As for the alleged magnificence of space itself, he found the scene overrated. The stars were quite a sight, true, cold unblinking sparks through a clear darkness. But undimmed by atmosphere, there were too many of them. Only a professional could distinguish constellations in that unmeaningful swarm. And now, two-thirds of an Astronomical Unit distant, e Eridani had changed from star to sun. You had to look away from it to see anything except fire.
Kivi’s voice jarred Svoboda aware again: ‘Have you spotted the piece of equipment which did the damage? It ought to be in orbit near the ship.’
‘No, not yet.-It’s probably wrecked anyway.’ Svoboda squinted into the screen. Damn the undiffused illumination of airlessness! The view was a mere jumble of nights and highlights. ‘I hope some of it can be salvaged, though. Then, once we get our machine shop set up at camp, the entire unit can be repaired.’
‘I fear you are too optimistic. That stuff is gone forever.’
Svoboda turned to the other man. He had not quite appreciated the implications of Kivi’s pessimism before this moment Perhaps he hadn’t dared think out what the captain meant. Now he knew horror. He could only say, feebly, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why can’t we transfer the lading to this ship? For that matter, why can’t we fix the Ranger?’
‘Because the planet’s magnetic field concentrates energetic charged particles in layers, and the Ranger happens to be in orbit at a mean distance of 11,600 kilometers from the center of Rustum, which happens to be the very middle of the inmost radiation zone,’ said Kivi with elaborate sarcasm. ‘Any person working on her would get a lethal dose in less than two days.’
‘For God’s sake!’ exploded Svoboda. He raised his left arm. A jag of pain went along the broken, metal-splinted clavicle. ‘Give me a straight answer! Our radiation screen extends outward for several kilometers from the hull. Why can’t we lay alongside, enveloping the Ranger in the field?’
‘Look,’ said Kivi. Svoboda wasn’t sure whether he was talking with strained patience or in continued mockery. ‘I trust you know how a radiation screen works. The generator uses a magnetohydrodynamic principle to catch hold of charged particles and deflect them from the hull. But the particles in a Van Allen belt are extremely energetic. They are not easily deflected. Most of them penetrate far into the field – whose intensity obeys an approximate inverse square law – before their paths acquire an appreciable curvature. Therefore, the concentration of undeflected particles increases sharply with each meter you go beyond our hull.
‘If we lay directly alongside the Ranger, a man who went aboard would be in a four-day lethal concentration at her central axis. I mean by that, fifty percent of humankind would die of radiation sickness if exposed for four days to such a dosage. On the opposite side of the Ranger, he would be in a two-and-a-half-day lethal concentration! Now do you understand?’
‘Well… no,’ said Svoboda. ‘The men needn’t work continuously. They can take a few hours at a time, no more. Can’t they?’
‘No.’ Kivi shook his head, peered at the control board, and tapped a stud. ‘Quite aside from the radiation, they could do nothing. Remember, the force screen is a pulsating magnetic field of great strength. It’s so heterodyned that it does not operate within the hull it protects. But if the Migrant’s screen enveloped the derelict … do you see? Nothing more complicated than a thermal cutting torch could function. Certainly nothing electronic, probably not many things electrical. Since the smashed gear is essentially electronic, how shall it be fixed, recalibrated, and tested? How shall the very tools to make the repairs be operated?’
Svoboda said desperately: ‘Well, why can’t we tow the Ranger? We need only get her into clear space, out of this zone. Then anyone can safely go aboard. How much orbital radius need we lose? Fifteen hundred kilometers? Two thousand?’
‘We’d wreck another ship if we tried that,’ snapped Kivi. ‘One vessel cannot pull another. The ion blast would disintegrate the one being towed. As for pushing – the least unbalance, and they’d collide and crumple.’
‘We could weld them together with girders. Maybe attach one ship to each side of the derelict.’
‘You have exaggerated ideas. At nine-to-one mass ratios, interstellar craft are not built like bulldozers. They have only moderate strength against longitudinal forces, and very little against any lateral push. Playing tugboat, they would yank the ribs out of themselves. I thought of the idea too, you see, and did some calculation, so I have figures to prove if s impossible.’
