Brian Stableford - Hooded Swan 5 - The Fenris Device

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Brian Stableford

The Fenris Device

I'm a spaceman. I like space. I like flying space, and I know every trick that makes it

easier, every trick which enables me to cope with the eccentricities of space better

than the next man. I feel at home in deep space and I can handle virtually anything

which deep space is disposed to throw at me. Handling the Hooded Swan in deep

space was a joy and a privilege.

But the Hooded Swan, so its architect declared, was a good deal more versatile

than an honest spaceship. It was not his purpose, he said, to use the Swan merely as a

means of transporting him from point A to point B—a job which could be done

almost as well by any common-or-garden p-shifter. He had always intended that the

Hooded Swan should do things which no other ship in existence was capable of doing.

That was why he had hired me. Well, things hadn't worked out quite as he'd planned,

because he was a very busy man, and he'd found other employment for both the Swan

and myself which was (he said) not very demanding.

And so, he said, when the opportunity arose to further his fondest dreams

and—at one and the same time—to use the Hooded Swan in an environment for

which no other spaceship in the galaxy was fitted, he was highly delighted.

I was not. Quite the reverse, in fact.

I hate atmosphere. While recognising that certain kinds of atmosphere are not

only useful but highly desirable in that they are necessary to life—specifically my

life—I feel that atmosphere is no place for a self-respecting spaceman to be piloting a

self-respecting spacecraft.

And when "atmosphere" is a euphemism for a cloud-filled, storm-torn inferno

such as one finds on a world like Leucifer V, then I feel absolutely justified in feeling

nothing less than hatred for it.

I don't doubt that the Swan was equipped to deal with it. Charlot certainly

didn't doubt it, because he was on board, peering over my shoulder, and he was

presumably a better judge than I of theoretical capabilities. I'm a practical man, and

I'm ready enough to admit that it was I, not the ship, who was inadequate to the task.

But Charlot didn't accept excuses of that kind. Charlot was a man who believed in

theoretical capabilities. He made no concessions to human weakness.

I dipped into the atmosphere feeling very much like the proverbial snowflake

in hell. I was travelling at mere thousands of kph, and slowing still, preparing to use

the wings to get lift. I would get the lift anyway, and I figured it was far better to try

to use it—absorb it into my system—than to fight it with the cannons and the flux. I

wished that I could screw my ship-body up into a tight sphere, fall like a cannonball

through a couple of thousand kilometres of atmosphere, and then miraculously unfurl

and take instant control of myself just above the ground. But the ground was a

difficult thing to find on Leucifer V. It hid beneath a cloak of tidal, flying dust,

whipped up by perpetual blizzards. Even if I were capable of masquerading as a

falling stone, there could be no easy way down. I couldn't "unfurl" in conditions like

that—I'd be ripped apart. No, I had to go down slowly, with my wings spread and my

effective mass denatured as far as I dared, pretending to be an autumn leaf rather than

a creature of steel and flesh.

As the atmosphere closed in around me my ship-senses gave me a sudden,

irrational claustrophobia, a sensation of drowning, of being smothered by soft cloth. I

shook it off.

I drifted on a long decaying arc, just accepting the effects of the thickening air

into the balanced flux-cycle. I filled the cortex of the driver with as much power as it

would hold, knowing that I would need all I could get. Slowly, I began to drain the

shields. At the kind of velocity I was making now they'd be far more of a hindrance

than a help. No matter how streamlined a ship is, even a ship with a manipulable skin

like the Swan, there is absolutely no way of evening out matter-scarring in the shields.

And down below I'd have far too much on my plate to want to bother with eddy

currents in the shields. If a seized shield immobilised one of my limbs for even a

second it could be fatal. On the other hand, as I stripped the shields I became more

and more aware of the atmosphere tearing at my skin, burning me, pecking and

clawing at me. The farther I went down, the sharper the blades that would cut at me. I

knew I was going to bleed, ship-body and cradle-body both, and I was going to hurt

and hurt bad.

"Ready," I said to Eve. She was standing beside me, with the medical kit

ready. We'd already worked out the sorts of shots I was liable to need, and a code by

which I could call for them. She had to needle the first shot into me—I wasn't rigged

for an intravenous feed because I didn't want equipment attached to me blurring the

sensations I was getting from the outer skin. Painful those sensations might be, but on

my correct reading of them and compensating for them would depend the life of the

ship.

