Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“How long?”

“Seven hours. Give or take.”

“What about the jump engines? Can’t we jump out of here?”

“They’re useless without the mains.” I switched on the hyperlight transmitter.

“Arapol, this is the Belle-Marie. Code White. We are adrift near Ramses. Heavy radiation. Request immediate assistance. I say again: Code White.” I added our coordinates, set the message to repeat, and began transmitting.

Help wasn’t going to arrive in time. So I began working on the assumption we’d have to save ourselves. To that end, I pulled up everything we had on pulsars in general and Ramses in particular. I’d never really had any cause to concern myself with pulsars. The only bit of information I thought I needed was pretty basic: Stay away from them. “It has an extremely strong magnetic field,” I told Alex. “It says here that it bounces around a lot, the magnetic field, sometimes close to light speed. It interacts with the magnetic poles, and that’s what generates what you’re looking at.”

“The lights?”

“Yep. They’re cones. ” We still had the frozen image on one of the screens.

“There are two of them. Ramses is a neutron star. It spins pretty fast, and the cones rotate with it.”

“Must be damned fast. They’re a blur.”

“It rotates once in about three-quarters of a second.”

“You mean the star spins on its axis at that rate?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell’s that possible?”

“It’s small, Alex. Like the one that hit Delta Kay. It’s only a few kilometers across.”

“And it spins like a banshee.”

“You got it. This is a slow one. Some of them do several hundred revolutions per second.” The two shafts of blue light both originated on the neutron star. Their narrow ends pointed toward the pulsar.

I’ve discovered since then that, like any superdense star, a pulsar has trouble supporting its own weight. It keeps squeezing down until it achieves some sort of stability. And the more it squeezes, the faster it spins. The point is that as the pulsar gets smaller, its magnetic field becomes more compressed. Stronger. It becomes a dynamo.

“Sons of bitches,” said Alex. “I hope we can get our hands on the people who did this.”

“Consider yourself lucky the quantum drive isn’t too precise. Or they’d have shipped us right into the thing. As it is, at least we got some breathing space.”

We were 60 million klicks from the pulsar. The cones at that range were almost 6 million kilometers in diameter. And they were directly in front of us, dancing all over the sky.

Hull temperature was up, but within levels of tolerance. Internal power was okay. Attitude thrusters had fuel left. The AI was dead. We had some computer power available, off-line from the AI.

So how do you change the course of a starship when you can’t run the engines? “Maybe,” suggested Alex, “we could start heaving furniture out the airlock.”

By any reasonable definition of a star, Ramses was dead. Collapsed. Crushed by its own weight. Its nuclear fires were long since burned out. But its magnetic field had intensified. It was a trillion times stronger than Rimway’s. Or Earth’s. It was throwing out vast torrents of charged particles.

Most of the particles escaped along magnetic field lines. They came off the surface in opposite directions from the north and south magnetic poles. Which meant there were two streams, accounting for the two light cones. They were necessarily narrow at the source, but they got wider as they moved out into space. It was those streams, more or less anchored on a wildly rotating body, that produced the lighthouse effect. But Ramses was a lighthouse spinning so swiftly and so wildly that even the beams of light got confused.

“That’s why the cones are twisted at intervals,” I told Alex. “Ramses spins like a maniac, and the light cones are millions of kilometers long. But the particles can only travel at light speed, so they become spirals.” I’d been punching data into the processing unit and was starting to get results. “Okay,” I said, “we’re not in orbit. But we’re going to go right through the circus.”

The link dinged. Transmission from Arapol. It was a bit like awaiting sentence.

I activated it. A short dumpy man appeared up front. “Belle-Marie, this is Arapol.

Emergency unit Toronto is on the way. Forward situation and location to us for relay to rescue vessel. Radio transmissions are negative your area. Too much interference from Ramses. ETA Toronto nine hours from time of transmission this message. Do not go near the pulsar. I say again, do not approach the pulsar. ”

“Nine hours,” said Alex. “Call him back. Tell him that’s not good enough.”

“Alex,” I said, “they could get here during the next ten minutes, and they wouldn’t be able to find us in time.” With radio transmissions wiped out by the pulsar, it could take weeks.

I wasn’t feeling very well. “Me neither,” said Alex. “You don’t think any of that radiation’s getting in, do you?”

I’d been watching the numbers. Radiation levels outside were still rising, would continue to rise as long as we kept getting nearer the pulsar. But they weren’t yet close to being a problem. “No,” I said, “we’re fine.” But my head was starting to spin, and my stomach was sliding toward throw-up mode.

“Good.” He looked terrible. “Back in a minute.” He released himself from his harness and pulled himself out of the chair.

I watched him stagger toward the hatch. “Be careful.”

He left without answering.

The washroom door closed. A few minutes later, when he came back, he still looked pale. “I wonder,” he said, “if they did something to life support, too?”

I ran an environment check. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear it. But something’s wrong.”

I saw nothing on the status boards. No evidence of a radiation leak. The ship was holding steady. What was making us sick? “Alex,” I said, “I’m going to shut everything down for a minute.” He nodded, and I killed the power. The lights went off. And the fans. And gravity. Backup lamps blinked on. We drifted silently through the night.

And there it was. “Feel it?” I asked.

“Something,” he said.

It had a rhythm. Like a tide rolling in and out.

“Are we tumbling?”

“No. It’s more like a pulse. A heartbeat.”

I wished I knew more about pulsars. We’d done a segment on them at school, but I never expected to go anywhere near one. Nobody ever goes near one. My kabba cup was a small metal container with a straw. I removed the cup from its holder and released it.

In the zero-gee environment, it floated away, drifting toward the open hatchway.

It disappeared out into the common room. I repeated the experiment with a metal clip.

It also went out through the hatch.

“What are you doing?” asked Alex.

“Just a moment.” I tried a handkerchief. Held it out. Let it go. It went nowhere.

Just floated there at arm’s length. So we had two metal objects that had gone aft, and a handkerchief that simply stayed adrift.

“Which tells us what?” asked Alex.

I brought the systems back up, turned the lights on, but left the gravity off. “The magnetics are screwed up.” I got grip shoes out for both of us so we could get around.

Then I gave myself a crash course on pulsars.