by Timothy Zahn
Obviously, my irritation at Lanton was a good fraction of it. Along with the high-handed way he treated the whole business of Bradley, he’d now added the insult of talking to me in a tone of voice that implied I needed his professional services—and for nothing worse than insisting on my rights as captain of the Dancer. I wished to hell I’d paid more attention to the passenger manifest before I’d let the two of them aboard. Next time I’d know better.
Still … I had to admit that maybe I had overreacted a bit. But it wasn’t as if I was being short-tempered without reason. I had plenty of reasons to be worried; Lanton’s game of cascade-image tag and its possible effects on Bradley, the still-unexplained discrepancy in the last point’s maneuvers, the changes I was seeing in Alana—
Alana. Up until that moment I hadn’t consciously admitted to myself that she was behaving any differently than usual. But I hadn’t flown with her for four years without knowing all of her moods and tendencies, and it was abundantly clear to me that she was slowly getting involved with Bradley.
My anger over such an unexpected turn of events was not in any way motivated by jealousy. Alana was her own woman, and any part of her life not directly related to her duties was none of my business. But I knew that, in this case, her involvement was more than likely her old affinity for broken wings, rising like the phoenix—except that the burning would come afterwards instead of beforehand. I didn’t want to see Alana go through that again, especially with someone whose presence I felt responsible for. There was, of course, little I could do directly without risking Alana’s notice and probable anger; but I could let Lanton know how I felt by continuing to make things as difficult as possible. And I would.
And with that settled, I managed to push it aside and return to my studies. It is, I suppose, revealing that it never occurred to me at the time how inconsistent my conclusion and proposed course of action really were. After all, the faster Lanton cured Bradley, the faster the broken-wing attraction would disappear and—presumably—the easier Alana would be able to extricate herself. Perhaps, even then, I was secretly starting to wonder if her attraction to him was something more than altruistic.
“Two minutes,” Alana said crisply from my right, her tone almost but not quite covering the tension I knew she must be feeling. “Gyro checks out perfectly.”
I made a minor adjustment in my mirror, confirmed that the long needle was set dead on zero. Behind the mirror, the displays stared blankly at me from the control board, their systems having long since been shut down. I looked at the computer’s printout, the field generator control cover, my own hands—anything to keep from looking at Alana. Like me, she was unaccustomed to company during a cascade point, and I was determined to give her what little privacy I could.
“One minute,” she said. “You sure we made up enough distance for this to be safe?”
“Positive. The only possible trouble could have come from Epsilon Eridani, and we’ve, made up enough lateral distance to put it the requisite six degrees off our path.”
“Do you suppose that could have been the trouble last time? Could we have come too close to something—a black dwarf, maybe, that drifted into our corridor?”
I shrugged, eyes on the clock. “Not according to the charts. Ships have been going to Taimyr a long time, you know, and the whole route’s been pretty thoroughly checked out. Even black dwarfs have to come from somewhere.” Gritting my teeth, I flipped the cover off the knob. “Brace yourself; here we go.”
Doing a cascade point alone invites introspection, memories of times long past, and melancholy. Doing it with someone else adds instant vertigo and claustrophobia to the list. Alana’s images and mine still appeared in the usual horizontal cross shape, but since we weren’t seated facing exactly the same direction, they didn’t overlap. The result was a suffocatingly crowded bridge—crowded, to make things worse, with images that were no longer tied to your own motions, but would twitch and jerk apparently on their own.
For me, the disadvantages far outweighed the single benefit of having someone there to talk to, but in this case I had had little choice. Alana had steadfastly refused to let me take over from her on two points in a row, and I’d been equally insistent on being awake to watch the proceedings. It was a lousy compromise, but I’d known better than to order Alana off the bridge. She had her pride too.
“Activating flywheel.”
Alana’s voice brought my mind back to business. I checked the printout one last time, then turned my full attention to the gyro needle. A moment later it began its slow creep, and the dual set of cascade images started into their own convoluted dances. Swallowing hard, I gave my stomach stern orders and held on.
