by Larry Niven
But Buckman liked to talk, and Bury at least had the time to listen. MacArthur was a beehive these days, frantically busy and crowded as hell. And there was room to pace in Bury's cabin.
Or, Bury speculated cynically, he might like Bury's coffee. Bury had almost a dozen varieties of coffee beans, his own grinder, and filter cones to make it. He was quite aware of how his coffee compared with that in the huge percolators about the ship.
Nabil served them coffee while they watched the fuel transfer on Bury's screen. The tanker fueling MacArthur was hidden, but Lenin and the other tanker showed as two space-black elongated eggs, linked by a silver umbilicus, silhouetted against a backdrop of fuzzy scarlet.
"It should not be that dangerous," said Dr. Buckman.
"You're thinking of it as a descent into a sun, Bury. Which it is, technically. But that whole vast volume isn't all that much more massive than Cal or any other yellow dwarf. Think of it as a red-hot vacuum. Except for the core, of course; that's probably tiny and very dense.
"We'll learn a great deal going in," he said. His eyes were alight, focused on infinity. Bury, watching him sidewise, found the expression fascinating. He had seen it before, but rarely. It marked men who could not be bought in any coin available to Horace Bury.
Bury had no more practical use for Buckman than Buckman had for Bury. Bury could relax with Buckman, as much as he could relax with anybody. He liked the feeling.
He said, "I thought you would already know everything about the Eye."
"You mean Murcheson's explorations? Too many records have been lost, and some of the others aren't trustworthy. I've had my instruments going since the Jump. Bury, the proportion of heavy particles in the solar wind is amazingly high. And helium-tremendous. But Murcheson's ships never went into the Eye itself, as far as we know. That's when we'll really learn things." Buckman frowned. "I hope our instruments can stand up to it. They have to poke through the Langston Field, of course. We're likely to be down in that red-hot fog for some considerable time, Bury. If the Field collapses it'll ruin everything."
Bury stared, then laughed. "Yes, Doctor, it certainly would!"
Buckman looked puzzled. Then, "Ah. I see what you mean. It would kill us too, wouldn't it? I hadn't thought of that."
Acceleration warnings sounded. MacArthur was moving into the Eye.
Sinclair's thick burr sounded in Rod's ear. "Engineering report, Captain. All systems green. Field holding verra well, ‘tis nae so warm as we feared."
"Good," Blaine replied. "Thanks, Sandy." Rod watched the tankers receding against the stars. Already they were thousands of kilometers away, visible only through the telescopes as bright as points of light.
The next screen showed a white splotch within a red fog: Lenin leading into the universal red glare. Lenin's crew would search for the Alderson point-if there were such a point.
"Still, ‘tis certain the Field will leak inward sooner or later," Sinclair's voice continued. "There's no place for the heat to go, it must be stored. ‘Tis no like a space battle, Captain. But we can hold wi' no place to radiate the accumulated energy for at least seventy-two hours. After that-we hae no data. No one has tried this loony stunt before."
"Yes."
"Somebody should have," Renner said cheerfully. He had been listening from his post on the bridge. MacArthur was holding at one gee, but it took attention: the thin photosphere was presenting more resistance than expected. "You'd think Murcheson would have tried it. The First Empire had better ships than ours."
"Maybe he did," Rod said absently. He watched Lenin move away, breaking trail for MacArthur, and felt an unreasonable irritation. MacArthur should have gone first...
The senior officers slept at their duty stations. There wasn't much anyone could do if the Field soaked up too much energy, but Rod felt better in his command seat. Finally it was obvious that he wasn't needed.
A signal came from Lenin and MacArthur cut her engines. Warning horns sounded, and she, came under spin until other hoots signaled the end of unpleasant changes in gravity. Crew and passengers climbed out of safety rigging.
"Dismiss the watch below," Rod ordered. Renner stood and stretched elaborately. "That's that, Captain. Of course we'll have to slow down as the photosphere gets thicker, but that's all right. The friction slows us down anyway." He looked at his screens and asked questions with swiftly moving fingers. "It's not as thick as, say, an atmosphere out there, but it's a lot thicker than a solar wind."
