Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

After an hour or so, and several trips to the washroom to throw up, I thought I knew what was happening. The axis of the magnetic field was well off the spin axis of the pulsar. More than thirty degrees. The plane of our vector almost aligned with the spin axis. So the magnetic field, as far as we were concerned, was off center.

Ramses was also oscillating, and it was strong. The magnetic forces were rocking the ship.

Alex made an animal sound. “I’m not following.”

“We’re getting eddy currents in the hull. They keep changing our orientation.

We have too much movement in too many directions.”

“Well, whatever. Can we do anything about it?”

“No. But the good news is that it’s slowing us down.” The hull was warm. “It’s heating up,” I said.

“Praise be!” Alex looked delighted. “We get a break! Enough that the Toronto will be here before we go into the soup?”

“No. Unfortunately not. But it’s going to give us”-I tapped a key and studied the result-“another two hours.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that helps. It’s just two extra hours to be sick.”

Then he brightened. “Wait a minute. How about the shuttle? It’s got a full tank. Why don’t we use it to clear out? Leave the ship?”

I’d already considered it and discarded the idea. “Its hull is too thin. If we go out in that, we’d be fried in about two minutes.”

“Then how about transferring its fuel? To the mains? Can we do that?”

“Different kind of fuel. And not enough to do any good anyhow.”

“So what do we have left, Chase?” he asked.

“Actually, the shuttle might come in handy. It uses a superconductor system during launch. And we’ve got some spare wire for it in cargo.”

“How does that help us?”

“Superconductors, at least some of them, don’t like external magnetic fields. It’s the way glide trains work. You turn it on, and it automatically removes itself from a region of high field strength to low field strength. It’s called the Meissner Effect.”

“So we are going to-”

“-Do a little electrical work.”

We had about sixty meters of superconducting wire in storage. We brought it out and cut it in half. We took one segment to cargo, which was located beneath the bridge, to the point farthest forward in the ship. We fastened it to the leading bulkhead with magnetic staples. “In a spiral,” I told him, adding, “I think.”

“You’re not sure, Chase?”

“Of course I’m not sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to take over-”

“No. I’m sorry. I wasn’t criticizing. Listen, get us clear of this, and you get a bonus.”

“Thank you.”

“You can name the bonus.”

We took the rest of the wire back into the engine room, at the aft end of the ship, and put it up the same way, on the rearmost bulkhead. “Now,” I said, “we need current, the more the better. And a sink.”

He frowned. “A washbasin?”

“No. A place to put the electricity after it runs through the coils.”

He stood there, looking puzzled.

The gravity control was our best bet. Artificial gravity requires substantial power, and the system has robust cells, which would be sufficient to absorb the dump.

“Why do we need to drain the power?” he asked.

“Because superconductors are a bit different from ordinary circuits. It’s easy to get the current going, but to shut it down, we need a place that can drain it off.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m glad one of us knows this stuff.”

“Alex,” I said, “this is all theory to me. I may be missing something. But it has a decent chance to work.”

Over his shoulder I could see one of the monitors. The light cones flickered across the screen. They were velvet blue. Lovely. Almost enticing.

The quantum drive uses a slide control device to monitor and regulate the power feed.

After we had the coil in place, I removed it, and collected the backup unit from storage. I wired each spiral into one of the slide controls and connected the controls to the AG generator. “Center position,” I told Alex, “is neutral. No power. Up, the current runs clockwise; down is counterclockwise. When it’s powered up, it should make the ship a large magnet, with north at the bow and south at the tail. Or vice versa.”

“Or vice versa? You don’t know?”

It was as if by explaining it, I gained real control over events. Describe the procedure, and it has to be so. “We need to align our north to the pulsar’s south. And our south to its north. If we can do that, the magnetic field will push us clear.”

“Good. That seems simple enough.”

“Okay. Hang on.” We belted down, and I put the pulsar on the navigation screen.

“First step: Line up.”

I used the alignment thrusters to turn Belle around. Get us angled parallel with the north-south axis of the pulsar. Tail up, nose down. When I had it as close as I could get it, I prepared to initiate step two.

“What’s step two?” he asked.

“Activate.”

I pushed the sliders up. Current flowed into the system. The ship lurched.

I was thrown sharply against the harness. Then shaken. Up and down, back and forth. Lots of stops and jolts. It was like being on one of those three-dimensional bumper rides in an amusement park, where the bumper car takes you ahead and bangs to a stop and takes you ahead again and bangs to another stop. Except this was serious stuff. We were tossed every which way, jerked back, forth, and sideways, thrown relentlessly against the harnesses. “No!” I screamed.

Alex was telling me to shut it down. It felt as if Belle was coming apart. I switched off the power, and it stopped.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe the current needs to go the other way.”

We tried it, with a similar result.

I went back to my data. Eventually I figured out what had happened. “The magnetic axis at Ramses is thirty degrees off the spin axis,” I told Alex. “I should have realized that would blow the program.”

“Why?”

“When we turned on the power, the ship aligned with the magnetic field, which it was supposed to do. But because it’s thirty degrees off center, the magnetic field kept changing as the pulsar spun. Every three-quarters of a second. That was what banged us around.

“Can we fix it?” Alex asked hopefully. “Try it again?”

“I have no idea how to compensate.”

“So,” he said, “what now?”

We were down to about five hours.

On the Belle-Marie, the shuttle was launched from the starboard side, and the main airlock was to port. That suggested another possibility.

I reactivated the gravity. I also killed the monitors so we didn’t have to watch the two sabers getting brighter and bigger.

The bulkheads were continuing to heat up, and the eddy forces were becoming more pronounced. On the bridge, we developed a drag forward. But if we went back to the washroom, which was located at the rear of the living quarters, the effect went in the opposite direction: Metal objects were pulled farther aft.

A buzzer sounded. I shut it off. “Yellow alert,” I explained. “Radiation.”

Alex nodded, but said nothing. Occasionally I caught him watching me, waiting for me to come up with something. And I sat there while forces that felt like tides dragged and pushed. I tried to put it out of my mind, to concentrate on what we needed to do. The critical point was that magnetic fields do push against one another.

Finally, I thought I had worked out another approach.

“I hope it’s better than last time,” Alex said. He must have seen that the comment was irritating because he immediately apologized.