It seemed at times to be lasting forever, but finally it was over. The Dancer had been rotated, had been brought to a stop, and had successfully made the transition to real space. I slumped in my seat, feeling a mixture of cascade depression and only marginally decreased tension. The astrogate programs verdict, after all, was still to come.
But I was spared the ordeal of waiting with twiddled thumbs for the computer. Alana had barely gotten the ship’s systems going again when the intercom bleeped at me. “Bridge,” I answered.
“This is Dr. Lanton,” the tight response came. “There’s something very wrong with the power supply to my cabin—one of my instruments just burned out on me.”
“Is it on fire?” I asked sharply, eyes flicking to the status display. Nothing there indicated any problem.
“Oh, no—there was just a little smoke and that’s gone now. But the thing’s ruined.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “But I can’t be responsible for damage to electronics that are left running through a cascade point. Even something as simple as an AC power line can show small voltage fluc—oh, damn it!”
Alana jerked at my exclamation. “What—”
“Lanton!” I snapped, already halfway out of my seat. “Stay put and don’t touch anything. I’m coming down.”
His reply was more question than acknowledgment, but I ignored it. “Alana,” I called to her, “call Wilkinson and have him meet me at Lanton’s cabin—and tell him to bring a Ming-metal detector.”
I caught just a glimpse of her suddenly horrified expression before the door slid shut and I went running down the corridor. There was no reason to run, but I did so anyway.
It was there, of course: a nice, neat Ming-metal dual crossover coil, smack in the center of the ruined neural tracer. At least it had been neat; now it was stained with a sticky goo that had dripped onto it from the blackened circuit board above. “Make sure none of it melted off onto something else,” I told Wilkinson as he carefully removed the coil. “If it has we’ll either have to gut the machine or find a way to squeeze it inside the shield.” He nodded and I stepped over to where Lanton was sitting, the white-hot anger inside me completely overriding my usual depression. “What the hell did you think you were doing, bringing that damn thing aboard?” I thundered, dimly aware that the freshly sedated Bradley might hear me from the next cabin but not giving a damn.
His voice, when he answered, was low and artificially calm—whether in stunned reaction to my rage or simply a reflexive habit I didn’t know. “I’m very sorry, Captain, but I swear I didn’t know the tracer had any Ming metal in it.”
“Why not? You told me yourself you could buy things with Ming-metal parts.” And I’d let that fact sail blithely by me, a blunder on my part that was probably fueling ninety percent of my anger.
“But I never see the manufacturing specs on anything I use,” he said. “It all comes through the Institute’s receiving department, and all I get are the operating manuals and such.” His eyes flicked to his machine as if he were going to object to Wilkinson’s manhandling of it. “I guess they must have removed any identification tags, as well.”
“I guess they must have,�
� I ground out. Wilkinson had the coil out now, and I watched as he laid it aside and picked up the detector wand again. A minute later he shook his head.
“Clean, Cap’n,” he told me, picking up the coil again. “I’ll take this one to One Hold and put it away.”
I nodded and he left. Gesturing to the other gadgets spread around the room, I asked, “Is this all you’ve got, or is there more in Bradley’s cabin?”
“No, this is it,” Lanton assured me.
“What about your stereovision camera? I know some of those have Ming metal in them.”
He frowned. “I don’t have any cameras. Who told you I did?”
“I—” I frowned in turn. “You said you were studying Bradley’s cascade images.”
“Yes, but you can’t take pictures of them. They don’t register on any kind of film.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. I was sure I’d known that once, but after years of watching the images I’d apparently clean forgotten it. They were so lifelike … and I was perhaps getting old. “I assumed someone had come up with a technique that worked,” I said stiffly, acutely aware that my attempt to save face wasn’t fooling either of us. “How do you do it, then?”
