What were the last words he had heard from Alexis Galley? …over five hundred Kelvins, going up every minute. Somehow, that had to be the key. A hundred and thirty degrees above the boiling point of water, almost four hundred degrees above the boiling point of methane. The surface of the asteroid had been cooking hotter and hotter in that unrelenting Sun, vaporizing the volatiles beneath. The pressure of the trapped gases forming there had increased and increased… until at last some critical value had been reached. Part of the rock had fractured under the intolerable stress. Fragments had been propelled out by the expanding gases, into the body of Alexis Galley, into the hanging target of the Alberich. All that had saved Regulo had been luck, his position on the asteroid and distance from the explosion.
But saved for what? Regulo looked about him with a sickening realization of his own plight. The ship was a total wreck, he had known that as soon as he saw it. There was no way that it could be powered up to take him away to a safe orbit. The automatic alarm system should have triggered as soon as the ship’s internal condition became unable to support human life. Regulo tuned quickly to the distress frequencies and heard the electronic scream as the ship blared and roared its high-frequency Mayday across the System. The signal would already be activating the monitors far out beyond Mercury, but that would be of no use to him. When the ship had swung past the Sun and out to the cooler regions of the Inner System, others would come and recover the hulk and its valuable cargo. But that would be too late for Regulo. At the moment, the Alberich was as unreachable by outside assistance as if it were sitting on the blinding photosphere of the Sun itself.
After those first few moments of animal panic, Darius Regulo steadied. In spite of the furnace looming ahead of him, he felt cool and analytical. What were his options?
The Alberich was available — but he had calculated long since that the ship’s refrigeration system could not support a tolerable temperature through a perihelion transit of two and a quarter million kilometers. If he stayed with the ship he would quietly broil to death. He stared again at the Sun. Already it seemed bigger than ever before. In imagination, those fierce rays were lancing through his puny suit, pushing his refrigeration system inexorably towards its final overload. He could feel sweat trickling down his neck and chest, the body’s own primitive protest at the worsening conditions surrounding it.
He could open the suit and end it now. That would be a quicker and more merciful death, but he was not ready for it.
Regulo entered the Alberich through its useless air lock. First he went to the communicator and sent out to the listening emergency stations a brief and precise description of his situation. He added a summary of what he intended to do, then went to the supply lockers and took out an armful of air tanks, jet packs, and emergency rations. The latter, he felt, had to be thought of as an expression of optimism. From the medical locker he took all the stimulants that he could find.
He performed a brief calculation on his suit computer, confirming his first estimate. Somehow he would have to survive for eight days. If he could do that, perihelion would be well past and the Alberich again cool enough to tolerate.
Dragging the bundle of supplies along behind him, Regulo left the ship and propelled himself slowly back to the asteroid. The explosion that destroyed the Alberich and killed Alexis and Nita had expelled enough material from the rock to give it some angular momentum. It was turning slowly about its shortest axis. Regulo attached the supplies firmly to his suit, took a last look at the ruined ship, then went behind the rock and entered the deep, black shadow. He knew what he had to do. At three million kilometers, the Sun would stretch across more than twenty-five degrees of the sky. He had to stay close enough to the surface to remain within the shield of the cool umbra. That was his only protection against the roaring furnace on the other side of the asteroid.
He felt cooler as soon as he passed into the shadow. That, he knew, was all psychological. It would take several minutes before his suit temperature dropped enough to make a perceptible difference.
As he expected, there were first of all several hours of experiment. If he ventured too far from the surface, he lost the protection of the cone of shadow. Too close, and he was forced to move outward when the long axis of the asymmetrical rock swung around towards him in its steady rotation. He found the pattern of movements that would minimize his use of the jet packs and settled in for a long, lonely siege.
There was ample time to look back and study the mistakes that they had made. With such a close swing-by of the Sun, they should have kept the rock turning. That would have given an even heating on all sides and also a chance for heat to radiate away again into space. And they should have put the Alberich at least a few kilometers away from the asteroid, to reduce its vulnerability to accidents. Regulo reached a grim conclusion. Alexis Galley had been right: with all his experience, he had not known how to handle the hyperbolic swing-by. Regulo would learn that — if he survived.
After the first twelve hours his actions became automatic. Move always to keep in the shadow. Eat and drink a little — he had to force himself to do that, because his appetite was gone completely. Check the fuel in the jet assembly. And take a stimulant every six hours.
He could not afford to sleep. Not with the menace of the Sun so ready to engulf him if he failed to hide from it. But sleep was the tempter. After sixty hours his whole body ached for it with a physical lust that surpassed any desire he had ever felt. The stimulants forced the mind to remain awake, but they did so without the body’s consent. Fatigue crushed him, sucked the marrow from his bones, drained his blood.
After eighty-five hours he began to hallucinate. Alexis and Nita were hanging there next to him, unsuited. Their empty eyes were full of reproach as they floated out into the golden sunlight and waved and beckoned for him to follow them, to leave the dead shadows.
Soon after the hundredth hour, he fell briefly asleep. The flood of molten gold wakened him, splashing in through his faceplate. He had drifted outside the guardian shadow of the asteroid, and although his visor had darkened to its maximum it was useless against the stabbing, shattering light. He squeezed his eyes shut. The orb was still visible, burning a bloody, awful red through his eyelids.
He must be close to perihelion. The Sun had become a giant torch surrounded by huge hydrogen flares. The asteroid had dipped well inside the solar corona itself, hurtling in to its point of closest approach. Light filled the world. Regulo writhed in its grip, turning desperately about to seek the shelter of the rock. The asteroid, the stars, the ship, all were invisible now, forced to insignificance by the tyrannous power of the great solar crucible.
Instinctively, Regulo began to jet back and forth, firing his thrusts at random in a desperate cast for the shadow. At last he found it by pure luck, a dark crescent bitten from the flaring disc. He moved towards it. Back once more in the blessed darkness, he hung seared and gasping in his overloaded suit.
“No.” His voice was hoarse and choking. “Not this time, you bastard. You don’t get me this time.” He glared through bloodshot eyes at the surface of the asteroid, as though seeing right through it to the burning orb beyond. “You won’t get me. Ever. You think you’re the boss of everything, but I’ll prove you’re not. I’ll beat you. I’ll outlast you.”