‘But the ferryboats—’
‘Yes, the ferries are sturdier. Two of them could do the job. But there would have to be crewmen aboard. So jerry-built a system could not be controlled remotely. And what shall protect those men from the radiation? The ferries have no screen generators. If a spaceship paced the ferries so closely that its own field gave a little protection – enough protection, even, for a man to stay aboard ten minutes – then that field would bollix up the ferries’ electronic system. So that’s out, too. Now shut your mouth!’
Kivi concentrated on the approach maneuver as if it were his enemy. Svoboda sat in angry silence. Faintly he could hear the ship murmur around him, engines, oxygenators, airblowers, echoes down long resonant passageways. It was like being swallowed alive by some giant fish, he thought, and hearing its metabolism close in. He strangled on the wish to escape.
Only, he thought, vacuum lay outside, the sun was a blowtorch and shadows were colder than charity. Senses, untrained for free fall and shifting accelerations, had made his cargomaster job a prolonged martyrdom. Antinausea pills kept him functioning, most of the time, but took away his appetite; the weakness of ill-nourished days underlay the shock and blood loss lately suffered. If Kivi knew how hard it had been not to let go of every stretched nerve and scream aloud, Kivi would be less vicious. But Svoboda was damned if he would tell the Finn.
Suddenly he slumped with weariness. It was almost as if he could remember the journey hither, not only the grindstone year when he stood watch, but the suspended animation period itself, four decades in darkness. He hardly noticed the little bump of contact, nor the resumption of free fall, nor the quiver in the ship as grapnels made fast. He had unstrapped before the captain’s words registered:
‘— and don’t touch anything while you wait. Understand?’
‘Huh?’ Svoboda gaped. ‘Where are you going?’
To put on a spacesuit and look over the wreck. Did you think I was bound for a tiddlywink tournament?’
‘But the radiation—’
The Migrants field will screen me enough that I can stand an hour or two.’
‘Well, wait, I’ll come too. I want to check the cargo.’
‘No, stay here. You’ve already gotten a hefty dose, when the accident happened.’
‘So did you. Send a crewman who wasn’t along at the time, rather than either of us.’
Kivi squared his shoulders. ‘I am the captain,’ he said, and left the bridge.
Svoboda made no move to follow. His exhaustion was still upon him. And he thought dully that, well, Kivi wasn’t married. Few spacemen were. Whereas Judith had spokenabout having more children…. Best not expose himself toany unnecessary radiation.
Why did I come on this trip at all, then? he wondered. I could have stayed aboard the Courier with her – No. I have to make sure Kivi doesn’t give up.
It would be only too natural for the commander to abandon the cargo. Why take risks for the sake of some damned colonists? Svoboda remembered scene after scene down at camp, quarrels flaring between the settlers and the spacemen assigned to help them. Groundbreaking, tree felling, concrete pouring, well drilling, were not work for an astronaut. To make it still more of an insult, they must take orders from the despised clodhuggers. No wonder the most trivial friction could make a man lose control. So far there had been nothing worse than fist fights, but Svoboda felt sure Kivi shared his own nightmare: knives and guns drawn, the Emperor River turned red.
Su
rely, Svoboda thought, no rational motive drove men to make such voyages, again and again and again, returning each time to an Earth grown more alien by decades. The spacemen were explorers. Their mystique could not be reconciled with that of the Constitutionalists, who had dragged these ships to Rustum because of a preoccupation with details of government which the spacemen found ridiculous. No wonder we don’t get along with each other. The two parties belong to two different civilizations.
His eyes went to the screen. Linked, derelict and ship formed a new object with its own angular momentum and inertial constants. The complex pattern of spin had changed, though still too slow to give any noticeable weight. Now the bridge turret faced Rustum.