"Johnny," I said, as we dropped deeper and deeper.

"Waiting," he said. "Nothing yet."

I had to keep the relaxation web over .9 in order to keep our effective mass as

close to zero as was desirable, and when the web is so tight the deration system is at

its most sensitive. An imbalance of any kind at the discharge points would cause the

flux to bleed. Some bleeding would be virtually inevitable, but we would have to keep

the loss under control. And "we" meant not just me, but Johnny too. This was going to

be tough for him—by far and away his toughest yet.

How are you? I asked the wind.

—All set, he told me.

There were long seconds of silence while nothing happened. I continued to

thin out the shields with careful slowness, feeling like a striptease dancer at rehearsal.

There was an awkward phase when the sensation of the air molecules flickering over

my skin was like an itch or an insistent tickle, But I knew that of old, and it didn't

bother me. We were through the phase quickly, and I began to feel the steady,

prickling pressure build up. I've never worn a hair shirt, but I imagine it might be

something like that. The deeper we went the heavier the pressure, but that wasn't the

worst of it. As we plunged deeper and deeper, the turbulence began to build up around

us. The Swan was designed to compensate for turbulence— she had wings like a bird,

nerves and motors which could make all kinds of changes in her outer skin to give her

total dynamic streamlining. But nothing's perfect, and there was always something I

couldn't cancel. It was like groping fingers sliding over me, sometimes light,

sometimes clumsy.

Inside the control room, everything was steady as a rock. It all looked easy

from the back seat, and the time that dragged by made things worse, not better, for the

people watching me. They had no way of understanding, no way of feeling what I was

feeling, no way of sensing the disaster that was lurking in the corners of my eyes. For

them, it was just like grooving in total vacuum, save that I was radiating tension and

concentration.

As the shields faded into gossamer, the whole subsurface came alive and alert.

"Give me the second now," I said, amazed by the calmness of my voice.

I felt the anaesthetic slide home into my arm, and almost automatically my

brain began to count off the seconds to de-sensitivity.

The relief seemed to last for only a few seconds. The insistence of the

atmosphere overrode the numbing effect and the subsurface still felt sore and reactive.

—Don't take any more, warned the wind, or I'll lose my control.

OK, I said, soothing him.

I had no intention of knocking either of us out.

Within a couple of minutes more, we began to find clouds, and things were

suddenly dramatically changed.

"Here we go," I said, aiming the comment at Johnny.

The pain took me across the back, first, like a muscle cramp. We were slow

now—no more than a few hundred kph, but the slower we went the harder it was to

balance the flux to the nth decimal. The web felt virtually non-existent, and the whole

drive-unit felt like putty inside me. I felt half dead, and yet I had to move with the

grace of an eagle and the delicacy of a hummingbird. I felt the anaesthetic that was

calming my body begin to swim up around my brain.

"Stim," I said.

The needle slid home again. I knew—and so did Eve—that hyping up on the

drugs at the rate I was doing could only have a bad effect in the end, but I had to buy

all the temporary help I could, and if I suffered tomorrow ... well, at least I was alive

to suffer. I don't like being shot up any more than the next man, but I'm not proud. I

don't court disaster. No doubt, in the final analysis, it would take years off my life, but

when you weigh the odds...

"Watch it," said Johnny.

He didn't need to. I could feel the flux slipping like sand between my fingers. I

could feel the danger floating up around me, like a wave of nausea. I felt my face

muscles contract as I wrestled with the controls. I could feel Johnny's hands

somewhere inside me, working away at the driver, milking the cortex, using his hands

and his delicate touch as he'd never been called upon to do in his life. The flux cycled.

We didn't bleed. We had her under control.

And still we went down, angling deep into the atmosphere of Leucifer V, the

world the Gallacellans called Mormyr, and still the drop seemed limitless, and the

sensors could pick up nothing down below but an abyss filled with storms. I took

thrust out of the drivers, feeding it through the flux and into the cortex, restoring the

reserve and reducing our forward impulse so that we fell steeper and steeper. Still I

felt sore, but the pain was under control. The drugs and the wind between them were

keeping me up to the job. So far, so good.