“I memorize all of it, of course. Psychiatrists have to have good memories, you know, and there are several drugs that can enhance one’s basic abilities.”
I’d heard of mnemonic drugs. They were safe, extremely effective, and cost a small fortune. “Do you have any of them with you? If so, I’m going to insist they be locked away.”
He shook his head. “I was given a six-month treatment at the Institute before we left. That’s the main reason we’re on your ship, by the way, instead of something specially chartered. Mnemonic drugs play havoc with otherwise reasonable budgets.”
He was making a joke, of course, but it was an exceedingly tasteless one, and the anger that had been draining out of me reversed its flow. No one needed to remind me that the Dancer wasn’t up to the Cunard lines standards. “My sympathies to your budget,” I said briefly. Turning away, I strode to the door.
“Wait a minute,” he called after me. “What are my chances of getting that neural tracer fixed?”
I glanced back over my shoulder. “That probably depends on how good you are with a screwdriver and solder gun,” I said, and left.
Alana was over her own cascade depression by the time I returned to the bridge. “I was right,” I said as I dropped into my seat. “One of the damned black boxes had a Ming-metal coil.”
“I know; Wilkinson called from One Hold.” She glanced sideways at me. “I hope you didn’t chew Lanton out in front of Bradley.”
“Why not?”
“Did you?”
“As it happens, no. Lanton sedated him right after the point again. Why does it matter?”
“Well …” She seemed embarrassed. “It might … upset him to see you angry. You see, he sort of looks up to you—captain of a star ship and all—”
“Captain of a struggling tramp,” I corrected her more harshly than was necessary. “Or didn’t you bother to tell him that we’re the absolute bottom of the line?”
“I told him,” she said steadily. “But he doesn’t see things that way. Even in five days aboard he’s had a glimpse of how demanding this kind of life is. He’s never been able to hold down a good job himself for very long, and that adds to the awe he feels for all of us.”
“I can tell he’s got a lot to learn about the universe,” I snorted. For some reason the conversation was making me nervous, and I hurried to bring it back to safer regions. “Did your concern for Bradley’s idealism leave you enough time to run the astrogate?”
She actually blushed, the first time in years I’d seen her do that. “Yes,” she said stiffly. “We’re about thirty-two light-days short this time.”
“Damn.” I hammered the edge of the control board once with my clenched fist, and then began punching computer keys.
“I’ve already checked that,” Alana spoke up. “We’ll dig pretty deep into our fuel reserve if we try to make it up through normal space.”
I nodded, my fingers coming to a halt. My insistence on maintaining a high fuel reserve was one of the last remnants of Lord Hendrik’s training that I still held onto, and despite occasional ribbing from other freighter captains I felt it was a safety precaution worth taking. The alternative to using it, though, wasn’t especially pleasant. “All right,” I sighed. “Let’s clear out enough room for the computer to refigure our course profile. If possible, I’d like to tack the extra fifty light-days onto one of the existing points instead of adding a new one.”
She nodded and started typing away at her console as I called down to the engine room to alert Matope. It was a semimajor pain, but the Dancer’s computer didn’t have enough memory space to handle the horribly complex Colloton calculations we needed while all the standard operations programming was in place. We would need to shift all but the most critical functions to Matope’s manual control, replacing the erased programs later from Pascal’s set of master tapes.
It took nearly an hour to get the results, but they turned out to be worth the wait. Not only could we make up our shortfall without an extra point, but with the slightly different stellar configuration we faced now it was going to be possible to actually shorten the duration of one of the points further down the line. That was good news from both practical and psychological considerations. Though I’ve never been able to prove it, I’ve long believed that the deepest depressions follow the longest points.
I didn’t see any more of Lanton that day, though I heard later that he and Bradley had mingled with the passengers as they always did, Lanton behaving as if nothing at all had happened. Though I knew my crew wasn’t likely to go around blabbing about Lanton’s Ming-metal blunder, I issued an order anyway to keep the whole matter quiet. It wasn’t to save Lanton any embarrassment—that much I was certain of—but beyond that my motives became uncomfortably fuzzy. I finally decided I was doing it for Alana, to keep her from having to explain to Bradley what an idiot his therapist was.
