Star Quest Page 2

  "You're lucky, Captain," said the head surgeon, checking his bared arm and shoulder while authorizing a hypo. The meds were spraying his burns with a mildly anesthetic healant. "Second degree, and not on your face, but we can't release you for the meeting in staff. I'll want you under the lights for a while. You can use the remotes, so you won't miss a thing."

  "Will you tell that to the commander?"

  Dr. Alonso Madrazo smiled almost patronizingly. As chief surgeon and project administrator he was as much a representative of World Council Authority as Lyshenko, ever since the regular administrator had died and he had taken his place. Without a word, the tall, lean figure moved onward toward the other patients, but Danny's new double-think was busy.

  Alonso, dubbed "the Duke," was quite a contrast to their iron-fisted skipper. With his scholarly beard and priestly-looking natural tonsure, he was an old-world figure endowed with an aristocratic air of assured dignity. He was also passionately devoted to the arts, history and epic poetry – not to mention his expertise in heraldry, of all things. Mild-mannered, a brilliant scientist, and a gifted administrator, Alonso was an opposite pillar to Alex. He was a man of considered reason.

  Some men said that if the whole crew went mad the Duke and the Skipper would still be hanging in there – one to the rule book and the other to tradition. It was a secret consolation to Danny. The Duke was a friend and sometimes an adviser. Stamen needed somebody like that to go to once in a while, for gyro-stabilization. Maybe he should talk to Alonso later, but first he needed that cold-blooded female headshrinker. Iceberg or no, he could use some couch time with her.

  "Fritters, my God!" somebody yelled.

  Danny turned abruptly in his wheelchair and groaned, for several reasons. One was the pain of his injury. The other was the sight of Jimmy Frater on a low gurney – dead. The once familiar brown eyes stared with an alien grotesqueness from a burned and distorted face.

  He didn't have to ask questions. Other crewmen had followed the grim-faced meddles. He only had to look and listen. Sergeant James Frater, computer maintenance tech and telemetry man, had died of third-degree burns when trapped by a sprung cross-brace in the recycling access well.

  Danny looked up into the troubled face of "Boozie," his own closest friend. Frans Mabuse, assistant electronics chief, was a moody and erratic genius. He thought he caught a signal in the ascetic thin face of his Flemish buddy of many years, but suddenly the ice-blue eyes glanced past him.

  Jerry Fontaine came pushing his way among the medics and crewmen and patients, heedless of his bloodied head wound. His normally passive and dreamy expression had been replaced by one of wild torment. His curly blond beard was as much awry as his semi-long hair as he lunged to the wheeled stretcher and dropped to his knees, clutching his dead friend's hand. He and Fritters had practically been brothers.

  Danny couldn't stand the sight of a grown man bawling, or seeing a companion's soul-pain on public display, particularly Jerry's, the gentle man with his Earth dreams of hybrid orchids and fertilizers from the sea. He was about to signal the medics to roll him away from the scene when there was a new disturbance.

  A brawny hand reached down and yanked Jerry to his feet. Jerry froze, staring bleary-eyed into the threatening long-jawed face of Major Pike.

  "You son of a bitch! You're under arrest!"

  A bleak moment of shocked silence was broken by "Adolf" as he slapped Fontaine around and threw him into the arms of Vinet and Makart, two of his security men. The bursting storm of comment and Pike's shouted answers revealed that Jimmy Frater could have been saved by Jerry. Jerry had been there but had "chickened out." His action or lack of it had been recorded on the closed-circuit monitors.

  Danny used his good hand to grasp Pike's arm and the major whirled about angrily, glowering down at him with a threat of mayhem in his deep-set black eyes.

  "Dolph, what the hell! He's not in Flight Command, he's civvy!"

  "You're out of line, Captain!" said Pike, looming over him. "This creep is going into the brig!"

  "What charge?"

  "Murder, treason, insanity – you name it! I'll throw the book at the lousy yellow bastard!"

