Dayan flung off her despair. “Good for you, Rico!” She clapped his shoulder. “Let’s start.”
Alanndoch likewise brightened a little. “Oh, yes, we must board.” She regarded the others. “But, Captain, Scientist,” she well-nigh pleaded, “you shouldn’t. Please reconsider. Don’t risk yourselves. You’ve crew who’re willing, anxious to go. Beginning with me.”
“Thanks,” Dayan said. “But Rico and I have earned the right.”
For her, he thought, the right to be not yet used up. To defy time once more, time that has devoured everything on Earth which was hers.
For me — He spoke in his wonted sober fashion: “We have argued this already. I well know the doctrine. The commander should stay with the ship. However, Dr. Dayan and I have more than training” — brief, though intense. “We have experience” — since before Envoy departed Sol, and at worlds unknown until she fetched up at them, and at the black hole; for a moment it felt to him like the full eleven thousand years. “We have by far the best chance of coping with anything unexpected. Stand by.”
Dayan’s demand rang heartening. “We’ll certainly want you and the whole crew later. If we find survivors, you’ll have tricky work to do.”
“At worst,” Nansen finished, “you shall take our ship home.”
CHAPTER 51
The Wreck swelled in the forward screen until it blocked sight of the stars. Spin brought an emblem into view, scarred and scoured, then took the blue-and-silver wing away, then swung it back. Nansen turned his space-boat and proceeded parallel to the hull at a distance of meters, seeking a place to make contact. Field drive gave marvelous responsiveness; this was almost like steering an aircraft.
Almost. Never quite. Robotics handled most of it, with more speed and precision than flesh could, but the basic judgments and decisions were his, and a mistake could kill.
He worked his way aft, turned again, matched velocities, and rested weightless in his harness. Before him yawned the hideous hole where the after wheel and plasma accelerator had been. He called a report to Envoy. Dayan, at his side, probed the interior with radar, detectors, and instruments more subtle, still experimental, that employed her new knowledge of quantum physics.
“As we thought,” she said after a few minutes. “The midships emergency bulkheads must have closed immediately and sealed the front end off The fusion reactor there is in regular operation, supplying ample current to all systems that are functional.” She frowned. “The readings at the wheel aren’t so good, but from here I can’t make out just what the trouble is.”
“That’s what we want to discover,” he said. “Ready? Hang on.”
As slowly as might be, he maneuvered around the hull and forward. A hundred meters from the bow end of the cylinder, he went into a circular path around it — not an orbit; the gravity of even this enormous vessel was negligible. To stay on course required a constant, exact interplay of vectors. He fought clown a brief dizziness and concentrated on matching the rotation “below” him.
And now: approach. He had picked a smooth area, free alike of installations and of damage. However, it spun at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour. A slight miscalculation could mean that a housing slammed into him. The boat stooped. Contact shivered and tolled in the metal. At once he made fast. It would not have been possible to do so speedily enough with magnetics, but an electron manipulator inspired by the Holont gave him talons. Silence washed over him.
Weight tugged, as if he were hanging upside down. Stars streamed in the viewscreens. Envoy hove in sight, merely a glint among them unless he magnified. “We’re docked,” he told them aboard.
“Elohim Adirim!” Dayan gasped. A lock of hair had come loose from her headband and wavered like a small flame. “That was piloting!”
Nansen realized he had been necessary. He also realized he had not by himself been sufficient. “Thank the boat,” he said.
Her name was Herald It.
Donning spacesuits and securing equipment to take along was a slow business. Weight amounted to about one-tenth terrestrial, in the wrong direction. They helped one another. Nansen saw Dayan’s distress when he strapped a pistol to his waist. “The last thing I want is to fire this,” he said, “but we simply don’t know.”