Between the Strokes of Night

“We couldn’t.” That was Dan Korwin, chief engineer on the Argo and a man as blunt and confrontational as Sy was indirect and devious. “Keep your eyes on your instruments, Rolf Sansome, and you too, Sy Day. I’m going to try something.”

Korwin was busy with his own hand-held. A shudder went through the ship, while glasses and plates left on the dining room table by the service robots danced and rattled on the polished surface.

Korwin looked up. “Well?”

Rolf Sansome shook his head. “Still zero velocity with respect to Urstar.” “The engines insist we’re accelerating.”

“The inertial sensors tell me we’re not moving.”

Sy added, “And the visuals say we have negligible velocity with respect to the three-degree cosmic background. You goosed the drive?”

“I sure as hell did.” Dan Korwin glared at his hand-held, as though holding it personally responsible. “I gave the engines as much of a boost as we can take in S-space. We should all have felt it. And with that much drive, all the plates and glasses ought to have slid down to the end of the table and finished in Sy’s lap.”

Everyone again looked to Judith Niles. She shook her head, as though the whole of the past five minutes had been too much for her. It was left to Charlene, reluctantly and after a nod from Emil, to ask the obvious: “Something brought us from a sixth of light-speed to a flat stop. We can’t move toward Urstar, even when we apply the Argo’s own propulsion system. Where do we go from here?” “We go nowhere.” Sy alone, of all the people in the room, was smiling. “We’re stuck, fixed in one place like an insect in amber until whatever decided to stop us decides to get in touch with us, or lets us move again. It looks bad, but there’s one huge piece of good news: we know now that we didn’t come to the wrong place. The star ahead of us, even if we can’t get there, is the real thing. That’s Urstar.”

How could Sy possibly be so cheerful? But then Charlene, surveying her companions, noticed that Emil appeared, if not cheerful, then relieved. He smiled across the table at her. His complacent look said, Well, things do look grim. But at least I can relax now. I may have brought us all to our doom — but at least I didn’t bring us to the wrong place!

Charlene gritted her teeth. Emil! And not just Emil, every man she had ever met. They were all as bad as each other. Which one of the old-timers, back on long-ago and faraway Earth, had said it? — “A man will rather die than look like a fool.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“What the devil is Korwin trying now?” Charlene spoke through clenched teeth. She hung on to the arms of her chair as the Argo shook from end to end in spasms that couldn’t be predicted or resisted.

“More of the same.” Sy sat next to her in the control room, his eyes fixed on the banks of displays. “My guess is that he’s pogoing us over a range of at least five gees. But I doubt if he’s accomplishing a thing.”

The crew was again in N-space, where they could tolerate considerable acceleration. Most had gone to their own quarters or the control room, where they could strap in securely while Dan Korwin, aft in the engine room, drove the ship at full power toward the distant spark of Urstar. One gee, two gees, and on up to an off-the-charts acceleration that left everyone feeling flattened. The ship should have been racing toward its destination. Previous attempts to fly closer had been useless, while an attempt to turn the ship and fly away from Urstar had been just as ineffective; the Argo could rotate on its axis, like some great beast impaled on a spit, but all other movement was denied. The acceleration abruptly ended and Korwin’s frustrated voice came over the ship’s central address. “All right. Screw it. I guess that’s all for today.” Sy ran his eyes over the monitors. “Same as before. Hefty acceleration, but according to the sensors we’ve moved not a single millimeter. Hm. I wonder.” Gus Eldridge, one of the communications specialists who had been skeptical of Dan Korwin’s efforts from the start, heard Sy’s comment. He grunted and said, “Of course we haven’t moved. This is — what? — the eighth day of trying? And while he’s accelerating the ship like that, nobody else can do a damned thing. How long do we give him before we tell him to stop fooling himself?”

Charlene could see Eldridge’s point. The Argo might be unable to move, but most of the scientist crew had plenty to keep them busy. According to the observers at X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths, the space around Urstar crackled with high-frequency energy. If the intensity estimates were anywhere close to correct, the ship would have been forced to halt of its own accord before ever reaching the outermost gas giant; otherwise, the field intensities around the hull would have melted the Argo. Sy had argued, with typical perverse logic, that the ship had been halted to prevent its destruction.