Pertin, laid heedlessly just inside the portal, was first in the creature’s path. He did not even have time to realize he was in danger before the Sirian was upon him. Then, queerly, the great eye stared at him and the Sirian paused, hesitated, and turned away. It propelled its glittering metal object at the bulkhead and at once reversed its field and sped away.
If that was another bomb, Pertin thought, they’d all had it now; beyond that bulkhead was empty space from the last attack. The rest of the ship might be saved if the automatic seals worked fast enough, but they would be boiled into outer space - himself, the purchased person, Doc Chimp and the T’Worlie, at least.
Pertin had forgotten the Sheliak. The soggy baker’s bun that slumped on the deck and had taken no part in the conversation was still in fact an able and intelligent being. It acted faster than Pertin would have believed possible. The bun shape elongated itself into a sort of stemmed sea-anemone, flowed like lightning up and down around the bomb, surrounding it, drowning it in alien flesh.
It exploded.
The only sign the rest of them could see was a quick convulsive shudder of the Sheliak’s tissue. Even the noise was muffled and almost inaudible, in the constant thunder of the rockets.
But the Sheliak glowed brilliant gold for a moment with a flash of the last light of its life, and died.
They had defended themselves, but at the cost of one of their allies.
As if on cue, the thunder of the rockets stopped, and they found themselves blessedly free of the crushing G forces. Doc Chimp, struggling to untangle himself from the silvery girl, went flying across the chamber, ricocheted against a wall and brought up short next to where Pertin was struggling to disassociate himself from the plastic foam.
“Are you all right, Ben James?” Doc Chimp yelled.
Pertin pushed himself free and caught the outstretched chimpanzee arm for stability. He ached in every bone and muscle, and he was drenched in sweat - from the heat of the plastic wrap or from fear, he could not say which.
“I think so,” he said. “Why do you suppose he did that?”
“What? Who? You mean the Sheliak? Why, I guess it’s their nature, Ben James—”
“No, not the Sheliak,” Pertin said but he didn’t say out loud what it was that was perplexing him. He only thought it to himself. Why had the Sirian looked at him with death in his eye, then stopped and turned away?
3
It turned out there were two things wrong with Pertin’s calculations. First, the odds weren’t quite as favourable as he had guessed; he had not remembered that the bombers might have allies who were as gravity-bound as himself, and so hadn’t put in an appearance. Second, he had not realized that a large proportion of the beings aboard the Aurora simply didn’t want to be bothered. They were apathetic, hopeless, detached, or in some exotic mood with no human analogue; or perhaps, here and there, they just weren’t about to take orders from an up-start biped jackanapes from - what was the name of it? -Earth.
The other problem was that the work of the Aurora was in observing Object Lambda, not in tracking down aberrant entities. Not even the fact that beings of one or two races had killed beings of another race could change their minds. The Scorpian robot, when it returned from patching together what it could of the damaged optical equipment, would not even take time to talk to Pertin; it went at once to its assigned place in the instrument chamber and began to oversee the series of observations which was what the thrust stoppage was for.
Pertin could not even get the free-fall period extended to permit a full-scale search of the ship. The T’Worlies pointed out to him, reasonably enough, that as they were all going to die anyhow the first priority was the errand for which they had all undertaken to give their lives: to complete the observation of Object Lambda. And the laws of celestial dynamics were remorseless. A certain quantum of delta-V had to be applied to Aurora’s course. There was only finite time in which to do it. If they failed to put in the necessary velocity change the probe would fly by Object Lambda too fast to accomplish the mission to which it was assigned. So the T’Worlies were going to work on their instrument observations and nothing else, although they certainly wished him well, they indicated, in his search for the guilty ones.
The search team turned out to be a party of five: Pertin, Doc Chimp, the pseudogirl, the purchased-people woman and the little kittenish object who had joined the party to greet them on arrival. They couldn’t even recruit the Boaty-Bits to their cause.
As soon as the collective creatures had learned of the bombing attempt they had departed en masse to swarm in some obscure corner of the vessel and unite all of their intelligence in the problem of deciding what to do about it.
Pertin saw a great deal of the ship, but found no criminals. The one being they had certainly identified, the Sirian, eluded their search. If a being the size of a horse, emitting an electrostatic crackle every time it moved, could avoid the searchers, what chance had they for locating a party of unidentified marauders? No chance, answered Echo; and they found nothing.
About all they really accomplished was to move the acceleration cocoons for the low-G beings they had come to think of as friends close enough together so that they could watch out for each other when the delta-V thrust immobilized them. There were many such periods. By the nature of things, there had to be. It was thuuud-screech! at least eighty percent of the time, cut up the individual portions as they would. The Aurora had thousands of kps of velocity to shed as it overtook Lambda, if they were to avoid over-running it too fast to orbit their package. It made little difference how it felt to the members of the crew.
To Pertin it felt like being kicked in the kidneys four or five times a minute, for hours on end. With allowances for variations in anatomy, it felt very much like that to most of the beings. Frail little creatures like the T’Worlies were particularly hard hit, or would have been if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Aurora was their own design, cocoons and all, and many thousands of years of thought had gone into reducing the damage to a T’Worlie frame in a cocoon. It was an advantage of a sort, but against it was the overpowering debit that on their native planet the surface gravity was less than a quarter-G. They were not creatures designed for strain.
It was the unfelt pain that was the worst. Every explosion produced noise and thrust, but it also sleeted a few more curies of radiation through their bodies and brought them a few hours nearer to death. As it was not felt, and as there was nothing that could be done about it, they seldom spoke of it to each other.
For half a dozen periods there was no further violence from anyone on board, and the Aurora went on about its business. Pertin reserved the time in the cocoon for taping his endless reports to Sun One, and for inspecting and studying the observation results on Object Lambda. When there was the blissful floating surcease, for half an hour or so at a time, he used it to roam around the ship. His announced purpose was to watch out for trouble. As time passed and trouble did not come, he stopped talking about it, but continued to roam. He was interested in the ship on its own merits. Simply by its novelty it helped take his mind off the growing number of things he didn’t want to think about. This was the first real spaceship he had ever seen. That seemed strange to him, when he considered how many tens of thousands of light-years he had travelled since he volunteered for tachyon transmission from Earth. It was normal enough, though. Sun One was thick with beings who had crossed and re-crossed the Galaxy a dozen times, and never seen a spaceship at all.