Crashlander Read online

Two hours passed.

  The red glow of the radiator fin became more pronounced. So did the dull uniformity of the planetary surface. The planet was a disk now beyond the front window; if you watched it for a while you could see it grow. Turning ship to face the planet had made no difference to the gravity drag.

  “Cue Ball,” said Elephant.

  “No good. It’s been used. Beta Lyrae I.”

  “Cannonball Express, then.”

  “Elephant, what are you doing here?”

  He turned, startled. “What do you mean?”

  “Look, you know by now I’m with you all the way. But I do wonder. You spent a million stars getting here, and you’d have spent two if you had to. You could be home in the Rockies with Dianna or hovering near Beta Lyrae, which is unusual enough and better scenery than this snowball. You could be sampling oddball drugs in Crashlanding or looking for Mist Demons on Plateau. Why here?”

  “Because it is there.”

  “What the blazes is that supposed to mean?”

  “Bey, once upon a time there was a guy named Miller. Six years ago he took a ramscoop-fusion drive ship and put a hyperdrive in it and set out for the edge of the universe, figuring he could get his hydrogen from space and use the fusion plant to power his hyperdrive. He’s probably still going. He’ll be going forever unless he hits something. Why?”

  “A psychiatrist I’m not.”

  “He wants to be remembered. When you’re dead a hundred years, what will you be remembered for?”

  “I’ll be the idiot who rode with Gregory Pelton, who spent two months and more than a million stars to set his ship down on a totally worthless planet.”

  “Gronk. All right, what about abstract knowledge? This star will be out of known space in ten years. Our only chance to explore it is right now. What—”

  There was an almost silent breeze of air, and a strangling pressure in my larynx, and a stabbing pain in my ears, simultaneously. I heard the bare beginning of an alarm, but I was already reaching for my helmet. I clamped it down hard, spun the collar, and gave vent to an enormous belch at the same time that the wind went shrieking from my lungs.

  There was no way to realize what was happening—and no time. But vacuum was around us, and air was spraying into my suit, frigid air. Iron spikes were being driven through my ears, but I was going to live. My lungs held a ghastly emptiness, but I would live. I turned to Elephant.

  The fear of death was naked in his face. He had his helmet down, but he was having trouble with the collar. I had to force his hands away to get it fastened right. His helmet misted over, then cleared; he was getting air. Had it come in time to save his life?

  I was alive. The pain was leaving my ears, and I was breathing: inhale, pause, inhale, as the pressure rose to normal.

  I’d seen what had happened. Now I had time to think it through, to remember it, to play it back.

  What had happened was insane.

  The hull had turned to dust. Just that. All at once and nothing first, the ship’s outside had disintegrated and blown away on a whispering breath of breathing air. I’d seen it.

  And sure enough, the hull was gone. Only the innards of the ship remained. Before me, the lighted control board. A little below that, the manhole to the packed bubble and the bubble package itself. Above the board, the half disk of the mystery planet and stars. To the left, stars. To the right, Elephant, looking dazed and scared, and beyond him, stars. Behind me, the air lock, the kitchen storage block and dial board, a glimpse of the landing legs and glowing radiator fin, and stars. The ST∞ was a skeleton.

  Elephant shook his head, then turned on his suit radio. I heard the magnified click in my helmet.

  We looked at each other, waiting. But there was nothing to say. Except, Elephant, look! We don’t have a hull no more! Isn’t that remarkable?

  I sighed, turned to the control board, and began nursing the fusion drive to life. From what I could see of the ship, nothing seemed to be floating away. Whatever had been fixed to the hull must also have been fixed to other things.

  “What are you doing, Bey?”

  “Getting us out of here. Uh, you can scream now.”

  “Why? I mean, why leave?”

  He’d flipped. Flatlanders are basically unstable. I got the drive pushing us at low power, turned off the gravity drag, and turned to face him. “Look, Elephant. No hull.” I swept an arm around me. “None.”

  “But what’s left of the ship is still mine?”

  “Uh, yah. Sure.”

  “I want to land. Can you talk me out of it?”

  He was serious. Completely so. “The landing legs are intact,” he went on. “Our suits can keep out the radiation for three days. We could land and take off in twelve hours.”

  “We probably could.”

  “And we spent going on two months getting here.”

  “Right.”

  “I’d feel like an idiot getting this close and then turning for home. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I would, except for one thing. And that one thing says you’re landing this ship over my unconscious body.”

  “All right, the hull turned to dust and blew away. What does that mean? It means we’ve got a faulty hull, and I’m going to sue the hind legs off General Products when we get back. But do you know what caused it?”

  “No.”

  “So why do you assume it’s some kind of threat?”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” I said. I turned the ship until it was tail down to Cannonball Express. “Now. We’ll be there in three hours if you insist on landing. It’s your ship, just as you say. But I’m going to try to talk you out of it.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Have you had space-pilot training?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Did it include a history of errors course?”

  “I don’t think so. We got a little history of the state of the art.”

