“You are, of course, at liberty to remain as long as you deem necessary, Doctor. For whatever reason,” it added sympathetically. “And if there is anything I can do to help you, you have only to ask.”
His Hudlar component was doing its equivalent of baying at the moon. Conway croaked something which his translator was probably unable to handle and began moving along the catwalk toward the exit at a near run.
For Heaven’s sake get control of yourself he raged silently at himself. It’s six times bigger than you are!. .
CHAPTER 12
The Menelden system was no stranger to catastrophe. It had been discovered some sixty years earlier by a Monitor Corps scoutship whose Captain had exercised the traditional right to name it because there were no indications that the system harbored indigenous intelligent life with its own name for the world. If such life had been present in the distant past, then all traces of it had been obliterated when a large, planet-size chunk of metal ore entered the system, colliding with the largest outer planet and causing havoc and ultimately further collision with the others, all in tight orbits around their primary.
When the system eventually restabilized itself, Menelde was an aging yellow sun tightly surrounded by a rapidly spinning cloud of asteroids, a large proportion of which were solid metal. Immediately following its discovery, life came to the Menelden system in the shape of mining and metal processing complexes and their operating crews from all over the Federation, and in that cosmic illustration of the Brownian movement of gases, accidents occurred.
The details of one did not become known until many weeks later, nor was the final responsibility for it ever determined.
An enormous multispecies accommodation module for housing mining and metal-processing workers was being moved by tugs from an exhausted area to a fresh one, and was ponderously following a path between the slowly moving or relatively motionless asteroids and the other mining traffic which was engaged in similar delicate exercises in three-dimensional navigation.
One of the vessels, whose course would take it safely but uncomfortably close to the accommodation module and its tugs, was a carrier fully loaded with finished metal girders and sheets. Between the thrusters aft and the tiny control module forward the structure of the carrier was completely open to facilitate the loading and unloading of its cargo. This meant that the clearly visible mass of metal held, apparently none too securely, to its lashing points was exerting undue psychological pressure on the senior tug Captain, who told the carrier Captain to sheer off.
The carrier Captain demurred, insisting that they would pass in perfect safety, while his ship and the vast accommodation module crept ponderously toward each other. The senior tug Captain, who was charged with the safety of a structure incapable of independent maneuver and containing more than one thousand people, as opposed to the carrier with its three-man crew, had the last word.
Very slowly, because of the tremendous weight and inertia of its cargo, the carrier began to swing broadside-on to the module, intending to use its main thrusters to drive it clear long before their paths could intersect. The two vessels were closing, but slowly. There was plenty of time.
It was at that point that the accommodation module’s supervisor, although not really worried, decided that it would be a very good time to hold an emergency drill.
The urgent flashing of hazard lights and the braying of alarm sirens, heard in the background while he was in communication with the module, must have had an unsettling effect on the senior tug Captain. He decided that the carrier was turning too slowly and despatched two of his tugs to assist the process with their pressor beams. In spite of the caustic reassurances from the carrier Captain that there was ample time for the maneuver and that everything was under control, the carrier was quickly pushed broadside-on to the approaching module-the position from which a brief burn on its thrusters would take it clear within a few seconds.
The thrusters did not fire.
Whether the failure was due to the effect of the hastily focused pressor beams on the carrier’s uncovered control linkages which ran between the crew pod and the thrusters astern-they may well have been warped into immobility-or Fate had decreed that the system would malfunction at precisely that moment would never be known. But there were still a few minutes remaining before the collision would occur.