Hans was busily shifting focus every time a few new frames came in, so now the pictures were coming in faster than anybody could absorb them. That couldn't be helped. There was a whole world to look at, and anyway it didn't matter if we saw it all in real time. All the data were being stored for later analysis and interpretation—by somebody else, though. Not by me. I had seen all I wanted.
So, evidently, had most of the Phoenix crew. Starminder and Julia Ibarruru were in the eating chamber, but they were talking to each other about the Core, and paying no attention to the confusing images that were pouring in. Bill Tartch had his cameras turned on the display, all right. But he was watching the pictures only with sulky half attention, while Denys hung, sound asleep, beside him. "What's the use of this, Klara?" he demanded as soon as he saw me. "I can't get any decent footage from this crap, and most of the crew's gone off to sleep."
I was looking at Denys. The little tart even snored prettily. They needed it," I told him. "How about Terple?"
He shrugged. "Kekuskian was here a minute ago, looking for her. I don't know whether he found her or not. Listen, how about a little more of your interview, so I won't be wasting my time entirely?"
"Maybe later," I said, not meaning it, and went in pursuit of June Terple.
I heard her voice raised in anger long before I saw her. Kekuskian had found her, all right, and the two of them were having a real cat-and-dog fight. She was yelling at him. "I don't give a snake's fart what you think you have to have, Oleg! We're going! We have to get the whole installation the hell out of here while we're still in one piece."
"You can't do that!" he screeched back at her. "What's the point of my coming out here at all if I can't observe the supernova?"
"The point," she said fiercely, "is to stay alive, and that's what we're going to do. I'm in charge here, Kekuskian! I give the orders, and I'm giving them now. Hans! Lay a course for the neutron star!"
That's when I got into the spat. "Cancel that, Hans," I ordered. "From here on in, you'll be taking your orders from me. Is that understood?"
"It is understood, Ms. Moynlin," the shipmind's voice said, as calm and unsurprised as ever. Terple wasn't calm at all. I made allowances for the woman; she hadn't had much sleep and there was a lot of strain. But for a minute there I thought she was going to hit me.
"Now what the hell do you think you're doing, Moynlin?" she demanded dangerously.
"I'm taking command," I explained. "We're going to stay for a while. I want to see that star blow up too."
"Yes!" Kekuskian shouted.
Terple didn't even look at him. She was giving her whole attention to me, and she wasn't in a friendly mood. "Are you crazy? Do you want to get killed?"
It crossed my mind to wonder if that would be so bad, but what I said, quite reasonably, was, "I don't mean we have to stay right here and let the star fry us. Not the people, anyway. We'll evacuate the crew and watch the blowup on the remote. There's plenty of room for everybody in the two ships. I can take three or four with me, Bill can take the others in his rental."
She was outraged and incredulous. "Klara! The radiation will be enormous! It could destroy the whole installation!"
"Fine," I said. "I understand that. So I'll buy you a new one."
She stared at me in shock. "Buy a new one? Klara, do you have any idea of what it would cost—"
Then she stopped herself short, and gave me a long look. "Well," she said, not a hit mollified, but more or less resigned to accepting the facts of life, "I guess you do know, at that. If that's what you want to do, well, you're the boss."
And, as usual, I was.
So when I gave orders, no one objected. I got everybody back in the dining chamber and explained that we were abandoning ship. I told Terple she could come on my ship, along with Starminder and Ibarruru. "It's only a few days to Earth; the three of you can all fit in my guest bedroom. Mason-Manley and Kekuskian can go with Bill and Denys. It'll be a little crowded in his rental, but they'll manage."
"What about Hans and me?" Rohrbeck asked, sounding puzzled.
I said, off-handedly, "Oh, you can come with me. We'll find a place for you."
He didn't look as thrilled as he might have at the idea of sailing off through space with a beautiful, unattached woman, such as me. He didn't even look interested. "I don't just mean me personally, Klara," he said testily. "I mean me and my shipmind. I put a lot of work into designing Hans! I don't want him ruined!"
I wasn't thrilled by his reaction, either, but I do like a man who likes his work. "Don't worry," I assured him. "I asked Hypatia about that. She says she has plenty of extra capacity. We'll just copy him and take him along."
XI
I had never seen a supernova explosion in real time before—well, how many people have?—but that, at least, was not a disappointment. The show was everything it promised to be.
When it happened we were hovering in our two ships, a few million kilometers off the prime focus. Hans was taking his orders from Kekuskian now, and he had ditched the Crabber planet for good to concentrate on the star. Hypatia whispered in my ear that, back on his rental, Bill Tartch was pissing and moaning about the decision. He had wanted to catch every horrible, tragic bit, if possible right down to the expressions on the faces of the Crabbers when they saw their sun go all woogly right over their heads. I didn't. I had seen enough of the Crabbers to last me, and I was the one who had the say.
In my main room we had a double display. Hypatia had rigged my ship's external optics so we could see the great mirror and the tiny Phoenix ship, together like toys in one corner of the room, but the big thing was the Crabber star itself as seen from PhoenixCorp. It wasn't dangerous—Hypatia said. Hans had dimmed it down, and anyway we were seeing only visible light, none of the wide-spectrum stuff that would be pouring out of it in a minute. Even so, it was huge, two meters across and so bright we had to squint to watch it.
I don't know much about stellar surfaces, but this particular star looked sick to me. Prominences stuck out all over its perimeter, and ugly sunspots spotted its face. And then, abruptly, it began to happen. The star seemed to shrink, as though Hans had zoomed back away from it. But that wasn't what was going on. The star really was collapsing on itself, and it was doing it fast. ("That's the implosion," Hypatia whispered.) While we watched, it went from two meters to a meter and a half, to a meter, to smaller still—
And then it began to expand again, almost as fast as it had shrunk, and far more bright. Hypatia whispered, "And that's the rebound. I've instructed Hans to cut back on the intensity. It's going to get worse."
It did.
It blossomed bigger and brighter—and angrier—until it filled the room and, just as I was feeling as though I were being swallowed up by that stellar hell, the picture began to break up. I heard Terple moan, "Look at the mirror!" Then I understood what was happening to our image. The little toy PhoenixCorp ship and mirror in our viewers were being hammered by the outpouring of raw radiation from the supernova. No filters. No cutouts. The PhoenixCorp craft were blazing bright themselves, reflecting the flood of blinding light that was pouring on them from the gravitational lensing. As I watched, the mirror began to warp. The flimsy sheets of mirror metal peeled off, exploding into bright plumes of plasma, like blossoming fireworks on the Fourth of July. For a moment we saw the wire mesh underneath the optical plates. Then it was gone, too, and all that was left was the skeleton of reinforcing struts, hot and glowing.
I thought we'd seen everything we were going to see of the star. I was wrong. A moment later the image of the supernova reappeared before us. It wasn't anywhere near as colossally huge or frighteningly bright as it had been before, but it was still something scary to look at. "What—?" I began to ask, but Hypatia had anticipated me.