The planet was near half phase. Its shield sprawled across 64 degrees of sky, a great vague circle whose dark half was rimmed in fire where atmosphere refracted sunlight and whose dayside was so brilliant that it drowned the stars. The edges were hazed, but Svoboda could see ghostly auroral banners shaken loose just above the night limb. The basic sunlit color was blue, shading from turquoise to opal. Clouds belted the planet with white, subtle red and gray tints. Beneath them, he could just make out a pair of continents, brownish green splotches. He thought of standing there, under a hard steady pull of gravitation, tasting wind. Rustum grew so beautiful to him that he gulped back tears.
He reminded himself that the surface was dense forest, chill desert, unclimbable scarps, hurricanes, rain, snow, and drought, a hostile ecology, poisonous plants, wild animals. Three thousand isolated humans would not survive without machines and scientific instruments.
Nonetheless he remained staring at it like a modernistic Lucifer. The rapid orbit of the ships, two hours and 43 minutes to complete a circuit, swung him dayward. Presently he was nearly blinded by sunlight, focused to a single point by a curving ocean surface. He squinted, seeking details. Yes, that continent was Roxana. The children were there—
‘Still waiting?’ said Kivi behind him.
Svoboda turned. In his tension he lost a handhold and drifted free of his seat. He kicked ignominiously in midair till Kivi pulled him back.
‘Well?’ His voice came out shrill.
‘No use,’ said Kivi. He looked away. ‘We can do nothing. The damage is too extensive for a jury rig. That ship is lost.’
‘But for mercy’s sake, man! I don’t care about the damned ship. We have to get the cargo out. Do you want to kill us?’
‘I do not want to kill my own men.’ Kivi scowled at the thin foam of the Milky Way. ‘What in that lading is so crucial?’
‘Everything. An atomic power generator. Part of a synthesizing laboratory. Biometric apparatus—’
‘Can’t you get along without it?’
‘Rustum isn’t Earth! We can’t eat many native life forms. Terrestrial plants won’t grow without ecological and chemical preparation. There are probably diseases, or will be as soon as a few native viruses mutate, to which we’ve no racial immunity whatever. We can’t dig and refine minerals at the rate we’ve got to have them without high-energy equipment, which requires a nuclear generator.’
‘You can build what you need.’
‘We can not. What’d we eat and wear and use for tools in the meantime? We took along a bare minimum of equipment as it is.’ Svoboda shook his head. ‘I’ve got a couple of kids, you know. I’m not about to risk their lives more than the original plan requires.’
Kivi sighed. ‘Well, then, tell me how to recover any significant portion of that cargo. I’m listening.’
‘Isn’t it obvious? The force screen of this ship will give enough protection for a man to work a few hours, unloading by hand, transferring the stuff here. If every crewman will take, say, a four-hour trick, the job can be done.’
Kivi shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I have better than 1600 men, yes. But transferring cargo without machinery, I think would take more than 1600 times four man-hours. Even if not, I can’t order my men to do this. The cargo is not essential to our survival, you see. Radiation effects being cumulative, and a spaceman getting far more than is good for him even under the best of conditions, regulations do not allow me to order men into unnecessary exposure. I’d have to ask for volunteers. I wouldn’t get any – for the sake of you groundgrubbers.’
Svoboda stared at Kivi. It was like a bad dream, he thought. They made noises at each other, but somehow meaning did not get across.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll transfer the cargo ourselves. We colonists.’
Kivi laughed aloud, with no merriment. ‘Do you seriously believe so? Why, untrained men would take so long about it, the radiation would kill them before they had properly started!’
The captain looked closely at his passenger. Briefly, there was a mildening in those slant eyes. ‘This is not easy for me either, you know,’ he added quietly. ‘Earth has fewer spaceships each generation. I have lost one. I would rather have lost both my hands.’
After a moment, he continued: ‘Well, I suggest you flit downstairs and debate the matter with your friends. They can decide if they want to continue under the new circumstances. Those who don’t can return home with the fleet. We can take them, distributed among the remaining ships, if we have larger watches to reduce the deepsleep apparatus needed.’
