The companionway to his cabin was jammed, as usual. Kevin Renner was pushing his way through with singleminded determination when someone lurched hard against him.
“Dammit! Excuse me,” he snarled. He watched the miscreant regain his feet by hanging onto the lapels of Renner’s uniform. “Dr. Horvath, isn’t it?”
“My apologies.” The Science Minister stepped back and brushed at himself ineffectually. “I haven’t gotten used to spin gravity yet. None of us have. It’s the Coriolis effect that throws us off.”
“No. It’s the elbows,” Renner said. He regained his habitual grin. “There are six times as many elbows as people aboard this ship, Doctor. I’ve been counting.”
“Very funny, Mr. Renner, isn’t it? Sailing Master Renner. Renner, this crowding bothers my personnel as much as yours. If we could stay out of your way, we would. But we can’t. The data on the Eye have to be collected. We may never have such a chance again.”
“I know, Doctor, and I sympathize. Now if you’ll—” Visions of hot water and clean bedding receded as Horvath clutched at his lapels again.
“Just a moment, please.” Horvath seemed to be making up his mind about something. “Mr. Renner, you were aboard MacArthur when she captured the alien probe, weren’t you?”
“Hoo Boy, I sure was.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“Now? But, Doctor, the ship may need my attention at any moment—”
“I consider it urgent.”
“But we’re cruising through the photosphere of a star, as you may have noticed.” And I haven’t had a hot shower in three days. as you may also have noticed… Renner took a second look at Horvath’s expression and gave up. “All right, Doctor. Only let’s get out of the passageway.”
Horvath’s cabin was as cramped as anything on board, except that it had walls. More than half of MacArthur’s crew would have considered those walls an undeserved luxury. Horvath apparently did not, from the look of disgust and the muttered apologies as they entered the cabin.
He lifted the bunk into the bulkhead and dropped two chairs from the opposite wall. “Sit down, Renner. There are things about that interception that have been bothering me. I hope I can get an unbiased view from you. You’re not a regular Navy man.”
The Sailing Master did not bother to deny it. He had been mate on a merchant ship before, and would skipper one when he left the Navy with his increased experience; and he could hardly wait to return to the merchant service.
“So,” said Horvath, and sat down on the very edge of the foldout chair. “Renner, was it absolutely necessary to attack the probe?”
Renner started to laugh.
Horvath took it, though he looked as if he had eaten a bad oyster.
“All right,” said Renner. “I shouldn’t have laughed. You weren’t there. Did you know the probe was diving into Cal for maximum deceleration?”
“Certainly, and I appreciate that you were too. But was it really that dangerous?”
“Dr. Horvath, the Captain surprised me twice. Utterly. When the probe attacked, I was trying to take us around the edge of the sail before we were cooked. Maybe I’d have got us away in time and maybe not. But the Captain took us through the sail. It was brilliant, it was something I should have thought of, and I happen to think the man’s a genius. He’s also a suicidal maniac.”
“What?”
On Renner’s face was retrospective dread. “He should never have tried to pick up the probe. We’d lost too much time. We were about to ram a star. I wouldn’t have believed we could pick up the damned thing so fast…”
“Blaine did that himself?”
“No. He gave the job to Cargill. Who’s better at tight high-gravity maneuvers than anybody else aboard. That’s the point, Doctor. The Captain picked the best man for the job and got out of the way.”
“And you would have run for it?”
“Forthrightly and without embarrassment.”
“But he picked it up. Well.” Horvath seemed to taste something bad. “But he also fired on it. The first—”
“It shot first.”
“That was a meteor defense!”
“So what?”
Horvath clamped his lips.
“All right, Doctor, try this. Suppose you left your car on a hill with the brakes off and the wheels turned the wrong way, and suppose it rolled down the hill and killed four people. What’s your ethical position?”
“Terrible. Make your point, Renner.”
“The Moties are at least as intelligent as we are. Granted? OK. They built a meteor defense. They had an obligation to see to it that it did not fire on neutral space craft.”
Horvath sat there for what seemed a long time, while Kevin Renner thought about the limited capacity of the hot-water tanks in officers’ country. That bad-taste expression was natural to Horvath, Renner saw; the lines in his face fell into it naturally and readily. Finally the Science Minister said, “Thank you, Mr. Renner.”
“You’re welcome.” Renner stood.
An alarm sounded.
“Oh, Lord. That’s me.” Renner dashed for the bridge.
They were deep within the Eye: deep enough that the thin starstuff around them showed yellow. The Field indicators showed yellow too, but with a tinge of green.
All this Renner saw as he glanced around at half a dozen screens on the bridge. He looked at the plots on his own screens; and he did not see the battleship. “Lenin’s Jumped?”
“Right,” Midshipman Whitbread said. “We’re next, sir.” The red-haired middie’s grin seemed to meet at the back of his head.
Blaine sailed into the bridge without touching the companionway sides. “Take the con, Mr. Renner. The pilot ought to be at your station now.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Renner turned to Whitbread. “I relieve you.” His fingers danced across the input keys, then he hit a line of buttons even as the new data flowed onto his screen. Alarms went off in rapid succession: JUMP STATIONS, BATTLE STATIONS, HEAVY ACCELERATION WARNING.
MacArthur prepared herself for the unknown.
PART TWO
The Crazy Eddie Point
13. Look Around You
She was the first to find the intruders.
She had been exploring a shapeless mass of stony asteroid that turned out to be mostly empty space. Some earlier culture had carved out rooms and nooks and tankages and storage chambers, then fused the detritus into more rooms and chambers, until the mass was a stone beehive. It had all happened very long ago, but that was of no interest to her.
In later ages meteoroids had made dozens of holes through the construct. Thick walls had been gradually thinned so that air might be chemically extracted from the stone. There was no air now. There was no metal anywhere. Dry mummies, and stone, stone, little else and nothing at all for an Engineer.
She left via a meteoroid puncture; for all the air locks had been fused shut by vacuum welding. A long time after that someone had removed their metal working parts.
After she was outside, she saw them, very far away, a tiny glimmer of golden light against the Coal Sack. It was worth a look. Anything was worth a look.
The Engineer returned to her ship.
Telescope and spectrometer failed her at first. There were two of the golden slivers, and some bulk inside each of them, but something was shutting out her view of the masses inside. Patiently the Engineer went to work on her instruments, redesigning, recalibrating, rebuilding, her hands working at blinding speed guided by a thousand Cycles of instincts.