by Diane Carey
She smiled. “What’s crazy about it?”
“You just said you’d rather be dead and I don’t believe it.”
Veronica settled her small shoulders against the back cushion of her seat. “I guess you don’t have to believe it. I’m the only one that has to.”
A fair point, as Jimmy sat thinking about it. He couldn’t come up with any better argument than calling her crazy again, and he’d already used that one.
She apparently noted that he still didn’t understand. She sighed and filled in. “I like the chance to see sectors of space like the one we’re passing on the way to the Faramond system.”
Hoping it sounded more like a dare than interest, Jimmy asked, “What’s so fancy about this sector of space?”
This time he spoke loud enough to reach the front of the cutter. Even from two rows back he caught his father’s glance and grimace.
“One of the most impressive natural wonders around,” the fleshy-faced engineering technician provided. “A trinary star in the Rosette Nebula, neighboring Faramond. Most of the stars in the Rosette are fairly young, but it’s got two suns orbiting a neutron star. Quickly! Who can tell me the gases? Quickly, now! Hup! Hup! Hup!”
Veronica spoke up before any of the men. “Green ionized oxygen, formaldehyde, ammonia, methyl alcohol, carbon monoxide, water . . . oh, no—that’s Orion, isn’t it? Darn it!”
“Yes, that’s what makes the Orion Trapezium appear green.”
The engineering tech chuckled and said, “Also why the Orions are so ornery.”
“You would be too,” Thorvaldsen said, “if you evolved in that mess.”
The others chuckled too, sharing a mutual entertainment that Jimmy didn’t understand.
He hunched down, taking it personally.
“We’ll be going right past Orion,” Captain April continued, “so we’ll be able to take a good long look and compare it to the young stars in the Rosette Nebula. I never tire of nebulae . . . they’re so particularly foudroyant . . . worth a voyage just to see one.”
“Rosette’s gorgeous. I’ve seen it once before,” Carlos Florida said. “Glowing agitated helium. Makes it all red.”
The tech added, “Hydrogen cyanide too.”
“Nitrogen and sulfur!” Veronica finished with a lilt of victory now that she had the right nebula in mind.
“You guys are giving me a chemical headache,” Jimmy’s father contributed. “Why does every errand have to be a classroom?”
The crew laughed.
“Now, now, George,” the captain admonished, “you of all people, now of all times.”
Everybody knew what he was hinting at, and they laughed again.
Thorvaldsen glanced back at Jimmy then and said, “You’re a lucky little bast—I mean, you’re lucky to be here.”
Then he and his assistant shared one of those so-are-we glances.
Pinched by the condescension he was getting from them, Jimmy shifted his feet and shrugged.
“Seen one star,” he cracked, “seen ’em all.”
He might as well have thrown liquid fuel on a fire. The entire shipload of eyes hit him. Slap.
Especially Thorvaldsen and his assistant.
They were looking at him as though he was turning polka-dotted in front of their very eyes. What had he said?
“Well, maybe you haven’t seen ’em all,” Thorvaldsen commented with a mean glare.
Before things got out of hand, Captain April interrupted and dampered the response that pushed at Jimmy’s lips.
“The neutron star,” he said, “is a very massive sun that’s gone through its supernova stage. It swirls so fast that it can’t be seen. The little devil constantly sucks matter off the other two suns as they produce it. We’re going to do some analysis as long as we’re going right past it. Quite something to witness. Very rare in the known galaxy.”
Calculating his response down to the last blink, Jimmy Kirk turned away and grumbled, “Yippee.”
Because they had to go around a star system experiencing high sunspot activity that could even screw up a ship in warp, it was more like seven hours than five before the navigational beeper roused them all from an on-board nap. Carlos Florida was the first to rouse and wake up enough to decipher the flashes and notices on his controls.
“Coming up on the trinary, sir,” he said to George.
“Take us off autopilot.”
“Autopilot off, aye.”
“Take us out of warp speed. Go to point five sublight.”
“Point five sublight, aye. Reducing speed.”