The next point, six days later, went flawlessly, and life aboard ship finally settled into the usual deep-space routine. Alana, Pascal, and I each took eight-hour shifts on the bridge; Matope, Tobbar, and Sarojis did the same back in the engine room; and Kate Epstein, Leeds, and Wilkinson took turns catering to the occasional whims of our passengers. Off duty, most of the crewers also made an effort to spend at least a little time in the passenger lounge, recognizing the need to be friendly in the part of our business that was mainly word of mouth. Since that first night, though, the exaggerated interest in Bradley the Mental Patient had pretty well evaporated, leaving him as just another passenger in nearly everyone’s eyes.
The exception, of course, was Alana.
In some ways, watching her during those weeks was roughly akin to watching a baby bird hacking its way out of its shell. Alana’s bridge shift followed mine, and I was often more or less forced to hang around for an hour or so listening to her talk about her day. Forced is perhaps the wrong word; obviously, no one was nailing me to my chair. And yet, in another sense, I really did have no choice. To the best of my knowledge, I was Alana’s only real confidant aboard the Dancer, and to have refused to listen would have deprived her of her only verbal sounding board. And the more I listened, the more I realized how vital my participation really was … because along with the usual rolls, pitches, and yaws of every embryo relationship, this one had an extra complication: Bradley’s personality was beginning to change.
Lanton had said he was on the verge of a breakthrough, but it had never occurred to me that he might be able to begin genuine treatment aboard ship, let alone that any of its effects would show up en route. But even to me, who saw Bradley for maybe ten minutes at a time three times a week, the changes were obvious. All the conflicting signals in posture and expression
that had bothered me so much at our first meeting diminished steadily until they were virtually gone, showing up only on brief occasions. At the same time, his self-confidence began to increase, and a heretofore unnoticed—by me, at least—sense of humor began to manifest itself. The latter effect bothered me, until Alana explained that a proper sense of humor required both a sense of dignity and an ability to take oneself less than seriously, neither of which Bradley had ever had before. I was duly pleased for her at the progress this showed; privately, I sought out Lanton to find out exactly what he was doing to his patient and the possible hazards thereof. The interview was easy to obtain—Bradley was soloing quite a bit these days—but relatively uninformative. Lanton tossed around a lot of stuff about synaptic fixing and duplicate messenger chemistry, but with visions of a Nobel Prize almost visibly orbiting his head he was in no mood to worry about dangerous side effects. He assured me that nothing he was using was in the slightest way experimental, and that I should go back to flying the Dancer and let him worry about Bradley. Or words to that effect.
I really was happy for Bradley, of course, but the fact remained that his rapid improvement was playing havoc with Alana’s feelings. After years away from the wing-mending business she felt herself painfully rusty at it; and as Bradley continued to get better despite that, she began to wonder out loud whether she was doing any good, and if not, what right she had to continue hanging around him. At first I thought this was just an effort to hide the growth of other feelings from me, but gradually I began to realize that she was as confused as she sounded about what was happening. Never before in her life, I gathered, had romantic feelings come to her without the framework of a broken-wing operation to both build on and help disguise, and with that scaffolding falling apart around her she was either unable or unwilling to admit to herself what was really going on.
I felt pretty rotten having to sit around watching her flounder, but until she was able to recognize for herself what was happening there wasn’t much I could do except listen. I wasn’t about to offer any suggestions, especially since I didn’t believe in love at first sight in the first place. My only consolation was that Bradley and Lanton were riding round trip with us, which meant that Alana wouldn’t have to deal with any sort of separation crisis until we were back on Earth. I’d never had much sympathy for people who expected time to solve all their problems for them, but in this case I couldn’t think of anything better to do.
