Ride the Star Winds (87 page)

I told him what to do with the rocket, tail fins and all. I said to Sandra, “It’s high time that we got things sorted out. You behaved very shabbily. Even you must admit that. I’ve nothing against Ralph—in fact I think that’s he’s more to be pitied than blamed. But if it hadn’t been for the way that you carried on aboard both
Flying Cloud
and
Aeriel
there wouldn’t have been any rockets. There wouldn’t have been any misguided attempts to break the light barrier.”

“So it’s all my fault,” she said sarcastically.

“Of course,” I told her.

“And that refugee from a bicycle shop, to whom you happen to be married at the moment, has nothing at all to do with it. Oh, no. And neither has the incompetent pill peddler who mixed the first batch of powder. And neither have you, who mixed the second. But, as far as I’m concerned, what really rankles is this. I don’t mind all this switching from one time track to another—after all, variety is the spice of life. What I do object to is being the victim of the blundering machinations of the same bunch of dimwits every bloody time. It’s too much. Really, it’s too much.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” I said. “Let me suggest that on the next time track you get you to a nunnery. Preferably a Trappist one. If there are such institutions.”

Her face was white with passion. Her hand flashed out and caught me a stinging blow across the mouth. My feet lost their magnetic contact with the deck and I floated backwards, fetching up hard against the bulkhead.

Peggy, her voice bitter, said, “You deserved that.”

“No,” said Martha. “No. Everything has been Sandra’s fault.”

“Pipe down,” ordered Ralph. “Pipe down, all of you. And you, Malcolm, please refrain from making any more slanderous attacks on my wife.”

“
My
wife,” I said.

“Not in this continuum,” he corrected me. “But what happened in the alternative Universes has a certain bearing upon our present predicament. Thanks to your otherwise unpardonable outburst, we can remember now—”

“And about bloody well time you did,” said Claude.

“We can’t all be perfect,” stated Ralph, with mild sarcasm. “Even so, we can try. We know the way out now—and, this time, we’re all of us involved.
All
of us. We must break the light barrier once more, and the only way that we can do it is by giving this wagon that extra push. Has anybody any suggestions?”

Martha said slowly, “We must have been close to Lume 1 when the meteors hit us. But the impact was at right angles to our trajectory . . .”

“Work it out by the parallelogram of forces,” Ralph told her. “If you really want to, that is. But we have the Doppler log—it’s still working—and that gives us the answer without any fooling around with slipsticks. Even though we are a dismasted derelict we’re still bowling along at a good rate. But it’ll take more than a powder-fuelled rocket to give us the boost.”

“There’s the reserve oxygen,” I said.

“And there’s plenty of alcohol,” added Jenkins.

“And Peggy’s a plumber in this incarnation,” said Sandra, rather nastily.

“So . . .” said Ralph.

Chapter 18

It was dark outside
and, despite the heating units and insulation of our suits, bitterly cold. Astern of us was the dull-glowing Galactic Lens, a monstrous ember in the black ash of the ultimate night. Ahead of us, flaring with an unnatural steely brilliance, was one of the distant island nebulae. But we were in no mood for astronomical sight-seeing. Almost at once our attention was caught and held by the horrible tangle of twisted wreckage that extended all the way from the stern, where we were standing, to the stem of the huge ship, standing out sharply and shockingly in the harsh glare of our working lights: the buckled spars, the vast, disorderly expanse of tattered sail and snapped cordage, the rent and battered shell plating. But we did not look long, nor did we want to. There was work to do—burning and welding, man-handling the massive pipe sections into place, heating and beating the twisted plating of the stern so that it conformed, more or less, to our plans.

Peggy took charge—and it was Peggy, too, who did most of the work. A tool in her hands was an extension of her body—or, even, an extension of her personality. She stitched metal to metal with the delicate precision that an ancestress might have displayed with needle, thread and fine fabric. I watched her with envy, and it was not only her manual dexterity that I envied. She was so sure of herself, so certain. And I was not certain. Oh, I had no doubts that this was the only way out of our predicament—but once we had won through to an alternative time track should we be any better off? In
Thermopylae
we had achieved what seemed to be a stable grouping, like paired with like, but would it, could it last?