But it could only get worse.

The double sensation began to trouble me. I could feel the ghosts of Eve and

Titus Charlot hovering over me in the atmosphere of the planet, like demons

following the ship on its descent, watching her like hawks, urging her on faster... to

her doom?

I felt the flux struggling. It really was trying to stay with me, to help me, but it

was being scourged by the winds and the vapours that were howling around the ship. I

could feel the Swan giving me all she could, trying her level best to do it on her own,

without the pilot inheriting her suffering and her peril. I poured myself into the bird's

synapses, we merged totally, and I was embodied in the flux that held strong against

the torture, sheltered neither by the shields nor by the relaxation web to any degree. It

was like a spider walking through the chambers of my heart, like centipedes moving

in my bloodstream, like a great fireworm writhing slowly in my gut. I felt myself be-

gin to open up inside, ever so slowly, ever so gently, without pain, without the

raggedness of tearing, and I felt myself begin to spill out within myself.

And lower and lower we came, into the clouds of black dust and ice, into the

rage of the storm which whirled and stabbed at us. I was bleeding. I was losing flux. I

could feel Johnny working away, with all the speed he could muster, all the fineness

of feeling. He had the touch, there was no doubt. He was good, but he wasn't good

enough. I opened up wider and wider inside myself, and I bled.

The sensors told me at last that there was a down to go to, that there was a

bottom to the gravity pit, that there was a haven if only I could reach it, but it was too

late. Johnny was losing and Johnny was panicking. I could feel it rising inside him as

it flooded into the movements of his fingers that were inside me. I could feel the flux

giving way to his hysteria and the mad insistency of the storm.

I could feel myself—and it was almost with surprise that I did so—being racked with

hideous, squeezing pain, and I knew that there was nothing I could do but run. I tried

to cry out, hoping that even a wordless cry might stabilise Johnny, might tell Eve that

I needed another boost, might even tell Charlot that what he wanted me to do simply

could not be done. But I could manage no cry. My jaw was locked, and the only one

who knew was the wind, locked inside with me, in rigid agony.

The last vestiges of power were flooding from the cortex into the deration

system. The flux was jammed. I discharged the cannons to shock the whole unit into

some imitation of life, and I blasted power through the nerve-net of the ship. With a

single convulsive manoeuvre— something no bird, no spaceship, no other thing in the

galaxy except the Hooded Swan and I could have done—I began to throw a surge of

strength into the web.

The flux stirred, and with it Johnny. We fought, all of us—Swan, Johnny, the

wind, and I—and we found enough to turn us, enough to give us the power to jump.

Just enough to run away. Full flight, in full terror. From somewhere, we managed to

make some kind of a syndrome, and we were up and away as the flux fed on herself.

The pain really took me then as we went up. No shield at all, nothing to

protect me. I felt as though I were burning alive, my skin blistering and bubbling and

turning to black, cold dust on my bones.

But the Swan was equal even to that. Johnny built the syndrome—Johnny and

the wind—and they found power for the driver, power for the cannons, and—at last—

power for the shields. Up and up we soared, and I realised that we were all of us alive,

and would stay that way.

I managed sound... I think it was the word "Go."

And go we did. We climbed in seconds what it had taken us long minutes to

fall. We cleared, we found space again. Still I was rigid in the cradle, my body and

my agony dissipated throughout the ship, still fighting for every last vestige of power

the syndrome could provide. All of us, we were united in those dragging seconds, all

in a single purpose.

And we made it.

By the time we found space, I was absolutely helpless in the cradle, with no

more involvement with my tiny, human self than an unborn child. Even as we headed

deep into the system-vacuum, I had only one sensation that I could relate to my bodily

self alone, rather than to my total, participant ship-self, and that was a sensation of

leakage. My bladder had emptied, and there was blood running from both corners of

my mouth to mingle with my tears.

Eve was mopping me up. As consciousness returned to its habitual mode of

residence, I could feel her wet cloth stroking back and forth across my face. I could

hear Charlot breathing.

There were long minutes of waiting, when nobody dared say a word. Not to

anyone, about anything. The two Gallacellans who waited in the rear of the control

room were absolutely impassive, waiting. Nick delArco had nothing to say.

