Foreigner

But there wasn’t a massive blue-white within twenty lights of the Sun, except Sirius, and this wasn’t Sirius. Spectra of those paired suns were a no-match. It wasn’t making sense. Nothing was.

He started looking for pulsars. When you were out of short yardsticks you looked for the long ones, the ones that wouldn’t lie, and you started thinking about half-baked theories, like cosmic macrostructures, folded interfaces, or any straw of reason that might give a mind something to work on or suggest a direction they’d gone or offer a hint which of a hundred improbables was the truth.

III

«^»

Something’s wrong, was the word running the outer corridors from the minute that the station staff and construction workers had permission to move about. The rumor moved into the lounges, where staffers and pusher pilots and mechanics all stood shoulder to shoulder in front of video displays that said, on every damned channel, STAND BY.

“Why don’t they tell us something?” someone asked, a breach of the peace. “They ought to tell us something.”

Another tech said, “Why don’t we get the vid? We always got the vid before.”

“We can go to hell,” a pusher pilot said. “We can all go to hell. They’re too good to bother.”

“It’s probably all right,” somebody else said, and there was an uneasy silence—because it didn’t feel like the other times. That had been a hell of a jolt the ship had dealt when she braked, coming in, and the techs who knew anything about deep space were as long-faced and nervous as the Sol-space miners and construction jocks, who had no prior voyages at all to draw on.

It wasn’t Probably All Right in Neill Cameron’s thinking, either—even a pusher mechanic like him could feel the difference between this system entry and the last. Friends and couples like himself and Miyume Little were generally just standing close and waiting. Miyume’s hand was cold and still. His was sweating.

Possibly—he’d said it to Miyume—the techs up topside were working up some big show for their arrival in their new home.

Maybe there was just a routine lot to do because they were shutting down and staying here—the crew might be figuring their insystem course or their local resources, and they’d get a take-hold call any time now, so that Phoenixcould do course corrections. He’d heard that speculation offered by someone in the lounge. It was what he sincerely hoped.

Or Phoenixwas in some sort of trouble. That was implicit in all the questions… but it was much too soon to panic. The ship’s crew was up there doing their job and a one-sun spacer brat at least knew better than to borrow trouble or start rumors—either with hopeful lies or the speculations on the worst case that had to be in everybody’s thoughts, like infall, an entry too near the star itself.

Foolish fear. Robots had been here and fixed T-230’s position with absolute certainty. Phoenix‘crew was an experienced, hand-picked lot— Phoenixherself had run trade for five years before they diverted her to the stations start-up at T-230, and the U.N. didn’t commit billions to any second-rate equipment or any crew that was going to drop a ship into a star.

God, infall couldn’t be the trouble up there. That was too remote a chance.

He could take pusher and miner-craft apart and put them together again. Most that went wrong with an insystem miner ship, a mechanic could fix with a good guess and a screwdriver; but what could go wrong with a stardrive—what could go amiss in the massive engines that generated effects into hyperspace—fell entirely outside his competency and his understanding.

The STAND BY flasher suddenly went off. A star-view came on-screen and a collective breath of relief went up from the room, chilled by a murmur of consternation from a handful of techs, all standing together in the center of the room. Miyume’s hand tightened on his, his on hers, while the tech staff were saying things like, That’s not right and Where in hell arewe?

The white glare looked like a star to him. Maybe it did to Miyume. But techs were shaking their heads. And there was a red glow in the view he didn’t understand.

“That’s not a G5,” one of them said. “It’s a damn binary.” And when ordinary worker-types started asking what he meant, the tech snapped, “We’re not where we’re supposed to be, you stupid ass!”

What are they talking about? Neill asked himself. What they were hearing wasn’t making sense, and Miyume was looking scared. The techs were saying calm down and not to start rumors, but the tech who had claimed they were wrong shouted over the other voices,

“We’re not at any damned G5!”