“Okay. But if he comes near the instruments I’ll kill him. Tell him that.”
There was no need to tell him. LaRoque nodded that he understood. Jacob bent over and fumbled with the strap hooks with the good fingers of his right hand.
Helene hissed behind him. “Jacob, your hands!”
The look of concern on her face warmed Jacob. But when she started to get up he’d have none of it. Right now her job was more important than his. She knew this. He took the fact that she was torn at all as a great display of affection. She smiled briefly in encouragement then bent to answer a half dozen alarms that started blaring at once.
LaRoque rose, rubbing his shoulders, then picked up the aid-kit and motioned to Jacob. His smile was ironic.
“Who should we fix first?” he said. “You, the other man, or Culla?”
27. EXCITATION
Helene had to find time to think. There must be something she could do! Slowly the systems based on Galactic science were failing. So far it had been the time-compression and the gravity thrust, plus several peripheral mechanisms. If internal gravity control went out they’d be helpless before the tossing of the chromosphere storms, battered within their own hull.
Not that it’d matter. The toroids that were holding them up against the pull of the Sun were obviously tiring. The altimeter was slipping. Already the rest of the herd was high overhead, almost lost in the pink haze of the upper chromosphere. It wouldn’t be long.
An alarm light flashed.
There was positive feedback in the internal gravity field. She did a quick mental calculation, then fed in a set of parameters to damp it out.
Poor Jacob, he’d tried. His exhaustion had been written on his face. She felt ashamed not to have shared the fight on flip-side, though, of course, it had never been likely that they could dislodge Culla from the computer on flip-side.
Now it was up to her. But how, with every damned component falling apart!
Not every component. Except for the maser link with Mercury, the equipment derived from Earth technology still ran perfectly. Culla hadn’t bothered with any of it. The refrigeration still worked. The E.M. fields around the hard shell of the ship still ran, though they had lost the ability to selectively let in more sunlight on flipside. Naturally.
The ship shuddered. It bounced as something bumped against it once, twice. Then a brightness appeared at the edge of the deck. Suddenly the rim of a toroid appeared, rubbing against the side of the ship. Above it, several Solarians fluttered.
The bumping became a scraping sound, loud and hideous. The toroid was livid with bright purple blotches around its rim. It pulsed and throbbed under the proddings of its tormentors. Then, in a sudden burst of light, it was gone. The Sunship tipped as its forward end, unsupported, fell suddenly. DeSilva and her partner struggled to right it.
When she looked up she could see her Solarian allies drifting away, with the two remaining toroids.
There was no more they could do. The toroid that had deserted them was just a spot of light overhead, receding rapidly atop a pillar of green flame.
The altimeter began to spin faster. On her view-screens Helene could see the pulsing granulation cells of the photosphere, and the Big Spot, now bigger than ever.
They were already closer than anyone had come before. Soon they’d be in there — the first men in the Sun.
Briefly.
She looked up at the now distant Solarians, and wondered if she should call everyone together to… to wave good-bye or something. She wanted Jacob here.
But he’d gone below again. They’d hit before he could make it back.
She gazed up at the tiny green lights and wondered how the toroid had been able to move so fast.
She jerked upright with a curse. Chen looked up at her. “What is it, skipper? Shields going?”
With a cry of exultation Helene started throwing switches.
She wished they could monitor their telemetry back on Mercury, because if they died here on the Sun now it would certainly be in a unique way!
Jacob’s arms still throbbed. Worse, they itched. He couldn’t scratch, of course. His left hand was in a solid block of flesh-foam and so were two of the fingers of his right hand.
He crouched again just inside the hatch of the gravity-loop, looking out onto the deck on flip-side. Fagin moved aside so he could push his new mirror, this one glued to the end of a pencil with more flesh-foam, out beyond the combing.
Culla wasn’t in sight. The hulking cameras stood out against the pulsing blue ceiling presented by the laboring magnetovores. The trail of the P-laser crisscrossed, marked by scattering from dust in the air.
He motioned for LaRoque to lay down his load just inside the hatch, next to Fagin.
They took turns coating each other’s necks and faces with more flesh-foam. The goggles were sealed down with extra blobs of the pliant, rubbery material.
“Of course you know this is dangerous,” LaRoque said. “It may protect us from damage from a quick shot but this stuff is highly flammable. It’s the only flammable substance allowed in spaceships, for that matter, because of its unique medicinal properties.”
Jacob nodded. If he looked anything like LaRoque, now, they’d stand a good chance of scaring the alien to death!
He hefted the brown cannister, then sprayed a shot out onto the deck. It didn’t have much range but it might do as a weapon. There was still plenty of the stuff left.
The deck jerked under them, then jounced twice more. Jacob looked out and saw that they were tipping over. The magnetovore that held up this side of the ship was rolling along lower and lower, toward the edge of the deck and away from where the photosphere covered the sky.
One of the beasts on the other side must have lost its hold, then. That meant it was almost over.
The ship shuddered and then began to right itself. Jacob sighed. There still might be time to save the ship if he could disable Culla immediately. But that was clearly impossible. He wished he could go up and join Helene.
“Fagin,” he said. “I’m not the man you used to know. That man would have had Culla by now. We’d have been out of here and safe. We both know what he was capable of.
“Please understand. I tried. But I’m just not the same anymore.”
Fagin rustled. “I knew, Jacob. It was to achieve this change that I invited you to Sundiver in the first place.”
Jacob stared at the alien.
“You are my artful dodger,” the Kanten whistled softly. “I had no idea the issues here were as critical as they turned out to be. I asked you here solely to help break the chrysalis you have been in since Ecuador and then to introduce you to Helene deSilva. The plan succeeded. I am pleased.”
Jacob was at a loss.
“But Fagin, my mind…” he trailed off.
“Your mind is fine. You simply have an overeager imagination. That is all. Truly, Jacob, you invent such fantasies. And so elaborate! I have never met a hypochondriac such as you!”
Jacob’s mind raced. Either the Kanten was being polite, or he was mistaken or… or he was right. Fagin had never lied to him before, especially regarding personal matters.
Could it be that Mr. Hyde wasn’t a neurosis at all but a game? As a child he had created play universes so detailed that they could hardly be distinguished from reality. His worlds had existed. The neo-Reichian therapists had merely smiled and credited him with a powerful, non-pathological imagination because the tests always showed that he knew he was playing, when it mattered that he know it!