The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  That fed me up. When I found myself locked out of half my own ship, I decided to ask for reassignment. With thirty years in the Guard, I thought I knew how inside thrust is applied, but I received a heartbreaking shock.

  “Request for reassignment unfavorably considered,” Luna station messaged me through channels, after a strange delay. “Impossible to replace you with officer of adequate experience. You will continue with Knedder mission.”

  A second message informed me that Operation Baby Giant had been re-evaluated to crash repeat crash priority. How an insignificant little civilian could swing so much thrust was something I didn’t understand, but I saw that Knedder had me trapped aboard my own ship, like a galley slave.

  His secret gear, when it was all weighed aboard, came to forty-two-point-nine mass-tons. Every item was essential, he insisted, and the Admiral backed him up. I had to leave half my regular crew behind and cut our supplies to the bone to get the lift and load sheets into any reasonable kind of balance.

  The ship was still heavy when we finally nosed out of the station. One-point-six tons of overload—all of it Knedder’s mysterious gear. I could feel it, in the sluggish way the Starhawk answered to her jets.

  One-point-six tons of trouble.

  Not that it was obvious to anybody else, on the outbound trip. We dropped around Jupiter, picking up acceleration, and slipped smoothly enough into our plotted orbit for Knedder’s insane destination. Even with only our skeleton crew to work the ship, she never faltered or grumbled.

  But all the time those tons of overload were eating up more tons of precious reaction-mass. The shape of trouble was plain enough to me, on every chart and meter. Fifteen billion miles was going to be a long way home.

  Knedder spent most of the long voyage out locked up in his own compartments. That was probably just as well, because even his dreamy-eyed smile had begun to get on my nerves. He was always too amiable and too deeply absorbed in his own scientific fairylands. His patient good humor became unendurable.

  We emptied the main tanks, braking toward his destination point. Sweating over the charts, I calculated that we could limp back to Jupiter on the emergencies before our supplies ran out, with just about enough ammonia left over to make a baby sneeze.

  I knew Knedder was searching with all that secret gear, but I kept my own eyes open. We were still three million miles from his destination point when I picked up an object there. Even though it seemed to be just a small asteroid, I was considerably surprised to find anything at all. I called Knedder on the intercom, and he came to the control room.

  “That’s Cerberus, all right.” He nodded calmly at the tiny blip glowing in the ’scope. “We first observed it a week ago.”

  “That’s no planet!” I told him. “It can’t be ten miles in diameter.”

  “About eight miles,” he said. “But Ming has just recomputed its mass, from the gravitational displacement of stellar images that Jefferson has been measuring. It’s a little more massive than all the other planets combined.”

  “Huh?” I stared at him. “What’s that heavy?” “Nuclear fluid,” he said. “Collapsed atoms, stripped of orbital electrons. Stuff with a trillion times the density of ordinary matter. Final state of matter, in dead stars. Properly speaking, that’s what Cerberus is. Dwarf star. Black cinder of a burned-out sun. No native member of our solar family. Orbit indicates a fairly recent capture.”

  I leaned to study the faint greenish speck in the ’scope, trying to imagine a planet larger than Jupiter squeezed into something smaller than Phobos. That was hard to do. I had never felt that any such notions had much to do with the efficient operation of the Starhawk, but alarm caught me now.

  “If all that’s true—” I tried to swallow a sudden tremor in my voice. “If that thing’s really so massive, hadn’t we better keep away?”

  “On the contrary—” Knedder’s dreamy eyes squinted at me till I shivered. “Cerberus has provided us with a natural gravitic laboratory, equipped with a field millions of times more intense than we can hope to reach anywhere else. Operation Baby Giant was organized and equipped to make use of it. I want you to take us within four hundred miles, at our first approach.”

  For an instant I was stunned beyond protest. We were in free fall, and some involuntary movement sent me into the air. I caught at a guide rail, and finally steadied myself enough to make a rough mental calculation.

