He held his eyes open, alternately trying to throw up and trying to cope with
the flow of data which comp itself had to sort and dump in a special mode
because it came so fast… still blind, ripping along at a velocity that would
fling even a smallish planet into his path before the computer could deal with
it Lucy headed for the other side of the nullpoint’s gravity well with manic
haste, but in that close pass they had gotten bent as light was bent, and the
calculations had to take that into account. He sat there ignoring the
scan-blindness into which they were rushing, trying to tell by the fluttering
passage of data whether the numbers converged, reality with his calculations,
trying to learn if there was error in position, and how that was going to
translate in jump.
And screaming in the back of his mind was the fact that he was playing tag with
a very large ship which could play games with distances which Lucy barely made,
in a time differential he could not calculate, and that on some quirk of malign
fate he could still run into them, if they just happened to coincide out here.
Dublin was either here now or out ahead of him, because his lead was going to
erode and change to lag somewhere in the transit. Ships missed each other
because space was wide and coincidences were statistically more than rare; but
not when two ships were playing leapfrog in the same nullpoints…
Second jump… statistically better this time… a vast point, three large masses in
juxtaposition, a kink in the between that hauled ships in and slung them along
in a complicated warping… Dump it now, dump the speed down…
‘Wake up, Sandy.”
And his own voice, prerecorded: “The referent now is Pell’s Star. Push the track
reset, Sandy. The track reset…”
He located the appropriate button, stared entranced at the screen… no rest
possible here. The velocity was still extreme. His tongue was swollen in his
mouth. He took another of the water bottles and drank, hurting. Food occurred to
him; the thought revolted him; he reached nonetheless and located the packet,
ate, because it was necessary to do.
He was crazy, that was what—he swallowed in mechanical, untasting gulps, unable
to remember what buttons he had pushed, trusting his own recorded voice giving
him the sequences as comp needed them, trusting to that star he saw bracketed
ahead of him, if that was not itself a trick of a mind which had come loose in
time. He recalled Dublin; if Allison Reilly knew remotely what he was doing this
moment she would curse him for the risk to her ship. He ought to dump more of
the velocity he had, right now, because he was scared. Tripoint was deadly
dangerous, with no margin for high-speed errors…
But Lucy was moving with the sureness of a woman with her mind made up, and he
was caught in that horrible impetus and the solid power of her, because a long
time ago she had hollowed him out and taken all there was of him. He moved in a
continual blur of slow motion, while the universe passed at much faster rates.
There was debris in this place. He was passing to zenith of the complicated
accretion disc… so he hoped. If he had miscalculated, he died, in an impact that
would make a minor, unnoticed light.
He dumped down: the recorded voice told him to. He obeyed. The data coming in
sorted itself into more manic strings of numbers. He punched in when the voice
told him, froze a segment, matched up—found a correspondence with his plotted
course. He grinned to himself, still scared witless, human component in a near C
projectile, and stared at the screens with trank-dulled eyes.
He kicked into Pell jump range with velocity that had the incoming-range buoy
screaming its automated indignation at him, advising whatever lunatic had just
come within its scan that he was traveling too fast and headed dead-on for
trafficked zones.
Dump! it warned him, dopplered and restructured by his com. Its systems were
hurling machine-to-machine warnings at Lucy’s autoalert, which Lucy was primed