Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  “BOTH BARBARA JEAN AND HAROLD ARE WELL STOP REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT BARBARA JEAN MARRIED COMMANDER JAMES HARRIMAN OF HENRY HUDSON THREE YEARS AGO STOP BREAK END PERSONAL MESSAGE BREAK BREAK MESSAGE ENDS.”

  Ramsey automatically reached for a drink, then angrily tossed the glass against a bare steel wall. It wouldn’t be fair to the crew. Or to his ship. And Daniel Webster was still the only wife he had.

  The intercom buzzed. “Bridge Captain.”

  “Go ahead, Trevor.”

  “Two hundred eighty plus hours to rendezvous, Captain. We’re on course.”

  “Thank you.” Damn long hours those are going to be. How could she—but that’s simple. For all Barbara Jean could know, she and the boy were trapped out here forever. I can bet there were plenty of suicides on those ships. And the boy would be growing up without a father.

  Not that I was so much of one. Half the time, I was out on patrol anyway. But I was home when he caught pneumonia from going with us to Ogden Base. Harold just had to play in that snow . . .

  He smiled in remembrance. They’d built a snowman together. But Harold wasn’t used to Earth gravity, and that more than the cold weakened him. The boy never did put in enough time in the centrifuge on Luna Base. Navy kids grew up on the Moon because the Navy was safe only among its own . . .

  Ramsey made a wry face. Hundreds of Navy kids crowding into the big centrifuge . . . they were hard to control, and Barbara Jean like most mothers hated to take her turn minding them. She needed a hairdo. Or had to go shopping. Or something . . .

  She should have remarried. Of course she should. He pictured Barbara Jean with another man. What did she say to him when they made love? Did she use the same words? Like our first time, when we—oh, damn.

  He fought against the black mood. Harriman. James Harriman. Fleet spatball champ seven years ago. A good man. Tough. Younger than Barbara Jean. Harriman used to be a real comer before he vanished. Never married and the girls at Luna Base forever trying to get—never married until now.

  Stop it! Would you rather she was dead? The thought crept through unwanted. If you would, you’ll godammit not admit it, you swine. Not now and not ever.

  She’s alive! Bart Ramsey, you remember that and forget the rest of it. Barbara Jean is alive!

  Savagely he punched the intercom buttons.

  “Bridge. Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “We on course, Mister?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Damage control parties working?”

  “Yes, sir.” Trevor’s voice was puzzled. He was a good first lieutenant, and it wasn’t like Ramsey to ride him . . .

  “Excellent.” Ramsey slapped the off button, waited a moment, and reached for another whiskey. This time he drank it. And waited.

  There was little communication as Daniel Webster accelerated, turned over, and slowed again to approach the derelicts. Messages took energy, and they’d need it all. To get out, or to survive if Marie Ward proved wrong with her theories. Someday there’d be a better theory. Lermontov might come up with something, and even now old Stirner would be examining ancient records at Stanford and Harvard. If Ward was wrong, they still had to survive . . .

  “Getting them on visual now,” the comm officer reported. The unemotional voice broke. “Good God, Captain!”

  Ramsey stared at the screens. The derelicts were worse than he could have imagined. Lorelei was battered, although she seemed intact, but the other ships seemed bent. The frigate Constellation was a wreck, with gaping holes in her hull structure. Henry Hudson was crumpled, almost unrecognizable. The survivors must all be on the Norton liner.

  Ramsey watched in horror as the images grew on the screens. Five years, with all hope going, gone. Harriman must be one hell of a man to keep anyone alive through that.

  When they were alongside, Navy routine carried Ramsey through hours that were lifetimes. Like one long continuous Jump. Everything wrong.

  Spacers took Daniel Webster’s cutter across to Lorelei and docked. After another eternity she lifted away with passengers. CDSN officers, one of the merchant service survivors from Lorelei—and the others. Senator Grant. Johnny Grant. Commander Harriman. Barbara Jean, Harold—and Jeanette Harriman, age three.

