Somewhat mollified, Tarrant turned his seat to the aft-facing position and forced himself to relax. He was now positioned behind the rest of the crew, looking over the backs of their seats and through the rear canopy of the flight deck. The ship’s tail fins, illuminated by the drive flare and marker lights, were as steady as structures implanted in bedrock, and the slow wheeling of the stars beyond them was comfortingly like that caused by the Earth’s diurnal rotation.
Tarrant thought again about Myrah, and in a few seconds was in the heavy, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.
The planetoid was a crescent of searing brilliance whose horns spanned the entire field of view from the forward canopy, and in the absence of spatial referents Tarrant had difficulty with orientation. As far as his senses were concerned he could have been a million miles out from an object the size of Jupiter. Only the obvious changes in the planetoid’s aspect as he jockeyed the ship into position told him he was close to what, in cosmic terms, was a relatively insignificant body.
At a radar height of two kilometres above the northern pole he began work on the tricky task of matching velocities with the planetoid. The ship had not been provided with instrumentation suitable for measuring slow drifts, and Tarrant had to improvise as best he could with the coarse navigational equipment and direct sightings. It was only necessary to satisfy himself that, during a crew sortie of several hours, the ship would not blunder into the planetoid or recede beyond the effective range of the miniature propulsion units in the space suits, but a good twenty minutes of shunting and balancing had gone by before he felt any degree of confidence about quitting the ship.
“That’s it,” he announced finally. “We can go now.”
The others had grown noticeably more tense during the prolonged and cautious manoeuvring, and to offset their mood he locked all the flight controls with a series of confident flourishes. The last one he touched was the thrust control lever. It travelled perhaps a centimetre along its slot before locking into the zero impulsion notch. Tarrant, who had been under the impression it was already in the last notch, felt his mouth go dry. He signalled the others to make ready to leave the ship and, trying not to be too obvious about it, he ran a final check on their position relative to the planetoid. Within the limits of observational error, it was unchanging. The only conclusion he could draw was that there had been a short period in which the control system had been demanding thrust and the drive unit had not been supplying it.
Martine floated into view beside him. “Something wrong, Hal?”
Tarrant hesitated, then decided to confide his alarm. “There seems to be a bit of free play in the thrust control linkage. When the lever position indicated the drive was on, it was actually off.”
“It must have been in the lowest ranges.”
“The very bottom.”
Martine gave the equivalent of a shrug with his eyebrows. “I shouldn’t worry about it.”
“It’s not your. …” Tarrant hesitated. “All right—let’s go.”
While they were sealing their helmets and assembling the equipment for the expedition, Tarrant secretly pondered those traits in his character which had rendered him unsuitable for the profession of astronaut. Did he suffer from an excess of imagination? Or, was he—quite simply—a coward? To him it seemed blindingly obvious that a drive unit which was off when it should have been on could, with the lethal arbitrariness of a flawed machine, decide to be on when it was supposed to be off. The trouble was that his principal commitment of the hour was the shepherding of four inexperienced men on their first space walk, and to do it effectively he would have to inspire them with confidence in himself and in all the artifacts upon which their lives depended. He pushed the vague forebodings to the back of his mind and concentrated on the practicalities of preparing to destroy an enemy he had never seen, and which was protected by a cocoon of water many kilometres in thickness.
The torpedo which Miss Orchard’s technicians had hastily cobbled together for Tarrant’s use had started life as a deep-ocean, self-propelled camera sled. They had removed the photographic equipment and replaced it with fifty kilos of commercial explosive wired to detonate in proximity to a mass as large as they conceived the matter transceiver to be. The theory, explained by Miss Orchard with the aid of blackboard sketches, was that although the transceiver was drawing in water at a rate great enough to set up far-reaching currents there would be a dead spot—corresponding to the low-pressure zone behind a moving body—close to its inactive side.
“You’ll appreciate that we’re working on very low-grade evidence,” Miss Orchard had said, “but, if we grant the existence of this monster of yours, that’s where it has to be. I’m having a gravimeter fitted to the sled to enable it to find its own way to the centre of the planetoid, and when it gets to within five hundred metres or so the charge will detonate. At that range the shock wave won’t damage the transceiver, but it should play hell with any organism as loosely constructed as a siphonophore.”
She had paused to give Tarrant and Martine a malign smile. “It would probably be enough for your purpose if you only succeeded in wafting the beast out of the dead spot and into the current. It would probably come apart quite nicely in that case.”
The conversation had impressed Tarrant with the ability of the scientific mind to pursue a thread of logic to the end, regardless of the twists and turns on the way, and it kept returning to his mind while he made ready to leave the ship.
As soon as he had checked on his companions’ suits Tarrant bled the flight deck air into space and opened the forward canopy. This operation was new to him and he was unprepared for the sense of awe which held him as the canopy parted like the wing-casings of an insect, putting him in direct communion with silent expanses beyond. He experienced in an intensified form a childhood feeling that the first step of a long journey was just as significant as the last, that the road itself was somehow mysterious and frightening because it extended from the familiar present to an unknown future.
As he was unstrapping the sled from its anchorages he was acutely aware—and the knowledge both chilled and exhilarated him—that were he to push a small object away from him, no matter how gently, it would begin a slow flight which might last for ever, and if he imparted spin to it the object would still be rotating at the same rate a million years later. Every movement he made seemed to have implications for eternity.
Trying not to let himself be distracted, Tarrent guided the sled out into the vacuum while the others were experimenting with their suit propulsers. The miniature thrusters were positioned on the lower edges of the backpacks, supposedly at each individual’s centre of gravity, but there was an unavoidable degree of eccentricity and it took some practice before a man could progress through space without gently tumbling head over heels. Finally, however, the five were gathered around the sled with all their equipment, and began their descent to the planetoid. They remained silent as the globe of water expanded to meet them.
The layer of mist which covered the sunward side appeared to be quite thin and Tarrant soon was able to distinguish a greenish mottling here and there. This, he deduced, was caused by the vegetation which thrived in the freakish conditions and among whose deep-probing roots Myrah’s people still lived.
Pressure of events had prevented him from thinking much about that strange offshoot of the human race—a lost tribe of two hundred men, women and children—but they represented a problem which he and others would soon have to face. The grand plan laid down by Bergmann’s ancient technocrats made no provision for them, and they were doomed to extinction as their world shrank to nothing, unless a major effort could be made to bring them back to Earth. There were enough serviceable space craft littered around the planet to form a rescue fleet, but international cooperation on that scale was no longer feasible. A remote possibility was that they might be contacted and persuaded to swim voluntarily into the maw of the matter transceiver, but the obstacles along that route were so numerous that Tarrant’s mind shied away from considering them. His present burden of responsibility was already in danger of becoming insupportable. …