“If our food lasts,” groaned Ryerson. “And we have to eat while we finish the web, too. Don’t forget that.”
“We’re going to have to reorganize our schedules,” declared Maclaren thoughtfully. “Hitherto we’ve found things to keep us occupied. Now we must wait, and not go crazy waiting.” He grinned. “I hereby declare the Southern Cross dirty limerick contest open and offer a prize of—”
“Yes,” said Ryerson. “Great sport. Fun and games, with Chang Sverdlov’s frozen corpse listening in!”
Silence clapped down. They heard the air mumble in the ventilators.
“What else can we do with our poor friend?” asked Nakamura softly. “Send him on a test rocket into the black sun? He deserved better of us. Yes-s-s? Let his own people bury him.”
“Bury a copy of him!” shrieked Ryerson. “Of all the senseless—”
“Please,” said Nakamura. He tried to smile. “After all it is no trouble to us, and it will comfort his friends at home; maybe yes? After all, speaking in terms of atoms, we do not even wish to send ourselves back. Only copies.” He laughed.
“Will you stop that giggling!”
“Please.” Nakamura pushed himself away, lifting astonished hands. “Please, if I have offended you, I am so sorry.”
“So sorry! So sorry! Get out of here! Get out, both of you! I’ve seen more of you than I can stand!”
Nakamura started to leave, still bobbing his head, smiling and hissing in the shaftway. Maclaren launched himself between the other two. He snapped a hand onto either wrist.
“That will do!” They grew suddenly aware, it was shocking, how the eyes burned green in his dark face. His words fell like axes. “Dave, you’re a baby, screaming for mother to come change you. Seiichi, you think it’s enough to make polite noises at the rest of the world. If you ever want to see sunlight again, you’ll both have to mend your ideas.” He shook them a little. “Dave, you’ll keep yourself clean. Seiichi, you’ll dress for dinner and talk with us. Both of you will stop feeling sorry for yourselves and start working to survive. And the next step is to become civilized again. We haven’t got the size, or the time, or the force to beat that star: nothing but manhood. Now go off and start practicing how to be men!”
They said nothing, only stared at him for a few moments and then departed in opposite directions. Maclaren found himself gazing stupidly at his guitar case. I’d better put that away till it’s requested, he thought. If ever. I didn’t stop to think, my own habits might possibly be hard to live with.
After a long time: Seems I’m the captain now, in fact if not in name. But how did it happen? What have I done, what have I got? Presently, with an inward twisting: It must be I’ve less to lose. I can be more objective because I’ve no wife, no children, no cause, no God. It’s easy for a hollow man to remain calm.
He covered his eyes, as if to deny he floated among a million unpitying stars. But he couldn’t hunch up that way for long. Someone might come back, and the captain mustn’t be seen afraid.
Not afraid of death. Of life.
14
Seen from a view turret on the observation deck, the planet looked eerily like its parent star which had murdered it. Ryerson crouched in darkness, staring out to darkness. Against strewn constellations there lay a gigantic outline with wan streaks and edgings of gray. As he watched, Ryerson saw it march across the Milky Way and out of his sight. But it was the Cross which moved, he thought, circling her hope in fear.
I stand on Mount Nebo, he thought, and down there is my Promised Land.
Irrationally — but the months had made them all odd, silent introverts, Trappists because meaningful conversation was too rare and precious to spill without due heed — he reached into his breast pocket. He took forth Tamara’s picture and held it close to him. Sometimes he woke up breathing the fragrance of her hair. Have a look, he told her. We found it. In a heathen adoration: You are my luck, Tamara. You found it.
As the black planet came back into sight, monstrously swallowing suns — it was only a thousand or so kilometers away — Ryerson turned his wife’s image outward so she could see what they had gained.
“Are you there, Dave?”
Maclaren’s voice came from around the cylinder of the living section. It had grown much lower in this time of search. Often you could scarcely hear Maclaren when he spoke. And the New Zealander, once in the best condition of them all, had lately gotten thinner than the other two, until his eyes stared from caves. But then, thought Ryerson, each man aboard had had to come to terms with himself, one way or another, and there had been a price. In his own case, he had paid with youth.
“Coming.” Ryerson pulled himself around the deck, between the instruments. Maclaren was at his little desk, with a clipboard full of scrawled paper in one hand. Nakamura had just joined him. The Saraian had gone wholly behind a mask, more and more a polite unobtrusive robot. Ryerson wondered whether serenity now lay within the man, or the loneliest circle of hell, or both.
“I’ve got the data pretty well computed,” said Maclaren.
Ryerson and Nakamura waited. There had been curiously little exultation when the planet finally revealed itself. I, thought Ryerson, have become a plodder. Nothing is quite real out here — there is only a succession of motions, in my body and my brain — but I can celebrate no victory, because there is none, until the final and sole victory: Tamara.
But I wonder why Terangi and Seiichi didn’t cheer?
Maclaren ruffled through his papers. “It has a smaller mass and radius than Earth,” he said, “but a considerably higher density suggesting it’s mostly nickel-iron. No satellite, of course. And, even though the surface gravity is a bit more than Earth’s, no atmosphere. Seems to be bare rock down there or metal, I imagine. Solid, anyhow.”
“How large was it once?” murmured Nakamura.
Maclaren shrugged. “That would be pure guesswork,” he said. “I don’t know which planet of the original system this is. One or two of the survivors may have crashed on the primary by now, you see. My personal guess, though, is that it was the 61 Cygni C type — more massive than Jupiter, though of less bulk because of core degeneracy. It had an extremely big orbit. Even so, the supernova boiled away all its hydrogen and probably some of the heavier elements, too. But that took time, and the planet still had this much mass left when the star decayed into a white dwarf. Of course, with the pressure of the outer layers removed, the core reverted to normal density, which must have been a pretty spectacular catastrophe in itself. Since then, the residual stellar gases have been making the planet spiral slowly inward, for hundreds of megayears. And now—”