There was a notable whine, but almost no physical sensation as the ship dropped out of warp. Though Jimmy stiffened and waited to be pressed against his straps, it never happened. How could that be? How could they go from serious zooming to a crawl without feeling anything? What kind of compensators did this tub have?
“Well?” His father was leaning forward, scanning the upper part of the screen. “Where is it?”
Only then did Jimmy notice that the screen had changed. There was no longer the image of space matter passing by, but now the business of stationary nebulae and stars in the distance.
Then . . .
“There it is,” Florida said. Awe closed his throat on his own words. “There it is!”
The two men in front had the best view, and they seemed suddenly hypnotized with appreciation. The engineers unstrapped themselves, got up, and went to look.
Before them, though the cutter was crossing laterally and not daring to get any closer, was the trinary star system.
Everyone but Jimmy was leaning forward. Somehow he was forcing himself not to do that. Even from inside his bubble of disinterest he could feel himself magnetized by what he could see.
Two suns, one yellow-orange, one scarlet red, different sizes, stood sentinel in space, burning hard and hot. Like two Irish women’s long red hair in high wind, their heat was being sucked off and dragged in two great tails, swirling down into a dark central point, resembling the stuff that pours out of volcanoes.
Just above a whisper, Carlos Florida said, “It must be billions of years old . . . ”
George nodded. “Must’ve been here already when the Rosette’s baby suns started to form.”
“Federation Astrophysics thinks it was a neutron star a billion years before those two other ones were even formed,” Thorvaldsen was saying softly. “Probably a first-generation star, formed when the galaxy formed. Those two probably condensed out of the Rosette, and all three attracted each other and went into a mutual orbit. Jesus, it’s really the last place a human being was ever meant to be, isn’t it?”
The awe was uncloaked in their voices.
“Go ahead, gentlemen,” Robert April said as he smiled at the engineers. “Have at her.”
Thorvaldsen and his assistant almost giggled with sheer excitement. Their eyes flashed and they bit their lips and couldn’t stop making victorious noises as they disappeared into the companionway aft. A few seconds—literally only seconds—later, they came up again, hauling satchels and containers of sensory equipment.
“Gonna get some readings, gonna get some facts,” Thorvaldsen bubbled, “gonna get some readings, and take my star back! Do-ron-ron-ron, da-do-ron-ron!”
Laughter crackled through the ship. The excitement could’ve been planted and rooted.
Veronica Hall was already opening a sliding panel in the cutter’s ceiling and drawing down a ladder. The engineers started handing her their equipment, and she stuffed it topside, into the sensor pod. One particularly heavy crate made her wince, and she stepped out of the way, favoring a hand and uttering, “Ow, ow, ouch.”
The two engineers eagerly took her place.
“See you later!” the engineering tech said as he jumped onto the ladder and took it two rungs at a time, boiling to get up there and start looking at this thing.
Jimmy watched all this and tried to figure out why they were all so excited. Wasn’t it just one of those space things
? Just another nebula nobody could dare go into?
Thorvaldsen stood back briefly, held both arms open, and huskily propositioned, “Come to Papa, darlin’!”
Then he was on the ladder and up there.
“I’m next!” Veronica called, still holding on to her strained hand.
“You’ll have to kill us first!”
The others laughed again. Jimmy just shook his head and kept wondering as the ladder disappeared topside and Thorvaldsen’s hands appeared to tug the insulated panel shut.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” Veronica mumbled as she plunked down across from Jimmy again. She was holding her right wrist. The hand was completely extended in a spasm, fingers out as far and straight as possible—even farther than possible. Out and bending backward.
She manipulated the wrist, then complained under her breath and . . . took the hand off.
Jimmy gasped, jolted against his side of the craft, and choked, “Wha—!”
She looked up. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot you didn’t know.”
As he gaped, horrified, she waved the disembodied hand. “The whole lower arm is prosthetic. Pretty good imitation, isn’t it? You didn’t notice I’ve been mostly using one hand, did you?” She nodded in agreement with herself and murmured, “That’s because I only have one.”
