Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

The three of them had been cooped up together inside the walker’s inflated bubble for an hour now, breathing by courtesy of the walker’s hydrogen-oxygen submetabolism. The curator had recovered somewhat and was getting snappish.

“Does that mean it’s going to take longer?” he complained. “I’m getting hungry. And my eyes and throat are burning from the atmosphere in here.”

“Be thankful you’re breathing at all,” Jao said. “We’re all going to be a little hungry after a while, but at least we won’t die of thirst.”

“See here,” the little man said. “I insist—”

Bram interrupted. “If we keep on this way much longer, by the time we overtake Yggdrasil, we’ll be thousands of miles off the rim. They won’t know where to look for us. And our suit radios don’t have that kind of range.”

“Yah, I guess we better have a little course correction about now,” Jao said.

“With what? I thought you said you shot off all our rockets.”

“Oh, there were a couple of spares left over from when I rigged the pallet,” Jao said casually. “They were still in the corner where I stowed them, fortunately. Under a tarpaulin. The stevedores must’ve thought they were part of the cargo. I lugged them over here while that walking appetite was trying to package you for its dinner.”

He gestured negligently at the thousand square feet of lumpy cargo net on which the walker rested. Bram saw the two solid-propellant canisters lying several feet away.

“What good will those do?” he asked. “Two little booster rockets aren’t enough to nudge a mass like this after the kick it got.”

“Oh, we don’t have to push the whole mass,” Jao said.

“Even if we dumped everything—at least as much as we could manage in the next hour, working at top speed—the platform itself has too much mass. We’d never be able to kill enough momentum to come out with the right vector.” He gestured at the receding rimscape and shrugged. “And after another hour of this…”

“We’ll ride the walker in!” Jao said impatiently. “Use it as our lifeboat. It weighs practically nothing, and there’s just the combined mass of the three of us. There’s enough thrust in just one of those boosters to change our vector while conserving the useful momentum toward Yggdrasil!”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all in the angles. I’ll retrofire the second rocket to slow us down at the other end enough to compensate for the extra momentum. Or most of it, anyway. We’ll hang in Yggdrasil’s space for hours—more than enough to zero in on our suit radios. And if we’re still out of range, I can rig up a hydrogen flare or something.”

They set to work with a will. There was more than enough cordage to lash the two canisters in position on the walker’s spindly frame. “Best to secure the retro-rocket now, while we have some footing underneath us,” Jao said. “I can align it precisely with the median axis. When it’s time to fire, we’ll aim the whole walker by squirting oxygen or something.”

“You going to clear the pallet the same way?”

“No … too many variables. I’m using the pallet as our launch platform. I know how it’s tumbling.”

Jao had done wonders with a few simple tools—the timer of his neck computer, a couple of wooden stakes marked off with measuring lines, a loop sight made of bent wire. “We can’t miss,” he said. “It’s a three-hundred-mile-wide target.”

Overcoming their distaste, they scavenged the dragonfly air tanks, then discovered that they were unusable. The air was thick with contaminants. One whiff set the curator coughing and wheezing.

“What’s the air of their world like if they can breathe that? ” Bram wondered aloud.

“Never mind,” Jao said. “Take ’em along. We’ll use ’em for attitude jets.”

They were about to leave when they saw movement amid the jumbled cargo. “We’ve got a stowaway,” Jao said.

Bram tensed, but it was only a Cuddly. They coaxed the little fellow closer, then grabbed him. His fur was beginning to lose the trapped air that made it fluffy.

“We’d better take him with us,” Bram said. “He can’t last much longer here.”

The small creature went willingly with them into the walker’s inflated bubble, eagerly sniffing the air. He immediately made a nuisance of himself by attempting to curl up in the lap of the one person there who didn’t care for animals—the curator.

“Get him off me,” the curator yelled. “I don’t want him messing up these etchings.”

“Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, he’s not going to hurt anything,” Jao said. “You’ve got them in nitrogen envelopes, anyway.”

Bram lifted the little beast away. “He’s an old one,” he said. “Look at that grizzled fur.”

“Yar, he’s lived a long time, all right. His string almost ran out here, though. He would have gone spinning through vacuum for eternity. Lucky we saw him in time.”

“Smart of him to come out and show himself, you mean.”

Jao cocked his head. “Going to bring him home to Mim?”

The Cuddly settled contentedly in Bram’s lap. “I guess I’ve got myself another Cuddly,” he sighed. “I hope he gets along with Loki.”

The furry animal responded to Bram’s voice by lifting its gray muzzle and blinking at him with big trusting brown eyes.

“What are you going to name him?” Jao asked.

“Who was that character in King James who lived so long? Methuselah. I’ll call him Methuselah.”

“Hear that, Methuselah? I guess you’ve got yourself a new home.” Jao spoke absently, his eye on the changing chronograph display of his pendant computer. “Five more seconds, then we’ll be pointed just right. Hold on, here we go.”

He set off the solid fuel booster with the yank of a wire, and the walker flew like a cork into space. The square bulk of the pallet tumbled away from them and grew smaller against the disk-filled night.

“Hold tight,” the voice of Lydis crackled through the static. “I’m coming to pick you up.”

“Did everybody make it?” Bram asked.

“Yes, the last shuttle got here hours ago. Smeth’s into his countdown. We blast off within the fivehour.”

That explained why Yggdrasil had stopped spinning. The tree’s green hemispheres filled the sky ahead of them, a sandwich with the void of space for a filling. The trunk was a stubby bar in the middle, eclipsing stars, seemingly pierced by the long skewer of the probe behind it. They were still too far above the surface to make out any detail of branches or leaf-clothed roots, but scattered here and there across the greener dome were the pinpoint lights of human habitation.

Bram looked for the yellow wink of Lydis’s drive and found it to one side. There was a more ominous sight beyond it—the pearly motes of dragonfly bubbles floating among the stars.

“How far from Yggdrasil do you make them?” Bram asked.

“We’ll beat them,” she said shortly, and switched off.

The burn was a long one, lasting almost an hour. Bram watched the flame until it winked out. Ten minutes later it flared up again, many times brighter now that it was facing them.

“That daughter of yours doesn’t fool around,” Jao said admiringly. “Burn till turnover, and no corrections.” He glanced at the chronograph window of his display. “She’ll be here in less than nine decaminutes.”

Actually it took a full hour; Jao had forgotten to allow for the fact that Lydis would have to shut off her engine a little early to avoid cooking them and coast the last few miles. Even so, she was still killing momentum with her hydrazine maneuvering jets when she arrived.

They watched through the clear bubble as the rhombohedral bulk bore down on them. Lydis was flying a heavy-duty space tug—a comet chaser—instead of one of the lightweight interbranch shuttles.