Ben Bova - Flight of Exiles

To the Pratt family, with thanks for fine times.

“Fire… it’s on fire!”

“EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY.”

“Attention everyone. Emergency in cryonics area six. Damage Control and Life Support groups to cryonics area six immediately. Emergency.”

“The whole area’s a mass of flames! The standby equipment is out! Get more men up here, quick!”

The starship had no name. The people aboard merely called it “the ship.” It had originally been a huge artificial satellite orbiting around Earth, a minor city in space, hugging close to the Mother World. Then it was made into a prison for thousands of the world’s best scientists and their families. Now it was a starship, coasting silently from the solar system toward the triple star system, Alpha Centauri.

Inside the main control center, things were anything but quiet.

“There are fifty men and women in cryosleepers in number six area. If you can’t get that fire under control they’ll die.”

Larry Belsen was standing up on the ship’s bridge. It was actually a long curving row of desk consoles, where seated technicians worked the controls that watched and directed every section of the mammoth ship. Larry’s job was as close to a ship’s captain as any job on the ship; he was in charge of this Command and Control center, he had a finger on every pulsebeat in the ship.

The technicians were hunched over the keyboards, fingers flying over the buttons that electronically linked all of the great ship’s machinery and people. In front of each of their desks were viewscreens that showed them pictures, graphs, charts, every kind of information from each compartment and piece of equipment aboard engines, computers, life support, living quarters, work areas, cryonics units, power systems, all on view in the hundreds of screens.

Normally, Larry thought of the curving ring of screens as the eye of a giant electronic insect, multifaceted to see into all the areas of the ship. He had studied about Earth’s insects briefly in a biology course, on the learning tapes. But now his attention was riveted to one particular screen, where the fire was raging in cryonics area six. There wasn’t much he could see smoke obscured almost everything.

He put a hand on the shoulder of the girl working that console.

“Can’t you get the emergency equipment functioning?”

She was a thin, dark-skinned girl, with close-cropped hair. Glancing up at Larry. “It should’ve gone on automatically. But it won’t respond at all. I’ve tried.” Her eyes were wide with fear, anxiety.

“It’s not your fault,” Larry said calmly “Don’t blame yourself.”

“But there are fifty sleepers in there!”

Larry shook his head. Without bothering to go across to the life support displays, he said, “They must be dead by now, Tania. No sense tearing yourself up over it.”

He took a step to the guy sitting at the next desk console. “You in touch with the Damage Control group?”

“Yes they’ve plugged into a wall phone out in the main corridor, just outside area six.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“It’s Mort Campbell’s unit, but he’s not the one on the phone.”

“Let me talk.”

“Is it cryonics six?”

Larry turned to see Dan Christopher at the door down at the far end of the bridge. For an instant, everything seemed to stand still people frozen at the console desks, communications speakers quiet, viewscreens stilled.

The two of them looked almost like brothers, at first glance. Larry was tall and slim with dark hair that he kept clipped fairly short. His eyes, though, were a cold gray, like a granite rock floating in space far from the warmth of a star. Dan was the same height and also youthfully slim. His hair was a lighter shade, and almost shoulder length. It curled slightly. His eyes were fiercely black, deep and flashing. Both of them were wearing workshift coveralls, Larry’s the blue-gray shade of the ship’s Command and Control personnel, Dan’s the howling orange of the Propulsion and Power section.

“Is it six?” Dan demanded, his voice rising.

Larry didn’t answer, he merely nodded slowly.

“My father’s in there!”

By now Larry had crossed the plastic tiled floor of the bridge and was within arm’s reach of Dan. He took him by the arm.

“So is mine! There’s nothing you can do, Dan. The Damage Control group’s already there, but…”

“My father!”

Dan pulled loose and yanked the door open. Larry stood there and watched him disappear down the corridor running, until the door automatically slid shut again.

With a sad shake of his head, Larry went back to the control desks and viewscreens.

“You still in contact with the Damage Control party?”

The fellow nodded and pointed to the main screen over his desk, in the center of a group of seven screens. A scared-looking teenager was in view. He was looking somewhere off camera, coughing in the smoke that was drifting past him.

“What’s going on up there?” Larry asked sharply.

The kid in the screen seemed to jerk with surprise. Then turning full face toward the screen, he said:

“Mr. Campbell and the crew are in there I saw flames coming through the main hatch a few minutes ago, but there’s only smoke now.”

“Is anybody hurt?”

“I don’t know. They’re all inside; there nobody’s come out.”

“Did they have smoke masks?”

“Yeah “

“Where’s yours?” Larry asked.

The kid looked startled again “I—uh—yeah, it’s right here. I got it.”

More gently, Larry said, “Don’t you think it might be a good idea to put it on? It can’t protect you while it’s zipped to your belt.”

Larry found that he was bending over the shoulder of the seated technician. He straightened up and glanced at the life support screens on the next console. They were blank, dead.

Fifty people in there. Dan’s father… and my own.

“Larry… look.”

He turned his attention back to the viewscreen. The Damage Control group was trudging wearily back into the corridor. Their faces’ were smudged, their coveralls blackened. The foamers and other fire-fighting equipment they dragged seemed to weigh tons.

There was hardly any smoke coming from the hatch now. The last man to step out into the corridor slowly unclipped his smoke mask. Larry recognized him as Mort Campbell stocky, slow-moving but always sure of himself, one of the oldest men working on this shift—nearly thirty.

Then Dan Christopher came dashing into view. He pushed wordlessly past the first few men of the Damage Control group, his eyes wild, his mouth open in silent frenzy.

Campbell stopped him at the hatch. Dan tried to dodge around him, but Campbell grabbed Dan by his slim shoulders and held him firmly.

“Don’t go in there. It’s not pretty.”

“My father…”

“They’re all dead.”

Watching them in the viewscreen, Larry felt his insides sink. You knew he was dead, he told himself. But knowing it in your head and feeling it in your guts are two entirely different things.

He knew all the technicians, all up and down the long row of consoles, were staring at him now. He stood unmoved, his face frozen into a mask of concentration, and kept his eyes on the viewscreen. Inside his head, he was telling himself over and over, You never knew him. He was frozen before you were old enough to remember him. There’s no reason for you to break up.

Dan’s reaction was very different.

“NO!” he screamed, and he twisted out of Campbell’s grasp and darted into the still smoky cryonics area. The older man slipped his face mask back on and went in after him.