “the machines will fail. Jerlet won’t let us be led toward death. If the machines work as Linc says they will, then we will reach the new world safely and live there in happiness. But if they fail, we’ll stay on the ship. All is Jerlet’s will.”

  They seemed satisfied with that. Even Monel appeared to relax. But Linc shook his head. Superstition. Nothing but stupid superstition.

  “COUNTDOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FOUR MINUTES AND COUNTING.”

  Time seemed to stretch out endlessly. Linc sat at the checkout desk, watching the displays on the viewscreens as they flickered past, showing every part of the rocket propulsion system. It all seemed perfectly normal, everything working smoothly.

  Three minutes. Two. Sixty seconds… thirty… ten.

  Linc suddenly felt as if he were somewhere high above the bridge, looking down on all the people standing there clustered around him, looking down on himself who stared solemn-eyed at the viewscreen displays, hands poised over the cutoff buttons, ready to stop the countdown if anything appeared to be wrong.

  “…THREE SECONDS…”

  The fuel pump symbol on the viewscreen flashed from green to amber, showing that the pump had turned on exactly on schedule.

  “…TWO… ONE…”

  Just at the count of ONE the pump symbol flashed red. Linc felt his jaw drop open. He jammed both hands down on the cutoff switch as the computer’s toneless voice said:

  “ZERO. IGNITION.”

  And an explosion tilted the bridge to a crazy angle, smashing Linc against the desk and sending everyone sprawling.