‘But that will be all of us!’ Svoboda cried. ‘The few who are stubborn enough to remain will be too few to survive under any conditions. You have fust sentenced the Rustum colony to death, and thereby everything the colony believed in. It’s all beep for nothing.9
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Finn.
He whipped himself into the pilot chair and fastened his harness. ‘Back to the Courier,’ he said into the intercom. ‘Stand by for casting loose of derelict and blastoff.’
His fingers paused above the board. ‘There is one other thing, Svoboda,’ he said. ‘Even if my men did agree to unload for you, which I know they won’t, I should not allow them to.’
Svoboda hunched together. He had taken too many Mows. Starlight filled his eyes, but did not reach his consciousness. ‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because the job would add weeks to our stay here,’ answered Kivi. ‘Only a few men at a time could be aboard the Ranger. The rest must stay cooped idle on the other ships, or on ground. Either alternative is explosive.’
‘What?’
‘It’s one thing for an all-male expedition to visit a star.’ Kivi’s tones were thin. ‘It’s another to mingle with a thousand nubile women, none of them ours. What do you think the basic reason is for the enmity and fights you’ve witnessed? How long till such a fight ends in someone’s death? And if that doesn’t touch off a riot, I don’t know what will. – And yet I can’t force my men to sit in orbit, week after week, when they might be on ground. We have a long voyage ahead of us. I dare not begin it with their morale shattered.’
Svoboda fastened himself in, though the onset of acceleration was weak enough. For the first time, he began to see that Kivi also had a right to be unreasonable.
He stared ahead of him. The poison rain should have been visible, he thought. He should have heard it hissing against the magnetic screen. Unsensed death warded off by unsensed armor, no, his mind could understand but his instincts rebelled. All they wanted was for him to hold Judith and the children close against him, under a sky which merely threw thunderbolts.
Bemused, he tried to convince himself of physics. Just because you can’t see electrons and protons going by, you must not call them unreal. You can watch their trail through a cloud chamber, their signature on a photographic plate … Magnetic fields are quite as real. A powerful magnet will snatch a knife from your hand and cut you if you go too near its poles. Planetary magnetism will swing a needle to guide you home.
For that matter, who ever saw or heard or measured an emotion? And yet love, hate, fear had driven men out between the stars, where despair broke them. The gross matter of a man’s body could pace in circles, worrying, till an unweighable thought stopped him in his tracks. If only a
thought could stop a spaceship in its orbit with the same ease. But an idea was not a magnetic field.
Or was it?
Svoboda leaped from his chair. He banged his left arm against the headrest. Anguish went in a wave through him, crested by his yell. Kivi looked around. ‘What’s wrong?’ he barked.
Fighting back tears, Svoboda said through the throbbing : ‘I believe I have a way. I have a way—’
‘Will it take long?’ asked Kivi, not impressed.
‘It, it, it might.’
‘Then forget it.’
‘But Judas in hell!’ Svoboda felt his collarbone. The splint seemed intact. Pain receded like a tide, advancing and retreating once more. He chose a moment when his brain was clear to choke out: ‘Will you listen to me? We can save the ship too!’
‘And risk losing twenty men by murder and riot. No.’ Kivi’s face was held straight forward, expressionless. ‘I told you, the tension between our parties is already dangerous. I hardly dare wait long enough to unload the remaining ships and fill our tanks. Then we must go! Not an extra day will I spend in this God-hated place.’
‘But the ship – you said —’
‘I know. It will hurt my reputation to come back minus a ship. I may lose my command. But I am not a fanatic, Svoboda. You are willing to sacrifice Judith’s life to preserve that weird philosophy of yours. (And what is it, anyhow, but an assertion of your own immortal importance?) I am not willing to let men be hurt, perhaps die, that my record may look good. I am going to bring a whole crew home, if not a whole fleet. And if you settlers give up and come home with us – as I think you will’- before heaven, I’ll have done you a favor!’ He turned blind blue eyes around and yelled: ‘Get out! I do not want to hear your crazy plan! Get off the bridge and leave me alone!’
Orbit Unlimited Page 9
