Дэймон Найт: Orbit 11

“We don’t know that he’s lost.”

“You didn’t find him, huh?”

“No, not yet.”

“You really think he’s alive and just not answering?”

“It could be,” Daw said. He did not have to remind Moke, as he had Helen Youngmeadow, that there was no danger of running out of oxygen in a modern space suit—each suit being a system as self-sufficient as a planet and its sun; energy from the suit’s tiny pile scavenging every molecule of water and whisper of carbon dioxide and making new, fresh food, freshwater, clean air that could be used again, so that once in the suit the occupant might live in plenty until time itself destroyed him. (He had not mentioned that even death would not end the life encysted in that steady protection, since the needs of the bacteria striking in at the now defenseless corpse from the skin, out from the intestines, would be sensed, still, by the faithful, empty suit; and served.)

Daw thought of Youngmeadow dead somewhere in this strange vessel, still secure in his suit, his corpse bloating and stinking while the suit hummed on; and found, startled, that the thought was pleasant—which was absurd, he hardly knew Youngmeadow, and certainly had nothing against the man.

“His wife still out looking for him?” Moke asked.

Daw nodded, though Moke could not see him. “Yes,” he said. “So are the other parties. I’ve got a couple of men with Mrs. Youngmeadow to make sure she comes back all right.”

“I was just talking to her,” Moke said. “I think she’s been talking to Polk too”

“What about?”

“She said she’d heard you found some maps, Captain. I guess Gladiator told her.”

“No reason why she shouldn’t, but I found those while she was here—she must have seen them. While we were waiting for the first survey parties to come in.”

“You didn’t hide them from her, or anything like that?”

“No, of course not. She just didn’t show much interest in them.” Actually, Daw remembered, he had taken the charts—technically they were star charts rather than maps—to show Helen and had been rather disappointed by her reaction; as an empathist, she had explained, she was much more concerned with things that had not been vital to the ship’s operations than with the things that had.

“Everyone takes what is necessary, Captain,” she had said. “By definition they have to. It’s what is taken that could be left behind that reveals the heart.”

“She wanted to know if any of them showed the inside of the ship,” Moke said.

Daw felt tired. “I’ll talk to her,” he said, and cut Moke off.

He started to adjust his communication for the girl’s band, then thought better of it. His investigation of the command module—if in fact this was the command module—was nearly complete, and it served no purpose for him to stand by and watch Polk tinkering with his instruments. After having Gladiator scan the charts so that duplicates could be made on board for study, he had replaced the originals. Now he gathered them again.

It was the first time he had been more than two units away from the corner module he and Helen had first investigated, and though he had heard the chambers of the interior modules described by the men he had sent through them, and had seen the pictures they had taken, it was a new and a strange experience to plunge through tube after tube and emerge in chamber after chamber, each so huge it seemed a sky around him, each seeming without end.

The tubes, like those of his own ship, were circular in section; but they were dim (as Gladiator’s were not) and lined with shimmering, luminous pastels he felt certain were codes but could not decipher. His years in space had taught him the trick of creating the thing called up and down in his mind, changing them when it suited him, destroying them with the truth of gravitationless reality when he wished. In the tubes he amused himself with them, sometimes diving down a pulsing pink well, sometimes rocketing up a black gun barrel, until at last he found that he was no longer master of these false perceptions, which came and went without his volition.

Entering each module was like being flung from a ventilation duct into the rotunda of some incredible building. The walls of most were lined with enigmatic machines, the centers cobwebbed with cables spanning distances that dwarfed the great mechanisms they held. Light in the modules—at least in most—was like that in the first Daw had examined—bright, shadowless), and all-surrounding; but some were dim, and some dark. In these his utility light showed shapes and cables not greatly different from those he had seen in other modules, but in the dancing shadows it cast to the remote walls, it sometimes seemed to Daw that he saw living shapes.

At last, when he had become almost certain he had lost his way and was cursing himself (for his religious beliefs permitted any degree of self-condemnation, though they caviled at the application of the same terms to any soul except his own) for a fool and a damned fool, he saw the flicker of other lights in one of the half-lit modules and was able, a moment later, to pick out Helen Youngmeadow’s suit with his own beam and, a half-second afterward, the suits of the sailors he had sent with her. At almost the same instant he heard her voice in his phones: “Captain, is that you?”

“Yes,” he said. Now that he had found her, he discovered that he was unwilling to admit that he had come looking for her. Everyone, notoriously, fell in love with empathists—the reason they were invariably assigned as married couples. In retrospect he realized how foolish it had been for him to allow her to accompany him at all, despite the rationalizations with which he had defended the decision to himself; and he found that he was anxious that neither she nor the men with her should think that he had come here for her sake. “I understand you were asking my second about charts, Mrs. Youngmeadow,” he said, deliberately bringing his voice to the pitch he used in delivering minor reprimands. “I want to make it clear to you that if you have found any such documents they should be submitted to me for scanning as soon as possible.”

“We haven’t found any maps,” the girl said, “and if we did, of course I’d turn them over to you, though I don’t suppose you could read them either.”

The fatigue in her voice made Daw despise himself. Softening the question as much as he could, he asked, “Then why were you questioning Mr. Moke?”

“I knew you had found some. I was hoping they showed this ship and could tell us where my husband might be.”

“They’re star charts, Mrs. Youngmeadow. You saw them when I found them.”

“I wasn’t paying much attention then. Do you think they’re important?”

“Very important,” Daw said. “They could easily be the key to understanding—well, the entire system of thought of the people who built this ship. Naturally Gladiator can’t stay here—”

“Can’t stay here until my husband’s found?”

“We aren’t going to abandon your husband, Mrs. Youngmeadow.”

“I don’t suppose I could stop you if you wanted to.”

“We don’t.”

“But if you do, Captain, you’ll have to abandon me too, I’m not going back to our ship until we find out what happened to him, and if he’s still alive; you say that a person can live indefinitely in one of these suits—all right, I’m going to do that. Even if your ship leaves they’ll still send out another one from Earth to investigate this, with cultural anthropologists and so forth on board; and when they get here they’ll find me.”

One of the crewmen muttered, “Tell him!” under his breath; Daw wondered if the man realized it had been picked up by his helmet mike. To the girl he said, “They’ll find me too, Mrs. Youngmeadow. This ship is much too valuable a discovery for us to leave before someone else comes—but when they do come—this is what I was trying to say when you interrupted me—we’ll have to go. They’ll have equipment and experts; we are primarily a fighting ship. But it should be possible for you to arrange a transfer at that time.”