We Have Fed Our Sea

by Poul Anderson

  "How long to do that job? Quickly!"

  "How should I know?" A dragon snarl. Then: "I'd have to go out and take a closer look. The damaged sections will have to be cut away. It'll probably be necessary to machine some fit­tings. With luck, we can do it in several hours."

  Nakamura paused. He worked his hands together, strength opposing strength; he drew slow breaths, rolled his head to loosen the neck muscles, finally closed his eyes and contem­plated peace for as long as needful. And a measure of peace came. The death of this little ego was not so terrible after all, provided said ego refrained from wishing to hold Baby-san in its arms just one more time.

  Almost absently, he punched the keys of the general com­puter. It was no surprise to see his guess verified.

  "Are you there?" called Sverdlov, as if across centuries. "Are you there, pilot?"

  "Yes. I beg your pardon. Several hours to repair the web, did you say? By that time, drifting free, we will have crashed on the star."

  "What? But—"

  "Consider its acceleration of us. And we still have inward radial velocity of our own. I think I can put us into an orbit before the whatever-it-is force has quite destroyed the acceler­ators. Yes."

  "But you'll burn them up! And the web! We'll damage the web beyond repair!"

  "Perhaps something can be improvised, once we are in orbit. But if we continue simply falling, we are dead men."

  "No!" Almost, Sverdlov shrieked. "Listen, maybe we can re­pair the web in time. Maybe we'll only need a couple of hours for the job. There's a chance. But caught in an orbit, with the web melted or vaporized . . . do you know how to build one from raw metal? I don't!"

  "We have a gravitics specialist aboard. If anyone can fashion us a new transmitter, he can."

  "And if he can't, we're trapped out here! To starve! Better to crash and be done!"

  Nakamura's hands began to dance over the keyboard. He demanded data of the instruments, calculations of the com­puters, and nothing of the autopilot. For no machine could help steer a vessel whose thrust-engine was being unpredict­ably devoured. This would be a manual task.

  "I am the captain," he said, as mildly as possible.

  "Not any more!"

  Nakamura slapped his master switch. "You have just been cut out of the control circuits," he said. "Please remain at your post." He opened the intercom to the observation deck. "Will the two honorable scientists be so kind as to stop the engineer from interfering with the pilot?"

  FOR a moment, the rage in Chang Sverdlov was such that blackness flapped before his eyes.

  When he regained himself, he found the viewscreens still painted with ruin. Starlight lay wan along the frail network of the transceiver web and the two sets of rings which it held together. At the far end the metal glowed red. A few globs of spattered stuff orbited like lunatic fireflies. Beyond the twisted burnt-off end of the system, light-years dropped away to the cold blue glitter of a thousand crowding stars. The dead sun was just discernible, a flattened darkness. It seemed to be swelling visibly. Whether that was a real effect or not, Sver­dlov felt the dread of falling, the no-weight horrors, like a lump in his belly.

  He hadn't been afraid of null-gee since he was a child. In his cadet days, he had invented more pranks involving free fall than any two other boys. But he had never been cut off from home in this fashion. Krasna had never been more than an interplanetary flight or an interstellar Jump away.

  And that cookbook pilot would starve out here to save his worthless ship?

  Sverdlov unbuckled his harness. He kicked himself across the little control room, twisted among the pipes and wheels and dials of the fuel-feed section like a swimming fish, and came to the tool rack. He chose a long wrench and arrowed for the shaftway. His fury had chilled into resolution: I don't want to kill him, but he'll have to be made to see reason. And quickly, or we really will crash!

  He was rounding the transmitter chamber when decelera­tion resumed. He had been going up by the usual process, grab a rung ahead of you and whip your weightless body beyond. Suddenly two Terrestrial gravities snatched him.

  He closed fingers about one of the bars. His left arm straightened, with a hundred and ninety kilos behind. The hand tore loose. He let go the wrench and caught with his right arm, jamming it between a rung and the shaft wall. The im­pact smashed across his biceps. Then his left hand clawed fast and he hung. He heard the wrench skid past the gyro housing, hit a straight dropoff, and clang on the after radiation shield.

