Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

He snorted out a kind of mirth. “Consider yourself spared. The Polyugorsk low-levels weren’t nice.”

“I’ve heard about conditions there. I never quite understood how they came about.”

“The Control Authority couldn’t act. No danger to world peace. The local bosses were too useful in too many ways to higher national figures to be thrown out. Like some of the war lords in your country, I imagine, or the Leopards on Mars before fighting got provoked. A lot of money to be had in the Antarctic, for those who didn’t mind gutting the last resources, killing the last wildlife, raping the last white wilderness—” He stopped. His voice had been rising. “Well, that’s all behind us. I wonder if the human race will do any better on Beta Three. I rather doubt it.”

“How did you learn to care about such things?” she asked mutedly.

“A teacher, to begin with. My father was killed when I was young, and by the time I was twelve, my mother had nearly finished going down the drain. We had this one man, however, Mr. Melikot, an Abyssinian, I don’t know how he ended up in our hellhole of a school, but he lived for us and for what he taught, we felt it and our brains came awake… I’m not certain if he did me a favor. I got to thinking and reading, and that got me into talking and doing, and that got me into trouble till I had to skip for Mars, never mind how… Yes, I suppose it was a favor in the long run.”

“You see,” she said, smiling in her helmet, “it isn’t hard to take off a mask.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “I’m trying to oblige you, no more.”

“Because we may soon be dead. That tells me something about you also, Charles. I begin to see the why of things, the man behind them. Why they say you were honest but tight-fisted with money in the Solar System, to name a trivial detail. Why you’re often gruff, and never try to dress well though it would look good on you, and hide that possessiveness of yours behind a ‘Go your own way if you don’t want to go mine’ that can be really freezing, and—”

“Hold on! A psychoanalysis, from a few elementary facts about when I was a kid?”

“Oh no, no. That would be ridiculous, I agree. But a bit of understanding, from the way you told them. A wolf in search of a den.”

“Enough!”

“Of course. I’m happy that you — No further, not ever again, unless you want.” Chi-Yuen’s figure of speech evidently lingered in her consciousness, for she mused: “I miss animals. More than I expected. We had carp and songbirds in my parents’ house. Jacques and I had a cat in Paris. I never realized till we traveled this far, how big a part of the world the rest of the animal creation is. Crickets in summer nights, a butterfly, a hummingbird, fish jumping in me water, sparrows in a street, horses with velvet noses and warm smell — Do you think we will find anything like Earth’s animals on Beta Three?”

The ship struck.

It was too swiftly changing a pattern of assault too great. The delicate dance of energies which balanced out acceleration pressures could not be continued. Its computer choreographers directed a circuit to break, shutting off that particular system, before positive feedback wrecked it.

Those aboard felt weight shift and change. A troll sat on each chest and choked each throat. Darkness went ragged before eyes. Sweat burst forth, hearts slugged, pulses brawled. That noise was answered by the ship, a metal groan, a rip and a crash. She was not meant for stresses like these. Her safety factors were small; mass was too precious. And she rammed hydrogen atoms swollen to the heaviness of nitrogen or oxygen, dust particles bloated into meteoroids. Velocity had flattened the cloud longitudinally, it was thin, she tore through in minutes. But by that same token, the nebulina was no longer a cloud to her. It was a well-nigh solid wall.

Her outside force-screens absorbed the battering, flung matter aside in turbulent streams, protected me hull from everything except slowdown drag. Reaction was inevitable, on the fields themselves and hence on the devices which, borne outside, produced and controlled them. Frameworks crumpled. Electronic components fused. Cryogenic liquids boiled from shattered containers.

So one of the thermonuclear fires went out.

The stars saw the event differently. They saw a tenuous murky mass struck by an object incredibly swift and dense. Hydromagnetic forces snatched at atoms, whirled them about, ionized them, cast them together. Radiation flashed. The object was encompassed in a meteor blaze. During the hour of its passage, it bored a tunnel through the nebulina. That tunnel was wider than the drill, because a shock wave spread outward — and outward and outward, destroying what stability there had been, casting substance forth in gouts and tatters.

If a sun and planets had been in embryo here, they would now never form.

The invader passed. It had not lost much speed. Accelerating once more, it dwindled away toward remoter stars.

Reymont struggled back to wakefulness. He could not have been darkened long. Could he? Sound had ceased. Was he deafened? Had the air puffed out of some hole into space? Were the screens down, had gamma-colored death already sleeted through him?

No. When he listened, he made out the familiar low beat of power. The fluoropanel shone steadily in his vision. The shadow of his cocoon fell on a bulkhead and had the blurred edges which betokened ample atmosphere. Weight had returned to a single gee. Most of the ship’s automata, at least, must be functioning. “To hell with melodrama,” he heard himself say. His voice came as if from far off, a stranger’s. “We’ve got work.”

He fumbled with his harness. Muscles throbbed and ached. A trickle of blood ran over his mouth, tasting salty. Or was that sweat? Nichevo. He was operational. He crawled free, opened his helmet, sniffed — slight smell of scorch and ozone, nothing serious — and gusted one deep sigh.

The cabin was a mare’s nest. Dresser drawers had burst open and scattered their contents. He didn’t notice particularly. Chi-Yuen hadn’t answered his queries. He waded through strewn garments to the slight form. Slipping off his gauntlets, he unlatched her faceplate. Her breathing sounded normal, no wheeze or gurgle to suggest internal injuries. When he peeled back an eyelid, the pupil was broad. Probably she had just fainted. He shucked his armor, located his stun pistol, and strapped it on. Others might need help worse. He went out.

Boris Fedoroff clattered down the stairs. “How goes it?” Reymont hailed.

“I am on my way to see,” the engineer tossed back, and disappeared.

Reymont grinned sourly and pushed into Johann Freiwald’s cabin half. The German had removed his spacesuit too and sat slumped on his bed. “Raus mit dir,” Reymont said.

“I have a headache like carpenters in my skull,” Freiwald protested.

“You offered to be in our squad. I thought you were a man.”

Freiwald gave Reymont a resentful glance but was stung into motion.

The constable’s recruits were busy for the next hour. The regular spacemen were busier yet, inspecting, measuring, conferring in hushed tones. That gave them little chance to feel pain or let terror grow. The scientists and technicians had no such anodyne. From the fact that they were alive and the ship apparently working as before, they might have drawn happiness … only why didn’t Telander make an announcement? Reymont bullied them into commons, started some making coffee and others attending to the most heavily bruised. At last he felt free to head for the bridge.

He stopped to look in on Chi-Yuen, as he had done at intervals. She was finally aware, had unharnessed but collapsed on her mattress before getting all armor off. A tiny light kindled in her when she saw him. “Charles,” she susurrated.