The restless forces bad thrown Trevelyan across the room, to skid along toning metal and strike a fallen tree. He came out of it in a minute, focusing blurred vision on the riven ship. Nicki was holding his head, frantically. Gathering himself, he willed the pain out of his consciousness.
“Come on,” he said. The iron roar trampled his words underfoot. “Come on, let’s go.”
She helped him up and they made a slow way through skirhdg, ringing murk. By the brief glare of spinning fireballs they saw a wreck of tangled branches, splintered trunks, and tumbled bodies. Now and again they passed an injured
human, but there weren’t many in sigbt. The Nomads were meeting this well, thought Trevelyan; they were going to emergency posts without stopping for panic.
The end of the park was ahead now. Nicki lurched, and be caught her, pulling her to him. For a moment they stood face to face in raving gloom. Then a fireball blew up, flaring the incandescence of bell across the ruins, and he saw her limned against night, eyes on his and lips parted, bair tossing in the wind.
Thunder followed, a doomsday bang and roar. He kissed her.
It lasted for a long while. Then they drew apart, staring at each other without real understanding, and ran on toward the bridge.
There was a flash suspended over the astrogation desk, a well of radiance and all the rest an enormous moving dark. joachim’s battered face was sliding shadow and dim highlights. His roar lifted above the sundering echoes: “There you arel What in Cosmos’ name can we do?”
For just an instant, Trevelyan recalled that something of the processes in a vortex had been known to Sol for almost a hundred years. But the frontier wanderers, to whom that knowledge could be life, had never heard of it. “Let me see your instruments,” he shouted.
Outside was utter black, the viewscreens dead, but the smp’s meters still registered. Needles flickered insanely across dial faces. Gravitational and electric potentials, gradients, magnetism, gyration, frequencies and amplitudes-he took it in at a single hurling glance, and his trained subconscious computed.
“We’re still on the fringes,” he cried. “But we’ve got to get clear. Components of the vibration have the ship’s resonant frequencies. They’ll shake us apart, atorn by atoml”
Steel groaned under his voice.
“If we get the ship as a whole in phase with the major space-pulsations- Can you signal the engine room yet?” Joachim nodded.
“All right. Pulse the byperdrive, sinusoid-here, III give you the figures.” He scribbled on a page of the log. Joachim tore it out and punched the keys of the emergency telenvriter.
The ship howled! The floor fell away beneath -Trevelyan; be was floating free, falling and falling endlessly through darkness. Then a titan’s hand grabbed him and threw him at the wall. He twisted in mi(f-air, drilled reasonless reflex, and landed on his feet. Wave after wave beat through the ship. The floor buckled. He beard the snapping of girclers.
He shouted for Nicki, stumbling up and reaching into a night that shuddered. Metal belled and gonged around Mm. ‘Nicki! Nicki!”
Thunder bawled through the ship. He heard the boofbeats of ruin galloping across the deck-. The clangorous war cry filled his universe.
And died!
Slowly, slowly, the vibrant metal shrilled into silence.
He stood listening to that wading voice and wondered if
this were death. He seemed to be afloat in endless space
and time. He groped into thick night, not sure whether he
was blind or not, and heard the cries of men about him,
“Nickil” he sobbed.
“We’re free.” joachim’s voice came quiet, resonant, from far away. “We’re free of the storm.”
The hyperdrive went off. Joachim must have signaled for that. They bung in normal state, open space. The burned-out viewsereens functioned as ordinary ports, and Trevelyan saw the stars.
By the hazy sheen of the Milky Way, river of suns spilling across infinity, he saw Nicl@i. Remembered words came to him, as if someone else were speaking into that great silence. “Hast thou commanded the morning since
thy ys; and caused the daysp ng to know his place? …”
Joachim stared out at heaven. “Where are we?” he asked.