“Come on!” he cried.
WORKING.
“Damn you!” Baker reached the screeching stage as he watched the first few troops float out of the blunted nose of the other ship and cautiously propel toward him, weapons zeroed in on the cockpit. “You goddamned machine! It can’t take that long to figure out. It’s not that hard!” He jerked backward in his seat when the first of the boarding party touched the hood of the shuttle. No. They’ll pick me apart trying to find out why Kinney can survive.
The light under the transfer button glowed. Baker shrieked “Go!” and punched his thumb into it.
Darkness consumed him.
Black, swimming black. I should have stayed. I lay here so limp and
unsafe. What if I don’t come back this time? I look scared. The doors! They’re bending in on me. I press beyond them into the shaft so dark and cold. I’m falling and I don’t want to fall. I’ve got to stop falling, got to stop. I’m needed. I’ve got to be needed somewhere—I know it. She’s telling me. Something needs help.
Baker took a heartbeat to realize where he was. His hands shot out for the ship’s controls and frantically punched buttons.
Directly ahead of him, a crater filled his viewing port.
Instead of falling toward it, though, the shuttle rose up and away from the planet’s surface.
The crater shrank. In a few moments, Baker saw the airless limb of the planet Mercury and beyond it the milky glow of the solar corona. The port turned nearly opaque the instant the sun blazed across the glasteel. He looked away by reflex.
I made it! He checked his instrument readouts and smiled. Intrinsic velocity retained. I’m rising into an orbit to accommodate my Earth orbital speed; I’ll be drifting beneath the halo of flak as safely as can be expected. At least it couldn’t hang too close to the surface without becoming meteorites.
“Begin search for Circus Galacticus and stand watch for other spacecraft.” Leaning back in the seat as best he could in freefall, he smiled wider.
The shuttle did not carry enough fuel to make it from the outer region of Mercury’s flak barrier to the inner orbits if he had transferred there. The flak could not reach to the surface, he suspected, and all he had to do was appear on the anti-revolutionward side of Mercury and let his Earth velocity take him away from the surface.
Something tapped at the ship’s hull once. Baker smiled after it happened again a few moments later. There it is. I was right about the flak. Starting to encounter it.
Baker stopped in the middle of his thoughts and froze.
What flak?
Another piece of debris hit the shuttle.
Where did I hear about flak? Why should I even have suspected.
He began to shake. Think, idiot. Where? The planet’s are at superior conjunction. No direct observation possible. But Circus transferred to sixty degrees above the ecliptic to— But I didn’t know that.
He swallowed with great difficulty. The back of his throat scraped like leather against brick.
That’s not my memory. It didn’t happen to me. I didn’t find it out. Someone else. Kinney!
He switched on a scrim to stare himself in the face.
“Who are you? Which mind is yours?” The face in the scrim mimicked his movements but did not answer. It stared back at him with equal fear and incomprehension.
“Who, God damn you? Who?”
?
When Circus Galacticus rose slowly over Mercury’s horizon, Baker plotted a rendezvous course without surprise. His days-old beard scraped at the collar of his pressure suit. His bristly scalp itched.
Why did I even think of Mercury? Even suspect that Circus’d be here? Dee is here, frozen somewhere below. Kinney must know it. That’s why he brought—
He brought me. here. His body, his brain, he’s running it all and I’m just a passenger who gets to drive once in a while along the same road.
Now I can’t be sure. Can’t think anything I do isn’t controlled by him. I’m not even here really. Just a few milliliters of—juice—that got realigned into someone else’s circuitry, a nothing man, a nowhere man, a never man with a never mind.
“What is your name?” Circus’s computer radioed.
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I don’t. No.” He grabbed at his head, then reached down for the attitude controls. “Jord. I am Jord Baker.” I am Jord Baker. All inside it’s like Jord. I die the way Jord dies. I’m here—
“Prepare to dock,” the computer said, opening the docking bay doors on its side. Baker’s hands deftly maneuvered the shuttle toward the glowing square on the dark side of the spacecraft. He hardly noticed his piloting.
I’m here and thinking and acting. I can tighten this thigh muscle, blink that eye, grind my teeth. I’m on the circuitry. If I could somehow deprogram. Deprogram. Dee. Program.
Pogrom. Pour grumbling, crumbling Kinney out of his own body. She’ll do it. Do it double-time. Triple Trine.
His hands tightened on the controls. “Ready to dock.” Looking for the
first time at what he had been seeing, he realized that he had already docked the shuttle. Behind him, the outer doors slid shut and air cycled in.
Unstrapping with one swift motion, Baker kicked out of the chair, pounded a hand against the emergency hatch release and sailed into the docking bay.
“Begin immediate search for the cryonic preservation unit on the surface.” He had to shout over the hiss of air still filling the bay. His ears rang. Grabbing hold of a handrail, he yanked toward the hatch.
“Searching,” the computer replied. “Have you not noticed the large object to your left?”
Baker turned and started. A spacecraft nearly double the size of the shuttle lay fast to the repair section. Baker had indeed not noticed it.
“Sure. That’s the ship you disabled at flameout. How’d you get it?” He floated over to it. The arcing slash of a laser beam had left a deep, uneven valley in the ship’s flattened-cone hull from its blunt nose to topside aft.
“I transferred out ahead of it when Fadeaway came under attack. I matched velocities and picked it up, then transferred to the outer region of Mercury’s flak barrier and moved slowly into a low orbit. Your method of arrival was much more elegant.”
“Have you found it yet? Delia’s redoubt?”
“No. Not yet. Please—examine the fighter.”
Baker pulled topside to check out the cockpit.
“As you’ll notice, all controls were severed by the laser, but the cockpit remained intact.”
“There’s a body in there!”
“The pilot. You will also note that the ship possesses no radio or maser equipment or, in fact, any ship-to-ship or ship-to-base communications of—”
“Why didn’t you remove the body?”
“I was waiting for you to take a look at it along with me.”
“Forget it.” He slid away from the viewing port.
“Jord,” the computer said in the softest voice it could synthesize. “The pilot is dead.”
“You need a billion miles of neurons to figure that out?”
“He was dead while piloting the fighter. He has been dead for weeks.”
Baker felt around the collar of his pressure suit for a water spigot and found none. He tried to swallow.
“Let me change.” He slipped out of the bulky pressure suit and into one of Circus’s skintights. He donned the headset with its vidlink to the computer and pushed off toward the fighter cockpit.
“Straight,” he said around the mouthpiece. “When we’re done, open the bay to space and I’ll stay here until I’m certain that any contamination on me is dead.”
He found no entrance hatch. After half an hour of thorough searching, he said, “Not even through the viewports—they’re sealed tight. Did they nail him inside here for good?”