Part 2 (2/2)
The scanner put its signal into the matrix. The matrix mod-ulated the carrier wave. But such terminology is mere slang, borrowed from electronics. You cannot have a ”wave” when you have no velocity, and gravitational forces do not. (This is a more accurate rendition of the common statement that ”gravi-tation propagates at an infinite speed.”) Inconceivable ener-gies surged within a thermonuclear fire chamber; nothing con-trolled them, nothing could control them, but the force fields they themselves generated.
Matter pulsed in and out of exis-tencequa matter, from particle to gamma ray quantum and back. Since quanta have no rest ma.s.s, the pulsations dis-turbed the geometry of s.p.a.ce according to the laws of Ein-steinian mechanics. Not much: gravitation is feebler than magnetism or electricity. Were it not for the resonance effect, the signal would have been smothered in ”noise” a few kilome-ters away. Even as it was, there were many relayings across the pa.r.s.ecs until the matrix on theCross reacted. And yet in one sense no time at all had pa.s.sed; and no self-respecting mathematician would have called the ”beam” by such a name. It was, however, a signal, the only signal which relativity physics allowed to go faster than light-and, after all, it did not reallygo, it simplywas.
Despite the pill inside him, Ryerson felt as if the bottom had dropped out of the world. He grabbed for a handhold. The after-image of the transmitter chamber yielded to the coils and banks of the receiver room on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. He hung weight-less, a thousand billion billion kilometers from Earth.
FORWARD of the 'casting chambers, ”above” them during acceleration, were fuel deck, gyros, and air renewal plant. Then you pa.s.sed through the observation deck, where instruments and laboratory equipment crowded together. A flimsy wall around the shaftway marked off the living quar-ters: folding bunks, galley, bath, table, benches, shelves, and lockers, all crammed into a six-meter circle.
Seiichi Nakamura wrapped one leg casually around a stan-chion, to keep himself from drifting in air currents, and made a ceremony out of leafing through the log-book in his hands. It gave the others a chance to calm down, and the yellow-haired boy, David Ryerson, seemed to need it. The astrophysicist, Maclaren, achieved the unusual feat of lounging in free fall; he puffed an expensive Earth-side cigarette and wrinkled his pa-trician nose at the pervading smell of an old s.h.i.+p, two hundred years of cooking and sweat and machine oil. The big, ugly young engineer, Sverdlov, merely looked sullen. Nakamura had never met any of them before.
”Well, gentlemen,” he said at last. ”Pardon me, I had to check the data recorded by the last pilot. Now I know approxi-mately where we are at.” He laughed with polite self-depreca-tion. ”Of course you are all familiar with the articles. The pilot is captain. His duty is to guide the s.h.i.+p where the chief scien-tist-Dr.
Maclaren-san in this case-wishes, within the limits of safety as determined by his own judgment. In case of my death or disability, command devolves upon the engineer, ah, Sverdlov-san, and you are to return home as soon as practica-ble. Yes-s-s. But I am sure we will all have a most pleasant and instructive expedition together.”
He felt the ba.n.a.lity of his words. It was the law, and a wise one, that authority be defined at once if there were non-Guild personnel aboard. Some pilots contented themselves with reading the regulations aloud, but it had always seemed an unnecessarily cold procedure to Nakamura. Only . . . he saw a sick bewilderment in Ryerson's eyes, supercilious humor in Maclaren's, angry impatience in Sverdlov's . . . his attempt at friendliness had gone flat.
”We do not operate so formally,” he went on in a lame fash-ion. ”We shall post a schedule of housekeeping duties and help each other, yes? Well. That is for later. Now as to the star, we have some approximate data and estimates taken by previous watches. It appears to have about four times the ma.s.s of Sol; its radius is hardly more than twice Earth's, possibly less; it emits detectably only in the lower radio frequencies, and even that is feeble. I have here a quick reading of the spectrum which may interest you, Dr. Maclaren.”
THE big dark man reached out for it. His brows went up. ”Now this,” he said, ”is the weirdest collection of wave lengths I ever saw.” He flickered experienced eyes along the column of numbers. ”Seems to be a lot of triplets, but the lines appear so broad, judging from the probable errors given, that I can't be sure without more careful . . . hm-m-m.” Glancing back at Nakamura: ”Just where are we with relation to the star?”
”Approximately two million kilometers from the center of its ma.s.s. We are being drawn toward it, of course, since an orbit has not yet been established, but have enough radial velocity of our own to-”
”Never mind.” The sophistication dropped from Maclaren like a tunic. He said with a boy's eagerness, ”I would like to get as near the star as possible. How close do you think you can put us?”
Nakamura smiled. He had a feeling Maclaren could prove likable. ”Too close isn't prudent. There would be meteors.”
”Not around this one!” exclaimed Maclaren. ”If physical the-ory is anything but mescaline dreams, a dead star is the clinker of a supernova. Any matter orbiting in its neighbor-hood became incandescent gas long ago.”
”Atmosphere?” asked Nakamura dubiously. ”Since we have nothing to see by, except starlight, we could hit its air.”
”Hm-m-m. Yes. I suppose it would have some. But not very deep: too compressed to be deep. In fact, the radio photo-sphere, from which the previous watches estimated the star's diameter, must be nearly identical with the fringes of atmo-sphere.”
”It would also take a great deal of reaction ma.s.s to pull us back out of its attraction, if we got too close,”
said Nakamura. He unclipped the specialized slide rule at his belt and made a few quick computations.
”In fact, this vessel cannot escape from a distance much less than three-quarters million kilome-ters, if there is to be reasonable amount of ma.s.s left for ma-neuvering around afterward. And I am sure you wish to ex-plore regions farther from the star, yes-s-s? However, I am willing to go that close.”
Maclaren smiled. ”Good enough. How long to arrive?”