  “I’ll be in my cabin, Trevor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And get some spin on the ship as soon as that boat’s fast aboard.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Ramsey waited. Who would come? It was his ship, he could send for anyone he liked. Instead he waited. Let Barbara Jean make up her own mind. Would she come? And would Harriman be with her?

  Five years. Too long, he’s had her for five years. But we had ten years together before that. Damned if I don’t feel like a Middie on his first prom.

  He was almost able to laugh at that.

  The door opened and she came in. There was no one with her, but he heard voices in the corridor outside. She stood nervously at the bulkhead, staring around the bare cabin, at the empty desk and blank steel walls.

  Her hair’s gone. The lovely black hair that she never cut, whacked off short and tangled—God, you’re beautiful. Why can’t I say that? Why can’t I say anything?

  She wore shapeless coveralls, once white, but now grimy, and her hands showed ground-in dirt and grease. They’d had to conserve water, and there was little soap. Five years is a long time to maintain a closed ecology—

  “No pictures, Bart? Not even one of me?”

  “I—I thought you were dead.” He stood, and in the small cabin they were very close. “There wasn’t anybody else to keep a picture of.”

  Her tightly kept smile faded. “I—I would have waited, Bart. But we were dead. I don’t even know why we tried to stay alive. Jim drove everybody, he kept us going, and then—he needed help.”

  Ramsey nodded. It was going to be all right. Wasn’t it? He moved closer and put his hands on her shoulders, pulling her to him. She responded woodenly, then broke away.

  “Give me—give me a little time to get used to it, Bart.”

  He backed away from her. “Yeah. The rest of you can come in now,” he called.

  “Bart, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right, Barbara Jean. We’ll work it out.” Somehow.

  The boy came in first. He was very hesitant. Harold didn’t look so very different. He still had a round face, a bit too plump. But he was big. And he was leading a little girl, a girl with dark hair and big round eyes, her mother’s eyes.

  Harold stood for a long moment. “Sir—ah,” he began formally, but then he let go of the girl and rushed to his father. “Daddy! I knew you’d come get us, I told them you’d come!” He was tall enough that his head reached Bart’s shoulder, and his arms went all the way around him.

  Finally, he broke away. “Dad, this is my little sister.” He said it defiantly, searchingly, watching his father’s face. Finally, he smiled. “She’s a nuisance sometimes, but she grows on you.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Ramsey said. It was very still in the bare cabin. Ramsey wanted to say something else, but he had trouble with his voice.

  Daniel Webster’s wardroom was crowded. There was barely room at the long steel table for all the surviving astrogation officers to sit with Ramsey, Senator Grant, and Marie Ward. They waited tensely.

  The senator was thinner than Ramsey had ever seen him despite the short time he’d been marooned. Constellation had been hit hard by a gravity storm—it was easier to think of them that way, although the term was a little silly. Now the senator’s hands rested lightly on the wardroom table, the tips of the fingers just interlocked, motionless. Like everyone else, Senator Grant watched Commander Harriman.

  Harriman paced nervously. He had grown a neatly trimmed beard, brown, with both silver and red hairs woven through it. His uniform had been patched a dozen times, but it was still the uniform of the Service, and Harriman wore it proudly. There was no doubt of who had been in command.

  “The only ship spacewo
rthy is Lorelei,” Harriman reported. “Henry Hudson was gutted to keep Lorelei livable, and Johnny Grant’s Constellation took it hard in the gravity storms before we could get him out far enough from that thing.”

  Senator Grant sighed loudly. “I hope never to have to live through anything like that again. Even out this far you can feel the gravity waves, although it’s not dangerous. But in close, before we knew where to go . . .”

  “But Lorelei can space?” Ramsey asked. Harriman nodded. “Then Lorelei it’ll have to be. Miss Ward, explain what it takes to get home again.”

  “Well, I’m not sure, Captain. I think we should wait.”

  “We can’t wait. I realize you want to stay out here and look at the Black Hole until doomsday, but these people want to go home. Not to mention my orders from Lermontov.”

  Reluctantly, she explained her theory, protesting all the while that they really ought to make a better study. “And the timing will have to be perfect,” she finished. “The ship must be at the jumpoff point and turn on the drive at just the right time.”

