The Quillian Sector

Questions which now had no meaning. Looking into the interior of the generator, she could see the damage which Jumoke had caused; delicate installations now seared and blacked, insulation charred, surfaces which should have gleamed like mirrors now dulled with the impact of heat, stained by condensed vapors. Things which could be repaired, and would be repaired if given the time, but the main problem was within the triple helixes. Each set at right angles to the other, things of delicate fabrication, matched to within five decimal places of similarity. How badly had they been distorted?

It would take instruments to tell. Tests and calibrations, and more tests with the instruments she had at hand and the knowledge she had acquired. But, to retune them was another matter. To match them so they would restore the field, was a matter of luck and skill and time. Luck, in that they weren't too badly damaged. Skill, to sense and adjust and manipulate and balance. Time, in which to work.

Time!

Egulus shook his head when Dumarest made his report.

"We haven't the time, Earl. That bastard did a good job on us. He worked on the instruments before heading for the generator. I guess he wanted to get us in any way he could."

The captain was being generous-Jumoke had only been interested in killing the engineer and her new lover.

"Radio?"

"Out. I don't mean we just can't get messages in the Quillian Sector. That's bad enough, but at least we might have been lucky. No. The crazy idiot took care of that. Busted it all to hell and the spare unit with it. I guess we should be thankful he didn't wreck the screens while he was at it."

A small advantage, and of dubious merit. Had the screens been wrecked they would have been "blind" but as it was, they could see the cold hostility of the universe in which they now drifted helplessly. See the flare of a nearby sun and the ugly corona around it, the leaping prominences, the blotches of roiling vapors which gave it a pocked appearance as if it were a thing alive and horribly diseased.

"We're heading towards it," said Egulus, "and without power we're going to hit it. Jumoke's last gift to his friends and partners." His hands closed as if he could feel a throat. "I was too gentle," he said bitterly. "I smelled the stink of that smoke but never thought he would be such a fool. To lose his head over a woman!"

"That's all you noticed? The smoke?"

"He was tense and withdrawn, but that's normal when in the Rift. To make a living, we have to take chances and always something can go wrong. It's worse in the Quillian Sector, but you know about that. We make profits but we earn them." He ended bleakly. "Greed. It's killed more men than anything else. The temptation to make an easy profit. To take that one extra chance."

"Kumetat?"

"We didn't have to go there. I was going to give it a miss this time and hit it on the way back in. Only there was a cargo, and how could I refuse?"

An odd cargo for a desert world, Dumarest remembered, but odd things were carried at times. And he'd had no choice but to stay with the Entil. The worlds at which it had touched had been too backward for plentiful shipping. Too undeveloped for a man to earn the price of another passage. Bad worlds on which to be stranded. Hard planets to easily leave. Impossible places on which to hide.

"And if we hadn't got that cargo?"

"We'd be on Tullon by now. At least, that's where we were headed until we touched at Kumetat. They had an urgent delivery for Mucianus. A good world. One on the rim of the Sector and close to the edge of the Rift. We could have stayed awhile, a day or two, maybe. There's always a choice of cargoes." He ended bitterly, "Now it looks as if we're going to roast in hell."

The Garden of Emdale had gone, the bright colors vanished, the flowers, the darting insects, all had disappeared. They had been followed by the chill mistiness of the Chephron Gorge, with its souring walls and looming masses, its blurred details and rocks stained and weathered with time and climate so as to give the appearance of ranked and leering skulls. Other recordings had followed, and now she sat engulfed by the glittering magic of the Elg Cavern. A place of winking points of variegated hue as crystals caught and reflected a mote of light, amplifying it, splintering it into a hundred component parts, distorting it, filling the salon with a snowstorm of sparkles, of eye-catching joy.

But now they gave her no pleasure. Nothing now could give her pleasure. She was filled with the knowledge that she was to die.

What had she said to Bochner?

An end. An extinction. The total erasure of a personal universe. The termination of existence.

And he had called it a form of beauty!