Blaine could see that for himself. Lenin was still ahead, at the outer limit of detection, and her engines were off. She was a black splinter in the screens, her outlines blurred by four thousand kilometers of red-hot fog.
The Eye thickened around them.
Rod stayed on the bridge another hour, then persuaded himself that he was being unfair. "Mr. Renner."
"Yes, sir?"
"You can go off watch now. Let Mr. Crawford take her."
"Aye aye, sir." Renner headed for his cabin. He'd reached the conclusion that he wasn't needed on the bridge fifty-eight minutes before. Now for a hot shower, and some sleep in his bunk instead of the conning chair.
The companionway to his cabin was jammed, as usual. Kevin Renner was pushing his way through with singleminded determination when someone lurched hard against hint.
"Dammit! Excuse me," he snarled. He watched the miscreant regain his feet by hanging onto the lapels of Renner's uniform. "Dr. Horvath, isn't it?"
"My apologies." The Science Minister stepped back and brushed at himself ineffectually. "I haven't gotten used to spin gravity yet. None of us have. It's the Coriolis effect that throws us off."
"No. It's the elbows," Renner said. He regained his habitual grin. "There are six times as many elbows as people aboard this ship, Doctor. I've been counting."
"Very funny, Mr. Renner, isn't it? Sailing Master Renner. Renner, this crowding bothers my personnel as much as yours. If we could stay out of your way, we would. But we can't. The data on the Eye have to be collected. We may never have such a chance again."
"I know, Doctor, and I sympathize. Now if you'll-" Visions of hot water and clean bedding receded as Horvath clutched at his lapels again.
"Just a moment, please." Horvath seemed to be making up his mind about something. "Mr. Renner, you were aboard MacArthur when she captured the alien probe, weren't you?"
"Hoo Boy, I sure was."
"I'd like to talk to you."
"Now? But, Doctor, the ship may need my attention at any moment-"
"I consider it urgent."
"But we're cruising through the photosphere of a star, as you may have noticed." And I haven't had a hot shower in three days. as you may also have noticed... Renner took a second look at Horvath's expression and gave up. "All right, Doctor. Only let's get out of the passageway."
Horvath's cabin was as cramped as anything on board, except that it had walls. More than half of MacArthur's crew would have considered those walls an undeserved luxury. Horvath apparently did not, from the look of disgust and the muttered apologies as they entered the cabin.
He lifted the bunk into the bulkhead and dropped two chairs from the opposite wall. "Sit down, Renner. There are things about that interception that have been bothering me. I hope I can get an unbiased view from you. You're not a regular Navy man."
The Sailing Master did not bother to deny it. He had been mate on a merchant ship before, and would skipper one when he left the Navy with his increased experience; and he could hardly wait to return to the merchant service.
"So," said Horvath, and sat down on the very edge of the foldout chair. "Renner, was it absolutely necessary to attack the probe?"
Renner started to laugh.
Horvath took it, though he looked as if he had eaten a bad oyster.
"All right," said Renner. "I shouldn't have laughed. You weren't there. Did you know the probe was diving into Cal for maximum deceleration?"
"Certainly, and I appreciate that you were too. But was it re
ally that dangerous?"
"Dr. Horvath, the Captain surprised me twice. Utterly. When the probe attacked, I was trying to take us around the edge of the sail before we were cooked. Maybe I'd have got us away in time and maybe not. But the Captain took us through the sail. It was brilliant, it was something I should have thought of, and I happen to think the man's a genius. He's also a suicidal maniac."
"What?"
On Renner's face was retrospective dread. "He should never have tried to pick up the probe. We'd lost too much time. We were about to ram a star. I wouldn't have believed we could pick up the damned thing so fast. .
"Blaine did that himself?"
