Ryerson nodded mutely and went back down the shaft.
I preach a good theory, Nakamura told himself. Why can I not practice it? Because a stone fell from heaven onto Sarai, and suddenly father and mother and sister and house were not. Because Hideki died in my arms, after the universe had casually tortured him. Because I shall never see Kyoto again, where every morning was full of cool bells. Because I am a slave of myself
And yet, he thought, sometimes I have achieved peace. And only in space.
Now he saw the dead sun through a viewscreen, when his ship swung so that it transitted the Milky Way. It was a tiny blackness. The next time around, it had grown. He wondered if it was indeed blacker than the sky. Nonsense. It should reflect starlight, should it not? But what color was metallic hydrogen? What gases overlay the metal? Space, especially here, was not absolutely black: there was a certain thin but measurable nebular cloud around the star. So conceivably the star might be blacker than the sky.
“I must ask Maclaren,” he murmured to himself. “He can measure it, very simply, and tell me. Meditation upon the concept of blacker than total blackness is not helpful, it seems.” That brought him a wry humor, which untensed his muscles. He grew aware of weariness. It should not have been; he had only been sitting here and pressing controls. He poured a cup of scalding tea and drank noisily and gratefully.
Down and down. Nakamura fell into an almost detached state. Now the star was close, not much smaller than the Moon seen from Earth. It grew rapidly, and crawled still more rapidly around the circle of the viewscreens. Now it was as big as Batu, at closest approach to Sarai. Now it was bigger. The rhythms entered Nakamura’s blood. Dimly, he felt himself become one with the ship, the fields, the immense interplay of forces. And this was why he went again and yet again into space. He touched the manual controls, assisting the robots, correcting, revising, in a pattern of unformulated but bodily known harmonies, a dance, a dream, yielding, controlling, unselfness, Nirvana, peace and wholeness.
Fire!
The shock rammed Nakamura’s spine against his skull. He felt his teeth clashed together. Blood from a bitten tongue welled in his mouth. Thunder roared between the walls.
He stared into the screens, clawing for comprehension. The ship was a million or so kilometers out. The black star was not quite one degree wide, snipped out of an unnamed alien constellation. The far end of the ion accelerator system was white hot. Even as Nakamura watched, the framework curled up, writhed like fingers in agony, and vaporized.
“What’s going on?” Horror bawled from the engine room.
The thrust fell off and weight dropped sickeningly. Nakamura saw hell eat along the accelerators. He jerked his eyes around to the primary megameter. Its needle sank down a tale of numbers. The four outermost rings were already destroyed. Even as he watched, the next one shriveled.
It could not be felt, but he knew how the star’s vast hand clamped on the ship and reeled her inward.
Metal whiffed into space. Underloaded, the nuclear system howled its anger. Echoes banged between shivering decks.
“Cut!” cried Nakamura. His hand slapped the pilot’s master switch.
The silence that fell, and the no-weight, were like death.
Someone’s voice gabbled from the observation deck.
Automatically, Nakamura chopped that interference out of the intercom circuit. “Engineer Sverdlov,” he called. “What happened? Do you know what is wrong?”
“No. No.” A groan. But at least the man lived. “Somehow the the ion streams… seem to have… gotten diverted.
The focusing fields went awry. The blast struck the rings — but it couldn’t happen!”
Nakamura hung onto his harness with all ten fingers. I will not scream, he shouted. I will not scream.
“The ‘caster web seems to be gone, too,” said a rusty machine using his throat. His brother’s dead face swam among the stars, just outside the turret, and mouthed at him.
“Aye.” Sverdlov must be hunched over his own viewscreens. After a while that tingled, he said harshly: “Not yet beyond repair. All ships carry a few replacement parts, in case of meteors or — We can repair the web and transmit ourselves out of here.”
“How long to do that job? Quickly!”
“How should I know?” A dragon snarl. Then: “I’d have to go out and take a closer look. The damaged sections will have to be cut away. It’ll probably be necessary to machine some fittings. With luck, we can do it in several hours.”
Nakamura paused. He worked his hands together, strength opposing strength; he drew slow breaths, rolled his head to loosen the neck muscles, finally closed his eyes and contemplated peace for as long as needful. And a measure of peace came. The death of this little ego was not so terrible after all, provided said ego refrained from wishing to hold Baby-san in its arms just one more time.
Almost absently, he punched the keys of the general computer. It was no surprise to see his guess verified.
“Are you there?” called Sverdlov, as if across centuries. “Are you there, pilot?”
“Yes. I beg your pardon. Several hours to repair the web, did you say? By that time, drifting free, we will have crashed on the star.”
“What? But—”
“Consider its acceleration of us. And we still have inward radial velocity of our own. I think I can put us into an orbit before the whatever-it-is force has quite destroyed the accelerators. Yes.”
“But you’ll burn them up! And the web! We’ll damage the web beyond repair!”
“Perhaps something can be improvised, once we are in orbit. But if we continue simply falling, we are dead men.”
“No!” Almost, Sverdlov shrieked. “Listen, maybe we can repair the web in time. Maybe we’ll only need a couple of hours for the job. There’s a chance. But caught in an orbit, with the web melted or vaporized… do you know how to build one from raw metal? I don’t!”
“We have a gravitics specialist aboard. If anyone can fashion us a new transmitter, he can.”
“And if he can’t, we’re trapped out here! To starve! Better to crash and be done!”
Nakamura’s hands began to dance over the keyboard. He demanded data of the instruments, calculations of the computers, and nothing of the autopilot. For no machine could help steer a vessel whose thrust-engine was being unpredictably devoured. This would be a manual task.
“I am the captain,” he said, as mildly as possible.
“Not any more!”
Nakamura slapped his master switch. “You have just been cut out of the control circuits,” he said. “Please remain at your post.” He opened the intercom to the observation deck. “Will the two honorable scientists be so kind as to stop the engineer from interfering with the pilot?”
7
For a moment, the rage in Chang Sverdlov was such that blackness flapped before his eyes.
When he regained himself, he found the viewscreens still painted with ruin. Starlight lay wan along the frail network of the transceiver web and the two sets of rings which it held together. At the far end the metal glowed red. A few globs of spattered stuff orbited like lunatic fireflies. Beyond the twisted burnt-off end of the system, light-years dropped away to the cold blue glitter of a thousand crowding stars. The dead sun was just discernible, a flattened darkness. It seemed to be swelling visibly. Whether that was a real effect or not, Sverdlov felt the dread of falling, the no-weight horrors, like a lump in his belly.
He hadn’t been afraid of null-gee since he was a child. In his cadet days, he had invented more pranks involving free fall than any two other boys. But he had never been cut off from home in this fashion. Krasna had never been more than an interplanetary flight or an interstellar Jump away.