  “Four hundred miles!” I hung staring at Knedder, trying to think I had misunderstood him. “That close in, the field intensity must be something like forty thousand gravities!”

  “Fifty thousand.” He was grinning like a kid with an unexpected Christmas gift. “Scientific instruments have never been carried into such a field before.” “How do you think we could pull away, against fifty thousand gravities?” I glared at him. “Even if we weren’t squashed flat!”

  “We’ll still be in free fall,” he answered. “So we won’t feel any force at all. And it won’t be necessary to pull away with the jets. If you take us around on a parabolic orbit, with the perihelion at four hundred miles, our own momentum will lift us out again.” “Theoretically it might,” I had to agree. “But I don’t care to gamble my ship on it. I’ll take you around at five thousand miles. That’s risky enough.” I’d thought I was still in command, and I knew we were some four months and thirteen billion miles beyond the present limits of radio communication, so that Knedder couldn’t go over my head to any paper-shuffling admiral. But he had one more bitter surprise for me. Apologetically, he handed me a sealed envelope.

  “Sorry, Barron,” he said. “But your headquarters gave me this, for use if necessary.”

  The official envelope was addressed to me, from Luna Station. The letter inside informed me that Dr. Knedder had been commissioned a temporary officer of the Guard, with the rank of admiral. The top brass was certain that I would co-operate faithfully toward every aim of Operation Baby Giant. That was a sickening kick, but I managed to come to attention.

  “Relax, Barron.” Knedder caught the guide rail and shoved himself away. “No formalities. Just take us around, at four hundred miles.”

  I worked the ship into the orbit he wanted, and we dropped around Cerberus. Once we were falling, there was nothing I could do but watch the ’scopes and try to trust his theories. For the first time in nearly twenty years, I felt a clammy shudder of space sickness.

  We fell with a frightening acceleration. I was trying to follow Cerberus in a visual ’scope. A faint gray point at first—if it had ever really been a star, its own atomic fuel was gone; I saw it only by the fading rays of our far sun.

  A dim gray speck. It swelled in the field of blackness, slowly at first. It was round, when I could see its shape; round and black and featureless, squeezed to perfect roundness by a hundred million gravities.

  It crawled across the stars beyond as we swung around it, at first very slowly, but faster, faster, faster. It grew, ballooned, exploded. And then, in the last split second, I saw the ring.

  A triple ring, wider in proportion than Saturn’s, but fainter in that feeble twilight than last year’s dreams. It lay at a right angle to the orbital plane of the planet, spread flat before us, so thin that I could see the rushing stars behind it.

  I knew' we were about to hit it.

  Cra-crash !

  That queer double blow came instantly, before I had time to do anything. The Starhawk shuddered, and I was smashed against the control-room bulkhead. I hung there a moment in free fall again, with my breath knocked out, half stunned and very sick.

  When I dragged myself back to the instruments, Cerberus was gone from the ’scopes. I searched for it groggily, with the wide-angle finder. It was shrinking again when I found it, a glistening black bead. The ghostly ring had already vanished.

  As I got my bearings, I began to understand that strange double impact. We must have burst through that ring, swung half around the planet, and struck the ring again, all in fractional seconds! Now we wer
e moving outward again, away from perihelion, and the ship was still alive.

  At first I was almost sorry, but my sickness soon uk subsided. I rinsed my mouth and mopped my sweaty face and turned shakily to check the instruments for indications of collision damage.

  To my surprise, we were still space-tight. Air pressure normal, in all compartments. The hull telemeters showed a skin temperature of almost 800° K., but that was already falling. And Cerberus was dwindling to a harmless spark behind.

  I tried to call Knedder on the intercom, to ask how his party had fared. He didn’t answer. I banged on his locked door till he opened it.

  “You look bad, Barron.” He floated in the doorway, blinking at me nearsightedly. His right cheek was bruised purple, and dark blood was oozing from a cut on his chin, but he didn’t seem concerned about himself. “Something wrong?”

