Through hours the storm continued.
They sat crowded together, the three of them, in the uneasy candlelight, which threw huge misshapen shadows across the roughness of bulkheads. Rather Dagny sat on the chair, Tom on the foot of the bunk, while Yasmin lay, The wind-noise was muffled down here, but the slap of water on hull came loud. From time to time, thunder cannonaded, or the barge rocked and grated on the sandbar.
Wet, dirty, haggard, the party looked at each other. “We should try to sleep,” Dagny said.
“Not while I got this bottle,” Tom said. “You do what you like. Me, though, I think wed better guzzle while we can. Prob’ly won’t be long, you see.”
“Probably not,” Dagny agreed, and took another pull herself.
“What will we do?” Yasmin whispered.
Tom suppressed exasperation—she had done a good job in Petar Landa’s house, if nowhere else—and said, “Come mornin’, we head into the swamps. I s’pose Weyer’ll send his merry men lookin’ for us, and whoever owns this hulk’ll search after it, so we can’t claim squatter’s rights. Maybe we can live off the country, though, and eventually, one way or another, reach the border.”
“Would it not be sanest… they do seem to be decent folk… should we not surrender to them and hope for mercy?”
“Go ahead, if you want,” Tom said. “You may or may not get the mercy. But you’ll for sure have no freedom. I’ll stay my own man.”
Yasmin tried to meet his hard gaze, and failed. “What has happened to us?” she pleaded.
He suspected that she meant, “What has become of the affection between you and me?” No doubt he should comfort her. But he didn’t have the strength left to play father image. Trying to distract her a little, he said, with calculated misunderstanding of her question:
“Why, we hit a storm that blew us the exact wrong way. It wasn’t s’posed to. But this’s such a funny planet. I reckon, given a violent kind o’ sun, you can get weather that whoops out o’ the east, straight seaward. And, o’ course, winds can move almighty fast when the air’s thin. Maybe young Aran was tryin’ to warn me. He spoke o’ twisty weather. Maybe he meant exactly this, and I got fooled once more by his Nikean lingo. Or maybe he just meant what ‘I believed he did, unreliable weather. He told me himself, their meteorology isn’t worth sour owl spit, ‘count o’ they can’t predict the solar output. Young star, you know. Have drink.”
Yasmin shook her head. But abruptly she sat straight. “Have you something to write with?”
“Huh?” Tom gaped at her.
“I have an idea. It is worthless,” she said humbly, “but since I cannot sleep, and do not wish to annoy my lord, I would like to pass the time.”
“Oh. Sure.” Tom found a paper and penstyl in a breast pocket of his coverall and gave them to her. She crossed her legs and began writing numbers in a neat foreign-looking script.
“What’s going on?” Dagny said in Eylan.
Tom explained. The older woman frowned. “I don’t like this, dear,” she said. “Yasmin’s been breaking down, closer and closer to hysteria, ever since we left those peasants. She’s not prepared for a guerrilla existence. She’s used up her last resources.”
“You reckon she’s quantum-jumpin’ already?”
“I don’t know. But I do think we should force her to take a drink, to put her to sleep.”
“Hm.” Tom glanced at the dark head, bent over some arithmetical calculations. “Could be. But no. Let her do what she chooses. She hasn’t bubbled her lips yet, has she? And—we are the free people.”
He went on with Dagny in a rather hopeless discussion of possibilities open to them. Once they were interrupted, when Yasmin asked if he had a trigonometric slide rule. No, he didn’t. “I suppose I can approximate the function with a series,” she said, and returned to her labors.
Has she really gone gollywobble? Tom wondered. Or is she just soothin’ herself with a hobby?
Half an hour later, Yasmin spoke again. “I have the solution.”
“To what?” Tom asked, a little muzzily after numerous gulps from the bottle. They distilled potent stuff in Hanno. “Our problem?”
“Oh, no, my lord. I couldn’t—I mean, I am nobody. But I did study science, you remember, and… and I assumed that if you and Lady Dagny said this was a young system, you must be right, you have traveled’ so widely. But it isn’t.”
“No? What’re you aimed at?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. I’m being an awful picky little nuisance. But this can’t be a young system. It has to be old.”
Tom put the bottle down with a thud that overrode the storm-yammer outside. Dagny opened her mouth to ask what .was happening. He shushed her. Out of the shadows across his scarred face, the single eye blazed blue. “Go on,” he said, most quietly.
Yasmin faltered. She hadn’t expected any such reaction. But, encouraged by him, she said with a, waxing confidence:
“From the known average distance of the sun, and the length of the planet’s year, anyone can calculate the sun’s mass. It turns out to be almost precisely one Sol. That is, it has the mass of a G2 star. But it has twice the luminosity, and more than half again the radius, and the reddish color of a late G or early K type. You thought those paradoxes were due to a strange composition. I don’t really see how that could be. I mean, any star is something like 98 per cent hydrogen and helium. Variations in other elements can affect its development some, but surely not this much. Well, we know from Nikean biology that this system must be at least a few billion years old. So the star’s instability cannot be due to extreme youth. Any solar mass must settle down on the main sequence far quicker than that. Otherwise we would have many, many more variables in the universe than we do.
“And besides, we can explain all the paradoxes so simply if we assume this system is old. Incredibly old, maybe almost as old as the galaxy itself.”
“Belay!” Tom exclaimed, though not loudly. “How could this planet have this much atmosphere after so long a time? If any? Don’t sunlight kick gases into space? And Nike hasn’t got the gravity to nail molecules down for good. Half a standard Gee; and the potential is even poorer, the field strength dropping off as fast as it does.”
“But my lord,” Yasmin said, “an atmosphere comes from within a planet. At least, it does for the smaller planets, that can’t keep their original hydrogen like the Jupiter types. On the smaller worlds, gas gets forced out of mineral compounds. Vulcanism and tectonism provide the heat for that, as well as radioactivity. But the major planetological forces originate in the core. And the core originates because the heavier elements, like iron, tend to migrate toward the center. We know Nike has some endowment of those. Perhaps more, even, than the average planet of its age.
“Earth-sized planets have strong gravity. The migration is quick. The core forms in their youth. But Mars-sized worlds… the process has to be slow, don’t you think? So much iron combines first in surface rocks that they are red. Nike. shows traces of this still today. The midget planets can’t outgas more than a wisp until their old age, when a core finally has taken shape.”
Tom shook his head in a stunned fashion. “I didn’t know. I took for granted—I mean, well, every Mars-type globe I ever saw or heard of had very little air—I reckoned they’d lost most o’ their gas long ago.”
“There are no extremely ancient systems in the range that your travels have covered,” Yasmin deduced. “Perhaps not in the whole Imperial territory. They aren’t common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, after all. So people never had much occasion to think about what they must be like.”
“Uh, what you been sayin’, this theory… you learned it in school?”