Gaping like an idiot, Jimmy choked, “How’d . . . how . . . ”
“Oh,” she groaned, “I just did something stupid, that’s all, back when I was sixteen.”
Jimmy struggled to shove down the quiver running up his spine. Sixteen . . .
She gazed almost sentimentally at her prosthetic and said, “I swear, it was another person entirely, sometimes. I went canoeing alone, after I promised my parents I wouldn’t. I went over on some rocks and opened my arm pretty bad, then I didn’t tell anybody. Tried to take care of it myself. You know, I knew everything, of course. Even when it got infected, I didn’t tell anybody. I tried to handle it myself for over a week. Finally I got feverish and passed out, and nobody found me for almost a whole day. I was lucky to keep the elbow.”
Trying to think of this soft-spoken, feminine, flowerish girl lying feverish in some back alley, Jimmy asked, “How’d you qualify for . . . I mean, with only one . . . uh . . . ”
“Starfleet? By taking the requirements one at a time, that’s all. I can’t give myself a manicure and I’ll never play a fiddle, but I can do a cartwheel, and I can even climb a rope if I have to. I just didn’t want to give up my biggest dream. The prosthetic works all right, but I had to prove to Starfleet that I could do without it in an emergency. You know, prove I don’t always need an extra hand.”
While she busied herself getting the fake limb to relax its spasm, Jimmy sank back and cradled his own right arm.
“Extra—” he echoed softly.
“She’s our one-armed bandit,” Captain April interrupted. He was looking back at them with mischief in his eyes. “You should see her manipulate a laser pistol and a communicator at the same time.”
“Silly thing,” Veronica commented, smiling at the captain. “State-of-the-science synthetic fingers. Sometimes it seizes up on me.”
Gazing down at his two plain human hands, flexing his own fingers and making fists, Jimmy tried to think of one of his hands as “extra.”
“Here.” Veronica turned toward him. She seemed to be having a good time when she said, “Give it a shake.”
He hesitated, but didn’t want to insult her, so he twisted and gave the fake thing a good Iowa handshake—and it almost lifted him out of his seat.
“Wow! That thing’s got a grip like a gorilla!”
“Sure does.” She settled back and said, “Here. Hold hands with it for me while I get the seizure out of it, will you?”
Jimmy took the hand and held it open end out to her as she went to work inside the narrow little wrist that fit her so well.
“You make it all sound so easy,” he said.
“It wasn’t,” she admitted. “I had sixteen years to get used to having more than one. I’ve had only since then to get used to having one to work with, but my mother always said easy things don’t get any appreciation. That’s why I appreciate Starfleet so much, y’know?”
“Yeah . . . sure, I know.”
“They didn’t hold it against me,” she said as she worked, then emphatically added, “Of course, I didn’t get any favors. I had to come up to everybody else’s standards and meet the same requirements as anybody else.”
Jimmy scowled and said, “That’s not very fair.”
She struck him with a wide-eyed look, pursed her lips, and admonished. “Then you don’t know what ‘fair’ really means. It doesn’t mean lowering standards to meet somebody’s hopes. It means you raising your own hopes to meet standards. What if somebody’s life depended on me someday? What if I could get along with the faker, but not very well without it? I mean, if one hand can get chewed off, there’s no reason this one couldn’t. Accidents happen, you know. Standards stayed up. I met ’em.” Suddenly she smiled. “Preach, preach, preach, right? Well, I’m kinda proud of myself, I guess. How old are you anyway?”
“Si—”
Sixteen. Sixteen. Say it, coward.
“Seventeen.”
“Oh, hey! Won’t be long, then. You’ll be in the Academy before you know it.”
Not if I can help it.
“Right. Won’t be long.”
The words were barely out of Jimmy’s mouth before he heard his father’s voice in the forward section.
“Carlos,” George was saying quietly, “would you mind . . . ”
“Oh, sure. No problem.”
