But then she had only to lift her eyes to the sky to see the kind of marvel she had never expected to behold. It was-there was only one word for it-magnificent. She noticed, as time went on, that the stars were appropriately wheeling across the heaven, just as they should do; that pair of blue-white beacons that had been low on the horizon when they arrived was now gone from view, and on the other side of the sky-she supposed she should call it the “east”-there was a whole new puzzle to gape at. Streamers of pale light stretched among the newly risen stars, some of them almost as bright as the stars themselves, almost enough to make her squint. She realized with a sudden shiver- part excitement, part wonder at being privileged to see such a thing with her own unaided eyes-that she was looking at stars in the very act of stealing gas from one another, a spectacle she had never before beheld except in plates from Starlab or the old Kecks.
She was so absorbed in the sight overhead that she wasn’t aware Dannerman was coming up to her until he called her name, and then she jumped. “Jesus, Dan-Dan! What are you doing up?”
“Time to relieve you,” he said, following her example and staring toward the east. “What the hell’s that? It looks like something you’d see under a microscope?”
Well, it did; all filamentary and webby. But she was glad to be able to explain something at least, when so little was explainable. “They’re exchanging matter. Stars can do that when they’re close, and some of those are probably nearer each other than Pluto is to the Sun. So you’re looking at the naked hearts of stars, Dan. If our models of star evolution are right,” she went on, warming to the subject, “some of those stars used to be red giants, but when the gas was stripped away they were rejuvenated. They became what we call ‘blue stragglers,’ with surface temperatures five or six times as hot as our own Sun. The bad part of that,” she began, but Dannerman held up his hand.
“Please, Patsy. Don’t tell me any bad parts right now, okay?’ You better get some sleep while you can. It’s almost daylight.”
And he was right about that, too, of course. Past the cobwebby gas streamers the far horizon was beginning to lighten; and Patsy felt the sudden weight of her fatigue. Gratefully enough she climbed onto the pallet that had been set aside for her, Pat stirring gently as she came in, Rosaleen moaning faintly in her sleep. It was not a comfortable bed. Whoever made it must have had skins like armor plate, she thought, and closed her eyes.
But she hadn’t told him what the bad part was.
The bad part was that some of those cannibal stars would sooner or later glut themselves on the mass they had stolen from the others. And then there would be a nova, maybe even a supernova, flooding the space around it with radiation of all kinds … at the congested distances of the globular cluster.
When might that happen? The astronomical time scale was far slower than the human. Such things might take centuries to occur, but when they did-
When they did, this would not be a good place to be, and the life expectancy of anyone out in the open under that suddenly lethal sky would be short indeed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Patsy
Patsy woke up with bright sunlight outside the opening of the yurt and the sound of somebody yelling at somebody, not very near, but not all that far away, either. When she peered out she saw that it was Dannerman who was doing the yelling. The person he was yelling at was Pat, placidly hanging her underwear on a tree branch to dry. “It’s just damn foolish for you to go wandering off by yourself,” he scolded. “Who knows what’s out there?”
“But you said yourself we needed to check out our surroundings,” Pat said reasonably, adjusting the bra to catch the sun.
“Not alone!”
“No,” she said, acknowledging the justice of what he said- but not, Patsy thought, particularly penitent about it, either. “I should have waited till the others woke up. But, Dan, I found this lovely pond just a little way down the stream, and I got a bath. Well, sort of a bath-no soap, of course, and it was really cold-but I can’t tell you how much better I feel. Maybe the two of us can go out later?” And then, looking past him, “Well, good morning, Patsy. Did you have a nice sleep?”
Damn the woman, Patsy thought. Damn the man, too; they might as well be married if they were going to squabble like that. She didn’t answer, simply turned and headed for the bushes. Then, delighting in the luxury of being able at last to pee without an audience, she relented. She was just jealous, she admitted to herself. Not merely jealous of the Dan-Pat relationship, although she was certainly envious of that, but extremely jealous of the bath.
On the way back she paused to peer down the stream and, yes, she was nearly sure that, just past where the brook made a bend around a grove of tall, emerald-leaved trees, there was a definite widening. That went right to the top of her list of priorities. Not to be taken advantage of just yet, maybe; she hadn’t missed Pat’s complaint about the cold, but as soon as the air warmed up a little . . .
It was astonishing how that thought elevated her mood. She glanced up, and there was the sky. The blue sky, with fleecy little muffins of fair-weather clouds scattered around, and the sun. The sun! Of course, it wasn’t their familiar sun of Earth; too large, too orangey. But it was a great deal better than that unending featureless white glow they had lived under in their cell, and she was interested to observe that, even in daylight, a scattering of those incredible stars were bright enough to be visible in the sky. This was not an awful place, she told herself. It was even sort of pretty: the grove of trees behind her was hung with clusters of things like bright-yellow berries; the spiky ground-cover stuff underfoot that was like grass (but wasn’t any grass Patsy had ever seen) was spotted with wildflower dots of color. Most important of all, she was outside. Things might be heading for something even worse than what had gone before, but at this moment, Patsy thought, they didn’t seem bad at all. So she had a cheery smile for Pat and Dan as she rejoined the group, and another for Rosaleen and Martin Delasquez, doing something with the stack of ration containers. The only ones missing were Patrice and Jimmy Lin, and about as soon as the thought crossed her mind they both appeared out of their respective yurts, Patrice heading toward the bushes without a word, Jimmy yawning, barely glancing at the others, making a beeline to check the condition of his pet campfire.
To Patsy’s eyes the fire was behaving just as it was supposed to behave. It was a neat bed of glowing coals, sixty or seventy centimeters across, with only a couple of lately added sticks palely flaming on top. Clearly, however, it did not meet Jimmy Lin’s expectations. He pushed the burning sticks together and carefully added two more, just so, muttering to himself. Then he caught sight of Rosaleen. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
She didn’t take offense. “We’re counting our rations,” she said, “and at the same time looking for containers that won’t burn if we boil water in them.”
“Thought so,” he said, patiently superior. “I told you to leave that sort of thing to me, didn’t I? What you should do now is find a big empty container and fill it with water, while I get some rocks from the brook.”
He made a production out of it, selecting golf-ball-sized pebbles, which he carried back and painstakingly placed on the coals. “Give them ten minutes,” he said, wise old expert showing the tenderfeet how to get along in the wild. “Then the rocks will be hot enough; we drop them in the water and they’ll have it hot in no time.”
“Hey,” Pat said, admiring against her will. “More Boy Scout stuff?”
He didn’t deign to answer, merely walked off to the shelter of the trees to relieve himself.
“Bastard,” Dannerman said, but his tone was tolerant. He glanced at Pat. “Shall we eat something? And then go explore?”
“If Rosaleen’s through with her count?” Pat said, looking toward the stack of rations.
“In a minute,” Rosaleen called. “Martin’s found a couple of other packets-I guess we dropped them.”
But Martin was standing a good three or four meters away- how could we have dropped any of the packets over there? Patsy wondered-and his expression was forbidding. He was holding two of what looked like dehydrated stew packets, and staring at the ground.