“Well?” Maclaren didn’t glance up from the figures. He had a lot of composure of his own to win back.
The fact is, he thought through a hammer-beat in his temples, I am the man afraid. Now that there is nothing I can do, only a cold waiting until word is given me whether I can live or must die . . . I find that Terangi Maclaren is a coward.
Sickness was a doubled fist inside his gullet.
“I am not certain what, er, happened,” stumbled Nakamura, “and I do not wish to know. If you will be so kind . . . I hope you were not unduly inconvenienced—”
“No. It’s all right.”
“If we could tacitly ignore it. As I think he has tried to do. Even the best men have a breaking point.”
I always knew that there must one day be an end to white sails above green water, and to wine, and No masks, and a woman’s laughter. I had not expected it yet.
“After all,” said Nakamura, “we must work together now.”
“Yes.”
I had not expected it a light-century from the home of my fathers. My life was spent in having fun, and now I find that the black star has no interest at all in amusing me.
“Do you know yet what happened?” asked Nakamura. “I would not press you for an answer, but—”
“Oh, yes,” said Maclaren. “I know.”
B
ENEATH a scrapheap of songs and keels, loves and jokes and victories, which mattered no longer but would not leave him, Maclaren found his brain working with a startling dry clarity. “I’m not sure how much we can admit to the others,” he said. “Because this could have been averted, if we’d proceeded with more caution.”
“I wondered a little at the time.” Nakamura laughed again. “But who would look for danger around a . . . a corpse?”
“Broadened spectrum lines mean a quickly rotating star,” said Maclaren. “Since the ship was not approaching in the equatorial plane, we missed the full Doppler effect, but we might have stopped to think. And tripled lines mean a Zeeman splitting.”
“Ah.” Nakamura sucked in a hiss of air. “Magnetism?”
“The most powerful bloody magnetic field ever noticed
around any heavenly body,” said Maclaren. “Judging from the readings I get here, the polar field is . . . ph, I can’t say yet. Five, six, seven thousand gauss—somewhere on that order of magnitude. Fantastic! Sol’s field is only fifty-three gauss. They don’t ever go much above two thousand. Except here.”
He rubbed his chin. “Blackett effect,” he went on. The steadiness of his words was a faintly pleasing surprise to him. “Magnetic field is directly related to angular velocity. The reason no live sun has a field like this dead thing here is that it would have to rotate too fast. Couldn’t take the strain; it would go whoomp and scatter pieces of star from hell to tiffin.” An odd, perverse comfort in speaking lightly: a lie to oneself, persuading the subconscious mind that its companions were not doomed men and a black sun, but an amorous girl waiting for the next jest in a Citadel tavern. “As this star collapsed on itself, after burning out, it had to spin faster, d’ you see? Conservation of angular momentum. It seems to have had an unusual amount to start with, of course, but the rotational speed is chiefly a result of its degenerate state. And that same super-density allows it to twirl with such indecent haste. You might say the bursting strength is immensely greater.”
“Yes,” said Nakamura. “I see.”
“I’ve been making some estimates,” said Maclaren. “It didn’t actually take a very strong field to wreck us. We could easily have been protected against it. Any ion-drive craft going close to a planet is—a counter-magnetic circuit with a feedback loop
—elementary. But naturally, these big ships were not meant to land anywhere. They would certainly never approach a live sun this close, and the possibility of this black dwarf having such a vicious magnetism . . . well, no one ever thought of it.”
He shrugged. “Figure it out yourself, Captain Nakamura. The old H, r, v formula. A proton traveling at three-fourths c down a hundred-meter tube is deflected one centimeter by a field of seven one-hundredths gauss. We entered such a field at a million kilometers out, more or less. A tenuous but extremely energetic stream of ionized gas hit the outermost accelerator ring. I make the temperature equivalent of that velocity to be something like three million million degrees Absolute, if I remember the value of the gas constant correctly.