  Gasping, he found a lower rung with his feet and sagged for a minute. The right arm was numb, until the pain woke in it. He flexed the fingers. Nothing broken.

  But he was supposed to be in harness. Nakamura's calcula­tions might demand spurts of ten or fifteen gravities, if the accelerators could still put out that much. The fear of being smeared across a bulkhead jolted into Sverdlov. He scrambled over the rungs. It was nightmarishly like climbing through glue. After a thousand years he burst into the living quarters.

  MACLAREN sat up in one of the bunks. "No further, please," he said.

  The deceleration climbed a notch. His weight was iron on Sverdlov's shoulders. He started back into the shaft. "No!" cried Ryerson. But it was Maclaren who flung off bunk harness and climbed to the deck. The brown face gleamed wet, but Maclaren smiled and said: "Didn't you hear me?"

  Sverdlov grunted and re-entered the shaft, both feet on a rung. I can make it up to the bubble and get my hands on Nakamura's throat. Maclaren stood for a gauging instant, as Sverdlov's foot crept toward the next rung. Finally the physi­cist added with a sneer in the tone: "When a technic says sit, you squat . . . colonial."

  Sverdlov halted. "What was that?" he asked slowly.

  "I can haul you out of there if I must, you backwoods pig," said Maclaren, "but I'd rather you came to me.

  Sverdlov wondered, with an odd quick sadness, why he re­sponded. Did an Earthling's yap make so much difference? He decided that Maclaren would probably make good on that promise to follow him up the shaft, and under this weight a fight on the rungs could kill them both. Therefore—Sverdlov's brain seemed as heavy as his bones. He climbed back and stood slumping on the observation deck. "Well?" he said.

  Maclaren folded his arms. "Better get into a bunk," he ad­vised.

  Sverdlov lumbered toward him. In a shimmery wisp of tu­nic, the Earthling looked muscular enough, but he probably massed ten kilos less, and lacked several centimeters of the Krasnan's height and reach. A few swift blows would disable him, and it might still not be too late to stop Nakamura.

  "Put up your fists," said Sverdlov hoarsely.

  Maclaren unfolded his arms. A sleepy smile crossed his face. Sverdlov came in, swinging at the eagle beak. Maclaren's head moved aside. His hands came up, took Sverdlov's arm, and applied a cruel leverage. Sverdlov gasped, broke free by sheer strength, and threw a blow to the ribs. Maclaren stopped that fist with an edge-on chop at the wrist behind it; almost, Sver­dlov thought he felt the bones crack. They stood toe to toe. Sverdlov drew back the other fist. Maclaren punched him in the groin. The Krasnan doubled over in a jag of anguish. Mac­laren rabbit-punched him. Sverdlov went to one knee. Mac­laren kicked him in the solar plexus. Sverdlov fell over and struck the floor with three gravities to help.

  Through a wobbling, ringing darkness, he heard the Earth­ling: "Help me with this beef, Dave." And he felt himself dragged across the floor, somehow manhandled into a bunk and harnessed.

  His mind returned. Pain stabbed and flickered through him. He struggled to sit up. "That was an Earthman way to fight," he pushed out through a swelling mouth.

  "I don't enjoy fighting," said Maclaren from his own bunk, "so I got it over with as soon as possible."

  "You—" the Krasnan lifted grotesquely heavy hands and fumbled with his harness. "I'm going to the control turret. If you try to stop me this time—"

  "You're already too late, brother Sverdlov," said Maclaren coolly. "Whatever you were setting out to forestall has gone
irrevocably far toward happening."

  The words were a physical blow.

  "It's . . . yes," said the engineer. "I'm too late." The shout burst from him: "We're all too late, now!"

  "Ease back," said Maclaren. "Frankly, your behavior doesn't give me much confidence in your judgment about anything."

  It rumbled through the ship. That shouldn't be, thought Sverdlov's training; even full blast ought to be nearly noise­less, and this was only fractional. Sweat prickled his skin. For the first time in a violent life, he totally realized that he could die.

  "I'm sorry for what I called you," said Maclaren. "I had to stop you, but now I apologize."

