White, James – Sector General 04 – Ambulance Ship

“I know,” said Prilicla, beginning to add items to its own spacesuit.

They exited by the small personnel lock forward, the main one being connected to the Tenelphi, and had to listen to Captain Fletcher worrying out loud about the situation for several interminable minutes. Then they were outside, and the hull of the derelict was spread out ahead and all around them like a gigantic wall, so pitted and torn and ruptured by centuries of meteorite collisions that at close range the spherical shape of the enormous vessel was not apparent. As they guided themselves towards it, there was a sudden dizzying change of perspective. The derelict was no longer a vertical wall but a vast, metallic landscape on which they were about to touch down, and the two coupled ships were hanging in the sky above it.

Conway found it much easier to guide himself down to the marked area than to control his emotions at the thought of landing on one of the legendary generation ships. But it was likely that his emotional radiation would not inconvenience Prilicla too much because the empath’s feelings would be very similar-even though it was physiologically impossible for a Cinrusskin to experience goose bumps or to have the non-existent hair at the back of its neck prickle with sheer wonder.

This was one of the generation ships which, before the discovery of hyperdrive, had carried colonists from their home worlds to the planets of other stars. All of the technologically advanced species of what was now the Galactic Federation had gone through their generation-ship phase. Melf, Illensa, Traltha, Kelgia and Earth had been among the scores of cultures which-between the time of their developing chemical- or nuclear-powered interplanetary travel and virtually instantaneous interstellar flight via the hyperdimension

had flung these planetary seed pods into space.

When a few decades or centuries later the cultures concerned had perfected hyperdrive or received it from one of the species of the emerging Galactic Federation, they had gone looking for these lumbering sub-light-speed behemoths and had rescued the majority of them a few decades or centuries after they had been launched.

This could be accomplished because the courses of the generation ships were known with accuracy, and their positions at any time during their centuries-long voyages could be computed with ease. Provided no physical or psychological catastrophe had occurred in the meantime-and some of the non-physical things that had gone wrong in the generation ships had given the would-be rescuers nightmares for the rest of their lives-the colonists were transferred to their target worlds within a matter of days rather than centuries.

Conway knew that the last of the generation ships to be contacted had been cleared, their metal and reactors salvaged. A few of them had been converted for use as accommodation for personnel engaged on space construction projects more than six hundred years ago. But this particular generation ship was one of the few which had not been contacted when hyperdrive was perfected. Either by accident or because of faulty design, it had gone off course to become a seedling destined never to reach fallow ground.

In silence they landed on the derelict’s hull. Because of the vessel’s slow spin, Conway had to use his feet and wrist magnets to keep from being tossed gently away again, while Prilicla used its gravity nullifiers in combination with magnetic pads on the ends of its six pipe-stem legs. Carefully they climbed through the gap in the plating and out of the direct sunlight. Conway waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, then he switched on his suit spotlight.

There was an irregular natural tunnel in the wreckage, leading down for perhaps thirty meters. At the bottom was a projecting piece of metal, which had been daubed with luminescent green marker paint and a smear of grease.

“If the Tenelphi’s officers marked a route for you,” Fletcher said when Conway reported the find, “it should speed the search for Sutherland. Always provided he hasn’t been diverted from the marked path. But there is another problem, Doctor. The farther you go into the derelict, the more difficult it will be to work your radio signals. We have more power here than you have in your suit power pack, so you will be able to listen to us long after we will cease hearing you. I’m referring to spoken messages, you understand. If you switch on your radio deep inside the ship, we will still be able to hear it, as a hiss or a burst of static, and vice versa. So even if we can no longer talk to each other, switch on your radio every fifteen minutes to let us know you’re still alive, and we’ll acknowledge.