"No. He gave the job to Cargill. Who's better at tight high-gravity maneuvers than anybody else aboard. That's the point, Doctor. The Captain picked the best man for the job and got out of the way."
"And you would have run for it?"
"Forthrightly and without embarrassment."
"But he picked it up. Well." Horvath seemed to taste something bad. "But he also fired on it. The first-"
"It shot first."
"That was a meteor defense!"
"So what?"
Horvath clamped his lips.
"All right, Doctor, try this. Suppose you left your car on a hill with the brakes off and the wheels turned the wrong way, and suppose it rolled down the hill and killed four people. What's your ethical position?"
"Terrible. Make your point, Renner."
"The Moties are at least as intelligent as we are. Granted? OK. They built a meteor defense. They had an obligation to see to it that it did not fire on neutral space craft."
Horvath sat there for what seemed a long time, while Kevin Renner thought about the limited capacity of the hot-water tanks in officers' country. That bad-taste expression was natural to Horvath, Renner saw; the lines in his face fell into it naturally and readily. Finally the Science Minister said, "Thank you, Mr. Renner."
"You're welcome." Renner stood.
An alarm sounded.
"Oh, Lord. That's me." Renner dashed for the bridge.
They were deep within the Eye: deep enough that the thin starstufi around them showed yellow. The Field indicators showed yellow too, but with a tinge of green.
All this Renner saw as he glanced around at half a dozen screens on the bridge. He looked at the plots on his own screens; and he did not see the battleship. "Lenin's Jumped?"
"Right," Midshipman Whitbread said. "We're next, sir." The red-haired middie's grin seemed to meet at the back of his head.
Blaine sailed into the bridge without touching the companionway sides. "Take the con, Mr. Renner. The pilot ought to be at your station now."
"Aye aye, sir," Renner turned to Whitbread. "I relieve you." His fingers danced across the input keys, then he hit a line of buttons even as the new data flowed onto his screen. Alarms went off in rapid succession: JUMP STATIONS, BATTLE STATIONS, HEAVY ACCELERATION WARNING.
MacArthur prepared herself for the unknown.
PART TWO - THE CRAZY EDDIE POINT
13 Look Around You
She was the first to find the intruders.
She had been exploring a shapeless mass of stony asteroid that turned out to be mostly empty space. Some earlier culture had carved out rooms and nooks and tankages and storage chambers, then fused the detritus into more rooms and chambers, until the mass was a stone beehive. It had all happened very long ago, but that was of no interest to her.
In later ages meteoroids had made dozens of holes through the construct. Thick walls had been gradually thinned so that air might be chemically extracted from the stone. There was no air now. There was no metal anywhere. Dry mummies, and stone, stone, little else and nothing at all for an Engineer.
She left via a meteoroid puncture; for all the air locks had been fused shut by vacuum welding. A long time after that someone had removed their metal working parts.
After she was outside, she saw them, very tar away, a tiny glimmer of golden light against the Coal Sack. It was worth a look. Anything was worth a look.
The Engineer returned to her ship.
Telescope and spectrometer failed her at first. There were two of the golden slivers, and some bulk inside each of them, but something was shutting out her view of the masses inside. Patiently the Engineer went to work on her instruments, redesigning, recalibrating, rebuilding, her hands working at blinding speed guided by a thousand Cycles of instincts.
There were force fields to be penetrated. Presently she had something that would do that. Not well, but she could see large objects.
She looked again.
Metal. Endless, endless metal.
She took off immediately. The call of treasure was not to be ignored. There was little of free will in an Engineer.
Blaine watched a flurry of activity through a red fog as he fought to regain control of his traitor body after return to normal space. An all-clear signal flashed from Lenin, and Rod breathed more easily. Nothing threatened, and he could enjoy the view.
It was the Eye he saw first. Murcheson's Eye was a tremendous ruby, brighter than a hundred full moons, all alone on the black velvet of the Coal Sack.
On the other side of the sky, the Mote was the brightest of a sea of stars. All systems looked this way at breakout: a lot of stars, and one distant sun. To starboard was a splinter of light, Lenin, her Langston Field radiating the overload picked up in the Eye.
