There was matter, of course—the Eta Carinae region is rich in nebulosity; but material at a density measured in atoms, or even billions of atoms, per liter does not jolt several million tons of spacecraft. The matter was unusually rich in heavy atoms, since it had cycled through more generations of star formation than even Molly’s part of space; but this seemed irrelevant, too.
There was energy. Arc was still hundreds of astronomical units away, and its companion even farther, but both radiated fiercely in their appropriate spectral ranges. None of Molly’s fellow students would have dreamed of exposing themselves to the flux outside the hull—she herself would have been uneasy about the X-ray component. Still, there seemed nothing to account for the ship’s behavior.
She frowned in thought for a moment, then flicked off her screen and removed her face from the viewing mask. Beside her, Joe made a gesture indicating that he was aware of her motion and willing to converse, though he kept his front eyes at his monitor.
“Joe, did you recognize that last bump? We went real two or three minutes ago and still are; it couldn’t have been interface.”
“Not sure. I wasn’t sure about the earlier one—it didn’t feel like faces I’ve been through, but if that’s what it seemed like to you, you’re probably right. This was some sort of real acceleration, then. Have you checked our surroundings? I’ve been concentrating on ion counts, and nothing has changed much there.”
“I made a quick sweep out to about a kilo for gross matter and obvious EM and particle radiation without spotting any immediate answer. Would any of our fellow teams be doing something that could account for it?”
Joe failed to answer at once, and for a moment Molly wondered whether she had violated one of the courtesy rules again. Some of the red-star races carried the mind-your-own-business attitude to what she considered an extreme, but her question could hardly have been an intrusion even by Nethneen standards. Scientific research was a matter of general interest, especially when several projects were working out of the same unit and likely to use the same resources. Besides, Joe would make allowances; he knew Molly and her husband very well, and several other human beings slightly.
“It’s possible,” he said at last. “There was some work to he done that involved leaving monitors adrift to gather data, and they would have to be dropped at velocities very precisely measured with respect to Arc and its companion. I suppose ...” His voice trailed off. The translator Molly carried had been well programmed in the last few months, and she got the distinct impression from the tone structure that he had been about to say more but couldn’t bring himself to do it. She remembered that the crew of the vessel consisted largely of students, too. Joe would not have wanted to say anything that reflected on the personal competence of one of these. It occurred to her that the student pilot might be a bit heavy-handed, and stopped worrying.
It was the first time she had thought even momentarily of personal danger in connection with the project, and had no trouble dismissing it from her mind at once. Space is, of course, a dangerous environment for a planetary species, but so is a world for which the organism has not evolved; and Mary Chmenici did belong to a race whose ancestors, only a few generations earlier, had casually accepted manually controlled and individually directed vehicular traffic.
Maybe some other people on watch would have ideas and be willing to discuss them, though for the most part they shared Joe’s ethical standards. At the moment, of course, everyone in the conning room was busy; this included pairs from ten different teams, whose usual membership was four, though her own group had five. She and Joe were the only ones from the Enigma Exercise now on watch.
She keyed a clock onto a corner of her screen. Looking at it directly meant that her translator was no help, and it took several seconds to interpret the dial, even ignoring the sweep-mike needle that was a little too fast for her eyesight, and work the reading into time units in which she could think comfortably. They would be relaxing in a little less than half an hour. She would spend the first ten minutes in her own decently lit cabin, thinking of personal matters like the husband and son she wouldn’t be seeing for several weeks; then she would go to the team’s office and spend some more time persuading Charley and Jenny that geo-chemical dating was really all that had to be done to solve their problem. Charley seemed nearly convinced already, and with luck she could get him to work on Joe, who was oddly hard to persuade. Then—
Then the weight went off. No one had come up with artificial gravity yet; weight on a spacecraft came from real acceleration in real space and its unreal mathematical equivalent in false-space. As a matter of safety, passengers were warned when either was about to be changed deliberately; there had been no warning this time. Main power? Molly thought. No, there was still light, and instruments were still functioning. Only drive seemed affected. No alarms, either visual or auditory, were making themselves obvious. The heavy-handed student pilot again? If so, there should be acceleration warning and a resumption of weight in, at the outside, a few seconds. Molly held her chair arm and waited.
No warning. No weight. For fully a minute, no word. The students in the conning room remained at their instruments, but a faint murmur of conversation began to interrupt the sacrosanct work atmosphere—some pairs present didn’t need translators, and the neutral gas mixture did carry sound—and faces lifted from monitor screens. Molly looked down at the Nethneen beside her and could tell that his right pair of eyes was meeting her own. Even Joe was willing to talk.
“What’s going on?” She hoped her translator was not betraying her uneasiness; she had done her best, over the last few months, to condition it to convey to her any innuendo it could read in incoming messages, but would be just as glad now to have that a one-way operation. Joe’s answer seemed free of worry, but that could be due to similar management at his own end of the communication link.
“I don’t know. No normal sequence within my experience is running, but I have never ridden in a craft of this type before, so that is not very meaningful. I can suggest nothing but to wait a reasonable time and, if no information is received, to follow standard emergency usage.”
“I know the emergency procedures. What’s a reasonable time?”
The Nethneen was spared the need to answer. Another voice, inhumanly calm, sounded in both their translators.
“Permanent crew to Condition Four stations. Research students to your assigned lifecraft, Salvage Status Four. Crew students to your assigned permanent crew monitors.” The orders were not repeated, giving Molly for the first time in some days a sharp awareness that she was not among human beings. This was reinforced by the absence of chatter among the students in the conning room. A few quick, short sentences from senior team members, establishing who was present and who was not, and a cloud of weirdly shaped forms had pushed away from their stools, chairs, wrapping posts, couches, and other stations and were floating rapidly toward the room’s dozen exits. In the dusky, rubrous light of the place, the Human student was reminded of a picture she had once seen of a stream of bats entering a cave on the home world she had never visited.
She joined one of the streams, her left hand held by Joe’s tendrils. Although accustomed to a gravity over five times as great as his, she had spent fully half her life on spacecraft and was much more adept at weightless maneuvering than he. The Nethneen knew it and allowed her to transport them both; his twenty-one kilograms of mass gave her no problems as long as he accepted responsibility for holding on.