The Long Night df-10

by Poul Anderson

  “You stay behind, natural,” Tom told Aran. “You been a nice lad, and here’s where I prove I never aimed at any hurt for you. Have a horse on me, get a boat from the village to Weyer’s place, tell him what happened—and to tell him we want to be his camarados and ‘change with him.”

  “I can say it.” Aran shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I think no large use comes from my word.”

  “The prejudice against spacemen—”

  “And the damage you worked. How shall you repay that? Since ’tis been ‘cided there’s no good in space-faring, I expect your ship’11 be stripped for its metal.”

  “Try, though,” Tom urged.

  “Should you leave now?” Aran wondered. “Weather looks twisty.”

  “Aye, we’d better, But thanks for frettin”bout it.”

  A storm, Tom thought, was the least of his problems. True, conditions did look fanged about the mountains. But he could sit down and wait them out, once over the border, which ought to remain in the bare fringes of the tempest. Who ever heard of weather moving very far west, on the western seacoast of a planet with rotation like this? What was urgent was to get beyond Weyer’s pursuit.

  Yasmin and Dagny fitted themselves into the rear fuselage as best they could, which wasn’t very. Tom took the pilot’s seat again. He waved good-by to Yanos Aran and gunned the engine. Overburdened as well as battered, the plane lifted sluggishly and made no particular speed. But it flew, and could be out of Hanno before dawn. That sufficed.

  Joy at reunion, vigilance against possible enemies, concentration on the difficult task of operating his cranky vessel, drove weariness out of him. He paid scant attention to the beauties of the landscape sliding below, though they were considerable—mist-magical delta, broad sweep of valley, river’s sinuous glow, all white under the moons. He must be one with the wind that blew across this sleeping land.

  And blew.

  Harder.

  The plane bucked. The noise around it shrilled more and more clamorous. Though the cloud wall above the mountains must be a hundred kilometers distant, it was suddenly boiling zenithward with unbelievable speed.

  It rolled over the peaks and hid them. Its murk swallowed the outer moon and reached tendrils forth for the inner one. Lightning blazed in its caverns. Then the first raindrops were hurled against the plane. Hail followed, and the snarl of a hurricane.

  East wind! Couldn’t be! Tom had no further chance to think. He was too busy staying alive.

  As if across parsecs, he heard Yasrnin’s scream, Dagny’s profane orders that she curb herself. Rain and hail made the cockpit a drum, himself a cockroach trapped, between the skins. The wind was the tuba of marching legions. Sheathing ripped loose from wings and tail. Now and then he could see through the night, when lightning burned. The thunder was like bombs, one after the, next, a line of them seeking him out. What followed was doomsday blackness.

  His instrument panel went dark. His altitude control stick waggled loose in his hand. The airflaps must be gone, the vessel whirled leaf-fashion on the wind. Tom groped until his fingers closed on the gray-drive knobs. By modulating fields and thrust beams, he could keep a measure of command. Just a measure; the powerplant had everything it could do to lift this weight, without guiding it. But let him get sucked down to earth, that was the end!

  He must land somehow, and survive the probably hard impact. How?

  The river flashed lurid beneath him. He tried to follow its course. Something real, in this raving night—There was no more inner moon, there were no more stars.

  The plane groaned, staggered, and tilted on its side. The starboard wing was torn off. Had the port one gone too, Tom might have operated the fuselage as a kind of gravity sled. But against forces as unbalanced as now fought him, he couldn’t last more than a few seconds. Minutes, if he was lucky.

  Must be back above the rivermouths, thought the tiny part of him that stood aside and watched the struggle of the rest. Got to set down easy-like. And find some kind o’ shelter. Yasmin wouldn’t last out this night in the open.

  Harshly: Will she last anyway? Is she anything but a dangerous drag on us? I can’t abandon her. I swore her an oath, but I almost wish.

  The sky exploded anew with lightnings and showed him a wide vista of channels among forested, swampy islands. Trees tossed and roared in the wind, but the streams were too narrow for great waves to build up and—Hoy!