  Sverdlov made no answer. He stared up at a blank ceiling. Oddly, his first emotion, as rage ebbed, was an overwhelming sorrow. Now he would never see Krasna made free.

  SILENCE and no-weight were dreamlike. For a reason ob­scure to himself, Maclaren had dimmed the fluoros around the observation deck, so that twilight filled it and the scientific apparatus crouched in racks and on benches seemed to be a herd of long-necked monsters. Thus there was nothing to drown the steely brilliance of the stars, when you looked out an unshuttered port.

  The star hurtled across his field of view. Her eccentric orbit took the Cross around it in thirty-seven minutes. Here, at closest approach, they were only half a million kilometers away. The thing had the visual diameter of three full Moons. It was curiously vague of outline: a central absolute blackness, fading toward deep gray near the edges where starlight caught an atmosphere more savagely compressed than Earth's ocean abyss. Through the telescope, there seemed to be changeable streaks and mottlings, bands, spots, a hint of color too faint for the eye to tell . . . as if the ghosts of burned-out fires still walked.

  Quite oblate, Maclaren reminded himself. That would have given us a hint, if we'd known. Or the radio spectrum; now I realize, when it's too late, that the lines really are triplets, and their broadening is Doppler shift.

  The silence was smothering.

  Nakamura drifted in. He poised himself in the air and waited quietly.

  "Well?" said Maclaren.

  "Sverdlov is still outside, looking at the accelerators and web," said Nakamura. "He will not admit there is no hope."

  "Neither will I," said Maclaren.

  "Virtually the whole system is destroyed. Fifty meters of it have vanished. The rest is fused, twisted, short-circuited; a miracle it continued to give some feeble kind of blast, so I could at least find an orbit." Nakamura laughed. Maclaren thought that that high-pitched, apologetic giggle was going to be hard to live with, if one hadn't been raised among such symbols. "We carry a few spare parts, but not that many."

  "Perhaps we can make some," said Maclaren.

  "Perhaps," said Nakamura. "But of course the accelerators are of no importance in themselves, the reconstruction of the web is the only way to get home . . . What has the young man Ryerson to say about that?"

  "Don't know. I sent him off to check the manifest and then look over the stuff the ship actually carries. He's been gone a long time, but—"

  "I understand," said Nakamura. "It is not easy to face a death sentence when one is young."

  Maclaren nodded absently and returned his gaze to the scribbled data sheets in one hand. After a moment, Nakamura cleared his throat and said awkwardly: "Ah . . . I beg your pardon . . . about the affair of Engineer Sverdlov—"

  "Well?" Maclaren didn't glance up from the figures. He had a lot of composure of his own to win back.

  The fact is, he thought through a hammer-beat in his tem­ples, I am the man afraid. Now that there is nothing I can do, only a cold waiting until word is given me whether I can live or must die . . . I find that Terangi Maclaren is a coward.

  Sickness was a doubled fist inside his gullet.

  "I am not certain what, er, happened," stumbled Nakamura, "and I do not wish to know. If you will be so kind . . . I hope you were not unduly inconvenienced—"

  "No. It's all right."

  "If we could tacitly ignore it. As I think he has tried to do. Even the best men have a breaking point."

  I always knew that there must one day be an end to white sails above green water, and to wine, and to masks, and a woman's laughter. I had not expected it yet.

  "After all," said Nakamura, "we must work together now."

  "Yes."

  I had not expected it a light-century from the home of my fathers. My life was spent in having fun, and now I find that the black star has no interest at all in amusing me.

  "Do you know yet what happened?" asked Nakamura. "I would not press you for an answer, but—"

  "Oh, yes," said Maclaren. "I know."

  BENEATH a scrapheap of songs and keels, loves and jokes and victories, which mattered no longer but would not leave him, Maclaren found his brain working with a startling dry clarity. "I'm not sure how much we can admit to the oth­ers," he said. "Because this could have been averted, if we'd proceeded with more caution."

  "I wondered a little at the time." Nakamura laughed again. "But who would look for danger around a . . . a corpse?"

  "Broadened spectrum lines mean a quickly rotating star," said Maclaren. "Since the ship was not approaching in the equatorial plane, we missed the full Doppler effect, but we might have stopped to think. And tripled lines mean a Zeeman splitting."