Inevitably, it was Charlot who broke the silence. "Less than a hundred

meters," he said. That was all. Just: Less than a hundred meters. No sympathy, no un-

derstanding. All he was interested in was how close we had come before we had

failed. He knew that if we could get down to the last kilometre—to one-tenth of the

last kilometre—then it was theoretically possible for us to have gone the whole way.

He just didn't see the blood that was coming out of me. All he saw was that we had

come within seconds of victory, and had failed. "It's impossible," I said. "It can't be

done."

"You were there," he said. "You were there but for a matter of meters."

"It makes no difference," I said. "A meter or a parsec. Those last hundred

meters were the worst of all. Nothing could live in that. Nothing. There's no way

down through those last hundred meters. No way."

"You had power left," he said. "Power to run away."

"And if I'd used that power to go down?" I said, my voice hoarse as the flow

of the argument matched the flow of feeling coming back into my body—and with the

feeling, renewed pain. "What would I have used to come away?" I finished.

"Once we were down ..." he began.

"And what if we ran out with ten meters still to go?" I interrupted. "Or ten

centimetres? All we had to do was roll over ... and we'd be down forever."

"It was my fault," Johnny's voice came over the circuit. "It was my fault. If I

could have held the flux just a few seconds ... I lost her. It wasn't Grainger's fault...."

Of all the help I'd never needed ...

"Is that true?" said Charlot.

"Nobody could have held it," I said. "Nobody. Johnny was brilliant. Nobody

could have done more. Not Rothgar, not Jesus Christ. Nobody human can land a ship

on that world. It just cannot be done."

"I could have done it," said Johnny, his voice sounding like the knell of doom.

"If only ..."

"Will you shut your bloody mouth!" I howled at him. "You want to go down

there again? Don't be a fool. You did your best. Your ultimate best. There's no more

that could be done. It's impossible. There's no point in whining, now or ever. You

have to realise that there are some things that just can't be done."

—It can be done, said the wind, and you know it.

I didn't need him. Yes, it could be done, with a perfect engineer and a perfect pilot.

The ship could do it. But Johnny was only Johnny, and I wasn't making any claims for

myself. Yes, it could be done. But only by a lunatic. And only a lunatic would suggest

to Charlot that there was any point at all in making another attempt. He was only

human. He couldn't send us down again. Not if there was no way.

Stylaster—the Gallacellan for whose benefit all this pantomime had been

staged—said something in his native tongue. No human knew the language—the

Gallacellans guarded their privacy—so we all had to wait for the interpreter. His name

was Ecdyon.

"Stylaster says that your pilot has been damaged," said Ecdyon, addressing

Charlot. "Will he have to be replaced for the second attempt?"

I gave him the filthiest look I could conjure up. It was wasted. What can a

filthy look mean to an alien? Ecdyon knew the score, and I was willing to bet that

Stylaster knew as well. They were playing a tough game. This was a real test for

Charlot's famed diplomatic talents.

"The pilot cannot be replaced," said Charlot, speaking to Ecdyon but keeping

one eye on me. "He will have to be rested until he is well. Then we will talk about a

second attempt."

"You can talk all you bloody well like," I said. "But I'm not going back down

there again."

"We'll talk about it later," said Charlot, ominously, and quietly, because

Ecdyon was busy clicking away at Stylaster in Gallacellan.

"It's impossible," I said.

"That's for me to decide."

"Like hell it is," I said. "You only own this ship. I fly it and Nick is the

captain. The only man who can order me to fly back into that hell is Captain delArco.

Now he knows I'm serious when I say it can't be done, and he's not going to order me

to do it. So legally, Mr. Charlot, you can't touch me."

He looked at me with pure poison in his gaze. All the politeness and the

helpfulness and the almost-friendship that we'd built up on Pharos was gone. He was

an old man. He was a sick man. If there was one thing he wanted to do more than any

other before he died it was to make meaningful contact with the Gallacellans. In the

five centuries since the Gallacellans met the human race on Leucifer IV there had

been exactly one opportunity to make that contact, and this was it. Only Grainger and

the bounds of possibility stood between Charlot and Stylaster, and Charlot was not the

man to respect the bounds of possibility. So what chance had Grainger?