”I estimate three hours, including time to establish an or-bit.” Nakamura looked around their faces. ”If everyone is pre-pared to go on duty, it is best we get into the desired path at once.”
”Not even a cup of tea first?” grumbled Sverdlov.
Nakamura nodded at Maclaren and Ryerson. ”You gentle-men will please prepare tea and sandwiches, and take them to the engineer and myself in about ninety minutes.”
”Now, wait!” protested Maclaren. ”We've hardly arrived. I haven't even looked at my instruments. I have to set up-”
”In ninety minutes, if you will be so kind. Very well, let us a.s.sume our posts.”
Nakamura turned from Maclaren's suddenly mutinous look and Sverdlov's broad grin. He entered the shaftway and pulled himself along it by the rungs. Through the transparent plastic he saw the observation deck fall behind. The boat deck was next, heavy storage levels followed, and then he was forward, into the main turret.
IT was a clear plastic bubble, unshuttered now when the sole outside illumination was a wintry blaze of stars.
Floating toward the controls, Nakamura grew aware of the silence. So quiet. So uncountably many stars.
The constella-tions were noticeably distorted, some altogether foreign. He searched a crystal darkness for Capella, but the bulge of the s.h.i.+p hid it from him. No use looking for Sol without a tele-scope, here on the lonely edge of the known.
Fear of raw emptiness lay tightly coiled within him. He smothered it by routine: strapped himself before the console, checked the instruments one by one, spoke with Sverdlov down the length of the s.h.i.+p. His fingers chattered out a compu-tation on a set of keys, he fed the tape to the robot, he felt a faint tug as the gyros woke up, swiveling the vessel into posi-tion for blast. Even now, at the end of acceleration to half light-speed and deceleration to a few hundred kilometers per sec-ond, theCross bore several tons of reaction-ma.s.s mercury. The total ma.s.s, including hull, equipment, and payload, was a bit over one kiloton. Accordingly, her ma.s.sive gyroscopes needed half an hour to turn her completely around.
Waiting, he studied the viewscreens. Since he must back down on his goal, what they showed him was more important than what his eyes saw through the turret in the nose. He could not make out the black sun.Well, what do you expect? he asked himself angrily.It must be occulating a few stars, but there are too many. ”Dr. Maclaren,” he said into the intercom, ”can you give me a radio directional on the target, as a check?”
”Aye, aye.” A surly answer. Maclaren resented having to put his toys to work. He would rather have been taking spectra, reading ionoscopes, gulping gas and dust samples from out-side into his a.n.a.lyzers, every centimeter of the way. Well, he would just have to get those data when they receded from the star again.
Nakamura's eyes strayed down the s.h.i.+p herself, as shown in the viewscreens.Old, he thought.The very nation which built her has ceased to exist. But good work. A man's work outlives his hands.
Though what remains of the little ivory figures my father carved to ornament our house? What chance did my brother have to create, before he shriveled in my arms? No! He shut off the thought, like a surgeon clamping a vein, and re-freshed his memory of theCygnus cla.s.s.
This hull was a sphere of reinforced self-sealing plastic, fifty meters across, its outside smoothness broken by hatches, ports, air locks, and the like. The various decks sliced it in parallel planes. Aft, diametrically opposite this turret, the hull opened on the fire chamber. And thence ran two thin metal skeletons, thirty meters apart, a hundred meters long, like radio masts or ancient oil derricks. They comprised two series of rings, a couple of centimeters in diameter, with auxiliary wiring and a spidery framework holding it all together-the ion accelerators, built into and supported by the gravitic trans-ceiver web.
”A ten-second test blast, if you please, Engineer Sverdlov,” said Nakamura.
The instruments showed him a certain unbalance in the distribution of ma.s.s within the hull. Yussuf bin Suleiman, who had just finished watch aboard the s.h.i.+p and gone back to Earth, was sloppy about . . . no, it was unjust to think so say that he had his own style of piloting. Nakamura set the pumps to work.
Mercury ran from the fuel deck to the trim tanks.
By then the s.h.i.+p was pointed correctly and it was time to start decelerating again. ”Stand by for blast ...
Report ... I shall want one-point-five-seven standard gees for-” Nakamura reeled it off almost automatically.
It rumbled in the s.h.i.+p. Weight came, like a sudden fist in the belly. Nakamura held his body relaxed in harness, only his eyes moved, now and then a finger touched a control. The secret of judo, of life, was to hold every part of the organism at ease except those precise tissues needed for the moment's task- Why was it so d.a.m.nably difficult to put into practice?
MERCURY fed through pipes and pumps, past Sverdlov's control board, past the radiation wall, into the expan-sion chamber and through the ionizer and so as a spray past the sunlike heart of a thermonuclear plasma. Briefly, each atom endured a rage of mesons. It broke down, gave up its ma.s.s as pure energy, which at once became proton-antiproton pairs. Magnetic fields separated them as they were born: posi-tive and negative particles fled down the linear accelerators. The plasma, converting the death of matter directly to electric-ity, charged each ring at a successively higher potential. When the particles emerged from the last ring, they were traveling at three-fourths the speed of light.
At such an exhaust velocity, no great ma.s.s had to be dis-charged. Nor was the twin stream visible; it was too efficient. Sensitive instruments might have detected a pale gamma-colored splotch, very far behind the s.h.i.+p, as a few opposite charges finally converged on each other, but that effect was of no importance.
The process was energy-eating. It had to be. Otherwise sur-plus heat would have vaporized the s.h.i.+p.
The plasma fur-nished energy to spare. The process was a good deal more complex than a few words can describe, and yet less so than an engineer accustomed to more primitive branches of his art might imagine.
Nakamura gave himself up to the instruments. Their read-ings checked out with his running computation.
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