by Ben Bova
Shaking his head, Linc asked, “I thought you believed—”
Her hand tightened on his shoulder. “The priestess is always in command. Monel thinks he’s the leader; he’s a fool. You think you can save us all from death; you’re a fool, too. I am the leader here, and all of you do as I wish. I am letting you try to fix the machines because you might be right about them. I am letting Monel think he’s giving orders to everyone because then I can make him give the orders that I want him to give.
“When you tried to overthrow everything we have believed all our lives, even the power of the priestess, I used Monel to balance your new power. When Monel wanted to stop your work in the Ghost Place and have you cast out, I used Slav to balance him. You men do all the struggling and I remain the priestess, the real leader, the one who brings Jerlet’s wisdom into the lives of the people.”
Linc felt stunned. “You’ve been playing us against each other?”
Magda’s voice smiled. “Of course. I’ve been directing all of you ever since I became priestess. Before that time, even when we were children, I could make any one of you do almost anything I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t want me to fix the machines in the bridge.”
“True. I was afraid for you. And afraid that if you succeeded, it would ruin my power and the people’s belief in Jerlet. But when I realized that i couldn’t stop you, I decided it was foolish to resist. This way, you counterbalance Monel’s power. And Slav and his farmers have become a third power, in between the two of you.”
Sagging against the edge of the bunk, Linc said, “I just can’t believe it. You can’t play with people’s lives like that. No one can. You just think___”
“Why do you think you came here tonight?” Magda asked.
“Why do I think… ? I came here because we’re going to light off the rockets tomorrow for the first course change, and I’d like you to be there.”
“No, that’s not why you came.” And her hand gripped his shoulder hard. “Linc, I summoned you. I called you. That’s why I knew who it was when you knocked.”
He puffed out a disgusted breath of air.
“I know you don’t believe me.” Magda’s voice was so quiet that he could barely hear her. “But you might at least ask why I called you.”
“All right: why?”
“Because I have a terrible fear. Your rockets are not going to work tomorrow. We’re all going to plunge into the yellow star and be burned… or… something terrible is going to happen.”
“Don’t be silly.” But her hand was a claw biting into his shoulder now. “Magda, everything’s checked out. The computer___”
“Don’t tell me what machines say!” she snapped. “I know something is wrong. And I need you to help me find out exactly what it is.”
“Need me?”
She nodded and closed her eyes. “I have to touch you, feel your vibrations, to find out what’s wrong.”
He stared up at her. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
But she was no longer listening to him. Her fingers were digging deeply into his shoulder. Her eyes glittered, but she was staring at empty shadows. Her entire body was shaking spasmodically.
Magda’s mouth worked, tried to form words, but no sounds came out. Despite himself, Linc felt drawn into her spell. “What is it? What do you see?”
She didn’t answer.
He waited. The minutes stretched tautly. Still she seemed possessed by something invisible.
Then she sagged and nearly collapsed against him. Linc got to his knees and held her.
“Magda, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She was cold with sweat. “I…trouble—” she gasped weakly. “Trouble with the engines___”
“What kind of trouble? What will go wrong?”
“I don’t know… couldn’t see.”
He held her tightly, his mind racing. Foolishness! You’re letting yourself get caught up in this whole superstitious nonsense. But his own inner voice asked, What could go wrong?
Where could a failure happen? The answer: Anywhere.
“But what’s the most likely way that a failure could happen?” he asked himself. And the answer flashed into his mind like an explosion. “If someone tampered with the engines…or the connections between the astrogation computer and the controls… or___”
Magda stiffened in his arms. She pulled away and stared into Linc’s eyes.
“Monel,” she whispered.
(18)
Monel was not in his room.
Linc and Magda raced down the corridor and banged on his door. When there was no answer, they pushed it open. No one was there.
“There’s a hundred places he could be,” Linc said.
“What should we do?” Magda’s eyes were wide with fear.
He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go to the bridge.”
Linc tried to force himself to think calmly as they ran toward the bridge. But his mind was a hopeless jumble of fears, hatred, darting wild thoughts.
He didn’t even realize that the bridge was totally new to Magda. He just made his way to the main computer desk and plunked himself down in the chair. With one hand he waved Magda to the empty chair beside him, with the other he switched on the computer screen.
“Show me the locations of the main rocket thrusters, the control systems, and all the links between them and the bridge,” he commanded.
A series of diagrams flashed onto the screens that Lincd the wall above the curving desk. The areas that Linc asked about were circled with bright colors.
“How could Monel know where these are?” Magda wondered, staring at the screens.