  “That’s something. You remember that they started out with chemical fuels and that the first ship to the asteroids was built in orbit around Earth’s moon?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “This you may not have heard. There were three men in that ship, and when they were launched, it was in an orbit that took them just slightly inside the moon’s orbit, then out again and away. About thirty hours after launching the men noticed that all their ports were turning opaque. A concentration of dust in their path was putting little meteor pits all through the quartz. Two of the men wanted to continue on, using instruments to finish their mission. But the third man was in command. They used their rockets and stopped themselves dead.

  “Remember, materials weren’t as durable in those days, and nothing they were using had been well tested. The men stopped their ship in the orbit of the moon, which by then was 230,000 miles behind them, and called base to say they’d aborted the mission.”

  “You remember this pretty well. How come?”

  “They drilled these stories into us again and again. Everything they tried to teach us was illustrated with something from history. It stuck.”

  “Go on.”

  “They called base and told them about their windows fogging up. Somebody decided it was dust, and someone else suddenly realized they’d launched the ship through one of the moon’s Trojan points.”

  Elephant laughed, then coughed. “Wish I hadn’t breathed so much vacuum. I gather you’re leading up to something.”

  “If the ship hadn’t stopped, it would have been wrecked. The dust would have torn it apart. The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.”

  “Sounds paranoid.”

  “Maybe it does to a flatlander. You come from a planet so kind to you, so seemingly adapted to you, that you think the whole universe is your oyster. You might remember my neutron star story. I’d have been killed if I hadn’t understood that tidal effect in time.”

  “So you would. So you think flatlanders are all fools?”

&nbs
p; “No, Elephant. Just not paranoid enough. And I refuse to apologize.”

  “Who asked you?”

  “I’ll land with you if you can tell me what made our hull turn to dust.”

  Elephant crossed his arms and glared forward. I shut up and waited.

  By and by he said, “Can we get home?”

  “I don’t know. The hyperdrive motor will work, and we can use the gravity drag to slow us down to something like normal. Physically we should be able to do it.”

  “Okay. Let’s go. But I’ll tell you this, Bey. If I were alone, I’d go down, and damn the hull.”

  So we turned tail and ran, under protest from Elephant. In four hours we were far enough from Cannonball Express’s gravity well to enter hyperspace.

  I turned on the hyperdrive, gasped, and turned it off just as fast as I could. We sat there shaking, and Elephant said, “We can inflate the bubble.”

  “But can we get in?”

  “It doesn’t have an air lock.”

  We worked it, though. There was a pressure-control dial in the cabin, and we set it for zero; the electromagnetic field that folded the bubble would now inflate it without pressure. We went inside, pressurized it, and took off our helmets.

  “We’re out of the radiation field,” said Elephant. “I looked.”

  “Good.” You can go pretty far in even a couple of seconds of hyperdrive. “Now, there’s one thing I’ve got to know. Can you take that again?”

  Elephant shuddered. “Can you?”

  “I think so. I can do all the navigating if I have to.”

  “Anything you can take, I can take.”

  “Can you take it and stay sane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can trade off. But if you change your mind, let me know that instant. A lot of good men have left their marbles in the Blind Spot, and all they had were a couple of windows.”

  “I believe you. Indeed I do, sir. How do we work it?”

  “We’ll have to chart a course through the least dense part of space. The nearest inhabited world is Kzin. I hate to risk asking help from the kzinti, but we may have to.”

  “Tell you what, Bey. Let’s at least try to reach Jinx. I want to use that number of yours to give the puppeteers hell.”

  “Sure. We can always turn off to something closer.”

  I spent an hour or so working out a course. When I’d finished, I was pretty sure we could navigate it without either of us having to leave the bubble more than once every twenty-four hours to look at the mass indicator. We threw fingers for who got the first watch, and I lost.

  We put on our suits and depressurized the bubble. As I crawled through the manhole, I saw Elephant opaqueing the bubble wall.

  I squeezed into the crash couch, all alone among the stars. They were blue ahead and red behind when I finished turning the ship. I couldn’t find the protosun.

  More than half the view was empty space. I found myself looking thoughtfully at the air lock. It was behind and to the left, a metal oblong standing alone at the edge of the deck, with both doors tightly closed. The inner door had slammed when the pressure dropped, and now the air lock mechanisms guarded the pressure inside against the vacuum outside in both directions. Nobody inside to use the air, but how do you explain that to a pressure sensor?

  I was procrastinating. The ship was aimed; I clenched my teeth and sent the ship into hyperspace.

  The Blind Spot, they call it. It fits.

  There are ways to find the blind spot in your eye. Close one eye, put two dots on a piece of paper, and bring the paper toward you, focusing on one of the dots. If you hold the paper just right, the other dot will suddenly vanish.

  Let a ship enter hyperspace with the windows transparent, and the windows will seem to vanish. So will the space enclosing them. Objects on either side stretch and draw closer together to fill the missing space. If you look long enough, the Blind Spot starts to spread; the walls and the things against the walls draw even closer to the missing space until they are engulfed.

  It’s all in your mind, they tell me. So?

  I turned the key, and half my view was Blind Spot. The control board stretched and flowed. The mass-indicator sphere tried to wrap itself around me. I reached for it, and my hands were distorted, too. With considerable effort I put them back at my sides and got a grip on myself.

