She knew she would never know.
—
Behind the Dawnsent, the star receded toward negative infinity, its light red-shifted to invisibility. With mixed feelings Orofan watched its shrinking image on the screen. Beside him, Pliij looked up from the helmboard. "We're all set, Shipmaster. The deviation's been calculated; we can correct course anytime in the next hundred aarns." He paused, and in a more personal tone said, "You did what was necessary, Orofan. Your honor is unblemished."
Orofan signed agreement, but it was an automatic gesture. The assault gun, he noticed, was still in his tentacle, and he slipped it back into its sheath.
A tentacle touched his. "Pliij is right," Lassarr said gently. "Whatever craft that was, its inhabitants had almost certainly been killed by our scoop before we detected it. You could have done nothing to help them. Refusing to accept the ship's mass at that point would have been dishonorable. You did well; your decisions and judgments have been proved correct."
"I know," Orofan sighed. It was true; fate had combined with his decisions to save the system from destruction without adding appreciable time to the Dawnsent's own journey. He should be satisfied.
And yet... the analyzers reported significant numbers of silicon, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms among the metals of the spacecraft the Dawnsent had unintentionally run down. Which of those atoms had once belonged to living creatures?... And how many of those beings had died so that the Sk'cee might reach their new home?
He knew he would never know.
Between a Rock and a High Place
"Ladies and gentlemen, shuttles one and two for United Flight 1103 are now ready for general boarding: Skyport service from Houston to Dallas-Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, and San Francisco."
Peter Whitney was ready; he'd been standing at the proper end of the waiting lounge for the past several minutes, as a matter of fact, eagerly awaiting the announcement. Picking up his carry-on bag, he stepped to the opening door, flashed his boarding pass for the attendant's inspection, and walked down the short tunnel to where the shuttle waited. The excitement within him seemed to increase with every step, a fact that embarrassed him a little—a twenty-eight-year-old computer specialist shouldn't be feeling like a kid on his first trip to Disney World, after all. But he refused to worry too much about it. Professional solemnity was still, for him, a recent acquisition, easily tucked out of the way.
The shuttle itself was unimpressive, of course: little more than a Boeing 727 with a heavily modified interior. Following the flight attendant's instructions he sat down in the front row, choosing the left-hand window seat. Pushing his bag into the compartment under his chair, he fastened his lap/shoulder belt and spent the next few minutes examining the ski lift-style bars connecting his pair of seats to the conveyors behind the grooves in floor and ceiling. He'd seen specs and models for the system back in St. Louis, but had never given up being amazed that it worked as well as it did in actual practice.
His seatmate turned out to be a smartly-suited businesswoman type who promptly pulled out her Wall Street Journal and buried herself in it. A bored executive who flew in Skyports every week, obviously, and her indifference helped dispel Whitney's last twinges of guilt at having taken the window seat.
Within a very few minutes the shuttle was loaded and ready. The door was closed, the tunnel withdrawn, and soon they were at the edge of the runway, awaiting permission to take off. Whitney kept an eye on his watch with some interest—Skyport logistics being what they were, a shuttle couldn't afford to be very late in getting off the ground. Even knowing that, he was impressed when the plane roared down the runway and into the sky only twelve seconds behind schedule.
They turned east, heading into the early-morning sun to meet the Skyport as it headed toward them from its New Orleans pickup. Whitney watched the city disappear behind them, and then shifted his gaze forward, wondering how far away something the size of a Skyport could be seen. Docking, he knew, would take place seventy to eighty miles out from Houston; assuming the shuttle was flying its normal four-ninety knots—five-sixty-odd miles an hour—meant an eight to nine minute trip. They'd covered seven of that already; surely they must be coming up on it by now. Unless...
With smooth abruptness, the horizon dropped below the level of his window, and Whitney knew he'd goofed. The Skyport was somewhere off to the shuttle's right, and the smaller craft was now circling around to get into docking position. Belatedly he realized he should have asked the flight attendant which was the scenic side when he boarded.
The passengers on the other side of the aisle were beginning to take an interest in the view out their windows, and Whitney craned his neck in an effort to see. Nothing but ground and sky were visible from where he sat; but even as he settled back in mild disappointment the shuttle leveled out and began to climb... and suddenly, ahead and above them, the Skyport loomed into view.
No film clip, scale model, or blueprint, Whitney realized in that moment, could ever fully prepare one for the sheer impact of a Skyport's presence. A giant flying wing, the size of seven football fields laid end to end, the Skyport looked like nothing else in aviation history—looked like nothing, in fact, that had any business being up in the air in the first place. The fact that it also flew more efficiently than anything else in the sky seemed almost like a footnote in comparison, though it was of course the economic justification for the six Skyports now in service and McDonnell Douglas's main argument in their ongoing sales campaign. Staying aloft for weeks or months at a time, the Skyports were designed for maximum efficiency at high altitudes and speeds, dispensing with the heavy landing gear, noise suppressors, and high-lift flaps required on normal jetliners. And with very little time spent on the ground amid contaminants like dust and insects, the Skyports had finally been able to take advantage of the well-known theories of laminar flow control, enabling the huge craft to fly with less than half the drag of planes with a fraction of their capacity. In Whitney's personal view, it was probably this incredible fuel efficiency that had finally convinced United and TWA to take a chance on the idea.
The shuttle was directly behind the Skyport now and closing swiftly. From his window Whitney could see five of the seven basically independent modules that made up the Skyport and, just barely, the two port engines of the sixth. That would be all right; since only the center module's engines fired during this part of the flight, docking one module in from the end was essentially equivalent in noise and turbulence to docking in the end section. Docking one module from center, on the other hand, was rumored to be a loud and rather unnerving experience. It was a theory he wasn't anxious to test.
A flash of sunlight off to the left caught his eye—the second Houston shuttle, making its approach toward the second-to-last module at the other end. He watched with interest as the distant plane nosed toward its docking bay, watched it until the port-side engines of his own shuttle's target module blocked it from sight. The silvery trailing edge of the Skyport was very near now, and the slight vibration that had been building almost imperceptibly began to increase at a noticeable rate. Whitney was just trying to estimate the vibrational amplitude and to recall the docking bay's dimensional tolerance when a sound like a muffled bass drum came from the fuselage skin a meter in front of him and the vibration abruptly stopped. The docking collar, clamping solidly around them. With the noise of the Skyport's engines still filling the cabin, Whitney's straining ears had no chance of picking up the nosewheel's descent into the docking bay; but he did distinctly hear the thump as the bay's forward clamp locked onto the nosewheel's tow bar. Only then, with the shuttle firmly and officially docked, did he realize he'd been holding his breath. He let it out with a wry smile, feeling more than ever like a kid on a ride Disney had never dreamed of.