Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

They all stared at the silent torrent of flame pouring out of Ragnarok.

Then she was moving, faster, faster yet. The jetstream swung and the port went black.

“It’s burning! Get the foam!”

Kranz grabbed a sealant cannister and they raced to the edge of the hard-wall area, where Ragnarok's exhaust had seared the bubble. When the burns were sealed the ship was a dwindling firetail among the stars.

“Topanga doesn’t like hospitals,” Gollem told them.

“The power units!” Kranz said urgently. “Call her back!”

They were pushing Gollem toward the commo board.

“No way. She just blew the last ignition charge. Where she’s headed now she goes.”

“What do you mean? To Coronis?”

“Never.” He rubbed his shaggy head. “I—I don’t recall exactly.

Mars, maybe the sun.”

“With the power units that would have saved these people.” Kranz’s face had the expression he probably used on gangrene. “Thanks to you. I suggest that you remove yourself from my sight for the remainder of our joint existence.”

“There never were any power units,” Gollem said, starting to go out.

“The phagers got my boat and you saw for yourself what the drive was like. Her acceleration would have broken you apart.”

The woman followed him out.

“Who was she, spacer?”

“Topanga Orlov,” Gollem said painfully. “Val Orlov’s wife. They were the first Saturn mission. That was their ship, Ragnarok. She was holed up in my sector.”

“You just wanted air.”

Gollem nodded.

They were by the base display tank. The computer was running a realtime display of the oncoming Trojans. The green blip was Medbase and the red blip with the smear was the smaller Trojan and attendant gravel tail. He studied the vectors. No doubt.

It was now dark-period. Sleep time coming up. The people here might eat breakfast, but for true they wouldn’t eat lunch. By noon or thereabouts

Medbase would be organic enrichment on a swarm of space ice.

So would ex-Inspector Gollem.

The two medics went out on the wards and Kranz unbent enough to accept Gollem’s offer to man the commo board. The spacer wobbled in to watch him. The sight of Ragnarok’s blast-out had lit his fires.

Gollem taped a routine red-call and began to hunt across the bands.

The old man mumbled about ships. Nobody was answering, nobody would.

Once Gollem thought he heard an echo from Topanga, but it was nothing.

Her oxy must be long gone by now, he thought. A mad old phage-ghost on her last trip. Where had he computed her to? He seemed to recall something about Mars. At least they wouldn’t end in some trophy-hunter’s plastic park.

“You know what they got in them cocoons? Squatters!” The old man squinted out of his good side to see how Gollem took this.

“Skinheads. Freaks ‘n’ crotties. Phagers, even. Medics, they don’t care.” He sighed, scratched his burned skin with his stump. “Grounders. They won’t last out here.”

“Too right,” Gollem agreed. “Like maybe tomorrow.” That tickled the old man.

Toward midnight Kranz took over. The woman brought in some hot redeye.

Gollem started to refuse and then realized his stomach wasn’t hurting any more. Nothing to worry about now. He sipped the stimulant. The woman was looking at a scanner.

“She was beautiful,” she murmured.

“Knock it off, Anna,” Kranz snapped.

She went on scanning and suddenly caught her breath.

“Your name. It’s Gollem, isn’t it?”

Gollem nodded and got up to go look at the tank.

Presently the woman Anna came out after him and looked at the tank, too. The old spacer was asleep in the corner.

“Topanga was married to a George Gollem once,” Anna said quietly.

“They had a son. On Luna.”

Gollem took the scanner cartridge out of her hand and flipped it into the wastechute. She said nothing more. They both watched the tank for a while.

Gollem noticed that her eyes were almost good enough to make up for her chin. She didn’t look at him. The tank didn’t change.

Around four she went in and took over from Kranz and the men settled down to wait.

“Medbase Themis calling, please come in. Medbase Themis calling anyone,” the woman whispered monotonously.

Kranz went out. It seemed a lot of work to breathe.

Suddenly Kranz snapped his fingers from the next room. Gollem went to him.

“Look.”

They hung over the tank. The red smear was closer to the green blip.

Between them was a yellow spark.

“What is that?”

Gollem shrugged. “A rock.”

“Impossible, we. scan-swept that area a dozen times.”

“No mass,” Gollem frowned. “It’s a tank ghost.”

Kranz began systematically flushing the computer input checks. The woman left the board and came to lean over the tank. Gollem watched absently, his brain picking at phage-warped memories. Something about the computer.

On impulse he went to the commo board and ran the receiver through its limits. All he got was a blast of squeals and whistles, the stress-front of the incoming rocks.

“What is it?” Anna’s eyes were phosphorescent.

“Nothing.”

Kranz finished his checks. The yellow ghost stayed in, sidling toward the red smear. If that were a rock, and it had about a hundred times more mass than it could have, it just might deflect the Trojan’s gravel swarm. But it didn’t.

Gollem played monotonously with the board. The old spacer snored. The minutes congealed. Kranz shook himself, took Anna out to tour the wards. When they came back they stopped at the tank.

The whatever-it-was stayed in, closing on the Trojan.

Sometime in the unreal dim light hours Gollem caught it, wavering on a gale of space noise: “I have contact! Val! I’m coming—” They crowded around him as he coaxed the tuners but there was nothing there.

Presently a ripple of relays tripped off in the next room and they all ran to the tank. It was dead; the computer had protected itself against an induction overload.

They never knew exactly what happened.

“It’s possible,” Gollem admitted to them. It was long after noon when they decided to eat.

“While we were on the way here I know I computed that Trojan all the way to Medbase, before that I got really bombed. Maybe I threw a bridge into the course computer, maybe it was already in. Say she took off with no course setting. Those old mechs are set to hunt. It’s possible it inverted and boosted straight back out that trajectory to the rock.”

“But your ship had no mass,” Kranz objected.

“That thing was a space-scoop feeding a monster drive. The pile dampers were cheese. Ragnarok could have scooped herself solid right through the gravel cloud and blown as she hit the Trojan. You could get a pocket sun.”

They went over it again at dark-period. And again later while he and Anna looked at nothing in particular out the ports. A long time after that he showed her a script he’d fixed for the wall of Medbase Free Enclave:

Launched in abyssal cupolas of space ward endless terminas,

Easters of speeding light—

Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace

On clarion cylinders pass out of sight.