Blog

IX.

S

QUARE and inhuman in a spacesuit, Sverdlov led the way through the engineroom air lock. When Ryerson,

following, stepped forth onto the ship’s hull, there was a mo­ment outside existence.

He snatched for his breath. Alien suns went streaming past his head. Otherwise he knew only blackness, touched by meaningless dull splashes. He clawed after anything real. The motion tore him loose and he went spinning outward toward the dead star. But he felt it just as a tide of nausea, his ears roared at him, the scrambled darks and gleams made a wheel with himself crucified at the hub. He was never sure if he screamed.

The lifeline jerked him to a halt. He rebounded, more slowly. Sverdlov’s sardonic voice struck his earphones: “Don’t be so jumpy next time, Earthling,” and there was a sense of direc­tion as the Krasnan began to reel him in.

Suddenly Ryerson made out a pattern. The circle of shadow before him was the hull. The metallic shimmers projecting from it . . . oh, yes, one of the auxiliary tank attachments. The mass-ratio needed to reach one-half c with an exhaust velocity of three-fourths c is 4.35—relativistic formulas apply rather than the simple Newtonian exponential—and this must be squared for deceleration. The Cross had left Sol with a tank of mercury on either side, feeding into the fuel deck.

Much later, the empty containers had been knocked down into parts of the aircraft now stowed inboard.

Ryerson pulled his mind back from the smugness of engi­neering data. Beyond the hull, and around it, behind him, for X billion light-years on all sides, lay the stars. The nearer ones flashed and glittered and stabbed his eyes, uncountably many. The outlines they scrawled were not those Ryerson remem­bered from Earth: even the recognizable constellations, like Sagittarius, were distorted, and he felt that as a somehow ghastly thing, as if it were his wife’s face which had melted and run. The farther stars blent into the Milky Way, a single clotted swoop around the sky, the coldest color in all reality. And yet farther away, beyond a million light-years, you could see more suns—a few billion at a time, formed into the tiny blue-white coils of other galaxies.

Impact jarred Ryerson’s feet. He stood erect, his bootsoles holding him by a weak stickiness to the plastic hull. There was just enough rotation to make the sky move slowly past his gaze. It created a dim sense of hanging head down; he thought of ghosts come back to the world like squeaking bats. His eyes sought Sverdlov’s vague, armored shape. It was so solid and ugly a form that he could have wept his gratitude.

“All right,” grunted the Krasnan. “Let’s go.”

T

HEY moved precariously around the curve of the ship. The long thin frame-sections lashed across their backs vibrated to their cautious footfalls. When they reached the lattice jutting from the stern, Sverdlov halted. “Show you a trick,” he said. “Light doesn’t diffuse in vacuum, makes it hard to see an object in the round, so-” He squeezed a small plastic bag with one gauntleted hand. His flashbeam snapped on, to glow through a fine mist in front of him. “It’s a heavy organic liquid. Forms droplets which hang around for hours before dissipating. Now, what d’ you think of the transceiver web?”

Ryerson stooped awkwardly, scrambled about peering for several minutes, and finally answered: “It bears out what you reported. I think all this can be repaired. But we’ll have to take most of the parts inboard, perhaps melt them down—re-ma­chine them, at least. And we’ll need wholly new sections to

replace what boiled away. Have we enough bar metal for that?”

“Guess so. Then what?”

“Then—” Ryerson felt sweat form beneath his armpits and break off in little globs. “You understand I am a graviticist, not a mattercasting engineer. A physicist would not be the best possible man to design a bridge; likewise, there’s much I’ll have to teach myself, to carry this out. But I can use the operating manual, and calculate a lot of quantities afresh, and

well . . . I think I could recreate a functioning web. The tuning will be strictly cut-and-try: you have to have exact resonance to get any effect at all, and the handbook assumes that such components as the distortion oscillator will have precise, standardized dimensions and crystal structure. Since they won’t—we have not the facilities to control it, even if I could remember what the quantities are—well, once we’ve rebuilt what looks like a workable web, I’ll have to try out different combinations of settings, perhaps for weeks, until