I looked at Peggy, and I hoped with all my heart that it would.

I heard her satisfied, peculiarly feminine grunt in my helmet phones. She said flatly, “That’s that.”

“Even so,” murmured Ralph doubtfully, “will it hold?”

“Long enough,” she told him cheerfully. “Long enough. After all, Ralph, this isn’t the first time . . .”

“No,” said Sandra, a nasty edge to her voice, “it isn’t.”

“That will do,” ordered her husband coldly.

“And now we’ll connect up the tanks and bottles,” said Peggy.

We clambered back inside through the rents in the shell plating, back into the wrecked lazaret. Intended for use as a sick bay by the ship’s builders, it had become over the generations a storeroom, a repository for things that never had been used, that never would be used, that had been stashed away in the belief that somebody, sooner or later, would find a use for them. We had found the piping there, a fine assortment, large and small bore. Some had been damaged by the meteor swarm, most of it had not been. Finding it saved us both time and labor.

The oxygen cylinders and the tanks of alcohol, however, we had to lug through the ship from the centrally situated storage compartments. The work was heavy and awkward, but that wasn’t the worst part of it. The trouble was that we were obliged to see again the torn, frozen bodies of our late shipmates. And there was that sense of responsibility that was so hard to shake off. If it hadn’t been for the pattern, as we were thinking of it, if it hadn’t been for the odd design which made it somehow imperative that the seven of us, and only the seven of us, should be attempting to break the light barrier by means of rocket power, would
Thermopylae
have come to grief? And had we, of our own volition, established the pattern? Or had the pattern existed always, and were we no more than puppets?

But we worked on. We were still alive, and we had every inducement to stay that way. We convinced ourselves that we were in, but not of,
Thermopylae
. We felt that we were innocent bystanders involved by blind chance in a catastrophe not of our making, not of our concern. All that concerned us was getting the hell out, and that as soon as possible. My parents, I knew, were among those who had perished when the cosmic debris destroyed the deep freeze. But my parents, I knew with even greater certainty, were solid citizens of Dunedin, capital of the Empire of Waverly, who, without fail, sent me a canned turkey every year in the pious hope that it would arrive at or before Christmas. Then there was the carroty cat Susan. I had known her before I met Peggy. I had known her very well indeed. I had seen her—what was left of her—as I helped lug the oxygen cylinders back aft from the stores. And I told myself,
That pitiful, broken body means nothing to me. I have never slept with it. When I was in
Flying Cloud
, when I was in
Aeriel
, I
never knew anybody catted Susan . . .

I told myself that.

But we worked, all of us, fetching and carrying at Peggy’s command, sweating in our suits, gasping in the stale air. We watched the makeshift contraption growing as we worked—the alcohol tanks with the oxygen bottles attached to them to drive the fluid into the firing chamber, the other oxygen bottles that would feed directly into the rocket motor. It was a dreadfully inefficient setup, but it didn’t matter. Mass ratio didn’t worry us. We weren’t concerned with escape velocity; all that we wanted was that extra nudge, the push that would drive us faster than light, that would expel us from this continuum in which we didn’t belong.

We worked, stumbling, fumbling automatons, breathing our own stinks, our skin chafed and sore inside our suits. We worked, tired and hungry and thirsty as we were. There was the urgency, there was the feeling that if we failed to meet the deadline we should be marooned here, doomed to die in a little, ruined world not of our making. We worked, half-blinded by the actinic flaring of Peggy’s torch, cursing the tools that slipped from our clumsy, gloved hands, cursing each other for carelessness and failure to cooperate.

But we worked.

And, astern of us, the target at which the cannon of our jury rocket was aimed, we could see the dull-glowing Galactic Lens, the smear of smoky crimson against the darkness. Whatever happened, we all knew, there was no return, ever, to the warmth and light of the center. We belonged on the Rim. Aboard
Flying Cloud
, aboard
Aeriel
, aboard
Thermopylae
—we belonged on the Rim . . .

“Now,” Peggy was saying. “
Now.
Stand by, all of you . . .”