"Captain delArco will follow my instructions," said Charlot coldly, getting

angrier by the minute because he knew that every word would get back to Stylaster,

now or later.

"Captain delArco had better think long and hard about that," I said. "And so

had you. Because between you and me and anyone else who can hear me, I won't take

this ship back down into the atmosphere of that planet. You can have me thrown in

jail till I rot, between you, if you have a mind to. But any other attempt at landing on

Mormyr is an attempt at suicide and murder, and I won't do it."

I had to put my case across in the strongest possible terms. It was no good at

all saying "It's too dangerous" or "I'm scared" or "It hurts." Nothing short of

impossibility was going to stop Charlot, so impossibility was what he was going to

get. I'd gone in once, because I had no way to refuse. But I wasn't going back. In my

humble opinion, no one had the right to ask that of me. And privately, I had every

confidence that when it came to the crunch, Nick delArco wasn't going to be Charlot's

puppet.

"You have to try again," said Charlot.

"No," said Eve, who was still waiting for the blood to stop oozing from my

mouth. "He can't. He's right. It would kill him."

I was really and truly thankful to have that support just then. Johnny had the

sense to keep his mouth shut, and Nick delArco had absolutely nothing to say—yet.

I reached out to take the controls in my hands again, and Eve slipped the hood

back down over my eyes. We were just drifting in a loose orbit around Leucifer, head-

ing away from Mormyr.

"Shall we go home?" I asked.

"Well go back to Iniomi," said Charlot. "Well get you back into shape. Then

we can discuss what to do next."

I began to set us on a course for the fourth world.

Stylaster clicked for a moment or two, like a demented typewriter.

"Stylaster says," Ecdyon translated, "that your ship was most impressive. He is

very confident that we will be successful."

"Bastard," I muttered, not loudly enough for the interpreter to hear. A moment

later, I regretted not saying it louder, so that Ecdyon could have passed it on. But it

was too late to repeat it.

—I still think ... began the wind.

I know, I said. Shut up.

Then I slipped the Swan into the groove.

Once we were down on Iniomi I was fit for nothing except crawling into my

bunk and waiting for the doctor. I didn't want to do that and I had no intention of

doing anything that I didn't want to do right at that moment. So I dumped the ship in

the yard like a sack of potatoes and I dragged my tired frame out of her belly, and I

went walking in the alien night.

The stars were bright, and they were packed closer than I usually see them in

the skies of the worlds where I habitually make my living. Brighter even than the stars

of New Alexandria. Leucifer was close to the core—some even called her a core star.

But we—the human race— hadn't touched the real core stars. That was bad space to

fly, and the worlds were bad, too. We stayed away, in the regions which were more

fitting for our kind of people. Perhaps we would have gone farther into the core,

extended the tentacles of interstellar human civilisation that way, if it hadn't been for

the Gallacellans. They were core people. They lived on the worlds which we thought

were bad. They didn't seem to like us much, and the feeling was fairly mutual.

The Gallacellans had been starfaring long before the human race had escaped

its own system, and long before the Khor-monsa had begun to build their galactic

society as well. Wherever we went, the Gallacellans had already been—at least to

have a look. But they were a careful people. We found no trace of them, until we met

them in the flesh. That was on Iniomi. Soon after, we met them on forty or fifty other

worlds as well. Our civilisations overlapped slightly. But not much. What we called

the heart of the galaxy, the Gallacellans figured almost as the rim. They came from

the centre. The humans and the Khor-monsa came from the outer reaches.

Iniomi got into all the history books as the world where we met the

Gallacellans. Once there, of course, it got more than its due share of attention.

Leucifer's inner worlds— II and III—attracted more people than they were worth on

simple merit, and became thriving worlds despite the fact that life on both of them

was tougher than it was most places we chose to settle. The Gallacellans retained only

a small base on Iniomi, for no apparent reason. We opened a small base as well, for

purposes of communication, but the Gallacellans weren't very interested in com-

municating. They wouldn't teach anyone their language, and only permitted a few

low-caste members of their own society to learn a couple of ours. A few centuries'

conversation seemed to have done little for either race. A number of Gallacellan

names had passed into human languages, but even that was via the interpreters, who

provided human-sounding equivalents of Gallacellan clickings. People could click in

a fair imitation of Gallacellan speech, but they couldn't click intelligibly. Hence

words like Mormyr and Iniomi were Gallacellan in origin, but sounded human

because the interpreters had made them over into human sounds for us.

