Assuming, of course, that Pegasus had recovered from whatever was bothering it.
For a moment his thoughts went back to Ferrol and the others waiting for them…
Resolutely, he forced his mind away. Whatever was happening back there was far beyond either his control or his assistance. “We’ll get the lifeboat ready,” he told Rrin-saa. “It’ll take an hour or so—we’ll let you know.”
“I will be ready,” Rrin-saa said.
Roman blanked the screen and looked up at Marlowe. “Anything?”
“There’s no way to tell, sir,” the other said, shaking his head in obvious frustration.
“All the readings I can get through that plasma soup out there come up ambiguous.
It could be alive; it could be dead.”
“All right. Call Stolt and have them get started on the lifeboat.” Bracing himself, he turned to Kennedy. Now came the sticky part. “We’re going to need a volunteer to fly this thing,” he told her. “A pilot who can handle something as lopsided as the boat’s likely to turn out.”
“MacKaig’s the one you want,” Kennedy said promptly. “She’s had experience with both tugboats and minesweepers. I’ll call her up here.”
Roman stopped her with an upraised hand. “Make it crystal clear to her that if the space horse out there is dead this is a suicide mission.”
Kennedy smiled tightly. “She’ll go,” she said. “She’s not exactly what you’d call trusting when it comes to Tampies.”
It was a long time before Roman understood the logic behind that last cryptic comment. It wasn’t until the lifeboat was ready to launch, in fact, that it and Rrinsaa’s reference to saving the space horse finally clicked together.
There was no simpler way for the Tampies to save the space horse, after all, than to wake it up and let it Jump.
Chapter 11
The tiny speck of brilliant light was like a lost diamond floating against the background of icy-cold stars. “Well?” Ferrol demanded as Tenzing pulled back from the telescope panel, blinking as his eyes adjusted from the dazzle of the distant asteroid to the relative darkness of the lander.
“It’s definitely getting dimmer,” the other reported, sounding even wearier than he looked. “I don’t think it would be safe to leave Pegasus’ shadow yet, though.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing that,” Ferrol told him, listening to the frustration rumbling in his stomach as he gazed out at the pinprick of light. Without any tethered instrument packs available aboard the lander—and with the radiation flood from B’s last burp far too intense for anyone to go out from Pegasus’ shadow for a direct measurement—they’d been forced to improvise. Analyzing the reflected light from the asteroid out there was crude, but it was the best they’d been able to come up with. Unfortunately, of all the scientists aboard only Tenzing had ever had actual field experience in estimating stellar magnitudes without instruments, and those days were far in his past.
Not that accuracy was really needed. A single glance at the asteroid was all it took to know that B was still too blazingly hot to risk direct exposure to it.
And if the light and radiation this far out was this bad…
“You think Amity could have survived?” Tenzing asked quietly.
Ferrol shook his head, the movement generating a quick flicker of lightheadedness.
It had been almost thirty hours since Amity’s departure, and he’d had barely five hours of sleep in that time. Not that staying awake to run things had made any appreciable difference. “There’s no way to know until we can move out around Pegasus and try raising them on the radio or laser,” he told Tenzing. “If the captain pushed their acceleration above the two-gee mark for any of the trip, they ought to have had time to get into the planet’s umbra before the balloon went up.”
And if they hadn’t… but there was no need to spell that scenerio out. Tenzing and everyone else on the lander and lifeboats had by now run that one out to its logical conclusion.
“Yeah,” Tenzing breathed. “Well…” He shivered.
“What’s the latest on Pegasus?” Ferrol asked, more to change the subject than for any other reason.
“No appreciable change,” Tenzing told him with a sigh. “The dust sweat chemistry is still way off all our standard benchmarks, though it seems like it might be coming back just a little.”
“Anything dramatic happen when the big burst came?”
“No. Not even anything undramatic, as far as we could tell. The Tampies said the same thing regarding its mental condition, by the way.”
“Yes, I’d heard,” Ferrol grunted, passing up the chance to tell Tenzing just how much trust he had in the Tampies’ word. Still, it was looking more and more likely that whatever was bothering Pegasus wasn’t related to the extreme conditions outside. “So that leaves us back where we started: fatigue or illness.”
“Looks that way,” Tenzing agreed soberly. “Unfortunately, without any way to treat either condition, the diagnosis seems more or less academic.”
“And of course the Tampies don’t know anything that could help.”
Tenzing gave him an odd look—the words must have come out with more venom than Ferrol had intended. “They’re doing what they can, Commander,” he said.
“You have to realize that none of them has ever seen a space horse in this condition, either.”
“Sure.” Or at least, Ferrol thought sourly, they won’t admit to it. The thought still nagged at the back of his mind that Amity’s Tampy contingent had been selected as a suicide crew, though what the Tampies could hope to gain by Amity’s destruction he couldn’t guess. “I gather nothing ever came of the vanadium test?”
“Not a whisper,” Tenzing said with a grimace. “As far as the dust sweat goes, the stuff just disappeared.”
Ferrol nodded. Vanadium had been one of the trace elements in Pegasus’ normal dust sweat that hadn’t been seen since the Jump to this system. On Dr. Sanderson’s recommendation Ferrol had ordered some instruments and tools rich in vanadium to be dumped overboard. Pegasus had promptly telekened them into a feeding orifice, but there had been no other reaction from the huge creature. Then, or in the six hours since. “Maybe we should try again with a different trace element,” he suggested. “Pegasus has stopped passing, what, eight of them?”
Tenzing shrugged. “We could try, but I really think we’d be wasting our time.
Nutritional deficiencies just don’t come on that quickly.”
“Maybe not with normal animals,” Ferrol growled. “With space horses, who can tell? Besides, it’s as good a way to waste our time as any, at least until we find out the real problem.”
“There’s that,” Tenzing conceded. “Though if the Tampies can’t figure it out, I doubt that we—”
He broke off in midsentence as Ferrol’s hand lashed out to clamp hard around his upper arm. “I don’t want to hear that again,” Ferrol told him icily. “Not from you, not from any of your people. The Tampies aren’t omniscient, they aren’t supermen, and you damn well will not behave or think otherwise. So they commune with nature and love all the humble creatures of the universe?—fine. We bend nature, and do what we like with it; and if Pegasus doesn’t want to Jump, we will damn well find a way to make it Jump. With or without the Tampies’ help.”
“Understood, Commander,” Tenzing muttered, his eyes wary.
“Make sure you do,” Ferrol said, releasing his arm. “Now get back there and find me a cure.”
Tenzing swallowed. “Yes, sir,” he said. Without another word, he turned and kicked off back to the impromptu laboratory.
I shouldn’t have chewed his head off, Ferrol thought, a touch of embarrassment seeping through the frustration and fatigue and worry. But Tenzing had more than once shown a quiet awe toward Tampy opinions that occasionally flirted with hero worship, and Ferrol had no intention of letting the aliens’ passive wait-and-seewhat- happens attitude soak into the only people who could get a handle on Pegasus’ mysterious ailment.
His eyes strayed to the bow of the lander and the Tampies… and abruptly he forgot about both embarrassment and the subtle dangers of defeatism.
The aliens were no longer merely sitting cross-legged in a rough three-dimensional circle around the Handler. Instead, they were clumped tightly together, each with a solid-looking grip on one of the Handler’s arms or legs. The Handler himself was rigid, distorted face contorted into something even stranger.