  “That ring, sir!” I wasn’t thinking very coherently, but I managed to remember that he was now an admiral. “I didn’t see it in time.”

  “Jefferson had been observing it.” He shrugged. “Wisp of cosmic dust. Mostly calcium atoms. Too thin to damage anything.”

  “You look damaged, sir. When you didn’t answer the intercom, I was afraid you’d been badly hurt.”

  “Busy, Barron.” He touched his face, glanced vaguely at the blood on his fingers, and wiped them absently on bis white laboratory smock. “Getting results! ”

  He smiled triumphantly through his lacerations.

  “Highly significant results!”

  I wondered what made them significant, but he was holding the door half closed, so that I couldn’t see beyond it. Dr. Jefferson was audible, hoarsely reading numbers, as if from some instrument.

  "-point-o—0 five nine~three—”

  Ned!” I couldn’t see the Eurasian girl, but she sounded breathless with a sudden elation. “That should give us a good approximation to the third constant—”

  “Sorry, Barron.”

  Knedder shut the door.

  I went on to inspect the rest of the ship, and discovered nothing disturbing. The jetman reported no damage. The reactor was still reacting as it should. I hauled myself back to the control room, feeling that the worst was past.

  I was finally getting used to Knedder, and Operation Baby Giant was evidently proceeding satisfactorily. In five or six months, with good luck and judicious use of the ammonia left in the emergency tanks, we ought to be back in radio range of Jupiter station. Knedder and his assistants would no doubt settle down to writing dull books full of bumble-brained speculations about the antics of their instruments in a field of fifty thousand gravities. When their equipment was dismantled, I could probably requisition new armament for the Starhawk. Whatever happened, at least I would have a new yam to spin at the club.

  Back at the ’scopes, I had another look at Cerberus. It seemed too bright. A faint sense of worry set me to checking our course and position against our calculated free-fall orbit. With the first observation, all my relief turned to alarm.

  We had fallen far behind where we should have been, and we were still drifting swiftly off our plotted parabolic orbit. I tapped the computer uneasily, and our present orbit was projected in the plotting tank, a green ellipse drawn close around the red reference point that stood for Cerberus.

  I tried for an instant to think the computer had gone wrong, and then I understood. Friction with that dusty ring, in that double collision, had stolen too much momentum. We had too little left to lift us out of that terrible gravity field. We were trapped, unless—

  I was already reaching for the siren. I blew a three-second warning blast, and opened the jets all the way. When you’ve run a ship for twenty years, such decisions get to be automatic. I didn’t wait to calculate our reaction-mass reserve, because I knew we had none. I also knew that the efficiency of the jets depended on our speed. With every instant I had wasted, while the deadly drag of Cerberus slowed us, our chances had been melting away.

  With our tanks so light, the accelerometer needle shot up to eight gravities. Not much, against fifty thousand, but this was not free fall. I was crushed down in the seat, and it took everything I had to watch the ’scopes and work the computer. I held the jets open nearly fifty seconds—till the glowing green filament of our projected orbit opened into a new parabola, to show that we had fought back to escape velocity.

  I cut the jets and turned to read the tank gauges. What I saw took my breath again. Four-point-three tons of mass—to carry us fifteen billion miles!

  I sagged back into the seat and reached dismally for the computer, but I already knew what we were in for. Years of drifting, on short rations, with only half a chance of ever getting home alive. That mass was enough to start us back, but only at about a billion miles a year.

  “Barron.” Knedder came floating up behind me, before I had finished computing the odds against us. What was the reason for that interruption?

  I was trying to save our lives.” All my inner tension exploded into anger. “I hope you don’t mind!”

  He just squinted at me, in a bewildered way.

  “That collision slowed us down.” I spelled it out for him. “It left us on a closed orbit, that would have carried us back to collide again. I discovered the danger just in time to pull us out—

  He hung to the guide rail, shaking his tousled head.

