We Have Fed Our Sea

9

Square 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.”

They 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 well, Sol or Centauri or… or any of the stations, even another spaceship… resonates—”

“Are you related to a Professor Broussard of Lomonosov Academy?” interrupted the other man.

“Why, no. What—”

“You lecture just like he used to. I am not interested in the theory and practice of mattercasting. I want to know, can we get home?”

Ryerson clenched a fist. He was glad that helmets and darkness hid their two faces. “Yes,” he said. “If all goes well. And if we can find four kilos of germanium.”

“What do you want that for?” Sverdlov asked.

“Do you see those thick junction points in the web? They are, uh, you might call them giant transistors. Half the lattice is gone: there, the germanium was simply whiffed away. I do know the crystallo-chemical structure involved. And we can get the other elements needed by cannibalizing, and there is an alloying unit aboard which could be adapted to manufacture the transistors themselves. But we don’t have four spare kilos of germanium aboard.”

Sverdlov’s tone grew heavy with skepticism: “And that balloon head Maclaren means to find a planet? And mine the stuff?”

“I don’t know—” Ryerson wet his lips. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

“But this star went supernova!”

“It was a big star. It would have had many planets. Some of the outermost ones… if they were large to start with may have survived.”

“Ha! And you’d hunt around on a lump of fused nickel-iron, without even a sun in the sky, for germanium ore?”

“We have an isotope separator. It could be adapted to… I haven’t figured it out yet, but — For God’s sake!” Ryerson found himself screaming. “What else can we do?”

“Shut up!” rapped Sverdlov. “When I want my earphones broken I’ll use a hammer.”

He stood in a swirl of golden fog, and the gray-rimmed black eye of the dead star marched behind him. Ryerson crouched back, hooked into the framework and waiting. At last Sverdlov said: “It’s one long string of ifs. But a transistor doesn’t do anything a vacuum tube can’t.” He barked a laugh. “And we’ve got all the vacuum we’ll ever want. Why not design and make the equivalent electronic elements? Ought to be a lot easier than — repairing the accelerators, and scouring space for a planet.”

“Design them?” cried Ryerson “And test them, and redesign them, and — Do you realize that on half rations we have not quite six months’ food supply?”

“I do,” said Sverdlov. “I feel it in my belly right now.” He muttered a few obscenities. “All right, then. I’ll go along with the plan. Though if that clotbrain of a Nakamura hadn’t—”

“He did the only thing possible! Did you want to crash us?”

“There are worse chances to take,” said Sverdlov. “Now what have we got, but six months of beating our hearts out and then another month or two to die?” He made a harsh noise in the radiophone, as if wanting to spit. “I’ve met Sarai settlers before. They’re worse than Earthlings for cowardice, and nearly as stupid.”

“Now, wait—” began Ryerson. “Wait, let’s not quarrel—”

“Afraid of what might happen?” jeered Sverdlov. “You don’t know your friend Maclaren’s dirty-fighting tricks, do you?”

The ship whirled through a darkness that grew noisy with Ryerson’s uneven breathing. He raised his hands against the bulky robot shape confronting him. “Please,” he stammered. “Now wait, wait, Engineer Sverdlov.” Tears stung his eyes. “We’re all in this together, you know.”

“I wondered just when you’d be coming up with that cliché,” snorted the Krasnan. “Having decided it would be oh, so amusing to tell your society friends, how you spent maybe a whole month in deep space, you got me yanked off the job I really want to do, and tossed me into a situation you’d never once stopped to think about, and wrecked us all — and now you tell me, We’re all in this together!’ “Suddenly he roared his words:

“You mangy son of a muckeating cockroach, I’ll get you back — not for your sake, nor for your wife’s — for my own planet, d’you hear? They need me there!”

It grew very still. Ryerson felt how his heartbeat dropped down to normal, and then still further, until he could no longer hear his own pulse. His hands felt chilly and his face numb. A far and terrified part of him thought, So this is how it feels, when the God of Hosts lays His hand upon a man, but he stared past Sverdlov, into the relentless white blaze of the stars, and said in a flat voice:

“That will do. I’ve heard the story of the poor oppressed colonies before now. I think you yourself are proof that the Protectorate is better than you deserve. As for me, I never saw a milli of this supposed extortion from other planets: my father worked his way up from midshipman to captain, my brothers and I went through the Academy on merit, as citizens of the poorest and most overcrowded world in the universe. Do you imagine you know what competition is? Why, you blowhard clodhopper, you wouldn’t last a week on Earth. As a matter of fact, I myself had grown tired of the struggle. If it weren’t for this wretched expedition, my wife and I would have started for a new colony next week. Now you make me wonder if it’s wise. Are all colonials like you — just barely brave enough to slander an old man when they’re a safe hundred light-years away?”

Sverdlov did not move. The slow spin of the Cross brought the black star into Ryerson’s view again. It seemed bigger, as the ship swooped toward periastron. He had a horrible sense of falling into it. Thou, God, watchest me, with the cold ashen eye of wrath. The silence was like a membrane stretched close to ripping.

Finally, very slow, the bass voice came. “Are you prepared to back up those words, Earthling?”

“Right after we finish here!” shouted Ryerson.

“Oh.” A moment longer. Then: “Forget it. Maybe I did speak out of turn. I’ve never known an Earthman who wasn’t an enemy of some kind.”

“Did you ever try to know them?”

“Forget it, I said. I’ll get you home. I might even come around one day and say hello, on your new planet. Now let’s get busy here. Our first job is to start the accelerators operating again.”

The weakness which poured through David Ryerson was such that he wondered if he would have fallen under gravity. Oh, Tamara, he thought, be with me now. He remembered how they had camped on a California beach… had it all to themselves, no one lived in the deserts eastward… and the gulls had swarmed around begging bread until both of them were helpless with laughter. Now why should he suddenly remember that, out of all the times they had had?