The average Gallacellan is about seven feet tall, but he looks taller because he

has big ears which stick upward from his head. At least, rumour has it they are ears.

After several hundred years, we still don't know for sure. He has a face which might

be yellow or brown, sometimes striped or blotched, the texture of wax. He has eyes in

the back of his head as well as the front, he also has a mouth in the back of his head,

but somewhat modified so that it doesn't look very much like the front one. One is for

eating (the front one), the other is for talking. A Gallacellan usually turns his back on

you to talk to you, but if you are another Gallacellan you have your back turned as

well, so it doesn't seem rude. Because Gallacellans don't look at one another when

they talk they have no need of facial expressions, but they sometimes use gestures to

attract the attention of the hind-eyes, which habitually look at the sky or the ground.

People have hypothesised that the Gallacellans have so many eyes and use them thus

because on their home-world they were prey to a large number of natural enemies.

This remains conjecture. The Gallacellan body looks humanoid, but is capable of

movements which the humanoid is not. The Gallacellan's limbs are of varying size

and multi-jointed, and his body can coil like a spring over its full length. It is

presumed that the Gallacellans are remarkable athletes. The females of the species are

similar in all respects save that they tend to be somewhat plumper than the males and

do not make use of the coiling facility, if they have it.

Little is known about the Gallacellan character. They appear proud and

xenophobic, but in no way hostile. They are simply incurious and unforthcoming.

Charlot, of course, wanted the Gallacellans to participate in his project for integrating

alien and human modes of thought (as the Khor-monsa were only too pleased to do),

but they refused. No one could have been more surprised than Charlot when the

Gallacellan named Stylaster offered co-operation in return for Charlot's assistance in a

little matter of salvage.

Which explains why Charlot was mad keen on my being able to take the

Hooded Swan all the way down to the surface of Mormyr. Needless to say, I was by

no means as keen on the project as he. I have quite natural reservations about risking

my life, especially for no good reason. I had wanted no part of the Lost Star farce, and

I wanted no part of this one, which seemed to me to be too close to a carbon copy for

comfort. As far as I was concerned, if the Gallacellans wanted to recover the ship

which had gone down on Mormyr, then they could go fetch it themselves, and if they

were unwilling to do so, then they shouldn't have been careless enough to lose it there

in the first place.

Normally, I wouldn't balk at the idea of helping out aliens, because I quite like

aliens, but the Gallacellans were not by any means a likeable lot. Ecdyon was the only

one I'd ever had occasion to exchange words with, and I hadn't much liked the

words—though most of them, I know, had been Stylaster's and not Ecdyon's own. I've

allowed people to talk me into doing some fairly hazardous things in my time, but not

when they used such insulting patronisation as Stylaster.

As I walked the streets of the Iniomi spaceport.—the human sector—I was

doing some pretty heavy thinking. I'd had it fairly easy for a long time with respect to

the piloting angle, and a very respectable slice of the two years I owed Charlot had

been swallowed up. It seemed a great pity to waste all that time by digging my heels

in now. If I'd been going to tell him to take a running jump, then I should have done it

right back at the very beginning. On the other hand. Titus Charlot simply was not a

reasonable man. I'd helped him out time and time again, yet he showed not the least

vestige of gratitude nor any intention of refraining from jeopardising my future—and,

for that matter, the future of the other people who worked for him. The poorer his

health became, the more determined he was to wring all that he could out of such time

as might remain to him.

I was considering quitting, and it was a difficult thing to consider.

The wind, of course, had every confidence in our ability to do whatever we

were called upon to do. He thought we were a great team, and that we were only just

beginning to integrate. I thought he had delusions of grandeur. He'd been on the rock

where I picked him up a lot longer than I had. One couldn't blame him for being glad

to get back in the swing of things, and he was certainly a useful guy to have around,

but no matter how fully I was disposed to trust him, the fact remained that I was me

and that I was the one who had to decide what to make of me. There's a protocol to be

observed in relationships with alien mind-parasites.