  "I froze!" said Jerry, his trembling face a mess of tears. "I saw him there. He was pinned down and yelling at me! I just couldn't move!"

  Pike whirled back toward him. "There were tools and equipment there. You could have pulled him out!" He swung a heavy fist and landed a haymaker. Jerry slumped, out cold, supported by the Flight-Com guards. "Put him in irons!"

  "Major Pike!" came a challenge from an unexpected source. "Release that patient at once! You're in violation of joint regulations, and I'm filing full charges! This is unheard of! The man is sick!"

  Frederica Sachs, stiff-necked, tight-lipped, rapier straight, and inescapably female, had suddenly appeared next to Danny in her smudged and rumpled clinic smock, with one raven strand of hair somehow liberated from her usually meticulous chignon. Her tawny big eyes were magnified behind her heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

  Major Pike hesitated for a brief moment, but then he dismissed her. "Stay out of this, Sachs. He goes with me!" She touched Ricky Campara's arm, Alonso's surgical assistant. Her eyes never wavered from Pike's sullen face.

  "Shall I order a crisis call, Major?"

  Danny caught Boozie's very faint smirk, which on his dour face meant secret appreciation. Crisis calls were met with full security intervention, with the burden of charges being placed upon the caller. It was a joint-operation proviso between Flight Command and Project Administration. The ultimate weapon had been hurled. The impasse was valid. The two challengers faced each other in glacial silence.

  Then came Alonso, unhurried, not pushing, calmly smiling. The Duke was as dignified as ever. "You both have a point," he said quietly.

  "What do you mean, we both have?" asked Pike belligerently.

  "The charter provides for the situation," said Alonso unperturbedly. "You may both be heard in Forum. Meanwhile, Mr. Fontaine is not medically released." He smiled in response to Pike's frown of resistance. "I'll make arrangements for both of you to register your charges and complaints, right after the meeting in staff."

  It was a loophole. Pike signaled to the guards. They handed Jerry over to the medics, and the major stomped away without another word.

  "And now if all you visitors will clear the area," said the chief surgeon, "I'm sure the medi-techs can take care of the wounded without your help." As a master diplomat the Duke had wielded his own ultimate weapon, the oldest one of ancient tradition, known as saving face.

  Freddie Sachs touched Danny's good shoulder lightly. He looked up at her hopefully but was met with a clinician's mask, notwithstanding her softly molded chin and creamy complexion.

  "I want to see you," she said briskly, "in a little while."

  Before he could speak she was gone.

  Boozie took charge of his wheelchair and pushed him purposefully toward the recovery room. Apparently he had been waiting to give him some news. Danny's cluttered emotions and thoughts concerning Jerry, Pike, and Frederica were suddenly derailed by what Frans was swiftly telling him. He spoke in low tones next to his ear.

  "That meeting in staff could be the big one. There was damage in the shaft where Fritters got fried."

  Danny favored his wounds this time, resisting an impulse to turn and glare at him. As engineers they both knew the significance of the area he was talking about. Recycling was the vital heart of life support.

  "Not the S-link!"

  "Burned and gutted to hell."

  "But Jesus, the spare!"

  "No sale, Danny. It's gone."

  Danny gripped the chair wheels and stopped, swinging around to face the slight-framed Belgian. "What the hell do you mean, it's gone?"

  Boozie smirked. The ice-blue eyes met his gaze head-on. "Like I said, that meeting in staff could be the big one. End of the line..."

  CHAPTER II

  Now there was only one slim chance of survi
val. Danny thought fiercely about it as he lay under the healing lights in recovery. If they did live through the hotly debated Jumper maneuver, it would mean an end to any hopes of ever returning home. But after all, no star ship had ever returned as yet, so why should the Sirius III be any different?

  You had to crack the C-line even to get started on an inter-stellar mission, and every schoolboy knew the time-contraction theory. Time was one conceivable barrier, if the theory was valid. That would offer a returning expedition the dubious prospect of either bringing back its findings for the delectation and amazement of dinosaurs, or of arriving home in some far future age where the knowledge gained, if any, would be superfluous. No astrophysicist knew much about the possible effects of traversing C-2, C-3, or going a dozen times the speed of light, hurtling into the star gulfs on nuclear-powered lasers.

