“What do you think?”
“I’d say take the chance,” Ariel said. “The TBI must be going mad over our disappearance. If they do a computer check, they may wonder about this Spacer ship. Don’t tell me they don’t watch carefully every takeoff and landing.
“Of course they wouldn’t be able to interfere; Earthers had little control over their own port, as they owned few ships. Still, if he and Ariel started shopping for food-
“Right. We’ll go.”
When they requested clearance it was readily given, and Derec primed the jets and goosed the micropile. The tubes burst into muffled thunder. He switched to air-breathing mode as soon as they had a little speed, and took an economical high-G trajectory into space. In minutes, the great blue world was off to one side.
“Which way?” Ariel asked.
There was a slight technical advantage in aiming one’s ship toward one’s objective, since intrinsic velocity was unaltered by passage through hyperspace. But the adjustment could be made at the other end.
“Straight out,” he said. “I’m not exactly afraid of pursuit, but-”
“Right. “
“Straight out” was in the direction Earth was traveling. Ariel calculated their fuel and Derec elected to use twenty percent. He liked a lot of maneuvering reserve. The bum wasn’t long, and when it was over, Earth had not altered much. It was more aft of them, and only a bit smaller. Now, though, there was a wall of delta-V between them and it: in order to catch them, any ship would have to match their change of velocity -their delta-V.
“We’ve got time to kill,” Derec said, feeling tired. Reaction weighed him down even in the absence of gravity.
“Think we should rig the condenser?” Ariel asked.
The thought of the excursion in a space-suit made him feel even more tired. Then he thought: Of course, Ariel can do it. She’s not sick any more.
She was still weak, though, despite her rapid recovery. And he himself was not up to it.
“It’s only for a week or two,” he said. “I think the ship can handle it. It’s only for two people, also.”
Ariel nodded. “Listen,” she said. “How do you feel? You seem better after your sleep, but you’re still sick. Just knowing what’s going on inside hasn’t cured you.”
That was true. “I feel tired at the moment. Why?”
“I want to talk about Robot City. I want to talk to you about everything we went through together, right back to the control room of Aranimas’s ship, before Rockliffe Station.”
She looked at him, her eyes big and intent. “I want all the help you can give me to recover my memory.”
That he could understand. “Of course, I’llbe glad to help. I just wish I could be more helpful.”
Ariel opened her mouth, closed it, her face pink. “Derec…” she said. “I…Derec, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more about yourself-about us. But I couldn’t! I couldn’t tell you I had amnemonic plague. And I-I can’t talk about us-from before. I’m not sure of my memories-I’ve lost so much, and I don’t know how much I can trust of what I have now. I’m sorry-but it’s just too uncertain-and too painful.”
Illness can make a person’s mind preternaturally clear. This was a girl who had been exiled and disinherited for having contracted a hideous disease. “Of course.”
Her feeling for him was obvious-the attraction, the repulsion, pain and pleasure intertwined in memories he didn’t share. Memories that now she couldn’t trust.
“No need to apologize,” he said gently. “There’s been nothing between us since Aranimas’s control room. Your previous memories, real or unreal, are of a different and forgotten person-whose name I don’t even know.”
She managed a weak smile. “True, that-person is forgotten. It’s true. You are a different person. Derec-do you mind if I don’t tell you your-his-name? I’m not sure I really do know it. Besides, it’s easier for me to think of you as Derec-”
Derec suppressed a sharp, small pain. His lack of a past was an emptiness that was always with him. “Of course I don’t mind,” he said. “Some things are more important than others. You are more important to me than any memory.”
And that was certainly true.
“Oh, Derec!” Ariel plunged at him, grappled him in a bearhug that sent them wheeling, laughing, through the air of the little ship, colliding with the bulkheads and the control board. Fortunately, the hoods were down over the control sections.
Lingering in the vicinity of Earth for a week was a risky business on several counts, Derec thought, but he had not wanted to bum more fuel unless he had to. Refueling was, in one sense, no problem: the rocket simply heated reaction mass with the micropile and flung it aft at very high velocity. Almost any kind of mass would do, and powdered rock in water-a slurry-was a very good reaction mass. It could be gotten almost anywhere. Water was next best; the ship was equipped to handle slurry, and the pumps could deal easily with water. These items were readily available in space or on planets.
There might not be time to stop and spend ten hours refueling, though. And they could well find themselves in a system with abundant fuel for them, but lacking the reserve fuel necessary to maneuver to it.
Ariel was a competent pilot herself, and had been traveling on her own for some time-Derec didn’t know how long-before being captured by Aranimas. And she was more reckless than he.
“If we’re going to spend all this time drifting, why don’t we do it in safety-at Kappa Whale? Or off Robot City?”
“If we’re pursued, we’ll bum more,” Derec said. “That would mean we’d have to bum still more at Robot City to lose our intrinsic velocity.”
“I think we should hurry,” she said. “Derec, I’m not happy about your condition. I don’t think you’re getting better. Every now and then you go off into a sort of fugue.”
It was true that occasionally the monitor opened, and the chemfets festering in his bloodstream droned an emotionless report into his mind about having overcome this or that difficulty or achieved this or that milestone of their growth. He supposed all this would mean much to Dr. Avery. To him it meant nothing, but he was not able to tune out the reports.
“At least I don’t go into convulsions anymore,” he said. The one incident was all there had been, but Ariel was obviously still frightened by the memory. He was glad he hadn’t been able to see himself. “You occasionally have-fugues, I guess, in an even more literal sense-yourself.”
She nodded. “I see you do the same thing-I suppose you still have flashes of memory, when memories return, so vividly that you are there.”
“Usually when I’m asleep, and I lose most of them,” Derec said.
Her memories were returning in a massive way, compared to his own. She wasn’t getting anything like a coherent account of her past life, of course, merely a chunk here and a chunk there. Like pages of a book torn out and scattered by the wind, here a leaf caught by a tree, there one against a house.
Four days out from Earth, with the mother planet a mere blue-green brilliant star behind them, now getting closer and closer to Sol, Derec and Ariel agreed that it was safe to open the hyperwave. They called Wolruf and Mandelbrot at Kappa Whale, but got no answer.
“Can you shift the elements so it broadcasts on the same wavelengths as the Keys to Perihelion do?” Ariel asked.
He had told her their deduction about the failure of the hyperwave aboard Dr. Avery’s other Star Seeker; she had been in such a feverish state that it hadn’t registered with her at the time.
Derec shook his head somberly. “It calls for precision tools and a fairly lengthy research effort. First, just to determine what broadcasts the Keys spray their static on.”
“Ship static wavelengths, perhaps?”
“Perhaps…Likely, in fact.” Hyperwave static was a fact of life, one the usual hyperwave link was designed to ignore. “But when did you even hear of a hyperlink designed to pick up static?”
Ariel smiled faintly, shook her head.
A week out from Earth, they started calculating the Jump to Kappa Whale.
“It hasn’t been too long,” said Ariel. “Wolruf’s food will hold out, of course, and so will their energy. The micropile is good for years yet. They’ve a sufficient supply of fuel to do what little maneuvering they may require. They could Jump out of Kappa Whale and back to avoid pursuit, if they have to.”