IV
Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn’t. He thought of forty things to re-check. Relax, he repeated—the work’s over; all that matters is in Copperhead’s memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the captain’s suited up.
The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude, except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the ship herself didn’t start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor hadn’t closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.
He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention, pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.
Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with the onrushing planet’s pale mottled green that now had the dulled richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought, or they’d already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still half out of his suit.
There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago. Its robot pilots were set to follow Prospero and imitate, nothing else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still …
Grunfeld wet his lips. “Captain,” he said hesitantly. “Captain?”
“Thank you, Grunfeld.” He caught the edge of the skull’s answering grin. “We are beginning to hit hydrogen,” the quiet voice went on. “Forward skin temperature’s up to 9 K.”
Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit.
“They’re still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a little more now. Their ship’s one thing and they’re another. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can’t stop it, they’re even less than passengers …”
The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.
The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of green—bright green as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior cabin lights glowed on.
Jackson droned: “They and their ships come from very far away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the … discontinuum, where they don’t have stars but something else and where gravity is different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn’t want to …”
And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill, less than a cobweb’s tug, of weight.
The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld’s suit had begun to revolve slowly on a vertical axis.
For a moment he glimpsed Jackson’s dark profile—all five suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn’t pull forward at high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.
The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld’s forehead. And now he was sure he felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.
A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the other ships—the fleet’s feeble sting. Like a bee’s, just one, in dying.
The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld’s suit began to close on his face like layers of pliable ice.
Jackson called faintly, “Now I understand. Their ship—” His voice was cut off.
Grunfeld’s ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.
But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now … now on Mars … now back on Earth …
The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew.
There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the ship’s jets roared, everything recovered, or didn’t.
The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out thought.
The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and in free-fall. His body didn’t feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it?
He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward again? If they’d actually come through—
There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after frictional heating?
There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?
He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken.
The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top of his opening suit.
Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex upward, that must, he realized, be the dark side of Uranus.
Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and pulled himself past the captain’s to the spaceshield.
The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.
A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel.
New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature 907 K, Gravs 87.
Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish phosphorescing.
“The torps got to ’em,” Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to the right.
“I did find out at the end,” Jackson said quietly from the left, his voice at last free of the trance-tone. “The Enemy ships weren’t ships at all. They were (there’s no other word for it) space animals. We’ve always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call ’em?) space-whales. Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate hydrogen (that’s the only way I know to say it) and spat light to move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their parasites.”
“That’s crazy,” Grunfeld said. “All of it. A child’s picture.”
“Sure it is,” Jackson agreed.
From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, “Quiet.”
The radio came on thin and wailing with static: “Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have jeep fueled and set to go—”
Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and last blue telltales still glowed for Caliban and Starveling. Breathe a prayer, he thought, for Moth and Snug.
Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be wrong. Three little words: Ship on Manual.
The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length, which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into their eyes.
They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.
The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the monitor box of the captain’s suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken from their max.
He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of Uranus.
But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as dark as those of Moth and Snug.
Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.