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.”
“So they should still be there. Where would they go, without us, if they acquired star charts?”
Ariel couldn’t guess.
Charts were one of the first things he and Ariel had checked for when they had entered the ship. There was a complete set, and if there hadn’t been, they could have requested a copy from Control. One would have been beamed to them immediately, without a question.
“It’s easier to calculate a single Jump for Kappa Whale,” he said. “But it definitely isn’t safer.”
Ariel calculated three Jumps, and Derec almost agreed. “The trouble is, Kappa Whale is nearly behind us. Your first Jump turns us in hyper, which is possible, but it’s a strain on the engines. I suggest we Jump to Procyon, which is near enough to our line of flight, and do a partial orbit about it, burning to bring us out on direct line for the first of your Jumps.”
She bit her lip and said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m too reckless. I think it’s because I had a sheltered childhood. I never got hurt much when I was a kid.”
Derec grinned. “I have to admit that in my few short months of life I’ve acquired a healthy respect for the laws of chance.”
Their first approximations done, all that remained was to put final figures into the computer and let it solve the equations of the Jump. They needed to know their correct speed and direction with some accuracy, so they would know what to expect when they landed in Procyon’s arms.
Ariel bent to the instruments while Derec fumble-fingeredly tried to set up the computer for their first Jump.
After a long time, he said, “ Ariel, can you handle this? I can’t seem to concentrate, and my fingers are made of rubber.”
She looked at him in concern. “I was afraid you were going off into a fever again.” Twice before on the trip he had had feverish episodes, as the chemfets altered their growth, in turn altering the environment around them: him.
Derec tried to fight off fear. He had no idea yet of the ultimate purpose of the chemfets, and had not been able to “talk” to them. Worse, he had no idea if he was contagious. After that one hug, they had avoided so much as touching each other, for fear that Ariel, too, would be infected with them.