Ben Bova - Flight of Exiles

There were times when Dr. Loring amused Larry, and other times when the old man exasperated him. This was one of the latter times. Stay cool, he told himself. After all, he is practically a father to you. He thinks he’s got a right to butt in.

Nodding, Larry led Dr. Loring through the door in the middle of the bridge’s back wall. It opened onto a short corridor that linked the bridge with the computer center. Off to one side of this hallway was Larry’s office. They stepped inside and Larry passed his hand over the light switch. The infrared sensor in the switch detected his body warmth and turned on the overhead light panels.

Larry gestured to the webchair and sat himself behind his desk. Loring sat down with great caution, lowering his weight onto the fragile-looking chair very slowly. The plastic squeaked.

“What’s the matter?” Larry asked.

“It’s about Dan Christopher,” Dr. Loring said, looking troubled.

Larry waited for the old man to add something else. When he didn’t, but merely sat there looking unhappy, Larry urged, “Well? What about Dan?”

“And Valery.”

Larry automatically tried to hide the jolting shock that went through him. Idiot! What are you afraid of? She loves you.

Patiently, he asked Dr. Loring, “Okay, what about Dan and Valery?”

Shaking his head, Dr. Loring said, “She’s seen him a couple of times since the fire. Had dinner with him…alone.”

“I know that.”

“I told her that I didn’t think it was right; nothing can come of it but trouble.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me? Val’s told me about it already. We’re not keeping secrets from each other. There’s nothing wrong with her having dinner with old friends—”

“He still wants her, you know.”

“I know.” I remember how I felt when she was promised to him.

“He’s asked her not to marry you until after we’ve decided about the Centaurian planet.”

Larry nodded again.

“He’s going to cause trouble.”

Larry’s patience was starting to wear thin. “Look, Dr. Loring, I know how Dan feels. I know he’s trying to gain control of the Council and have me pushed out. But you’ve got to remember that he and I were friends for a long time and …”

“He believes,” Dr. Loring said, his voice rising to interrupt Larry, “that the fire in the cryosleepers was no accident. He thinks his father was deliberately killed. Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“That’s right.”

“By whom? Who’d do such a thing? Why?”

Dr. Loring almost smiled. “You see, there are some things that you don’t know. Valery’s been afraid to tell you everything, for fear that it would cause more trouble between you and Dan. But I wormed it out of her. She can’t keep secrets from her father!”

“Why in hell would Dan think his father was murdered? What possible reason could there be?”

Shrugging, Loring replied, “I happen to_ know that he has a computer technician digging through the oldest memory cores on the ship for some special instructions that his father fed into the computer—apparently when the voyage first began. Perhaps even before the voyage started, when the ship was still in orbit around Earth.”

Larry sank back in his chair.

“Take my word for it,” Loring insisted, shaking a stubby finger in the air, “Dan is dangerous. I think he’s unbalanced … insane. And he’s determined to get his own way—with the ship, with Valery, with everything. That means he’s got to get rid of you, one way or another.”

Dan Christopher’s job aboard the ship was in Propulsion and Power.

Trained from childhood in physics and electrical engineering, Dan watched over the ship’s all-important hydrogen fusion reactors, the thermonuclear power plants that provided the ship’s rocket thrust and electrical power. Using the same energy reactions as the stars, the fusion reactors were small enough to fit into a pair of shielded blisters up on level seven—the innermost ring of the ship, closest to the hub. Small, yet these reactors had enough power in them to drive the ship across the light-years between the stars and to provide all the electrical power needed by the ship and its people for year after year after year.

The fusion reactors were like miniature suns. Inside each heavy egg-shaped radiation shield of lead and steel was a tiny, man-made star: a ball of glowing plasma, a hundred million degrees hot, held suspended in vacuum by enormously powerful magnetic fields. Deuterium—a heavy isotope of hydrogen—was fed into the fusion plasma almost one atom at a time. Energy came out, as the deuterium atoms were fused into helium. The same process that powers the sun, the stars—and hydrogen bombs.

There was enough energy in the fusion reactors to turn the entire ship into a tiny, glowing star—for an explosive flash of a second.

In theory, the reactors were expected to be quiet, almost silent. And the energy converters that changed the heat of the fusion plasma into electricity were supposed to be virtually silent too.

Yet as Dan prowled down along the metal catwalk that hung over one of the reactors, he could feel through the soles of his slippered feet the low-frequency growl of a star chained to a man’s command. The metal floor plates vibrated, the air itself seemed to be heavy with the barely audible rumbling of some unseen giant’s breathing.

Dan leaned over the catwalk’s flimsy railing and peered down at the work crew on the floor below. The railing could be flimsy because the gravity factor at level seven was only one-tenth of Earth-normal g. The ship’s designers had put the heaviest equipment in the areas where weight was almost negligible. People had to live at full Earth g, so that the living quarters were down in the outermost wheel, level one. But the big equipment was up here, where a man could haul a five-hundred kilo generator by himself, if he had to.

Dan could feel the frail railing tremble in his hands from the reactors’ deep-pitched subsonic song. The reactors themselves were little to look at, just a pair of dull metal domes some twenty meters across: like a brace of eggs lain by a giant robot bird. Off on the other side of level seven was another pair of reactors, and the smaller auxiliary electrical power generators. Between the two blisters housing the big equipment was nestled the control instrumentation and offices for the Propulsion and Power group.

The work crew on the main floor below the catwalk was still trying to get the main generator going. All the repairs had been made, and the generator had been reassembled in its place between the two reactors. But it would still not light off.

As Joe Haller had put it after an exasperating week of working on the generator: “It’s an engineer’s hell. Everything checks but nothing works.”

Dan knew they’d get it going sooner or later. But he couldn’t help wondering why the generator wasn’t working, when all the calculations and tests showed that it should.

Is there a saboteur in Joe’s team? he wondered, watching them work. And if so — why? Who’s behind all this?

“MR. CHRISTOPHER, MESSAGE FOR YOU,” said the computer’s flatly calm voice over the intercom loudspeakers.

Dan reluctantly turned away from the sweating crew beneath him and strode back toward the control area. The magnetized metal foil strips in his slippers clung slightly to the floor plates of the catwalk.

Shutting the door behind him, Dan felt the bone-quivering rumble of the reactors disappear, to be replaced by the higher-pitched hum of electrical equipment monitors, computer terminals, viewscreens. A half-dozen people were seated at monitoring desks, watching the performance of the reactors and generators.