  "Ah." Nakamura sucked in a hiss of air. "Magnetism?"

  "The most powerful bloody magnetic field ever noticed around any heavenly body," said Maclaren. "Judging from the readings I get here, the polar field is . . . ph, I can't say yet. Five, six, seven thousand gauss—somewhere on that order of magnitude. Fantastic! Sol's field is only fifty-three gauss. They don't ever go much above two thousand. Except here."

  He rubbed his chin. "Blackett effect," he went on. The stead­iness of his words was a faintly pleasing surprise to him. "Magnetic field is directly related to angular velocity. The rea­son no live sun has a field like this dead thing here is that it would have to rotate too fast. Couldn't take the strain; it would go whoomp and scatter pieces of star from hell to tiffin." An odd, perverse comfort in speaking lightly: a lie to oneself, per­suading the subconscious mind that its companions were not doomed men and a black sun, but an amorous girl waiting for the next jest in a Citadel tavern. "As this star collapsed on itself, after burning out, it had to spin faster, d' you see? Con­servation of angular momentum. It seems to have had an un­usual amount to start with, of course, but the rotational speed is chiefly a result of its degenerate state. And that same super-density allows it to twirl with such indecent haste. You might say the bursting strength is immensely greater."

  "Yes," said Nakamura. "I see."

  "I've been making some estimates," said Maclaren. "It didn't actually take a very strong field to wreck us. We could easily have been protected against it. Any ion-drive craft going close to a planet is—a counter-magnetic circuit with a feedback loop—elementary. But naturally, these big ships were not meant to land anywhere. They would certainly never approach a live sun this close, and the possibility of this black dwarf having such a vicious magnetism . . . well, no one ever thought of it."

  He shrugged. "Figure it out yourself, Captain Nakamura. The old H, r, v formula. A proton traveling at three-fourths c down a hundred-meter tube is deflected one centimeter by a field of seven one-hundredths gauss. We entered such a field at a million kilometers out, more or less. A tenuous but ex­tremely energetic stream of ionized gas hit the outermost ac­celerator ring. I make the temperature equivalent of that ve­locity to be something like three million million degrees Absolute, if I remember the value of the gas constant correctly.

  The closer to the star we got, the stronger field we were in, so the farther up the ions struck.

  "Of course," finished Maclaren in a tired voice, "all these quantities are just estimates, using simple algebra. Since we slanted across the magnetic field, you'd need a vectoral differ­ential equation to describe exactly what happened. You might find occa
sion to change my figures by a factor of five or six. But I think I have the general idea."

  "Yes-s-s," said Nakamura, "I think you do."

  They hung side by side in dimness and looked out at the eye-hurting bright stars.

  "Do you know," said Maclaren, "there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity."

  "I am not so sure." Nakamura's reply jarred him a little, by its sober literal-mindedness. "I have known many . . . well, shall I call them unintellectual people . . . who lived happy and useful lives."

  "I wasn't referring to that kind of stupidity." Maclaren went through the motions of a chuckle. "I meant our own kind. Yours and mine. We bear the guilt, you know. We should have stopped and thought the situation over before rushing in. I did want to approach more slowly, measuring as we went, and you overruled me."

  "I am ashamed," said Nakamura. He bent his face toward his hands.

  "No, let me finish. I should have come here with a well-thought-out program in mind. I gave you no valid reasons not to establish a close-in orbit at once. My only grumble was that you wouldn't allow me time to take observations as we went toward the star. You were perfectly justified, on the basis of the information available to you—Oh, the devils take it! I bring this up only so you'll know what topics to avoid with our shipmates—who must also bear some of the blame for not thinking—because we can't afford quarrels." Maclaren felt his cheeks crease in a sort of grin. "I have no interest in the guilt question anyway. My problem is strictly pragmatic: I want out of here!"

  Ryerson emerged from the living-quarter screen. Maclaren saw him first as a shadow. Then the young face came so near that he could see the eyes unnaturally bright and the lips shaking.

  "What have you found, Dave?" The question ripped from him before he thought.