“Somebody told him,” Linc snapped. “Rix… the guard that stayed here to help us. A traitor. That overfed, rat-faced… he’s been telling Monel everything, I’ll bet.”
Linc hauled himself out of the computer desk chair and hurried over to another station. He punched buttons madly and studied the pictures that the screens there showed: TV camera views of a half-dozen different parts of the ship. All empty.
He spun around and faced Magda. “We’ll have to search everyplace where he might be.”
“How much time do we have?”
Linc glanced at the computer’s countdown timer. “A little more than two hours until the rockets fire.”
“How can we search….”
But Linc was already at the communications desk. “Everybody…wake up!” he bellowed into the pin-sized microphone that projected from the desk top. “Slav, Cal, Hollie, get up. and report to the bridge at once. Emergency! We need everybody up here right away.”
In less than five minutes they staggered in, sleepy, puzzled, surprised. Linc quickly told them what had happened.
There were nearly fourdozen people standing around as Linc said:
“I don’t think he could get much farther than the second level, upstairs. The computer has shown us where the vital areas are. He must be in one of those places. We’ve got just about two hours to find him. I want you to move in teams of at least six people each. No telling how many of his guards are with him.”
Magda stayed on the bridge with Linc. He checked every circuit, all the controls, using the computer and the ship’s sensing equipment to tell him if Monel had damaged the rocket engines or their control circuits.
Linc showed Magda how to work the communications desk, and she began to keep track of the search parties. They could hear the people shouting to one another, thanks to the ship’s built-in microphones and loudspeakers, as they tracked through the corridors and rooms of the first and second levels.
“Nothing in here.”
“Hey, I thought I saw… naw, just a shadow.”
“Look at this! Does this look like wheel tracks?”
“Where?”
“Right here. See, he must’ve rolled through that oil stain back there___”
Linc wished a thousand times each minute that he had fixed the TV cameras in all the corridors so that he co.uld
see what they were doing.
The countdown timer went past the one-hour mark. Forty-five minutes. Thirty.
“Up here, by the deadlock.”
Linc hadn’t moved from the checkout desk. The whole rocket system still seemed to be perfectly intact; no damage.
“Ask them where they are… the ones who’re following those wheel tracks,” he said to Magda, without taking his eyes off the viewscreens.
She said back to him, “The tracks go into the deadlock up on level two.”
You-mean airlock, he corrected silently. Then he realized that Magda was working the communications machinery without arguing or complaining and he was glad that he’d kept his mouth shut. If she’s scared to touch the machines, she’s not showing it.
“WE GOT HIM!” The voice was a triumphant shout.
“He was in the deadlock, hiding. We got him. We’re bringing him back down to the bridge.”
Linc realized that he should feel relieved. There was still more than twenty minutes to go before the rockets would fire. But somehow he still felt anxious. What was he doing in there? He glanced over at Magda. She looked apprehensive, too.
“Still worried?” he asked.
She nodded. “You?”
“I’ll feel better when the engines fire okay.”
Monel was his usual glaring, angry self.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? All of you!” he shouted. He sat huddled in his chair, surrounded by the grinning men and women who had ferreted him out of his hiding place. They had also found all of his guards.
All except Rix.
“What were you trying to do?” Linc demanded.
“Stop you.”
“By hiding in an airlock?”
Monel looked disgusted. “By getting your attention away from these damnable machines!”
The answer didn’t satisfy Linc at all. But before he could say anything, Slav sho’ok Monel by the shoulder roughly.
“Why don’t you want us to get to the new world? You want us all to die?”
Monel pulled himself free of the farmer’s heavy hand. “What makes you think that you’ll be able to live on this new world? Because he says so?” He sneered at Linc. “We know we can live on the ship. But this new world of his… who’s ever lived outside the ship?” His thin voice rose to a nerve-racking shrillness. “It’s death to go outside, everyone knows that! The ship is life… everyplace else is death.”
Linc stepped up in front of him; towering over him. “And what happens when the ship plunges into the yellow sun? That’s certain death!”
“Who says we’re going to fall into the yellow sun?”- Monel snapped back. “You do! You claim Jerlet told you. But Jerlet never spoke to us about it.”
Slav frowned down at Monel. “Everybody’s afraid of being eaten by the yellow star. You are, too.”
With an exasperated flap of his hands, Monel answered, “Of course I’m afraid! But I’d rather take my chances with the yellow star than deliberately leave the Living Wheel. We know it’s death to go outside.”
“Linc’s been outside,” said Jayna.
