registering them–First, though, we turn our systems off.”
“Why?” she asked from her seat to which she had returned, and from her
weariness.
“I can’t tell how many the ships are. Space is still somewhat kinky
and–well, they may have left one posted for insurance. The moment we
pass a threshold value of the metric, there’ll be no mistaking our
radiation, infrared from the hull, neutrinos from the power-plant, that
kind of junk. Unless we douse the sources.”
“Whatever you want, darling.”
Weightlessness was like stepping off a cliff and dropping without end.
Cabin dark, the pulsar flash on one side and stars on the other crowded
near in dreadful glory. Nothing remained save the faintest
accumulator-powered susurrus of forced ventilation; and the cold crept
inward.
“Hold me,” Djana beseeched into the blindness. “Warm me.”
A pencil-thin flashbeam from Flandry’s hand slipped along the console.
Back-scattered light limned him, a shadow. Silence lengthened and
lengthened until:
“Uh-oh. They’re smart as I feared. Grav waves. Somebody under primary
acceleration. Has to be a ship of theirs.”
Son of Man, help us.
At the boat’s high kinetic velocity, the pulsar shrank and dimmed while
they watched.
“Radar touch,” Flandry reported tunelessly.
“Th-they’ve caught us?”
“M-m-m, they may assume we’re a bit of cosmic débris. You can’t check
out every blip on your scope … Oof! They’re applying a new vector.
Wish I dared use the computer. It looks to me as if they’re maneuvering
for an intercept with us, but I’d need math to make sure.
“If they are?” The abstractness of it, that’s half the horror. A
reading, an equation, and me closed off from touching you, even seeing
you. We’re not us, we’re objects. Like being already dead–no, that’s
not right, Jesus promised well live. He did.
“They aren’t necessarily. No beam’s latched onto us. I suspect they’ve
been casting about more or less at random. We registered strong enough
to rate a closer look, but they lost and haven’t refound us.
Interplanetary space is bigger than most people imagine. So they may as
well direct themselves according to the orbit this whatsit seemed to
have, in hopes of checking us out at shorter range.”
“Will they?”
“I don’t know. If we’re caught … well, I suppose we should eschew a
last-ditch stand. How would one dig a ditch in vacuum? We can surrender,
hope Ydwyr can save us and another chance’ll come to worm out.” His
voice in the dark was not as calm as he evidently wished.
“You’d trust Ydwyr?” lashed from her.
His beam stepped across the dials. “Closing in fast,” he said. “Radar
sweep’s bound to pick us up soon. We may show as an interstellar
asteroid, but considering the probability of a natural passage at any
given time–” She heard and felt his despair. “Sorry, sweetheart. We
gave ’em a good try, didn’t we?”
The image might have sprung to her physical vision, shark shape across
the Milky Way, man’s great foes black-clad at the guns. She reached out
to the stars of heaven. “God have mercy,” she cried with her whole
being. “Oh, send them back where they belong!”
Blink … blink … blink.
The light ray danced. Where it touched, meters turned into pools beneath
those suns that crowded the screens. “Ho-o-old,” Flandry murmured. “One
minute … They’re receding!” exploded from him. “Judas priest, they,
they must’ve decided the blip didn’t mean anything!”
“They’re going?” she heard herself blurt. “They are?”
“Yes. They are. Can’t’ve felt too strongly about that stray indication
they got … Whoo! They’ve gone hyper! Already! Aimed back toward Siekh,
seems like. And the–here, we can use our circuits again, lemme activate
the secondary-wave receivers first–yes, yes, four indications, our
couriers, their other three ships, right on the verge of detectability,
headed out–Djana, we did it! Judas priest!”
“Not Judas, dear,” she said in worship. “Jesus.”
“Anybody you like.” Flandry turned on the fluoros.
Joy torrented from him. “You yourself–your wonderful, wonderful self–”
Weight. Warm hearty gusts of air. Flandry was doing a fandango around
the cabin. “We can take off ourselves inside an hour. Go a long way
round for safety’s sake–but at the end, home!” He surged to embrace