Maybe I’m trying to find out what those things are, he thought confusedly.
He crawled “up” till his feet were braced on a cross-member, with the terminal accelerator ring by his right ankle but the electroprober dial conveniently near his faceplate. His right hand gripped a vernier wrench, his left drew taut the life line. “Stand by for blast,” he said into his radio. “Build up to two gees over a one-minute period, then hold it till I say cut.”
Nothing happened for a while except the crawling of the constellations as gyros brought the ship around. Good boy, Seiichi! He’d get some escape distance out of even a test blast. “Stand by,” it said in Sverdlov’s earphones. And his weight came back to him, until he felt an exultant straining in the muscles of shoulder and arm and leg and belly; until his heart thudded loud enough to drown out the thin crackling talk of the stars.
The hull was above him now, a giant sphere upheld on twin derricks. Down the middle of each derrick guttered a ghostly blue light, and sparks writhed and fountained at junction points. The constellations shone chill through the electric discharge.
Inefficient, thought Sverdlov. The result of reconstruction without adequate instruments. But it’s pretty. Like festival fireworks. He remembered a pyrotechnic display once, when he was small. His mother had taken him. They sat on a hired catamaran and watched wonder explode softly above the lake.
“Uh,” grunted Sverdlov. He narrowed his eyes to peer at the detector dial. There certainly was a significant deflection yet, when whole grams of matter were being thrown out every second. It didn’t heat up the ring very much, maybe not enough to notice; but negatrons plowed through terrene electron shells, into terrene nuclei, and atoms were destroyed. Presently there would be crystal deformation, fatigue, ultimate failure. He reported his findings and added with a sense of earned boasting: “I was right. This had to be done.”
“I shall halt blast, then. Stand by.”
Weightlessness came back. Sverdlov reached out delicately with his wrench, nipped a coil nut, and loosened the bolt. He shifted the coil itself backward. “I’ll have this fixed in a minute. There! Now give me three gees for about thirty seconds, just to make sure.”
“Three? Are you certain you—”
“I am. Fire!”
It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man. Maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who happened to live somewhere else. Oh, come off it, he told himself, next thing you’ll be teaching a Humane League kindergarten.
The force on him climbed, and his muscles rejoiced in it. At three gees there was no deflection against the ring .
or was there? He peered closer. His right hand, weighted by the tool it still bore, slipped from the member on which it had been leaning. Sverdlov was thrown off balance. He flung both arms wide, instinctively trying not to fall. His right went between the field coils and into the negatron stream.
Fire sprouted.
Nakamura cut the drive. Sverdlov hung free, staring by starlight at his arm. The blast had sliced it across as cleanly as an industrial torch. Blood and water vapor rushed out and froze in a small cloud, pale among the nebulae.
There was no pain. Not yet. But his eardrums popped as
pressure fell. “Engine room!” he snapped. A part of him stood aside and marveled at his own mind. What a survival machine, when the need came! “Emergency! Drop total accelerator voltage to one thousand. Give me about ten amps down the tube. Quick!”
He felt no weight, such a blast didn’t exert enough push on the hull to move it appreciably. He thrust his arm back into the ion stream. Pain did come now, but in his head, as the eardrums ruptured. One minute more and he would have the bends. The gas of antiprotons roared without noise around the stump of his wrist. Steel melted. Sverdlov prodded with a hacksaw gripped in his left hand, trying to seal the spacesuit arm shut.
He seemed far away from everything. Night ate at his brain. He asked himself once in wonderment: “Was I planning to do this to other men?”