  Suddenly, disastrously smitten, a barge train headed from Sea Gate to the upriver towns had broken apart. In the single blazing moment of vision that he had, Tom saw the tug itself reel toward safety on the northern side of the main channel. Its tow was scattered, some members sinking, some flung around, and one—yes, driven into a tributary creek, woods and waterplants closing behind it, screening it.

  Tom made his decision.

  He hoped for nothing more than a bellyflop in the drink, a scramble to escape from the plane and a swim to the barge. But lightning flamed again and again, enormous sheets of it that turned every raindrop and hailstone into brass. And once he was down near the surface of that natural canal, a wall of trees on either side, he got some relief. He was actually able to land on deck. The barge had ended on a sandbar and lay solid and stable. Tom led his women from the plane. He and Dagny found some rope and lashed their remnant of a vehicle into place. The cargo appeared to be casks of petroleum. A hatch led below, to a cabin where a watchman might rest. Tom’s flashlight picked out bunk, chair, a stump of candle.

  “We’re playin’ a good hand,” he said.

  “For how long?” Dagny mumbled.

  “Till the weather slacks off.” Tom shrugged. “What comes after that, I’m too tired to care. I don’t s’pose… gods, yes!” he whooped. “Here, on the shelf! A bottle—lenune sniff—aye-ya, booze! Got to be booze!” And he danced upon the deckboards till he cracked his pate on the low overhead.

  Yasmin regarded him with a dull kind of wonder. “What are you so happy about?” she asked in Anglic. When he had explained, she slumped. “You can laugh… at that… tonight? Lord Tom, I did not know how alien you are to me.”

  Through hours the storm continued.

  They sat crowded together, the three of them, in the uneasy candlelight, which threw huge misshapen shadows across the roughness of bulkheads. Rather Dagny sat on the chair, Tom on the foot of the bunk, while Yasmin lay, The wind-noise was muffled down here, but the slap of water on hull came loud. From time to time, thunder cannonaded, or the barge rocked and grated on the sandbar.

  Wet, dirty, haggard, the party looked at each other. “We should try to sleep,” Dagny said.

  “Not while I got this bottle,” Tom said. “You do what you like. Me, though, I think wed better guzzle while we can. Prob’ly won’t be long, you see.”

  “Probably not,” Dagny agreed, and took another pull herself.

  “What will we do?” Yasmin whispered.

  Tom suppressed exasperation—she had done a good job in Petar Landa’s house, if nowhere else—and said, “Come mornin’, we head into the swamps. I s’pose Weyer’ll send his merry men lookin’ for us, and whoever owns this hulk’ll search after it, so we can’t claim squatter’s rights. Maybe we can live off the country, though, and eventually, one way or another, reach the border.”

  “Would it not be sanest… they do seem to be decent folk… should we not surrender to them and hope for mercy?”

  “Go ahead, if you want,” Tom said. “You may or may not get the mercy. But you’ll for sure have no freedom. I’ll stay my own man.”

  Yasmin tried to meet his hard gaze, and failed. “What has happened to us?” she pleaded.

  He suspected that she meant, “What has become of the affection between you and me?” No doubt he should comfort her. But he didn’t have the strength left to play father image. Trying to distract her a little, he said, with calculated misunderstanding of her question:

  “Why, we hit a storm that blew us the exact wrong way. It wasn’t s’posed to. But t
his’s such a funny planet. I reckon, given a violent kind o’ sun, you can get weather that whoops out o’ the east, straight seaward. And, o’ course, winds can move almighty fast when the air’s thin. Maybe young Aran was tryin’ to warn me. He spoke o’ twisty weather. Maybe he meant exactly this, and I got fooled once more by his Nikean lingo. Or maybe he just meant what ‘I believed he did, unreliable weather. He told me himself, their meteorology isn’t worth sour owl spit, ‘count o’ they can’t predict the solar output. Young star, you know. Have drink.”

  Yasmin shook her head. But abruptly she sat straight. “Have you something to write with?”

  “Huh?” Tom gaped at her.

