Part 3 (1/2)
TheCross was approaching the black star in a complex spiral curve, the re-sultant of several velocities and two accelerating vectors, which would become a nearly circular orbit seven hundred fifty thousand kilometers out.
He started to awareness of time when Ryerson came up the shaftway rungs. ”Oh,” he exclaimed.
”Tea, sir,” said the boy shyly.
”Thank you. Ah . . . set it down there, please . . . the reg-ulations forbid entering this turret during blast without in-quiring of the-No, no. Please!” Nakamura waved a hand, laughing. ”You did not know.
There is no harm done.”
He saw Ryerson, stooped under one and a half gravities, lift a heavy head to the foreign stars. The Milky Way formed a cold halo about his tangled hair. Nakamura asked gently, ”This is your first time in extrasolar s.p.a.ce, yes?”
”Y-yes, sir.” Ryerson licked his lips. The blue eyes were somehow hazy, unable to focus closer than the nebulae.
”Do not-” Nakamura paused. He had been about to say, ”Do not be afraid,” but it might hurt. He felt after words. ”s.p.a.ce is a good place to meditate,” he said. ”I use the wrong word, of course.
'Meditation,' in Zen, consists more of an at-tempt at identification with the universe than verbalized thinking. What I mean to say,” he floundered, ”is this: Some people feel themselves so helplessly small out here that they become frightened. Others, remembering that home is no more than a step away through the transmitter, become care-less and arrogant, the cosmos merely a set of meaningless numbers to them.
Both att.i.tudes are wrong, and have killed men. But if you think of yourself as being apart of everything else-integral-the same forces in you which shaped the suns do you see?”
”The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d,” whispered Ryerson, ”and the firmament showeth His handiwork . . . It is a terri-ble thing to fall into the hands of the living G.o.d.”
He had not been listening, and Nakamura did not under-stand English. The pilot sighed. ”I think you had best return to the observation deck,” he said. ”Dr. Maclaren may have need of you.”
Ryerson nodded mutely and went back down the shaft.
I preach a good theory, Nakamura told himself.Why can I not practice it? Because a stone fell from heaven onto Sarai, and suddenly father and mother and sister and house were not. Because Hideki died in my arms, after the universe had casu-ally tortured him. Because I shall never see Kyoto again, where every morning was full of cool bells. Because I am a slave of myself And yet,he thought,sometimes I have achieved peace. And only in s.p.a.ce.
Now he saw the dead sun through a viewscreen, when his s.h.i.+p swung so that it transitted the Milky Way. It was a tiny blackness. The next time around, it had grown. He wondered if it was indeed blacker than the sky. Nonsense. It should reflect starlight, should it not? But what color was metallic hydrogen?
What gases overlay the metal? s.p.a.ce, especially here, was not absolutely black: there was a certain thin but measurable neb-ular cloud around the star. So conceivably the star might be blacker than the sky.
”I must ask Maclaren,” he murmured to himself. ”He can measure it, very simply, and tell me. Meditation upon the concept of blacker than total blackness is not helpful, it seems.” That brought him a wry humor, which untensed his muscles. He grew aware of weariness. It should not have been; he had only been sitting here and pressing controls. He poured a cup of scalding tea and drank noisily and gratefully.
Down and down. Nakamura fell into an almost detached state. Now the star was close, not much smaller than the Moon seen from Earth. It grew rapidly, and crawled still more rap-idly around the circle of the viewscreens. Now it was as big as Batu, at closest approach to Sarai. Now it was bigger. The rhythms entered Nakamura's blood. Dimly, he felt himself become one with the s.h.i.+p, the fields, the immense interplay of forces. And this was why he went again and yet again into s.p.a.ce. He touched the manual controls, a.s.sisting the robots, correcting, revising, in a pattern of unformulated but bodily known harmonies, a dance, a dream, yielding, controlling, un-selfness, Nirvana, peace and wholeness.
Fire!
The shock rammed Nakamura's spine against his skull. He felt his teeth clashed together. Blood from a bitten tongue welled in his mouth. Thunder roared between the walls.
He stared into the screens, clawing for comprehension. The s.h.i.+p was a million or so kilometers out. The black star was not quite one degree wide, snipped out of an unnamed alien con-stellation. The far end of the ion accelerator system was white hot. Even as Nakamura watched, the framework curled up, writhed like fingers in agony, and vaporized.
”What's going on?”Horror bawled from the engine room.
The thrust fell off and weight dropped sickeningly. Nakamura saw h.e.l.l eat along the accelerators. He jerked his eyes around to the primary megameter. Its needle sank down a tale of numbers. The four outermost rings were already de-stroyed. Even as he watched, the next one shriveled.
It could not be felt, but he knew how the star's vast hand clamped on the s.h.i.+p and reeled her inward.
Metal whiffed into s.p.a.ce. Underloaded, the nuclear system howled its anger. Echoes banged between s.h.i.+vering decks.
”Cut!” cried Nakamura. His hand slapped the pilot's master switch.
THE silence that fell, and the no-weight, were like death.
Someone's voice gabbled from the observation deck.
Automatically, Nakamura chopped that interference out of the intercom circuit. ”Engineer Sverdlov,” he called. ”What hap-pened? Do you know what is wrong?”
”No. No.” A groan. But at least the man lived. ”Somehow the the ion streams . . . seem to have . . .
gotten diverted.
The focusing fields went awry. The blast struck the rings-but it couldn't happen!”
Nakamura hung onto his harness with all ten fingers.I will not scream, he shouted.I will not scream.
”The 'caster web seems to be gone, too,” said a rusty machine using his throat. His brother's dead face swam among the stars, just outside the turret, and mouthed at him.
”Aye.” Sverdlov must be hunched over his own viewscreens. After a while that tingled, he said harshly: ”Not yet beyond repair. All s.h.i.+ps carry a few replacement parts, in case of meteors or-We can repair the web and transmit ourselves out of here.”
”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 fit-tings. 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 contem-plated 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 wis.h.i.+ng to hold Baby-san in its arms just one more time.
Almost absently, he punched the keys of the general com-puter. 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 acceler-ators. 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 re-pair 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 fas.h.i.+on us a new transmitter, he can.”
”And if he can't, we're trapped out here! To starve! Better to crash and be done!”