Part 7 (1/2)

”Uh,” grunted Sverdlov. He narrowed his eyes to peer at the detector dial. There certainly was a significant deflection yet, when whole grams of matter were being thrown out every second. It didn't heat up the ring very much, maybe not enough to notice; but negatrons plowed through terrene elec-tron sh.e.l.ls, into terrene nuclei, and atoms were destroyed. Presently there would be crystal deformation, fatigue, ulti-mate failure. He reported his findings and added with a sense of earned boasting: ”I was right.

This had to be done.”

”I shall halt blast, then. Stand by.”

Weightlessness came back. Sverdlov reached out delicately with his wrench, nipped a coil nut, and loosened the bolt. He s.h.i.+fted the coil itself backward. ”I'll have this fixed in a min-ute. There! Now give me three gees for about thirty seconds, just to make sure.”

”Three? Are you certain you-”

”I am. Fire!”

It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man. Maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who hap-pened to live somewhere else.Oh, come off it, he told himself,next thing you'll be teaching a Humane League kindergarten.

The force on him climbed, and his muscles rejoiced in it. At three gees there was no deflection against the ring or was there? He peered closer. His right hand, weighted by the tool it still bore, slipped from the member on which it had been leaning. Sverdlov was thrown off balance. He flung both arms wide, instinctively trying not to fall. His right went be-tween the field coils and into the negatron stream.

Fire sprouted.

Nakamura cut the drive. Sverdlov hung free, staring by starlight at his arm. The blast had sliced it across as cleanly as an industrial torch. Blood and water vapor rushed out and froze in a small cloud, pale among the nebulae.

There was no pain. Not yet. But his eardrums popped as pressure fell. ”Engine room!” he snapped. A part of him stood aside and marveled at his own mind. What a survival ma-chine, when the need came!

”Emergency! Drop total accelera-tor voltage to one thousand. Give me about ten amps down the tube.

Quick!”

He felt no weight, such a blast didn't exert enough push on the hull to move it appreciably. He thrust his arm back into the ion stream. Pain did come now, but in his head, as the eardrums ruptured. One minute more and he would have the bends. The gas of antiprotons roared without noise around the stump of his wrist. Steel melted. Sverdlov prodded with a hacksaw gripped in his left hand, trying to seal the s.p.a.cesuit arm shut.

He seemed far away from everything. Night ate at his brain. He asked himself once in wonderment: ”Was I planning to do this to other men?”

When he thought the sleeve was sealed, he withdrew it. ”Cut blast,” he whispered. ”Come and get me.”

His airtanks fed him oxygen, pressure climbed again inside the suit. It was good to float at the end of a life line, breathing. Until he began to strangle on his own blood. Then he gave up and accepted the gift of darkness.

NOW, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds.

Tamara had been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if s.p.a.ce itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in s.p.a.ce.

On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.

A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was small protection. But shewould not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.

She said to herself, drearily: ”I would stay here even then, except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don't know which would be worse!”

There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with her-self. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David's unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not yet . . . so far it was only sick-ness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoa.r.s.e grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehen-sible readings aloud-his island and his sea and his language lessons!

For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!

She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor's daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of gracious-ness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her hus-band's father. This was her family now.

But.

Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smas.h.i.+ng at heaped boulders with a violence that s.h.i.+vered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin.

Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.

She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm trees under infi-nitely tall skies.

She remembered David saying wryly: ”My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it-Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge-that must be why so many of them have become s.p.a.cemen in the last sev-eral generations. To get away!”

And then, touching her hair with his lips: ”But I've found what all of them were really looking for.”

It was hard to imagine that David's warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a country. She had always thought of the religion which so troubled him-he first came to know her through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David groped for a G.o.d not all iron and h.e.l.lfire-as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.

Now she saw that Skula's dwellers and Skula's G.o.d had come from Skula itself, with winter seas in their veins. David had not been struggling toward normality; he had been re-shaping himself into something which-down underneath- Magnus Ryerson thought was not human. Suddenly, almost blindingly, Tamara remembered a few weeks ago, one night when the old man had set her a ballad to translate.

”Our folk have sung it for many hundreds of years,” he said-and how he had looked at her under his heavy brows.

He hath taken off cross and iron helm, He hath bound his good horse to a limb, He hath not spoken Jesu name Since the Faerie Queen did first kiss him.

Tamara struck a fist into one palm. The wind caught her cloak and peeled it from her, so that it flapped at her shoulders like black wings. She pulled it back around her, shuddering.

The sun was a red sliver on the world's rim. Darkness would come in minutes, so thick you could freeze to death fumbling your way home. Tamara began to walk, quickly, hoping to find a decision. She had not come out today just because the house was unendurable. But her mind had been stiff, as if rusted. She still didn't know what to do.

Or rather,she thought,I do know, but haven't saved up enough courage.

WHEN she reached the house, the air was already so murky she could almost not make out whitewashed walls and steep snowstreaked roof. A few yellow gleams of light came through cracks in the shutters. She paused at the door. To go in-! But there was no choice. She twisted the k.n.o.b and stepped through. The wind and the sea-growl came in with her.

”Close the door,” said Magnus. ”Close the door, you little fool.”

She shut out all but a mumble and whine under the eaves, hung her cloak on a peg and faced around.

Magnus Ryerson sat in his worn leather chair with a worn leather-bound book in his hands. As always, as always! How could you tell one day from the next in this den? The radiglobe was turned low, so that he was mostly shadow, with an icicle gleam of eyes and a dirty-white cataract of beard. A peat fire sputtered forlornly, trying to warm a tea kettle on the hob.

Ryerson put the book down on his lap, knocked out his archaic pipe-it had made the air foul in here-and asked roughly: ”Where have you been all day, girl? I was about to go look for you. You could turn an ankle and die of exposure, alone on the ling.”

”I didn't,” said Tamara. She exchanged her boots for zori and moved toward the kitchen.

”Wait!” said Magnus. ”Will you never learn? I want my high tea just at 1630 hours-Now. You must be more careful, la.s.s. You're carrying the last of the Ryersons.”

Tamara stopped. There was a downward slant to the ancient brick floor, she felt vaguely how her body braced itself. More nearly she felt how her chilled skin, which had begun to tingle as it warmed, grew numb again.

”Besides David,” she said.

”If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?” Magnus began sc.r.a.ping out his pipe. He did not look at her.