  There was one fuzzy green line in the plastic distortion that had been a mass indicator. It was behind and to the side. The ship could fly itself until Elephant’s turn came. I fumbled my way to the manhole and crawled through.

  Hyperspace was only half the problem.

  It was a big problem. Every twenty-four hours one of us had to go out there, see if there were any dangerous masses around, drop back to normal space to take a fix and adjust course. I found myself getting unbearably tense during the few hours before each turn. So did Elephant. At these times we didn’t dare talk to each other.

  On my third trip I had the bad sense to look up—and went more than blind. Looking up, there was nothing at all in my field of vision, nothing but the Blind Spot.

  It was more than blindness. A blind man, a man whose eyes have lost their function, at least remembers what things looked like. A man whose optic brain center has been damaged doesn’t. I could remember what I’d come out here for—to find out if there were masses near enough to harm us—but I couldn’t remember how to do it. I touched a curved glass surface and knew that this was the machine that would tell me, if only I knew its secret.

  Eventually my neck got sore, so I moved my head. That brought my eyes back into existence.

  When we got the bubble pressurized, Elephant said, “Where were you? You’ve been gone half an hour.”

  “And lucky at that. When you go out there, don’t look up.”

  “Oh.”

  That was the other half of the problem. Elephant and I had stopped communicating. He was not interested in saying anything, and he was not interested in anything I had to say.

  It took me a good week to figure out why. Then I braced him with it.

  “Elephant, there’s a word missing from our language.”

  He looked up from the reading screen. If there hadn’t been a reading screen in the bubble, I don’t think we’d have made it. “More than one word,” he said. “Things have been pretty silent.”

  “One word. You’re so afraid of using that word, you’re afraid to talk at all.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Coward.”

  Elephant wrinkled his brows, then snapped off the screen. “All right, Bey, we’ll talk about it. First of all, you said it, I didn’t. Right?”

  “Right. Have you been thinking it?”

  “No. I’ve been thinking euphemisms like ‘overcautious’ and ‘reluctance to risk bodily harm.’ But since we’re on the subject, why were you so eager to turn back?”

  “I was scared.” I let that word soak into him, then went on. “The people who trained me made certain that I’d be scared in certain situations. With all due respect, Elephant, I’ve had more training for space than you have. I think your wanting to land was the result of ignorance.”

  Elephant sighed. “I think it would have been safe to land. You don’t. We’re not going to get anywhere arguing about it, are we?”

  We weren’t. One of us was right, one wrong. And if I was wrong, then a pretty good friendship had gone out the air lock.

  It was a silent trip.

  We came out of hyperspace near the two Sirius suns. But that wasn’t the end of it, because we still faced a universe squashed by relativity. It took us almost two weeks to brake ourselves. The gravity drag’s radiator fin glowed orange-white for most of that time. I have no idea how many times we circled around through hyperspace for another run through the system.

  Finally we were moving in on Jinx with the fusion drive.

  I broke a silence of hours. “Now what, Elephant?”

  “As soon as we get in range, I’m going to call that nu
mber of yours.”

  “Then?”

  “Drop you off at Sirius Mater with enough money to get you home. I’d take it kindly if you’d use my house as your own until I come back from Cannonball Express. I’ll buy a ship here and go back.”

  “You don’t want me along.”

  “With all due respect, Bey, I don’t. I’m going to land. Wouldn’t you feel like a damn fool if you died then?”

  “I’ve spent about three months in a small extension bubble because of that silly planet. If you conquered it alone, I would feel like a damn fool.”

  Elephant looked excruciatingly unhappy. He started to speak, caught his breath—

  If ever I picked the right time to shut a man up, that was it.

  “Hold it. Let’s call the puppeteers first. Plenty of time to decide.”

  Elephant nodded. In a moment he’d have told me he didn’t want me along because I was overcautious. Instead, he picked up the ship phone.

  Jinx was a banded Easter egg ahead of us. To the side was Binary, the primary to which Jinx is a moon. We should be close enough to talk…and the puppeteers’ transfer-booth number would also be their phone number.

  Elephant dialed.

  A sweet contralto voice answered. There was no picture, but I could tell: no woman’s voice is quite that good. The puppeteer said, “Eight eight three two six seven seven oh.”

  “My General Products hull just failed.” Elephant was wasting no time at all.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My name is Gregory Pelton. Twelve years ago I bought a No. 2 hull from General Products. A month and a half ago it failed. We’ve spent the intervening time limping home. May I speak to a puppeteer?”

  The screen came on. Two flat, brainless heads looked out at us. “This is quite serious,” said the puppeteer. “Naturally we will pay the indemnity in full. Would you mind detailing the circumstances?”

  Elephant didn’t mind at all. He was quite vehement. It was a pleasure to listen to him. The puppeteer’s silly expressions never wavered, but he was blinking rapidly when Elephant finished.

  “I see,” he said. “Our apologies are insufficient, of course, but you will understand that it was a natural mistake. We did not think that antimatter was available anywhere in the galaxy, especially in such quantity.”