Florida unstrapped, got up, and crouched back behind his own seat.
“Jim,” George called.
Stiffening, Jimmy had to beat down a jolt of surprise and keep a leash on his tone.
“What?”
“Come up here to the pilot’s seat and take a look at this thing.”
Jimmy shook Veronica out of his head and fought to concentrate on his main message of the day.
“I can see fine,” he said.
There was some shuffling on the forward deck.
“Not after I pound that snotty tone out of you,” his father said. “Get up here, and I mean right now.”
Jimmy thought about balking again. His father had never laid a violent hand on him, and they both knew it. The walls, the furniture, the occasional farm animal, yes, but his kids, no.
Something about being in front of these professionals, though, made Jimmy get to his feet so he wouldn’t have to be groused at again. He could always count on his father for a second grouse. If only he could get up there and take a look at this thing without seeming too interested . . . that was the trick.
He collapsed into the pilot’s seat so hard that the swivel mechanism shrieked. Then he slumped way, way down, still holding on to his right wrist. After a few seconds of calculated boredom, he looked up at the big main screen.
Before him, all of nature swirled.
The two suns, their hair streams being ripped off and sucked in two great gaseous spirals, the halo effect of three violent gravitational forces working against each other, glowing disks of residual matter spiraling slowly to a common center—what a mess.
But what a pretty mess . . .
“That’s the neutron star,” his father said. “The small dark area. It’s a whole sun, millions of kilometers across, collapsed down to a rock only a few kilometers in diameter. All its elemental matter is crushed down that far.”
“Son-of-a-bitch density,” Florida murmured.
“Yeah, and it’s spinning so fast it can’t even be seen. Because it’s still acquiring matter, taking it right off those other two stars, it’ll eventually have enough gravity to collapse all the way down into a black hole. It could go at any moment.”
Jimmy watched the churning, sparkling phenomenon out there, and half expected it to go and take all of them with it. Every time he saw a flash, his nerves jumped.
“We lost a good many advance exploration ships in storms like that,” Robert added, “before we learned how to avoid them. Lot of decent people fell off that mountain so the rest of us could sit here and look without worrying. . . . ”
His voice trailed off into respectful silence.
The neutron star twisted energy into tight braids as fast as the two suns could produce it, then ate it. The yellow-orange sun’s orbit was elliptical and on a different plane from the red giant, and the red giant’s higher gravity was also ripping matter off the smaller sun even as its own energy and matter was being sucked into the neutron star. A competition of the most primitive order.
All around the area was a blue haze that resembled fog, except that it sparkled with charged solar plasma. The whole thing made a wacky sight, and baffled Jimmy’s imagination as he looked.
“What are those guys doing on top of us?” he asked.
“Looking at it,” Captain April said. “Measuring it, analyzing it, and so on. The sensor pod has a retractable window with special screening. They’re able to look at it with their naked eyes. They’re taking readings of it in order for the Federation to justify posting long-term cameras and sensor monitors on buoys, in hope of witnessing the event when the neutron collapses into a black hole.”
Jimmy’s father mistily commented, “It could happen anytime in the next two minutes or the next thousand years.”
“A thousand years?” Jimmy abruptly complained. “Then what’s the big deal!”
“That’s nothing in the billion-year life of a sun, my boy,” the captain said. “The next thousand years is any moment. We stand a fair chance of recording the event if we can get sentinel buoys out here. They have an operational life of almost a hundred years.” He leaned back in his seat and whispered, “Wouldn’t that be something!”
“Thorvaldsen and Bennings are having kittens, they’re so excited,” Veronica said.
“But you aren’t interested,” Florida tossed back at her, grinning.
She shrugged and squeezed her shoulders girlishly. “Didn’t you hear the meows from my seat?”
“This Blue Zone is a computer-enhanced image,” Jimmy’s father went on, pointing, “to show us the action of the energy out there so we can avoid it. It’s not really blue. If you were looking at it with your naked eye, you’d see the suns and a hole, but all you’d see around them is a slight electrical discharge.”