Admiral Kutuzov made one final check and signaled Blaine again. Until something threatened, the scientists aboard MacArthur were in charge. Rod ordered coffee and waited for information.
At first there was maddeningly little that he hadn't already known. The Mote was only thirty-five light years from New Scotland, and there had been a number of observations, some dating back to Jasper Murcheson himself. A G2 star, less energetic than Sol, cooler, smaller and a bit less massive. It showed almost no sunspot activity at the moment, and the astrophysicists found it dull.
Rod had known about the gas giant before they started. Early astronomers had deduced it from perturbations in the Mote's orbit around the Eye. They knew the gas giant planet's mass and they found it almost where they expected, seventy degrees around from them. Heavier than Jupiter, but smaller, much denser, with a degenerate matter core. While the scientists worked, the Navy men plotted courses to the gas giant, in case one or the other warship should need to refuel. Scooping up hydrogen by ramming through a gas giant's atmosphere on a hyperbolic orbit was hard on ships and crew but a lot better than being stranded in an alien system.
"We're searching out the Trojan points now, Captain," Buckman told Rod two hours after breakout
"Any sign of the Mote planet?"
"Not yet." Buckman hung up.
Why was Buckman concerned with Trojan points? Sixty degrees ahead of the giant planet in its orbit, and sixty degrees behind, would be two points of stable equilibrium, called Trojan points after the Trojan asteroids that occupy similar points in Jupiter's orbit. Over millions of years they ought to have collected dust clouds and clusters of asteroids. But why would Buckman bother with these?
Buckman called again when he found the Trojans. "They're packed!" Buckman gloated. "Either this whole system is cluttered with asteroids from edge to edge or there's a new principle at work. There's more junk in Mote Beta's Trojans than has ever been reported in another system. It's a wonder they haven't all collected to form a pair of moons-"
"Have you found the habitable planet yet?"
"Not yet," said Buckman, and faded off the screen. That was three hours after breakout.
He called back hail an hour later. "Those Trojan point asteroids have very high albedos, Captain. They must be thick with dust. That might explain how so many of the larger particles were captured. The dust clouds slow them down, then polish them smooth-"
"Dr. Buckman! There is an inhabited world in this system and it is vital that we find it. These are the first intelligent aliens-"
"Dammit Captain, we're lookin
g! We're looking!" Buckman glanced to one side, then withdrew. The screen was blank for a moment, showing only a badly focused shot of a technician in the background.
Blaine found himself confronting Science Minister Horvath, who said, "Please excuse the interruption, Captain~ Do I understand you are not satisfied with our search methods?"
"Dr. Horvath, I have no wish to intrude on your prerogatives. But you've taken over all my instruments, and I keep hearing about asteroids. I wonder if we're all looking for the same thing?"
Horvath's reply was mild. "This is not a space battle, Captain." He paused. "In a war operation, you would know your target. You would probably know the ephemeris of the planets in any system of interest-"
"Hell, survey teams find planets."
"Ever been on one, Captain?"
"Well, think about the problem we face. Until we located the gas giant and the Trojan asteroids we weren't precise about the plane of the system. From the probe's instruments we have deduced the temperature the Modes find comfortable, and from that we deduce how far from their sun their planet should be-and we still must search out a toroid a hundred and twenty million kilometers in radius. Do you follow me?"
Blaine nodded.
"We're going to have to search that entire region. We know the planet isn't hidden behind the sun because we're above the plane of the system. But when we finish photographing the system we have to examine this enormous star field for the one dot of light we want."
"Perhaps I was expecting too much."
"Perhaps. We're all waiting as fast as we can." He smiled-a spasm that lifted his whole face for a split second-and vanished.
Six hours after breakout Horvath reported again. There was no sign of Buckman. "No, Captain, we haven't found the inhabited planet. But Dr. Buckman's time-wasting observations have identified a Motie civilization. In the Trojan points."