  A star ship's life-support capabilities plus human psychological factors limited voyages to three or four years, so that to get anywhere the multiple light-speed hazard had to be faced. To reach Alpha Centauri required a speed of 4.3-C, allowing one year of exploration and one year for return. Vega in one year's time meant 26-C. Their own target had been the bright blue binary, Sirius, in Canus Major, requiring a one year speed of 8.7-C.

  At those velocities, God only knew what else could happen to make a star ship lose its way. There had been wild conjectures about slipping into parallel universes or even other dimensions. However, one thing they had determined. There was, definitely, a trans-C barrier. Something had happened that was an unknown effect. For almost a year now, they had known that they were lost. A totally mystifying fact was that in cutting the Barrier Wall at multiple high-C they had somehow slewed across the parsecs as if they'd struck a pocket in space and time. They had suddenly shot through the void many hundreds or even thousands of light-years. All sight had been lost of the more definite signposts such as the Magellanic Clouds or the greater galactic novae. The computers had been working on the problem ever since, tied in to the astrophysics lab and the observatory, even trying to "back-build" the constellations in an attempt to find some kind of coordinate system that could give them a clue to their return course.

  This, then, was what had happened to all the star quests before them. Multiple attempts had been made – Alpha Centauri, Bernard's Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, Sirius, Vega, Arcturus, even Canopus, 100 light-years out – but all the expeditions had vanished without a trace of even a spacebeam signal after the Barrier was crossed. Yet more ships would follow, bigger, more expensive, more sophisticated and farther ranging. Since Earth had abolished war and the bomb and had become a single society, all nations had become one entity called Man. However, Man still had his need for coping and pushing and expanding. There had to be polarity. Out there in the starry heavens he had to find another intelligence. In more than three centuries of radar astronomy, stellar probing, and piloted searching no other intelligent life-form had been detected.

  The resulting world psychosis had a name: monophobia. Was Man alone in the universe? Were the old behaviorists right? Were humans a biological accident in the unmeasured immensities of time and space? If so, what was the meaning of existence? The star quests had to continue until somebody found an answer. Starmen had become the new myth-heroes of Earth; the star quest itself was a world cult. When the searching stopped, hope would die, and civilization might implode in a wave of degeneration.

  A quality of life had been forfeited for many – the human and personal side. This embraced the hopes and dreams of what might have become an individual contribution to humanity, such as hobbies, creations, and the natural epigenesis of the species.

  Danny himself had once thought of taking power-and-water conversion systems to isolated minority peoples in the semi-blighted areas of the world. Mabuse had left his music behind, like Jerry his orchids, Foxy his sailboats, and even Lyshenko's fish breeding. Everyone had sacrificed an Earth dream to the stars.

  So this was why they were out here now, like all their predecessors, lost beyond returning. This was the third thrust at Sirius, but they were far beyond it now. Until the latest disaster on board, the Duke and the Skipper had kept them trying for a way back. The general theory was that whatever had happened might possibly reverse itself on the return voyage. However, their nuclear fuel was low. For the unshielded main propulsion pile, half a mile astern on the pod frames, there was a theoretical point of no return. Even if they hadn't passed the PNR, the consensus of private opinion was that their course was hopelessly blind. The constellations were sometimes tantalizingly familiar, but in the final analysis they were indefinably alien and awry. They had dared to cross the Barrier Wall of the great trans-C. It came with a price tag.

  There were two opposed camps on board concerning survival. The majority had comprised the "Homer" faction those who were in favor of heading back. The minority dissenters were called the "Jumpers." In the old maritime tradition of jumping ship, these preferred to abort the mission.