  “Should have consulted me,” he broke in gently. “Because our observations aren’t complete.1

  That stunned me.

  “The readings we got on that first run are highly significant,” he was murmuring. “Unfortunately, they are not sufficiently precise to give accurate determinations of the constants we’re looking for. Want you to take us around again. Perihelion at forty miles. Give us readings at a good million gravities—"

  “You’re crazy!” I forgot he was an admiral. “It would take most of the ammonia in the tanks to work us back into that orbit. We’d hit the ring again, and never get out!

  “I think we can avoid the ring.” His face tried to smile. “Jefferson says the inner cleft is about ten radii from the planet. Want you to take us through that.”

  “Even if we hit that gap,” I told him bitterly, “we won’t come out with mass enough to start us home. We’ll drift out here until we die of starvation.”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “But at least we can continue our research.” His shortsighted eyes were shining, with a look that I wanted to interpret as only something close to insanity. “A grazing passage, inside the inner ring, would give us readings at a hundred million gravities. Think of that!”

  “The stresses would tear the whole ship to atoms! Even if we missed the ring and the planet itself!

  “Probably.” He sighed regretfully. “But Jefferson believes we can get sufficiently precise readings forty miles out. I think we can survive the field differentials there.”

  “Suppose we can?” I demanded. “What good will your wonderful new constants ever do anybody? We can’t hope to get even a radio message back to civilization—”

  I heard the girl calling him.

  “We’ll take care of that.” He turned himself in the air. “We have equipment of our own. All I want you to do is take us down to one million gravities. Now please excuse me.

  He sled away down the rail and left me boiling. I wanted to haul him back and dump him out through the disposal lock, but when you’ve spent half your life in the Guard, actual mutiny doesn’t come easily. He might be a nincompoop, but he was still a temporary admiral. I cursed him under my breath, and started plotting the orbit he wanted.

  It took three-point-seven tons of mass to turn us back toward Cerberus. The gauges showed point-five tons left in the last emergency tank. Not enough to fret about. I strapped myself into the acceleration seat, and watched the ’scopes as we fell.

  The pygmy planet shot up to meet us like a round black bullet. The triple ring swelled around it, a faint ripple on the starry pool of space. The inner cleft was straight ahead, and I had time
to hope we’d really get through safe.

  A curved blade blade, it slashed at us. Cr-r-rang!

  If there were two impacts, our velocity fused them into a single crushing concussion. Something savage wrenched at every fiber of my body, and smashed me down in the seat. In an instant it was gone. The reverberation died. The black and perfect globe of Cerberus was falling away again behind.

  I struggled feebly to the instruments. Somehow, we were still space-tight. The telemeters showed a skin temperature of 980°K. When our new orbit sprang into the plotting tank, it was a closer ellipse around the red point that stood for Cerberus. That meant we were going to fall hack, and fall again, until the end.

  Knedder ignored the intercom, and I hammered on the door until at last he stuck his head out. Fresh blood was beading a new injury on his forehead, but he didn’t seem aware of it.

  “Captain Barron reporting, sir.” I felt curiously relaxed, now that I knew nothing more could be done. “Seems we hit something.”

  “Did we?” He spoke too loudly, as if still deaf from that concussion. “Not surprising. Ring doubtless denser as you approach the planet. Cleft probably only relatively clear.”

  “Anyhow, we’re all done for.” I couldn’t help feeling a certain irrational triumph as I told him that. “We lost momentum again. We’re falling back. With only a cupful of ammonia left, we can’t do anything about it.”

  “No matter.” His preoccupied shrug demolished my sense of victory. “Jefferson says his readings are now sufficiently precise. Ming is using them to derive the electro-gravitic constants we came to look for.”

  “And I’ve got the last one, Ned!” Her eager voice came past the half-closed door. “Point-o-nine-o-four-o-seven! ”