“Wait!” Ralph’s voice was sharp. “There’ll be acceleration. Unless we’ve secured ourselves we shall fall through the holes in the plating—and that will be the end.”

“Then secure yourselves,” said Peggy.

I shuffled to where she was standing, got one arm around a stanchion, the other around her waist. I saw that the others were similarly disposing themselves. Peggy, with both hands free, opened two valves. From the venturi of the rocket jetted a white vapor. Then her right hand went out to a crude switch—and, abruptly, the white vapor became a torrent of fire.

It won’t work,
I thought.
It won’t work. Not this time . . .

Desperately I clung to the stanchion, fighting the pseudogravity of our acceleration. I tried not to look down through the rents in the shell plating, tried to ignore the lightyears-deep chasm beneath us. I clung with desperation to the stanchion and even more desperately to Peggy, who needed both hands to adjust the valves.

The weight on my arms, as acceleration mounted, became intolerable, but I knew that I must not, could not, would not let go.

Then I felt the ominous vibration as the stanchion started to give.

Chapter 19

Ahead of us
had been the spark of luminescence that was a planet, astern of us the disc of fire that was a sun. We had done the things that had to be done—mechanically, not too inefficiently. But I was still seeing, in my mind’s eye, the dull-glowing Lens of the Galaxy, smoky crimson against the sooty depths of the ultimate night, still feeling, in my left hand and arm, the strain—the strain, and the crackling of the weakening, snapping stanchion. What was real and what was unreal? Was this world towards which we were headed some sort of latter-day Valhalla, a heaven (or hell?) for the souls of departed spacemen?

But we had done the right things—shortening sail, trimming sail, rotating the spars so that the black surfaces of some of the vanes were presented to the major luminary, so that their reflecting surfaces were catching the reflected light from the planet. We had slowed down sufficiently for the making of a safe approach.

“Even so,” Ralph was saying, slowly and softly, “what world is it? What world can it be?”

I reached out for the big binoculars on their universally jointed mount. I thought,
I’ll
play this for real. But it must be real. Or must it?
Slowly, carefully, I adjusted the focus. What had been only short hours ago little more than a point of light was now a great shining sphere. I stared at it stupidly. About a third of the planetary surface was cloud-covered, mainly in the polar regions. I could observe clearly the seas and the continents—blue and brown and green, the snowclad peaks of the mountain ranges a sparkling white—the seas and the continents, the utterly unfamiliar configurations of land and water.

“What world is it?” asked Ralph again, addressing me directly this time.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, adding wryly, “But navigation in this ship—or these ships?—has been rather a lost art of late . . .”

“But not, unfortunately, rocketry,” observed Sandra cattily.

“Pipe down,” growled Ralph. “Pipe down. We’ve all of us come through, somehow, and we’re back where we belong, in
Flying Cloud
. All we have to do now is to make a landing.”

“But where, lord and master?” asked Sandra, too sweetly. “But where?”

“Does it matter?” he growled. “That looks to be a very pleasant world. Frankly, I shall be happy to set this scow down on any convenient stretch of calm water. After we’re rested we’ll see about getting our bearings . . .”

“In space?” she asked. “Or in time? Or both?”

“Does it matter?” he almost shouted. Then, “It’s time we heard something from our tame telepath.”

I said, “His amplifier up and died on him.”

“I hope he hasn’t dumped it,” said Sandra, “although I never did fancy dog’s brain in aspic. But Peter could make a curry of it.”

“I’m not the cook,” I told her coldly. “Not on this time track. And neither, my dear, are you the captain.”

Ralph glared at us and then turned to the journalist. “Any luck, Martha?”

“Yes,” she said, fiddling with the controls of her transceiver. “There are people there, and they’re advanced enough to have radio. Their language is strange—to me, at any rate—but their music is human enough, even though it’s a little corny for my taste.” She switched over from headphone to speaker. There was a man singing, in a pleasant baritone, accompanied by some stringed instrument. The melody was hauntingly familiar, although the words were in that unknown tongue. Then, in spite of the shifts in key, the odd distortions of rhythm, I had it. In his own language, he was singing:

“Good-bye, I’ll run

To seek another sun