Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“We’re holding.”

“Station Two? Do you see anything?”

Torrance Harbish said into his throat microphone, “We verify Station Seven off-line thrust. Everything else is nominal.”

“Noted. You may switch to automatic recording.”

Harbish said, “Changeover in process.” And then, in a less formal tone, “Good show, John. We’re wrapping up here. Expect us in the control room in about five minutes.”

Two more minutes, and he and Lauren Stansfield had set the scopes to automatic mode and left. Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander followed, still bickering. Maddy turned to Seth Parsigian. “You want to talk?”

“Not yet.” His sallow face was thoughtful. “Got some stuff I have to do first. I’ll come to your rooms when I’m ready to chitchat.”

“If you do come, don’t do it late at night — I found out how much I hate that. And let me tell you how to reach my quarters.”

“Don’t need to; I already know. But I got a question for you. Have you been workin’ on the Argos Group deliveries?”

“Not up here. I worked deliveries down on Earth, years ago.”

“That’s all right, then. See you.” Seth slipped out of his seat and was gone.

Maddy was alone in the observation chamber. She could go back to her rooms and wait for Seth, but she lacked the will to do so. This was a better place for thinking, here with the great wheel of Sky City below her and the silent stars above.

There was plenty to think about. Far beyond Sky City, out beyond the shield and more than four light-years away, lay the source of the particle storm. Maddy was in no danger. In principle, particle bundles spit out by the Alpha Centauri supernova could hit Sky City right this very minute, and she would be protected by the bulk of the massive structure.

Each particle bundle averaged four trillion separate nuclei, but each bundle was still minute, its mass less than a billionth of a gram. Even so, each one packed enormous energy. Maddy had heard Astarte’s casual comment a few days earlier. “Yeah, they’re little, but yer don’t want ter underestimate them. They’re really smoking. Traveling close to a tenth of light speed — not really relativistic, but getting up there — and energy goes like the square of velocity. Every one of the little buggers packs as much of a wallop as a half-gram pellet traveling at a third of a kilometer of a second — that’s the speed of a bullet as it comes out of the muzzle of a handgun. A particle bundle can do a lot more damage to human tissue than a bullet, too, because the particles in it are all charged. If the bundle comes apart inside you when it hits, that’s still worse. We still don’t know if that will happen or not.”

Maddy was protected by Sky City, but Earth was not. She looked to her left, where the hazy globe hung in the heavens. She could see the moving day-night boundary of the terminator, but the planet itself seemed exactly the same size as before. She held up her hand and measured the width of Earth between thumb and first finger. The space city was leaving its orbit, but you would never know by looking. Acceleration was imperceptible. It would be days before Earth began to shrink in the sky.

And yet Maddy had the uneasy feeling that she was already infinitely far away. Out here she had been thrown into the company of people whose dreams and ambitions and daily lives were so far removed from her own that they seemed incomprehensible. Odder yet, listening to them had made her own ambitions just as hard to understand. For the first time since she was fifteen years old, Maddy was not consumed by the immediate pressures of the here and now. She had been provided with a fatal indulgence: time to think.

Did she want to be the head of the Argos Group? Would she take Gordy Rolfe’s job, even if he (unlikely thought) went down on his knees and begged her?

A month ago, she had thought she had the best job in the world and Gordy was a genius. He was still a genius in electronics and robotics, but more and more he was also an obvious lunatic. She had spent the past nine years trying to get close to him, doing whatever pleased him, clawing her way up the Argos Group ladder so that she could be a lunatic, too.

Surely there had to be more to life than that.

Drearily Maddy lifted out of her chair and began the solitary trek back to her rooms. The four o’clock blues. They came as easily in space as back on Earth. A few hours of sleep would probably make a difference.

After that, sooner or later, would come the unsought meeting with Seth Parsigian. They had roamed Sky City together, with no result. What else did he want from her — and could she wriggle out of it?

Probably not. Maddy saw before her the rough-cut hair, the bullet head, and the wary brown eyes. It was a close call, but in his own way Seth perched as far up the tree of lunacy as Gordy Rolfe.

From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

I agreed to contact Seth Parsigian only in an emergency. There has been no emergency, and it is eight days since we last spoke to each other.

For all I know, Seth could be dead, although I would hate to be the one who sought to bring about that event. Seth is a man with a tenacious hold on life.

Where is he? Presumably he is still on Sky City, but I cannot even be sure of that. Occasionally I have donned the RV helmet, and been rewarded only with a view of the interior of his apartment. The jacket has obviously been left to hang on the wall. Wherever Seth is, and whatever he is doing, he feels no desire to share his experiences with me.

That is an attitude with which I sympathize. I am impatient for results on the Sky City murders, but were Seth to call me at this instant I would be able to report negligible progress in my thinking. I know the murderer, yet I cannot suggest a foolproof method of capture.

In truth, my thinking has been embarrassingly limited about the whole problem. My mind has been otherwise engaged. Although I can point to no one overriding concern, we have seen several distracting events.

The term we offers its own ambiguities. The meaning extends from the single elevated personage — “We are not amused” — to a family or local group, and thence the whole human race — “We are not alone.”

My comment concerning recent distracting events does not refer to our race, or, more correctly, our species, although it might well have. One might assume that the collective human mind of Earth would at this time be concentrated on the single issue of its own possible demise. The great swarm of particles generated by the Alpha Centauri supernova advances steadily, and no human power can halt or slow it. The most recent reports point to the arrival of a devastating sleet from space sooner than expected, just a few weeks or months from now. A new way of protecting Earth will be implemented, Sky City is already on the move toward the end of the space shield, the timing of everything is touch and go, and we (the species) could be wiped out or find our civilization sent back millennia.

And so one looks around the world. Are people consumed by contemplation of cosmic catastrophe, obsessed by their own potential demise?

I scanned the news leads this morning. Look on these words, ye mighty, and despair.

Scientists Prove Alpha Centauri Supernova Was “Hand of God”

According to Star Vjansander, sexy young Australian super physicist, a superbeing created the 2026 supernova of Alpha Centauri. The superbeing is being carried here in a cloud of superparticles and will shortly reach Earth.

Ghost of Lucille DeNorville Haunts Sky City

Psychic Marion Mentorian, in contact with the soul of the murder victim whose body was recently discovered,i s asking funding from the wealthy DeNorville family to visit Space City and reveal the identity of the killer.