And that cookbook pilot would starve out here to save his worthless ship?
Sverdlov unbuckled his harness. He kicked himself across the little control room, twisted among the pipes and wheels and dials of the fuel-feed section like a swimming fish, and came to the tool rack. He chose a long wrench and arrowed for the shaftway. His fury had chilled into resolution: I don’t want to kill him, but he’ll have to be made to see reason. And quickly, or we really will crash!
He was rounding the transmitter chamber when deceleration resumed. He had been going up by the usual process, grab a rung ahead of you and whip your weightless body beyond. Suddenly two Terrestrial gravities snatched him.
He closed fingers about one of the bars. His left arm straightened, with a hundred and ninety kilos behind. The hand tore loose. He let go the wrench and caught with his right arm, jamming it between a rung and the shaft wall. The impact smashed across his biceps. Then his left hand clawed fast and he hung. He heard the wrench skid past the gyro housing, hit a straight dropoff, and clang on the after radiation shield.
Gasping, he found a lower rung with his feet and sagged for a minute. The right arm was numb, until the pain woke in it. He flexed the fingers. Nothing broken.
But he was supposed to be in harness. Nakamura’s calculations might demand spurts of ten or fifteen gravities, if the accelerators could still put out that much. The fear of being smeared across a bulkhead jolted into Sverdlov. He scrambled over the rungs. It was nightmarishly like climbing through glue. After a thousand years he burst into the living quarters.
Maclaren sat up in one of the bunks. “No further, please,” he said.
The deceleration climbed a notch. His weight was iron on Sverdlov’s shoulders. He started back into the shaft. “No!” cried Ryerson. But it was Maclaren who flung off bunk harness and climbed to the deck. The brown face gleamed wet, but Maclaren smiled and said: “Didn’t you hear me?”
Sverdlov grunted and re-entered the shaft, both feet on a rung. I can make it up to the bubble and get my hands on Nakamura’s throat. Maclaren stood for a gauging instant, as Sverdlov’s foot crept toward the next rung. Finally the physicist added with a sneer in the tone: “When a technic says sit, you squat… colonial.”
Sverdlov halted. “What was that?” he asked slowly.
“I can haul you out of there if I must, you backwoods pig,” said Maclaren, “but I’d rather you came to me.
Sverdlov wondered, with an odd quick sadness, why he responded. Did an Earthling’s yap make so much difference? He decided that Maclaren would probably make good on that promise to follow him up the shaft, and under this weight a fight on the rungs could kill them both. Therefore — Sverdlov’s brain seemed as heavy as his bones. He climbed back and stood slumping on the observation deck. “Well?” he said.
Maclaren folded his arms. “Better get into a bunk,” he advised.
Sverdlov lumbered toward him. In a shimmery wisp of tunic, the Earthling looked muscular enough, but he probably massed ten kilos less, and lacked several centimeters of the Krasnan’s height and reach. A few swift blows would disable him, and it might still not be too late to stop Nakamura.
“Put up your fists,” said Sverdlov hoarsely.
Maclaren unfolded his arms. A sleepy smile crossed his face. Sverdlov came in, swinging at the eagle beak. Maclaren’s head moved aside. His hands came up, took Sverdlov’s arm, and applied a cruel leverage. Sverdlov gasped, broke free by sheer strength, and threw a blow to the ribs. Maclaren stopped that fist with an edge-on chop at the wrist behind it; almost, Sverdlov thought he felt the bones crack. They stood toe to toe. Sverdlov drew back the other fist. Maclaren punched him in the groin. The Krasnan doubled over in a jag of anguish. Maclaren rabbit-punched him. Sverdlov went to one knee. Maclaren kicked him in the solar plexus. Sverdlov fell over and struck the floor with three gravities to help.
Through a wobbling, ringing darkness, he heard the Earthling: “Help me with this beef, Dave.” And he felt himself dragged across the floor, somehow manhandled into a bunk and harnessed.
His mind returned. Pain stabbed and flickered through him. He struggled to sit up. “That was an Earthman way to fight,” he pushed out through a swelling mouth.
“I don’t enjoy fighting,” said Maclaren from his own bunk, “so I got it over with as soon as possible.”
“You—” the Krasnan lifted grotesquely heavy hands and fumbled with his harness. “I’m going to the control turret. If you try to stop me this time—”
“You’re already too late, brother Sverdlov,” said Maclaren coolly. “Whatever you were setting out to forestall has gone irrevocably far toward happening.”
The words were a physical blow.
“It’s… yes,” said the engineer. “I’m too late.” The shout burst from him: “We’re all too late, now!”
“Ease back,” said Maclaren. “Frankly, your behavior doesn’t give me much confidence in your judgment about anything.”
It rumbled through the ship. That shouldn’t be, thought Sverdlov’s training; even full blast ought to be nearly noiseless, and this was only fractional. Sweat prickled his skin. For the first time in a violent life, he totally realized that he could die.
“I’m sorry for what I called you,” said Maclaren. “I had to stop you, but now I apologize.”
Sverdlov made no answer. He stared up at a blank ceiling. Oddly, his first emotion, as rage ebbed, was an overwhelming sorrow. Now he would never see Krasna made free.
8
Silence and no-weight were dreamlike. For a reason obscure to himself, Maclaren had dimmed the fluoros around the observation deck, so that twilight filled it and the scientific apparatus crouched in racks and on benches seemed to be a herd of long-necked monsters. Thus there was nothing to drown the steely brilliance of the stars, when you looked out an unshuttered port.
The star hurtled across his field of view. Her eccentric orbit took the Cross around it in thirty-seven minutes. Here, at closest approach, they were only half a million kilometers away. The thing had the visual diameter of three full Moons. It was curiously vague of outline: a central absolute blackness, fading toward deep gray near the edges where starlight caught an atmosphere more savagely compressed than Earth’s ocean abyss. Through the telescope, there seemed to be changeable streaks and mottlings, bands, spots, a hint of color too faint for the eye to tell… as if the ghosts of burned-out fires still walked.
Quite oblate, Maclaren reminded himself. That would have given us a hint, if we’d known. Or the radio spectrum; now I realize, when it’s too late, that the lines really are triplets, and their broadening is Doppler shift.
The silence was smothering.
Nakamura drifted in. He poised himself in the air and waited quietly.
“Well?” said Maclaren.
“Sverdlov is still outside, looking at the accelerators and web,” said Nakamura. “He will not admit there is no hope.”
“Neither will I,” said Maclaren.
“Virtually the whole system is destroyed. Fifty meters of it have vanished. The rest is fused, twisted, short-circuited; a miracle it continued to give some feeble kind of blast, so I could at least find an orbit.” Nakamura laughed. Maclaren thought that that high-pitched, apologetic giggle was going to be hard to live with, if one hadn’t been raised among such symbols. “We carry a few spare parts, but not that many.”