“In ninety minutes, if you will be so kind. Very well, let us assume our posts.”
Nakamura turned from Maclaren’s suddenly mutinous look and Sverdlov’s broad grin. He entered the shaftway and pulled himself along it by the rungs. Through the transparent plastic he saw the observation deck fall behind. The boat deck was next, heavy storage levels followed, and then he was forward, into the main turret.
It was a clear plastic bubble, unshuttered now when the sole outside illumination was a wintry blaze of stars.
Floating toward the controls, Nakamura grew aware of the silence. So quiet. So uncountably many stars. The constellations were noticeably distorted, some altogether foreign. He searched a crystal darkness for Capella, but the bulge of the ship hid it from him. No use looking for Sol without a telescope, here on the lonely edge of the known.
Fear of raw emptiness lay tightly coiled within him. He smothered it by routine: strapped himself before the console, checked the instruments one by one, spoke with Sverdlov down the length of the ship. His fingers chattered out a computation on a set of keys, he fed the tape to the robot, he felt a faint tug as the gyros woke up, swiveling the vessel into position for blast. Even now, at the end of acceleration to half light-speed and deceleration to a few hundred kilometers per second, the Cross bore several tons of reaction-mass mercury. The total mass, including hull, equipment, and payload, was a bit over one kiloton. Accordingly, her massive gyroscopes needed half an hour to turn her completely around.
Waiting, he studied the viewscreens. Since he must back down on his goal, what they showed him was more important than what his eyes saw through the turret in the nose. He could not make out the black sun. Well, what do you expect? he asked himself angrily. It must be occulating a few stars, but there are too many. “Dr. Maclaren,” he said into the intercom, “can you give me a radio directional on the target, as a check?”
“Aye, aye.” A surly answer. Maclaren resented having to put his toys to work. He would rather have been taking spectra, reading ionoscopes, gulping gas and dust samples from outside into his analyzers, every centimeter of the way. Well, he would just have to get those data when they receded from the star again.
Nakamura’s eyes strayed down the ship herself, as shown in the viewscreens. Old, he thought. The very nation which built her has ceased to exist. But good work. A man’s work outlives his hands. Though what remains of the little ivory figures my father carved to ornament our house? What chance did my brother have to create, before he shriveled in my arms? No! He shut off the thought, like a surgeon clamping a vein, and refreshed his memory of the Cygnus class.
This hull was a sphere of reinforced self-sealing plastic, fifty meters across, its outside smoothness broken by hatches, ports, air locks, and the like. The various decks sliced it in parallel planes. Aft, diametrically opposite this turret, the hull opened on the fire chamber. And thence ran two thin metal skeletons, thirty meters apart, a hundred meters long, like radio masts or ancient oil derricks. They comprised two series of rings, a couple of centimeters in diameter, with auxiliary wiring and a spidery framework holding it all together — the ion accelerators, built into and supported by the gravitic transceiver web.
“A ten-second test blast, if you please, Engineer Sverdlov,” said Nakamura.
The instruments showed him a certain unbalance in the distribution of mass within the hull. Yussuf bin Suleiman, who had just finished watch aboard the ship and gone back to Earth, was sloppy about… no, it was unjust to think so say that he had his own style of piloting. Nakamura set the pumps to work. Mercury ran from the fuel deck to the trim tanks.
By then the ship was pointed correctly and it was time to start decelerating again. “Stand by for blast … Report … I shall want one-point-five-seven standard gees for—” Nakamura reeled it off almost automatically.
It rumbled in the ship. Weight came, like a sudden fist in the belly. Nakamura held his body relaxed in harness, only his eyes moved, now and then a finger touched a control. The secret of judo, of life, was to hold every part of the organism at ease except those precise tissues needed for the moment’s task — Why was it so damnably difficult to put into practice?
Mercury fed through pipes and pumps, past Sverdlov’s control board, past the radiation wall, into the expansion chamber and through the ionizer and so as a spray past the sunlike heart of a thermonuclear plasma. Briefly, each atom endured a rage of mesons. It broke down, gave up its mass as pure energy, which at once became proton-antiproton pairs. Magnetic fields separated them as they were born: positive and negative particles fled down the linear accelerators. The plasma, converting the death of matter directly to electricity, charged each ring at a successively higher potential. When the particles emerged from the last ring, they were traveling at three-fourths the speed of light.
At such an exhaust velocity, no great mass had to be discharged. Nor was the twin stream visible; it was too efficient. Sensitive instruments might have detected a pale gamma-colored splotch, very far behind the ship, as a few opposite charges finally converged on each other, but that effect was of no importance.
The process was energy-eating. It had to be. Otherwise surplus heat would have vaporized the ship. The plasma furnished energy to spare. The process was a good deal more complex than a few words can describe, and yet less so than an engineer accustomed to more primitive branches of his art might imagine.
Nakamura gave himself up to the instruments. Their readings checked out with his running computation. The Cross was approaching the black star in a complex spiral curve, the resultant of several velocities and two accelerating vectors, which would become a nearly circular orbit seven hundred fifty thousand kilometers out.
He started to awareness of time when Ryerson came up the shaftway rungs. “Oh,” he exclaimed.
“Tea, sir,” said the boy shyly.
“Thank you. Ah… set it down there, please… the regulations forbid entering this turret during blast without inquiring of the — No, no. Please!” Nakamura waved a hand, laughing. “You did not know. There is no harm done.”
He saw Ryerson, stooped under one and a half gravities, lift a heavy head to the foreign stars. The Milky Way formed a cold halo about his tangled hair. Nakamura asked gently, “This is your first time in extrasolar space, yes?”
“Y-yes, sir.” Ryerson licked his lips. The blue eyes were somehow hazy, unable to focus closer than the nebulae.
“Do not—” Nakamura paused. He had been about to say, “Do not be afraid,” but it might hurt. He felt after words. “Space is a good place to meditate,” he said. “I use the wrong word, of course. ‘Meditation,’ in Zen, consists more of an attempt at identification with the universe than verbalized thinking. What I mean to say,” he floundered, “is this: Some people feel themselves so helplessly small out here that they become frightened. Others, remembering that home is no more than a step away through the transmitter, become careless and arrogant, the cosmos merely a set of meaningless numbers to them. Both attitudes are wrong, and have killed men. But if you think of yourself as being a part of everything else — integral — the same forces in you which shaped the suns do you see?”
“The heavens declare the glory of God,” whispered Ryerson, “and the firmament showeth His handiwork… It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
He had not been listening, and Nakamura did not understand English. The pilot sighed. “I think you had best return to the observation deck,” he said. “Dr. Maclaren may have need of you.”