  “I have an idea. It is worthless,” she said humbly, “but since I cannot sleep, and do not wish to annoy my lord, I would like to pass the time.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Tom found a paper and penstyl in a breast pocket of his coverall and gave them to her. She crossed her legs and began writing numbers in a neat foreign-looking script.

  “What’s going on?” Dagny said in Eylan.

  Tom explained. The older woman frowned. “I don’t like this, dear,” she said. “Yasmin’s been breaking down, closer and closer to hysteria, ever since we left those peasants. She’s not prepared for a guerrilla existence. She’s used up her last resources.”

  “You reckon she’s quantum-jumpin’ already?”

  “I don’t know. But I do think we should force her to take a drink, to put her to sleep.”

  “Hm.” Tom glanced at the dark head, bent over some arithmetical calculations. “Could be. But no. Let her do what she chooses. She hasn’t bubbled her lips yet, has she? And—we are the free people.”

  He went on with Dagny in a rather hopeless discussion of possibilities open to them. Once they were interrupted, when Yasmin asked if he had a trigonometric slide rule. No, he didn’t. “I suppose I can approximate the function with a series,” she said, and returned to her labors.

  Has she really gone gollywobble? Tom wondered. Or is she just soothin’ herself with a hobby?

  Half an hour later, Yasmin spoke again. “I have the solution.”

  “To what?” Tom asked, a little muzzily after numerous gulps from the bottle. They distilled potent stuff in Hanno. “Our problem?”

  “Oh, no, my lord. I couldn’t—I mean, I am nobody. But I did study science, you remember, and… and I assumed that if you and Lady Dagny said this was a young system, you must be right, you have traveled’ so widely. But it isn’t.”

  “No? What’re you aimed at?”

  “It doesn’t matter, really. I’m being an awful picky little nuisance. But this can’t be a young system. It has to be old.”

  Tom put the bottle down with a thud that overrode the storm-yammer outside. Dagny opened her mouth to ask what .was happening. He shushed her. Out of the shadows across his scarred face, the single eye blazed blue. “Go on,” he said, most quietly.

  Yasmin faltered. She hadn’t expected any such reaction. But, encouraged by him, she said with a, waxing confidence:

  “From the known average distance of the sun, and the length of the planet’s year, anyone can calculate the sun’s mass. It turns out to be almost precisely one Sol. That is, it has the mass of a G2 star. But it has twice the luminosity, and more than half again the radius, and the reddish color of a late G or early K type. You thought those paradoxes were due to a strange composition. I don’t really see how that could be. I mean, any star is something like 98 per cent hydrogen and helium. Variations in other elements can affect its development some, but surely not this much. Well, we know from Nikean biology that this system must be at least a few billion years old. So the star’s instability cannot be due to extreme youth. Any solar mass must settle down on the main sequence far quicker than that. Otherwise we would have many, many more variables in the universe than we do.

  “And besides, we can explain all the paradoxes so simply if we assume this system is old. Incredibly old, maybe almost as old as the galaxy itself.”

  “Belay!” Tom exclaimed, though not loudly. “How could this planet have this much atmosphere after so long a time? If any? Don’t sunlight kick gases into space? And Nike hasn’t got the gravity to nail molecules down for good. Half a standard Gee; and the potential is even poorer, the field strength dropping off as fast as it does.”

  “But my lord,” Yasmin said, “an atmosphere comes from within a planet. At least, it does for the smaller planets, that can’t keep their original hydrogen like the Jupiter types. On the smaller worlds, gas gets forced out of mineral compounds. Vulcanism and tectonism provide the heat for that, as well as radioactivity. But the major planetological forces originate in the core. And the core originates because the heavier elements, like iron, tend to migrate toward the center. We know Nike has some endowment of those. Perhaps more, even, than the average planet of its age.

  “Earth-sized planets have strong gravity. The migration is quick. The core forms in their youth. But Mars-sized worlds… the process has to be slow, don’t you think? So much iron combines first in surface rocks that they are red. Nike. shows traces of this still today. The midget planets can’t outgas more than a wisp until their old age, when a core finally has taken shape.”

  Tom shook his head in a stunned fashion. “I didn’t know. I took for granted—I mean, well, every Mars-type globe I ever saw or heard of had very little air—I reckoned they’d lost most o’ their gas long ago.”

