Poul Anderson: A Circus of Hells

“Believe me, I did not wish to sacrifice you. I did not want to be involved in that wretched business at all. Honor compelled me. But I begrudged every minute away from my Talwinian research.”

Djana knelt on the deck and wept.

Blink…blink…blink…furnace glare spearing from the screens. The hull groaned and shuddered with stresses. Fighting them, the interior field set air ashake in a wild thin singing. Often, looking down a passage, you thought you saw it ripple; and perhaps it did, sliding through some acute bend in space. From time to time hideous nauseas twisted you, and your mind grew blurred. Sunward was only the alternation of night and red. Starward were no constellations nor points of light, nothing but rainbow blotches and smears.

Djana helped Flandry put the courier torpedoes, which he had programmed under normal conditions, on the launch rack. When they were outside, he must don a spacesuit and go couple them. He was gone a long while and came back white and shaken. “Done,” was everything he would tell her.

They sought the conn. He sat down, she on his lap, and they held each other through the nightmare hours. “You’re real,” she kept babbling. “You’re real.”

And the strangeness faded. Quietness, solidity, stars returned one by one. A haggard Flandry pored over instruments whose readings again made sense, about which he could again think clearly.

“Receding hyperwakes,” he breathed. “Our stunt worked. Soon’s we stop registering them—First, though, we turn our systems off.”

“Why?” she asked from her seat to which she had returned, and from her weariness.

“I can’t tell how many the ships are. Space is still somewhat kinky and—well, they may have left one posted for insurance. The moment we pass a threshold value of the metric, there’ll be no mistaking our radiation, infrared from the hull, neutrinos from the power-plant, that kind of junk. Unless we douse the sources.”

“Whatever you want, darling.”

Weightlessness was like stepping off a cliff and dropping without end. Cabin dark, the pulsar flash on one side and stars on the other crowded near in dreadful glory. Nothing remained save the faintest accumulator-powered susurrus of forced ventilation; and the cold crept inward.

“Hold me,” Djana beseeched into the blindness. “Warm me.”

A pencil-thin flashbeam from Flandry’s hand slipped along the console. Back-scattered light limned him, a shadow. Silence lengthened and lengthened until:

“Uh-oh. They’re smart as I feared. Grav waves. Somebody under primary acceleration. Has to be a ship of theirs.”

Son of Man, help us.

At the boat’s high kinetic velocity, the pulsar shrank and dimmed while they watched.

“Radar touch,” Flandry reported tunelessly.

“Th-they’ve caught us?”

“M-m-m, they may assume we’re a bit of cosmic débris. You can’t check out every blip on your scope…Oof! They’re applying a new vector. Wish I dared use the computer. It looks to me as if they’re maneuvering for an intercept with us, but I’d need math to make sure.

“If they are?” The abstractness of it, that’s half the horror. A reading, an equation, and me closed off from touching you, even seeing you. We’re not us, we’re objects. Like being already dead—no, that’s not right, Jesus promised we’ll live. He did.

“They aren’t necessarily. No beam’s latched onto us. I suspect they’ve been casting about more or less at random. We registered strong enough to rate a closer look, but they lost and haven’t refound us. Interplanetary space is bigger than most people imagine. So they may as well direct themselves according to the orbit this whatsit seemed to have, in hopes of checking us out at shorter range.”

“Will they?”

“I don’t know. If we’re caught…well, I suppose we should eschew a last-ditch stand. How would one dig a ditch in vacuum? We can surrender, hope Ydwyr can save us and another chance’ll come to worm out.” His voice in the dark was not as calm as he evidently wished.

“You’d trust Ydwyr?” lashed from her.

His beam stepped across the dials. “Closing in fast,” he said. “Radar sweep’s bound to pick us up soon. We may show as an interstellar asteroid, but considering the probability of a natural passage at any given time—” She heard and felt his despair. “Sorry, sweetheart. We gave ’em a good try, didn’t we?”

The image might have sprung to her physical vision, shark shape across the Milky Way, man’s great foes black-clad at the guns. She reached out to the stars of heaven. “God have mercy,” she cried with her whole being. “Oh, send them back where they belong!”

Blink…blink…blink.

The light ray danced. Where it touched, meters turned into pools beneath those suns that crowded the screens. “Ho-o-old,” Flandry murmured. “One minute…They’re receding!” exploded from him. “Judas priest, they, they must’ve decided the blip didn’t mean anything!”

“They’re going?” she heard herself blurt. “They are?”

“Yes. They are. Can’t’ve felt too strongly about that stray indication they got…Whoo! They’ve gone hyper! Already! Aimed back toward Siekh, seems like. And the—here, we can use our circuits again, lemme activate the secondary-wave receivers first—yes, yes, four indications, our couriers, their other three ships, right on the verge of detectability, headed out—Djana, we did it! Judas priest!”

“Not Judas, dear,” she said in worship. “Jesus.”

“Anybody you like.” Flandry turned on the fluoros.

Joy torrented from him. “You yourself—your wonderful, wonderful self—” Weight. Warm hearty gusts of air. Flandry was doing a fandango around the cabin. “We can take off ourselves inside an hour. Go a long way round for safety’s sake—but at the end, home!” He surged to embrace her. “And never mind Ydwyr,” he warbled. “We’re going to celebrate the whole way back!”

Standing in the cramped, thrumming space between bulkheads, beyond reach of him who sat chained, the Terran said: “You appreciate that the whole truth about what happened would embarrass me. I want your solemn promise you’ll support my account and drop no hint concerning Wayland.”

“Why should I agree?” the Merseian asked blandly.

“Because if you don’t,” Djana told him—venom seethed in each word—“I’ll have the pleasure of killing you.”

“No, no, spare the dramatics,” Flandry said. “Especially since he too considers an oath under duress is worthless. Ydwyr, the pilot’s data list various planets where I could let you off. You can survive. A few have intelligent natives to study. Their main drawback is that no one has found any particular reason to revisit them, so you may have a slight problem in publishing your findings. But if you don’t mind, I don’t.”

“Is that not a threat?” the prisoner rumbled.

“No more than your threat to expose my, ah, sideline financial interests. Talwin’s bound to lose its military value whatever becomes of you or me. Suppose I throw in that I’ll do what I can to help keep your scientific station alive. Under the circumstances, does that bargain sound fair?”

“Done!” Ydwyr said. He swore to the terms by the formulas of honor. Afterward he extended a hand. “And for your part, let us shake on it.”

Flandry did. Djana watched, gripping a stunner. “You’re not figuring to turn him loose now, are you?” she demanded.

“No, I’m afraid that can’t be included in the deal,” Flandry said. “Unless you’ll give me your parole, Ydwyr.”

The girl looked hurt and puzzled, then relieved when the Merseian answered: