She looked doubtful. "Even if the drive’s okay, you’d be taking a hell of a risk. If something came loose somewhere, say during the jump—" She shook her head.
The quality of light was changing: we were moving into the early evening, the Corsarius dwindling quickly, falling through the dusk, plunging toward the terminator. It glowed against the encroaching dark. I watched it during those last moments before it lost the sunlight, waiting, wondering perhaps whether it wasn’t some phantasm of the night which, with the morning, would leave no trace of its passing.
The object dropped into the planetary shadow. It grew dimmer, but—
"I can still see it," said Chase, tensely. "It’s glowing." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Where the hell is the reflection coming from? There aren’t any moons."
It shone with a steady, pale luminescence. A cool damp hand groped its way up my spine. "Running lights," I said. "It’s running lights are on."
Chase nodded. "The Tenandrome people must have done it. I wonder why?"
I couldn’t believe that. I knew enough about the way professionals with technological artifacts: if possible, until studies are complete, they get left the way they’re found. I wondered briefly whether the people from Tenandrome had boarded the ship at all.
An hour or so later, we followed the Corsarius down the nightside. By then it was only a dull star. "That’s enough for me," Chase said, getting up. "Maybe we should take Scott’s advice and go home. Barring that, I think it would be a good idea if one of us remains in the cockpit at all times. I know that’s a little paranoid, but I’ll feel a lot better. You agree?"
"Okay." I tried to look amused, but I favored the proposal.
"Since this is your expedition, Alex, you draw the first watch. I’m going back and try to get some sleep. If you decide to drop this whole business, you’ll get no argument from me. And while you’re thinking about it, keep an eye on the goddam thing." She let herself out through the cockpit hatch. I listened to her moving around back there, running the dispenser, closing doors, and finally turning on the shower. I was glad she was there. Had she not been, I doubt I’d have gone any further.
I depressed the back of my seat, adjusted my cushions, and closed my eyes. But I kept thinking about the derelict, and periodically I raised myself on an elbow to look out at the night sky, to make sure something wasn’t sneaking up on us.
After an hour or so of that, I gave up trying to sleep, and switched on a comic monologue from the library. I didn’t much care about the humor, which was weak and obvious. But the delivery was casual, energetic, studded with one-liners and awash with audience laughter. It was a good sound, reassuring, soothing, encouraging. There is this about comedy: even when it’s bad, it provides a sense of a secure existence, in which things are under control.
Eventually the cockpit drifted away from me. I was vaguely aware of the absolute stillness in the after living quarters—which meant Chase was asleep, and that I was, in a sense, alone—of the smooth liquid rhythm of a cinco band, and of the occasional flicker of instrument lights against my eyelids. When I came out of it, it was still dark. Chase was back in the pilot’s chair, not moving, but I knew she was awake.
She’d tossed a spread over me.
"How are we doing?" I asked.
"Okay."
"What are you thinking?"
The instrument lights caught in her eyes. Her breathing was audible; it was part of the pulse of the ship, one with the muted bleeps and whistles of the computers, and the occasional creek of metal walls protesting some minor adjustment of velocity or course, and the thousand other seconds which one hears between the stars. "I keep thinking," she said, "about the old legend that Sim will come back in the Confederacy’s supreme hour of need." She was looking through the viewpoint.
"Where is it?" I asked.
"Around the curve of the planet. The scanners won’t pick it up again for several hours. We’ll have dawn in about twenty minutes, by the way."
"You said last night we should leave it alone. Did you really mean that?"
"To be honest with you, Alex, yes. I’m queasy about all this. That damned thing shouldn’t be out here. The people on the Tenandrome must have reacted to it the same way we have. Which means they rendezvoused and went aboard, and then they pulled out and went home and swore everyone who know anything about it to keep quiet. Why? Why in God’s name would they do that?"
"Leave now," I said, "and sleep no more."
"It might be a no-win situation. From what you’ve told me about Scott, he’s become a driven man. Is that what’s going to happen to us after we board her tomorrow?" She shifted her weight, and stretched her long legs (lovely in the pale green glow of the instruments!). "If I could arrange to forget this thing, erase the record, go somewhere else, and never come back, I believe I’d opt for it. That thing out there, I don’t know what it is, nor how it could be what it seems; but it doesn’t belong in this sky, or any sky. I don’t want anything to do with it."
She tapped the keyboard, and a stored image of the stranger ship unfolded on the monitor. She homed in on the bridge. It was dark, of course. But it looked as alert and deadly as it had in the simulations of the raid on the Spinners, and the action at Rigel. "I was reading his book during the night," she said.
"Man and Olympian?"
"Yes. He was a complex man. I can’t say I always agree with him, but he has a forceful way of stating his position. He comes down rather hard, for example, on Socrates."
"I know. Socrates is not one of his favorite people."
Her lips formed a half-smile. "Man had no respect for anybody."
"His critics agreed. But of course Sim blasted them, too, in a second book that he didn’t live to finish." Critics have all the advantage, he’d once said, because they wait until you 've died, and then they get the last word.
"It’s a pity." She sat back and locked her hands behind her head.
"They never present this side of him in the schools. The Christopher Sim that the kids get to see comes off as perfect, preachy, and unapproachable." Her brow furrowed. "I wonder what he’d have made of that thing out there?"
"He’d have boarded. Or, if he couldn’t board, he’d have waited for more information, and found something else to think about in the meantime."
Her hull was seared and blistered and pocked. It had a patchwork quality imposed by the periodic replacement of plates. Navigational and communication pods were scored, shields toward the after section of the ship appeared to have buckled, and the drive housing was missing. "Nevertheless," said Chase, "I don’t see any major damage. There is one strange thing, though." We were approaching from above and behind in the Centaur’s capsule. We were wedged in pretty tight. The capsule itself isn’t much more than a plexibubble with a set of magnetics. "The drive housing wasn’t blown off. It was removed. And I’m not sure, but it looks as if the drive units themselves are missing." She pointed toward two pod-shaped objects that I’d assumed were the Armstrongs. "No," she said. "They’re only the outer shells. I can’t see any cores. But they should be visible."
"They have to be there," I said. "Unless someone deliberately disabled the ship after it arrived."
She shrugged. "Who knows? The rest of it doesn’t look too good either. I’d bet there’s a lot of jury-rigging down there."
"Unfinished repairs," I said.
"Yes. Repairs made in a hurry. Not the way I’d want to take a ship into combat. But, except for the Armstrongs, it looks serviceable enough." The aguan solenoids, through which Corsarius had hurled the lightning, protruded stiff and cold from an array of mounts. "So do they," she added.