“In his special suit,” Monel countered. “How long could he live out there? Well, Linc—tell them! How long could you live outside in that suit?”
Linc shrugged. “Many hours. A few days, probably.”
“But you want us to live outside forever! Don’t you?”
“Not in space,” Linc said. “Not in outer darkness. On Beryl. On the new world. We’ll live the way our ancestors did on old Earth.”
“They had to leave old Earth, didn’t they?”
“TIMECHECK,” the computer’s tape voice called out. “COUNT DOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FIVE MINUTES AND COUNTING.”
Slav turned to Magda. “What do you say, priestess? Is Linc right or is Monel? Should we try to leave the ship and live on the new world, or should we stay here?”
Magda was standing halfway between Linc and Monel. All eyes turned to her.
“I’ve meditated on this for a long time^she said, her voice low but strong. “I’ve asked Jerlet for guidance, and tried to feel the inner truth of the problem.”
“And…?”
“Linc has shown that our old fears of the machines were probably wrong. He should be allowed to bring us to the new world.”
The crowd sighed. A decision had been reached.
“If we were not meant to live there,” Magda went on, “the machines will fail. Jerlet won’t let us be led toward death. If the machines work as Linc says they will, then we will reach the new world safely and live there in happiness. But if they fail, we’ll stay on the ship. All is Jerlet’s will.”
They seemed satisfied with that. Even Monel appeared to relax. But Linc shook his head. Superstition. Nothing but stupid superstition.
“COUNTDOWN TIMECHECK: T MINUS FOUR MINUTES AND COUNTING.”
Time seemed to stretch out endlessly. Linc sat at the checkout desk, watching the displays on the viewscreens as they flickered past, showing every part of the rocket propulsion system. It all seemed perfectly normal, everything working smoothly.
Three minutes. Two. Sixty seconds… thirty… ten.
Linc suddenly felt as if he were somewhere high above the bridge, looking down on all the people standing there clustered around him, looking down on himself who stared solemn-eyed at the viewscreen displays, hands poised over the cutoff buttons, ready to stop the countdown if anything appeared to be wrong.
“…THREE SECONDS…”
The fuel pump symbol on the viewscreen flashed from green to amber, showing that the pump had turned on exactly on schedule.
“…TWO… ONE…”
Just at the count of ONE the pump symbol flashed red. Linc felt his jaw drop open. He jammed both hands down on the cutoff switch as the computer’s toneless voice said:
“ZERO. IGNITION.”
And an explosion tilted the bridge to a crazy angle, smashing Linc against the desk and sending everyone sprawling.
(19)
They were alive.
Through the pain that flamed through his chest, Linc realized that basic fact. He pulled himself up dizzily to his feet and looked around. The bridge seemed undamaged. There was no smoke, no fire. The people were dazed, but more from some inner turmoil than any outward fear. Hollie and one of the guards were helping Monel back into his chair.
He was laughing.
Linc glanced at the viewscreens. Everything seemed to be working, except that the astrogation display was flashing a red ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, sign.
Linc stepped over to Monel, who was laughing so hard that his eyes were squeezed shut. His head was thrown back and the cackling, screeching sound of his laughter was the only noise in the bridge.
Linc slapped him.
With all the fury in him. Linc slapped Monel’s laughing face hard enough to knock him out of the chair.
No one moved.
“Get him out offiere,” Linc growled. “He’s killed us all: Now get him out of here. All of you! Out! Get outf
They grabbed at the sputtering Monel, his face striped with the white prints of Linc’s fingers, and dragged him away. Someone pushed the empty wheelchair. They all scurried out of the bridge.
Linc turned and saw Magda standing in front of the communications desk, taut as a steel rod.
“He’s killed us all,” Linc said.
“You hit him.”
“I wanted to kill him!” Linc pounded his fists against his thighs.
“You struck him.”
“What difference does it make?” Linc shouted at her. “We’re all dead. He’s ruined everything.”
She shook her head. “No, Linc. Nothing is ruined except your own inner peace. You’ll find a way to get us to the new world, despite Monel. You’ll make the machines do what you want. But you run the danger of turning into a machine yourself.”
“Leave me alone,” he snapped.
“I will. You’re not fit for human company.”
The machi
nes told him what had happened. Someone had deliberately knocked the safety valve off one of the fuel pumps at precisely T minus one second, too late for even the automatic machinery to shut down the rocket firing. It turned out that it was Rix who had done it. Monel told him what to do, and he did it. The explosion wrecked one of the rocket engines and killed him. That much Slav found out, and came back to the bridge to tell Linc.
