When they found Fagin, the Kanten was comatose. A faint sound came from the blowhole and the silver chimes tinkled, but there was no answer to their questions. When they tried to move him they found it impossible. Sharp claws had emerged from Fagin’s root pods and dug into the tough springy material of the deck. There were dozens, and no way to loosen them.
Jacob had other business to tend to. Reluctantly, he led LaRoque around the Kanten. They staggered toward the hatchway in the side of the dome.
Jacob gasped for breath next to the intercom.
“Hel… Helene…”
He waited. But no one answered. He could hear, faintly, his own words echoing from topside. So he knew it wasn’t the mechanism. What was wrong?
“Helene, can you hear me! Culla’s dead! We’re pretty badly torn up… though. You… you or Chen come down… down and fix…”
The cold air blasting from the Refer Laser sent him into a fit of shivering. He couldn’t talk anymore. With LaRoque helping, he stumbled up past the duct and fell to the sloping floor of the gravity-loop.
He fell into a fit of coughing, lying on his side to favor his burned back. Slowly the hacking subsided, leaving him raw and aching in his chest.
He fought off sleep. Rest. Just rest here a moment, then over and around to topside. Find out what’s wrong.
His arms and legs sent tremors of sharp pain up to his brain. There were too many and his mind was too unfocused to cut all the messages off. It felt as though one of his ribs was cracked, probably from the struggle with Culla.
All of this paled beside the throbbing burden of the left side of his head. He felt as if he was carrying a hot coal there.
The deck of the gravity-loop felt strange. The tight, wraparound g-field should have pulled evenly along his body. Instead it seemed to. swell like the surface of the ocean, rippling under his back with tiny wavelets of lightness and weight.
Obviously something was wrong. But it actually felt good, like a lullaby. Sleep would be so nice.
“Jacob! Thank God!” Helene’s voice boomed around him, but still it sounded far away — friendly, definitely, warm — but also irrelevant.
“No time to talk! Come up here quick, darling! The g-fields are going! I’m sending Martine, but…” There was a clattering and the voice cut off.
It would have been nice to see Helene again, he thought dimly. Sleep invaded in force this time. For a while he thought of nothing.
He dreamt of Sisyphus, the man cursed forever to roll a boulder up an endless hill. Jacob thought he had a way to be tricky about it. He had a way to make the hill think it was flat while still looking like a hill. He’d done it before.
But this time the hill was angry. It was covered with ants that climbed up onto his body and bit him all over, painfully. A wasp was laying its eggs in his eye.
What’s more, it was cheating. The hill was sticky in places and didn’t want to let him go. Elsewhere it was slippery and his body was too light to get a grip on its surface. It heaved with sickening unevenness.
He didn’t remember anything in the rules about crawling, either. But that seemed to be part of it. At least it helped the traction.
The boulder helped too. He only had to push it a little. Mostly it crawled on its own. That was nice, but he wished it wouldn’t moan so. Boulders shouldn’t moan. Especially not in French. It wasn’t fair to make him listen to it.
He awakened, Wearily, in sight of a hatchway. Which hatchway he wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t very smoky.
Outside, beyond the deck, he could see the beginnings of a blackness, a transparency, returning to the red haze of the chromosphere.
Was that a horizon, out there? An edge to the Sun? The flat photosphere stretched out on ahead, a feathery carpet of crimson and black flame. In its depths it crawled with tiny movements. It pulsed, and filaments sewed elongated patterns above brightly waving jets.
Waving. Back and forth, on and on, Sol waved before his eyes.
Millie Martine stood in the doorway, with her fist up near her mouth and an expression of horror on her face.
He wanted to reassure her. Everything was all right. It would be from now on. Mr. Hyde was dead, wasn’t he? Jacob remembered seeing him somewhere, in the rubble of his castle. His face was burned up and his eyes were gone and he gave off a terrible stink.
Then something reached up and grabbed him. Down was now towards the hatchway. There was a steep slope in between. He tumbled forward and never remembered crashing to a halt just outside the door.
PART X
A lovely thing to see through the paper window’s holes the Galaxy.
30. OPACITY
Commissioner Abatsoglou: “Then it would be a fair statement to say that all of the Library-designed systems failed, before the end?”
Professor Kepler: “Yes, Commissioner. Every one eventually deteriorated to uselessness. The only mechanisms still working at the last were components designed on Earth, by terrestrial personnel. Mechanisms which, I might add, were declared superfluous and unnecessary by Pil Bubbacub and many others during construction.”
C.A. : “You aren’t implying that Bubbacub knew in advance…”
P.K.: “No, of course not. In his own way he was as much a dupe as the rest of us. His opposition was based solely on esthetics. He didn’t want Galactic time-compression and gravity-control systems crammed into a ceramic shell and linked to an archaic cooling system.
“The reflection fields and the Refrigerator Laser were based on physical laws known by humans back in the twentieth century. Naturally he objected to our ‘superstitious’ insistence on building a ship around them, not only because the Galactic systems made them redundant, but also because he considered pre-contact Earth science to be a pathetic accumulation of half-truths and mumbo-jumbo.”
C.A. : “The ‘mumbo jumbo’ worked when the new stuff failed, though.”
P.K.: “In all fairness, Commissioner, I’d have to say that that was a lucky break. The saboteur believed they’d make no difference, so he didn’t try to wreck them, at first. He was denied an opportunity to correct his error.”
Commissioner Montes: “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Dr. Kepler. I’m sure some of my associates here share my mystification. I understand the Sunship Captain’s use of the Refrigerator-Laser to blast out of the chromosphere. But to do so she had to boost at an acceleration greater than the surface gravity of the Sun! Now they could get away with this as long as the internal gravity fields held. But what happened when they failed? Weren’t they immediately subjected to a force that would squash them flat?”
P.K.: “Not immediately. Failure came in stages; first the fine-tuned fields used to maintain the gravity-loop tunnel to the instrument hemisphere, ‘flip-side,’ then the automatic turbulence adjustment, and finally a gradual loss of the major field which compensated internally for the pull of the Sun. By the time the latter failed, thley had already reached the lower corona. Captain deSilva was ready when it happened.
“She knew that to climb straight out after internal compensation failed would be suicide, though she considered doing it anyway to get her records out to us. The alternative was to allow the ship to fall, braking only enough to impose on the occupants about three gees or so.
“Fortunately, there is a way to fall towards a gravity sink and still get away. What Helene did was to try for a hyperbolic escape orbit. Almost all of the laser thrust then went into giving the ship a tangent velocity as it fell back again.