  “There are no extremely ancient systems in the range that your travels have covered,” Yasmin deduced. “Perhaps not in the whole Imperial territory. They aren’t common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, after all. So people never had much occasion to think about what they must be like.”

  “Uh, what you been sayin’, this theory… you learned it in school?”

  “No. I didn’t major in astronomy, just took some required basic courses. It simply appeared to me that some such idea is the only way to explain this system we’re in.” Yasmin spread her hands. “Maybe the pro-lessors at my university haven’t heard of the idea either. The truth must have been known in Imperial times, but it could have been lost since, not having immediate practical value.” Her smile was sad. “Who cares about pure science any more? What can you buy with it?

  “Even the original colonists on Nike—Well, to them the fact must have been interesting, but not terribly important. They knew the planet was so old that it had lately gained an atmosphere and oxygen-liberating life.

  So old that its sun is on the verge of becoming a red giant. Already the hydrogen is exhausted at the core, the nuclear reactions are moving outward in a shell, the photosphere is expanding and cooling while the total energy output rises. But the sun won’t be so huge that Nike is scorched for—oh, several million years. I suppose the colonists appreciated the irony here. But on the human time-scale, what difference did it make? No wonder their descendants have forgotten and think, like you, this has to be a young system.”

  Tom caught her hands between his own. “And… that’s the reason… the real reason the sun’s so rambunctious?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Why, yes. Red giants are usually variable. This star is in a transition stage, I guess, and hasn’t ‘found’ its period yet.” Yasmin’s smile turned warm. “If I have taken your mind off your troubles, I am glad. But why do you care about the aspect of this planet ten mega-years from now? I think best I do try to sleep, that I may help you a little tomorrow.”

  Tom gulped. “Kid,” he said, “you don’t know your own:strength.”

  “What’s she been talking about?” Dagny demanded. Tom told her. They spent the rest of the night laying plans.

  * * *

  Now and then a mid-morning sunbeam struck copper through the fog. But otherwise a wet, dripping, smoking mystery enclosed the barge. Despite its chill, Tom was glad. He didn’t care to be interrupted by a strafing attack.

  To be sure, the air force might triangulate on the radio emission of his ruined plane and drop a bo
mb. However—

  He sat in the cockpit, looked squarely into the screen, and said, “This is a parley. Agreed?”

  “For the moment.” Karol Weyer gave him a smoldering return stare. “I talked with Fish Aran.”

  “And he made it clear to you, didn’t her about the lingo scramble? How often your Anglic and mine use the same word different? Well, let’s not keep on with the farce. If anybody thinks t’other’s said somethin’ bad, let’s call a halt and thresh out what was intended. Aye?”

  Weyer tugged his beard. His countenance lost none of its sternness. “You have yet to prove your good faith,” he said. “After what harm you worked—”

  “I’m ready to make that up to you. To your whole planet.”

  Weyer cocked a brow and waited.

  “S’pose you give us what we need to fix our ship,” Tom said. “Some of it might be kind of expensive—copper and silver and such, and handicrafted because you haven’t got the dies and jigs—but we can make some gold payment. Then let us go. I, or a trusty captain o’ mine, will be back in a few months… uh, a few thirty-day periods.”

  “With a host of friends to do business?”

  “No. With camarados to ‘change. Nike lived on trade under the Terran Empire. It can once more.”

  “How do I know you speak truth?”

  ‘Well, you’ll have to take somethin’ on my word. But listen. Kind of a bad storm last night, no? Did a lot o’ damage, I’ll bet. How much less would’ve been done if you’d been able to predict it? I can make that possible.” Tom paused before adding cynically, “You can share the information with all Nike, or keep it your national secret. Could be useful, if you feel like maybe the planet should—have a really strong Emperor, name of Weyer, for instance.”

  The Engineer leaned forward till his image seemed about to jump from the screen. “How is this?”

  Tom related what Yasmin had told him. “No wonder your solar meteorologists never get anywhere,” he finished. “They’re usin’ exactly the wrong mathematical model.”