The Enemy Stars by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson [ANDERSON, POUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: Science fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9423-1
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

NAKAMURA noted in the log, which he had religiously maintained, the precise moment when the Cross blasted from the dead star. The others had not even tried to keep track of days. There were none out here. There was not even time, in any meaningful sense of the word only existence, with an unreal impression of sunlight and leaves and women before existence began, like an inverted prenatal memory.

The initial minutes of blast were no more veritable. They took their posts and stared without any sense of victory at their instruments. Nakamura in the control turret, Maclaren on the observation deck feeding him data, Sverdlov and Ryerson watchful in the engine room, felt themselves merely doing another task in an infinite succession.

Sverdlov was the first who broke from his cold womb and knew himself alive. After an hour of poring over his dials and viewscreens, through eyes bulged by two gravities, he ran a hand across the bristles on his jaw. ‘Holy fecal matter,’ he whispered. ‘The canine-descending thing is hanging together.’

And perhaps only Ryerson, who had worked outside with him for weeks of hours, could understand.

The lattice jutting from the sphere had a crude, unfinished look. And indeed little had been done toward restoring the transceiver web; time enough for that while they hunted a planet. Sverdlov had simply installed a framework to support his re-fashioned accelerator rings, antimagnetic shielding circuits, and incidental wire, tubes, grids, capacitors, transformers…. He had tested with a milliampere of ion current, cursed, readjusted, tested again, nodded, asked for a full amp, made obscene comments, readjusted, retested, and wondered if he could have done it without Ryerson. It was not so much that he needed the extra hands, but the boy had been impossibly patient. When Sverdlov could take no more electronic misbehavior, and went back into the ship and got a sledge and pounded at an iron bar for lack of human skulls to break, Ryerson had stayed outside trying a fresh hookup.

Once, when they were alone among galaxies, Sverdlov asked him about it. ‘Aren’t you human, kid? Don’t you ever want to throw a rheostat across the room?’

Ryerson’s tone came gnat-like in his earphones, almost lost in an endless crackling of cosmic noise. ‘It doesn’t do any good. My father taught me that much. We sailed a lot at home.’

‘So?’

‘The sea never forgives you.’

Sverdlov glanced at the other, couldn’t find him in the tricky patching of highlight and blackness, and suddenly confronted Polaris. It was like being stabbed. How many men, he thought with a gasp, had followed the icy North Star to their weird?

‘Of course,’ Ryerson admitted humbly, ‘it’s not so easy to get along with people.’

And the lattice grew. And finally it tested sound, and Sverdlov told Nakamura they could depart.

The engine which had accelerated the Cross to half light speed could not lift her straight away from this sun. Nor could her men have endured a couple of hundred gravities, even for a short time. She moved out at

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