It was a cold night, and I wasn't in any fit condition to walk for miles—and the

town didn't stretch for miles, in any case—so I stopped off at a small coffee shop to sit

and brood for a while. It was dimly lit and I deliberately chose a shadowed corner in

which to sit, but I knew I couldn't hide. There were only a dozen places on Iniomi

where I could possibly be, and if anyone wanted to seek me out they'd be sure to find

me eventually. I knew someone would come looking—it was only a matter of waiting

to see who.

The shop was deserted—there was no night-life on Iniomi. Bleak worlds breed

bleak people. Iniomi had no life, and the air was unbreathable except in the domes.

The base was supplied from Pallant—the third world. Nobody really knew why it was

still here—they'd given up their attempts to make headway with the Gallacellans

generations before. But these human bridgeheads tend to cling somehow. People who

can't stand it leave, and whatever remains becomes the population of the world. Bleak

people, but people nevertheless.

The coffee was good. Real. Pallant, though poor, was a productive world. Not

big enough for the companies to take over, but good enough to supply its own needs

with a lot to spare. Small traders—such as Lapthorn and I had been—ran in and out

all the time. Worlds like Pallant were the only places where they could make a safe

living now that the companies were steadily absorbing everything exploitable.

The waiting was good, too. The room was warm, and the girl who was serving

didn't attempt to bother me except when I called. She sat, too, reading. Patiently

whiling the night away. I riffled a pack of cards, not even bothering to lay out a game

of patience.

I don't really know who I was expecting. I hoped it wouldn't be Charlot, and I didn't

think that it would be. But Johnny might have come, to tell me why he'd lost his touch

with the plasm and blown the flux-field, and to tell me that it wouldn't happen again.

Not that he could be held to blame—he was as good with the drive as anyone could

expect him to be. He was a good engineer. Sometimes the flux-field blows, and that's

all there is to it. No one has perfect touch. That's why it would be so foolhardy to go

back again, even if Johnny could do it just a little bit better. Next time, it might be me

who blew it. Nobody's fault. I mulled over the things I might say to Johnny.

On the other hand, it might be Eve who came. Eve often came around, just to

see how I felt. Eve had an almost morbid curiosity about my well-being, or lack of it.

I was the man who knew her brother, the man who nearly died with her brother, the

man who might have died instead of her brother. She was Lapthorn's ghost, haunting

me. But not in any malicious way. I didn't mind Eve. I wouldn't have minded if it had

been Eve who came through the door, looking for me, wanting to talk to me about

what was on and what might yet be happening.

As things turned out, however, it was Nick who came. Perhaps he'd been sent,

perhaps they had all talked it over and decided it had better be Nick who tried to ease

me back to a state fit for human company. Nick was my friend. Ever since the clash of

loyalties had come out my way on the world in the Drift, Nick had reckoned himself

my bosom buddy. But he knew I didn't see things the same way. He knew there was

something between us—a ship. He always wanted to remove that obstruction to the

true communion of our souls, because he was a guy who needed very much to like

and be liked, but I had never permitted it. A matter of principle.

"You ought to be seeing the doctor," he said.

"I oughtn't to be in such bad shape I need a doctor," I said.

"This means a lot to Charlot—getting the Gallacellans to break down their

wall of silence."

"It's not a wall of silence," I said. "It's a wall of indifference. They don't like us. They

never have. Nobody can blame them. Their only interest in us is keeping us from

interfering with them. They don't want to know about us and they don't want us to

know about them. That's fine by virtually all the human race except Charlot. They're

playing him for a sucker. They're using him, or attempting to. He knows it, and it

makes him angry. He also knows he can't pass up the bait, and that makes him

angrier. We'd all be better off out of this."

"You're going to try to use me against him," said Nick.

I nodded. I put the cards back in my pocket.

"Suppose I take his side?"

I drew a rigid finger across my Adam's apple.

"Could it be done?" he asked.

I hesitated. "Perhaps," I admitted after a while, figuring that earnest sincerity

was the best line to take with a man like delArco. "Perhaps it could. Getting down is

the tough bit. Once down, it's easier to come back. It's always easier accelerating than

slowing down. But there's no man in the galaxy up to it. Not Johnny, and not me.

We're both good. But a man can only do so much. And I'm a spaceman, remember,

not a deep sea diver. Atmospherics is not my speciality. Down there, my reputation

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