by Fritz Leiber
CHAPTER III
In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.
“Captain won’t like that,” plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from where he floated in womb position across the cabin. “Enemy can feel a candle of our light, captain says, ten million miles away.” He rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a pollywog’s.
“And Jackson hears the Enemy think…and Heimdall hears the grass grow,” Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. “Isn’t an Enemy for a billion miles, Ness.” He launched aft from the hammock. “We haven’t spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There’s nowhere for them.”
“There’s the far side of Uranus,” Ness pointed out. “That’s less than ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there.”
“Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity,” Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding momentum. “That’s likely, isn’t it, when they didn’t have time for us back in the Belt?” He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full moon pouring from it—too much light to look at comfortably. He began to button the inner cover over the port.
“Don’t do that,” Ness objected without conviction. “There’s not much heat in it but there’s some.” He hugged his elbows and shivered. “I don’t remember being warm since Mars orbit.”
“The sun gets on my nerves,” Croker said. “It’s like looking at an arc light through a pinhole. It’s like a high, high jail light in a cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire.” He continued to button out the sun.
“You ever in jail?” Ness asked. Croker grinned.
With the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little light at the head of Jackson’s hammock, flicking his hands from the wrists like flippers. “I got one thing against the sun,” he said quietly. “It’s blanketing out the radio. I’d like us to get one more message from Earth. We haven’t tried rigging our mirror to catch radio waves. I’d like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter.”
“If we won it,” Croker said.
“Our telescopes show no more green around Jove,” Ness reminded him. “We counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers ‘burning.’ Captain verified the count.”
“Repeat: if we won it.” Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the hammock. “If there was a real victory message they’d push it through, even if the sun’s in the way and it takes three hours to catch us. People who win, shout.”
Ness shrugged as he paddled. “One way or the other, we should be getting the news soon from Titania station,” he said. “They’ll have heard.”
“If they’re still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,” Croker amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the hammock. “Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived. At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the War and we haven’t any idea of what’s happened to them since and if they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station could raise Earth I haven’t been told. Sure thing Prospero hasn’t heard anything and we’re getting close.”
“I won’t argue.” Ness said. “Even if we raise ’em, it’ll just be hello-goodbye with maybe time between for a battle report.”
“And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per man as the station fades.” Croker frowned and added, “If Captain had cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this express train at Uranus.”
“Tell me how,” Ness asked drily.
“How? Why, one of the 16 ship’s launches. Replace the fusion-head with the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it between the ship and the launch.”
“I haven’t got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,” Ness said, referring to Prospero’s piloting robot. “Fully fueled, one of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per second. Use it all in braking and you’ve only taken 30 from 100. The launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a second.”
“You didn’t hear all my idea.” Croker said. “You put piggyback tanks on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four launches. Then you’ve 100 miles of braking and a maneuvering reserve. You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second’s the close circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed it.”
“Cute,” Ness conceded. “Especially the jeep. But I’m glad just the same we’ve got 70 percent of our chem fuel in our ships’ tanks instead of the launches. We’re on such a bull’s eye course for Uranus—Copperhead really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup at our 100 mps—”
Croker shrugged. “We still could have dropped a couple of us,” he said.
“Captain’s got to look after the whole fleet,” Ness said. “You’re beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain himself.”
“But if Titania Station’s alive, a couple of men dropped off would do the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out after us. If we’ve won the War.”
“But Titania Station’s dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And we’ve lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself,” Ness asserted owlishly. “Captain’s got to look after the whole fleet.”
“Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the Stars! Ness, do you know how long it’d take us to reach the nearest star—except we aren’t headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand years!”
“That’s a lot of time to kill,” Ness said. “Let’s play chess.”
Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids. Croker said, “Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?”
“I suppose,” Ness said. “When he talks about them it’s as if he was their interpreter. How about the chess?”
“Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.”
“Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.”
“Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,” Croker objected.
“That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really visualized in my head than the game’s over.”
“I don’t want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours away.”
Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. “They…” he breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. “They…”
“I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy’s mind?” Ness said.
“He thinks he speaks for them,” Croker replied and the next instant felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always know when Jackson’s going to talk?
“They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,” Jackson breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little louder, though his eyes stayed shut. “They’re welcoming us, they’re our brothers.” The smile died. “But they know they got to kill us, they know we got to die.”
The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch leading forward.
Grunf
eld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought he’d be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.
“Ambush,” he said. “At least two cruisers.”
He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.
The blue telltales for Caliban and Starveling began to blink.
“They’ve seen it too,” the captain said. He snatched up the mike and his next words rang through the Prospero.
“Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet.”
Aft, Croker muttered, “Rig our shrouds, don’t he mean? Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.”
Ness said, “Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history has to end some time.”
CHAPTER IV
Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn’t. He thought of forty things to recheck. Relax, he repeated—the work’s over; all that matters is in Copperhead’s memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the captain’s suited up.
The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude, except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the ship herself didn’t start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor hadn’t closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.
He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention, pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.
Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with the onrushing planet’s pale mottled green that now had the dulled richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought, or they’d already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still half out of his suit.
There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago. Its robot pilots were set to follow Prospero and imitate, nothing else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still…
Grunfeld wet his lips. “Captain,” he said hesitantly. “Captain?”
“Thank you, Grunfeld.” He caught the edge of the skull’s answering grin. “We are beginning to hit hydrogen,” the quiet voice went on. “Forward skin temperature’s up to 9 K.”
Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit.
“They’re still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a little more now. Their ship’s one thing and they’re another. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can’t stop it, they’re even less than passengers…”
The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.
The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of green—bright green as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior cabin lights glowed on.
Jackson droned: “They and their ships come from very far away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the…discontinuum, where they don’t have stars but something else and where gravity is different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn’t want to…”
And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill, less than a cobweb’s tug, of weight.
The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld’s suit had begun to revolve slowly on a vertical axis.
For a moment he glimpsed Jackson’s dark profile—all five suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn’t pull forward at high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.
The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld’s forehead. And now he was sure he felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.
A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the other ships—the fleet’s feeble sting. Like a bee’s, just one, in dying.
The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld’s suit began to close on his face like layers of pliable ice.
Jackson called faintly, “Now I understand. Their ship—” His voice was cut off.
Grunfeld’s ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.
But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now…now on Mars…now back on Earth…
The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew.
There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the ship’s jets roared, everything recovered, or didn’t.
The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out thought.
* * * *
The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and in freefall. His body didn’t feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it?
He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward again? If they’d actually come through—
There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after frictional heating?
There was
a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?
He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken.
The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top of his opening suit.
Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex upward, that must, he realized, be the dark side of Uranus.
Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and pulled himself past the captain’s to the spaceshield.
The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.
A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel.
New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature 907 K, Gravs 87.
Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish phosphorescing.
“The torps got to ’em,” Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to the right.
* * * *
“I did find out at the end.” Jackson said quietly from the left, his voice at last free of the trance-tone. “The Enemy ships weren’t ships at all. They were (there’s no other word for it) space animals. We’ve always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call ’em?) space-whales. Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate hydrogen (that’s the only way I know to say it) and spat light to move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their parasites.”