  They favored landing on a habitable planet. In the ship's turn-around phase of a year or more, they had slowed down enough to scan at least three planetary systems from a distance. The first two had revealed minimal parameters for survival. The third system had been unusually promising, but that was when the PNR had won out. They had opted for a last desperate dash for home, hoping to refine their nav coordinates as they progressed. The explosion had occurred while they were building their velocity back to C-1. And now there was the life-support question.

  Star ships were not designed to carry bulk supplies of water in any large quantity. Instead, high-compression tanks carried hydrogen and oxygen which served two purposes. These elements were fuel components for their thruster engines, but they were also the components of water. The two gases were piped from the main cryogenic tanks out on the frame, and could be pumped back for storage when the waste was processed. Local small accumulator tanks were in the life pod itself. Fresh water was synthesized and added to recycled waste when needed, but without the S-link, the key to the synthesizer, their time for survival was short. They had perhaps four months, on the small reserves and no showers. That was just enough time to make it back to that G-type yellow star and its promising group of planets. Even if they found a habitable sphere, that would be it. Castaways forever. As Boozie said, the end of the line.

  Danny ached physically to get up and find that spare.

  It couldn't be missing. It was last seen in one of the storage pods on the forward frame, but all inventory was listed in the data banks. He had checked it on a readout tab himself only six months ago. Was somebody crazy?

  Certainly not Boozie. The eccentric young wizard might have his phobic moods and often take to the Pit or an amber glass when off duty, but he knew his parts. If he said the spare S-link was gone, it was gone.

  * * * *

  His thoughts were finally interrupted when cool, light fingers touched his temples and deftly removed his eye pads. The normal room lighting revealed the familiar black-framed glasses of Dr. Frederica Sachs, after which came the face: smooth white, prim lipped, and amber eyed.

  "You've had enough of the therapy beams for a while. We have a few minutes before the meeting starts. I want to talk to you." The rumpled smock was gone and the raven hair was neatly swept up again into her chignon. She wore a close fitting pastel blue jumper with an orange picture collar, which with her measurements gave her a provocative blousy look.

  "You must have read my mind," he said. Then he thought it was a good thing she couldn't read his mind at the moment. "How is Jerry doing?"

  She told him Fontaine was under sedation and no, he wasn't phasing, which was space-medical jargon for the flippies. He had merely experienced emotional shock under extreme crisis. While she talked, she swabbed his burns with medication and applied an aerated blanket pad to his shoulder and chest while bandaging his left arm. With an obvious note of belligerent disdain, she concluded that it was Major Pike who was phasing, if anybody.

  Meanwhi
le, Danny noted that the recovery room was collecting visitors. They were here because of the remote equipment along the front wall. This was a panel of two-way video monitors that would give them access to the upcoming meeting in the staff room.

  "But now to business," said Frederica. "I want to talk about the Pits."

  Danny felt his brows go up. The Pit Cluster of three holophonic simulator chambers was strictly sanctum sanctorum, off limits even to a medical psychiatrist. It was the last subject he'd ever expect Freddie to be capable of mentioning. Besides, it was personal as hell. He looked around apprehensively.

  "I'll be brief," she said, "merely to explain the problem. We can go into it later in depth."

  Sex experiences in depth, with Freddie baby? He reflected that Freud did happen to be the father of her profession. But why single him out, of all people, and warm-blooded Kitty Keene? There were no hangups with either of them, if that was what she was after. He noted the presence of Freddie's closest companion, who was known as "the Lily."

  Lalille Sardou was blond, blue-eyed, nubile as hell but equally unreachable, and characterized by a mystique of melancholy that was disturbingly ethereal. Especially gifted with a talent for languages, she was the project's comparative philologist. He saw her talking, probably in Tamil, to an orange-robed swami who was a member of the paragnostic team, owing to a multiple-consciousness sensitivity and other parafaculties. The bearded old holy man was known officially as Sambhava Ramprasad, so the crewmen called him Sam. The two were off in a corner, and a few others were engrossed in what seemed to be the S-link situation. Among these were Fitz, Foxy, and Mabuse, he noticed, only a few yards away.