"What kind of ship? Smithpeople? Monks?" These are the only known spacegoing races, aside from ourselves. I'd never seen one of their ships; but they sometimes docked in the Léshy worlds.
The rammer's eyes narrowed in his quilted face. "I see. You think I speak of some registered alien ship in a human spaceport." His voice was no longer slurred; he picked his words with apparent care. "I was halfway between the Horvendile and Koschei systems, shipwrecked at the edge of lightspeed, waiting to die. And I saw a golden giant walking among the stars."
"A humanoid? Not a ship?"
"I... thought it was a ship. I can't prove it."
"Mmm."
"Let me tell you. I was a year and a half out from Horvendile, bound for Koschei. It would have been my first trip home in thirty-one years...
Flying a ramship under sail is like flying a spiderweb.
Even with the web retracted, a ramship is a flimsy beast. Cargo holds, external cargo netting and hooks, pilot cabin and life support system, and the insystem fusion motor are all contained in a rigid pod just three hundred feet long. All else is balloons and webbing.
At takeoff the balloons are filled with hydrogen fuel for the insystem fusion motor. By the time the ship reaches ramscoop speed the fuel is half gone, replaced by low-pressure gas. The balloons are retained as meteor shielding.
The ramscoop web is superconducting wire, thin as spiderweb, tens of thousands of miles of it. Coiled for takeoff, it forms a roll no bigger than the main pod. Put a uniform negative charge on it and it spreads to form a hoop two hundred miles across. It ripples at first under the differentiating fields. .
Interstellar hydrogen, thin as nothing, enters the mouth of the ramscoop web. An atom to a cubic centimeter. Differentiating fields compress it along the axis, compress it until it undergoes fusion. It burns in a narrow blue flame, yellow-tinged at the edges. The electromagnetic fields in the fusion flame begin to support the ramscoop web. Mighty forces add, making web and flame and incoming hydrogen one interlocking whole.
A rigid pod, invisibly small, rides the flank of a wispy cylinder of webbing two hundred miles across. A tiny spider on an enormous web.
Time slows down, distances compress at the higher velocities. Hydrogen flows faster through the web; the ramscoop fields increase in power, the web becomes more rigid, more stable.
A ship should not need supervision as it approaches the midpoint turnover.
"I was halfway to Koschei," said the rammer, "carrying the usual cargo: genetically altered seeds, machine prototypes, spices, and three corpsicles: passengers frozen for storage. We carry anything that cannot be sent by message laser.
"I still don't know what went wrong. I was asleep. I had been asleep for months, with a current pulsing through my brain. Perhaps a piece of meteoric iron entered the ramscoop. Perhaps the hydrogen grew thin for an hour, then thickened too fast. Perhaps we entered a sharply bounded OH + region. In any case, something twisted the ramscoop field, and the web collapsed.
"I was wakened too late. The web had roman-candled, and was trailing the ship like a parachute that will not open. Wires must have touched, for much of the web was vaporized.
"It was my death," said the rammer. "Without the ramscoop web I was falling helplessly. I would enter the system of Koschei months too early, moving at nearly lightspeed, a dangerous missile. For my honor I must inform Koschei by laser, that I might be shot down before I arrive."
"Take it easy," I soothed him. His jaw had clenched, and the muscles that tightened in his face patterned the skin like a jigsaw puzzle. "Relax. It's all over. Smell the grass; you're on Earth now."
"I wept helplessly at first, though we consider weeping unmanly..." The rammer looked around him as if coming awake. "You are right. If I took off my shoes, would the law take offense?"
‘‘No."
He took his shoes off and wiggled his toes in the grass. His feet were too small for him, and his toes were long and agile, almost prehensile.
No doctor had appeared yet. Probably the matronly woman had simply walked away to avoid being involved. In any case, the rammer's strength had returned.
He said, "On Koschei we tend to large girth. Gravity pulls less heavily at the meat of us. To qualify as a rammer I sweated away half my body weight, so that the unneeded two hundred earthweight pounds of me could be replaced by payload cargo."
"You must have wanted the stars badly."
"Yes. I was simultaneously learning disciplines whose very names most people can neither pronounce nor spell." The rammer pulled at his chin. The quilted skin stretched incredibly, and did not snap back immediately when he let go. "I cut my weight by half, yet my feet hurt when I walk the Earth. My skin has not yet shrunk to fit my smaller mass. Perhaps you noticed."
"What did you do about Koschei?"
"I sent the message. It would precede me to Koschei by just two ship's months."
"Then?"
"I thought to wait it out, to use what time was left to me. My taped library was adequate... but even in the face of death, I grew bored."
"After all, I had seen the stars before. Ahead they were blue-white and thickly clustered. To the side they were orange and red and somewhat sparse. Behind was black space, empty but for a handful of dying embers. Doppler shift made my velocity more than obvious. But there was no sense of motion, of going somewhere."
"A month and a half of this, and I was ready to go back to sleep."
"When the collision alarm went off, I tried to ignore it. My death was already certain. But the noise bothered me, and I went to the control room to shut it off. I saw then that a respectable mass was approaching, aimed dangerously, from behind."
"From behind! It was moving faster than my own ship! I searched among the sparse crimson dots with my scope at top magnification. Presently I found a golden man walking toward me."
"My first thought was that I had gone mad. My second was that my God had come for me. Then, as the intruder grew in the scope screen, I saw that it was not quite human."
"Somehow that made it better. A golden man walking between the stars was impossible. A golden alien was a lesser impossibility. At least I could examine it sanely."
"I found the alien larger than I had thought, much larger than human."
"It was a biped, definitely humanoid, with two arms and legs and a well-defined head. Its skin glowed like molten gold, all over, for it was hairless and without scales. Between its legs was nothing but smooth skin. Its feet were strange, without toes, and the knee and elbow joints were bulbous and knobby—"
"Were you really thinking in big expansive words like that?"
"I really was. I wanted to forget that I was terrified."
‘‘Oh.''
"The intruder was nearing fast. Three times I lowered the magnification. Each time I saw him more clearly. His hands were three-fingered, with a long middle finger and two thumbs. The knees and elbows were too far down the limbs, but seemed quite flexible. The eyes—"
"Flexible? You saw them move?"
The rammer became agitated. He stuttered; he had to stop to gain control of himself. When he spoke again he seemed to force the words through his throat.
"I... decided that the intruder was not actually walking. But as it approached my ship, it seemed to be walking on empty space."
"Like a robot?"
"Like a not-quite-man. Like a Monk, perhaps, if we could see beneath the garment worn by Monk ambassadors."