  “Throw a big mass down the hole,” Harriman said. “Well, there’s only the one mass to throw. Lorelei.” He stopped pacing for a moment and looked thoughtful. “And that means somebody has to ride her in.”

  “Gentlemen?” Ramsey looked around the table. One by one, the astrogation officers nodded mutely. Trevor, seeing his captain’s face, paused for a long second before he also nodded agreement.

  “There’s no way to be sure of a hit if we send her in on automatic,” Trevor said. “We can’t locate the thing close enough from out here. We can’t send Lorelei on remote, either. The time lag’s too long.”

  “Couldn’t you build some kind of homing device?” Senator Grant asked. His voice was carefully controlled, and it compelled attention. In the Grand Senate, Martin Grant’s speeches were worth listening to, although senators usually voted from politics anyway.

  “What would you home on?” Marie asked caustically. “There’s nothing to detect. In close enough you should see bending light rays, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure of anything, but I know we couldn’t build a homing device.”

  “Could we wait for a gravity storm and fly out on that?” Trevor asked. “If we were ready for it, we could make the jump . . .”

  “Nonsense,” Harriman snapped. “Give me credit for a little sense, Lieutenant. We tried that. I didn’t know what we were up against, but I figured those were gravity waves after they’d nearly wrecked my ships. Where there’s gravity there may be Alderson forces. But you can’t predict the damn gravity storms. We get one every thousand hours, sometimes close together, sometimes a long time apart, but about a thousand-hour average. How can you be in position for a jump when you don’t know it’s coming? And the damn gravity waves do things to the drives.”

  “Every thousand hours!” Marie demanded excitedly. “But that’s impossible! What could cause that—so much matter! Commander Harriman, have you observed asteroids in this system?”

  “Yeah. There’s a whole beehive of them, all in close to the dark star. Thousands and thousands of them, it looks like. But they’re really close, it’s a swarm in a thick plane, a ring about ten kilometers thick. It’s hard to observe anything, though. They move so fast, and if you get in close the gravity storms kill you. From out here we don’t see much.”

  “A ring—are they large bodies?” Marie asked. Her eyes shone.

  Harriman shrugged. “We’ve bounced radar off them and we deduce they’re anywhere from a few millimeters to maybe a full kilometer in diameter, but it’s hard to tell. There’s nothing stable about the system, either.”

  Marie chewed both thumbnails. “There wouldn’t be,” she said. She began so softly that it was difficult to hear her. “There wouldn’t be if chunks keep falling into the Hole. Ha! We won’t be able to use the asteroids to give a position on the Black Hole. Even if you had better observations, the Hole is rotating. There must be enormous gravitational anomalies.”

  Harriman shrugged again, this time helplessly. “You understand, all we ever really observed was some bending light and a fuzzy occultation of stars. We deduced there was a dark star, but there was nothing in our data banks about them. Even if we’d known what a Black Hole was, I don’t know how much good it would have done. I burned out the last of the Alderson drives three years ago trying to ride out. We were never in the right position . . . I was going to patch up Constellation and have another stab at it.”

  Just like that, Ramsey thought. Just go out and patch up that wreck of a ship. How many people would even try, much less be sure they could . . . so three years ago they’d lost their last hope of getting out of there. And after that, Barbara Jean had . . .

  “Did you ever try throwing something down the Hole yourself?” Trevor asked.

  “No. Until today we had no idea what we were up against. I still don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.” Harriman drew in a deep breath and stopped pacing. “I’ll take Lorelei down.”

  Bart looked past Harriman to a painting on the wardroom bulkhead. Trevor had liked it and hung it there long ago. John Paul Jones strode across the blazing decks of his flagship. Tattered banners blew through sagging rigging, blood ran in the scuppers, but Jones held his old cutlass aloft.

  Well, why not? Somebody’s got to do it, why not Harriman? But—but what will Barbara Jean think?

  “I want to go, too.” Marie Ward spoke softly, but everyone turned to look at her. “I’ll come with you, Commander Harriman.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Harriman snapped.

  “Ridiculous? What’s ridiculous about it? This is an irreplaceable opportunity. We can’t leave the only chance we’ll ever have to study Black Holes for an amateur. There is certainly nothing ridiculous about a trained observer going.” Her voice softened. “Besides, you’ll be too busy with the ship to take decent observations.”

  “Miss Ward.” Harriman compelled attention although it was difficult to say exactly why. Even though Ramsey was senior officer present, Harriman seemed to dominate the meeting. “Miss Ward, we practically rebuilt Lorelei over the past five years. I doubt if anyone else could handle her, so I’ve got to go. But just why do you want to?”

  “Oh—” the arrogant tone left her voice. “Because this is my one chance to do something important. Just what am I? I’m not pretty.” She paused, as if she hoped someone would disagree, but there was only silence.

  “And no one ever took me seriously as an intellectual. I’ve no accomplishments at all. No publications. Nothing. But as the only person ever to study a Black Hole, I’ll be recognized!”

  “You’ve missed a point.” Ramsey spoke quickly before anyone else could jump in. His voice was sympathetic and concerned. “We take you seriously. Admiral Lermontov took you so seriously he sent this cruiser out here. And you’re our only expert on Black Holes. If Commander Harriman’s attempt fails or for any other reason we don’t get out of this system on this try, you’ll have to think of something else for us.”

  “But—”

  Harriman clucked his tongue impatiently. “Will Lorelei be mass enough, Miss Ward?”

  “I don’t know.” She’d answered softly, but when they all stared at her she pouted defensively. “Well, I don’t! How could I! There should be more than enough energy but I don’t know!” Her voice rose higher. “If you people hadn’t suppressed everything we’d have more information. But I’ve had to work all by myself, and I—”

  Dave Trevor put his hand gently on her arm. “It’ll be all right. You haven’t been wrong yet.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  Senator Grant cleared his throat. “This isn’t getting us anywhere at all. We have only one ship capable of sailing down to that Hole and only one theory of how to get away from here. We’ll just have to try it.”

  There was a long silence before Bart spoke. “You sure you want to do this, Commander?” Ramsey cursed himself for the relief he felt, knowing what Harriman’s answ
er would be.

  “I’ll do it, Captain. Who else could? Let’s get started.”

  Ramsey nodded. If ’twere done, ’twere best done quickly . . . what was that from? Shakespeare? “Mr. Trevor, take an engineering crew over to Lorelei and start making her ready. Get all the ships’ logs too.”

  “Logs!” Marie smiled excitedly. “Dave, I want to see those as soon as possible.”

  As Trevor nodded agreement, Ramsey waved dismissal to the officers. “Commander Harriman, if you’d stay just a moment . . .”

  The wardroom emptied. There was a burst of chatter as the others left. Their talk was too spirited, betraying their relief. They didn’t have to take Lorelei into a Black Hole. Ramsey and Harriman sat for what seemed like a long time.

  “Is there something I can say?” Ramsey asked.

  “No. I’d fight you for her if there wasn’t a way home. But if there’s any chance at all—you’ll take care of Jeanette, of course.” Harriman looked at the battered mug on the table, then reached for the coffee pot. After years in space, he didn’t notice the strange angle the liquid made as it flowed into the cup under spin gravity. “That’s fine coffee, Captain. We ran out, must be three, four years ago. You get to miss coffee after a while.”

  “Yeah.” What the Hell can I say to him? Do I thank him for not making me order him to take that ship in? He really is the only one who could do it, and we both knew that. Unwanted, the image of Barbara Jean in this man’s arms came to him. Ramsey grimaced savagely. “Look, Harriman, there’s got to be some way we can—”

  “There isn’t and we both know it. Sir. Even if there were, what good would it do? We can’t both go back with her.”

  And I’m glad it’s me who’s going home, Ramsey thought. Hah. The first time in five years I’ve cared about staying alive. But will she ever really be mine again?

  Was that all that was wrong with me?

  “Your inertial navigation gear working all right?” Harriman asked. “Got an intact telescope?”

  “Eh? Yeah, sure.”