“It’ll still make a nice little honeymoon trip. And we’ll be the only humans alive who’ve seen the tenth planet. I suppose we can sell the equipment again when we get back?”
They got down to technical discussions.
It was going to cost.
Brennan…
… what can one say about Brennan? He will always make maximum use of his environment to achieve his ends. Knowing his environment, knowing his motives, one could predict his actions exactly.
But his mind. What goes on in his mind?
His chosen career — the career that has chosen him for its life’s work — is accomplished largely by waiting. Long ago he was prepared. Now he waits and watches, and sometimes he adds refinements to his preparations. He has his hobbies. The solar system is one of these.
Sometimes he takes samples. Otherwise he watches the moving lights of fusion drives with his eccentric substitute for a telescope. He catches fragments of news and entertainment broadcasts with sophisticated noise filtering equipment. Earth provides most of these fragments. The Belt communicates via lasers, and they are not aimed at Brennan.
Civilization goes on. Brennan watches.
In a news broadcast he learns of the death of Estelle Randall.
This raises an interesting possibility. Brennan begins to watch for a fusion light source moving toward Persephone.
Roy wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He lay quiet in the web hammock, feeling the ship alive around him.
The vibration of the drive was feel rather than sound. Two days of that, and he couldn’t sense it without concentrating. The sensation had not changed — he thought.
Alice was beside him in the other hammock. Her eyes were open, her mouth faintly frowning.
That scared him. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. Suit up.”
He grimaced. Suit up — she’d had him climbing in and out of that damn emergency suit for six hours of the first day. It was a man-shaped clear plastic bag with a zipper that ran from chin to knees, forking at the crotch. You could get into it in an instant, and it took another instant to plug that thick air-and-water tube into the ship’s lifesystem; but he’d caught the zipper a couple of times and got language one does not expect from one’s sex partner regardless of previous experience. “From now on you wear nothing but a jock strap,” she’d ordered. “And you wear that all the time. Nothing gets caught in that zipper.” The last couple of hours she was throwing the suit at him from behind, a crumpled ball he had to shake out and get into in ten seconds. When he could do it with a blindfold, she was satisfied.
“It’s your first move,” she’d said. “Always. Anything happens, get into that suit.”
He snatched the suit without looking, slid feet and hands and head in and zipped it two-handed and plugged into the wall. Another instant to pull the shoulder pack out of its recess, slip it on, pull the plug and plug it into that. Stored air filled his suit, tasting tasteless. Alice was still faster; she was ahead of him, swarming up the ladder.
She was in the pilot’s chair when be came through the hatch. “Nice going,” she said without looking around.
“What’s happening?”
“The drive’s functioning perfectly. We’re doing one gee exactly, still lined up for Persephone.”
“Okay.” He relaxed. He moved toward the other chair, stumbling slightly.
She looked around. “Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“Maybe it’s me. I feel… light.”
Now he felt it too. “But we’re registering one gee.”
“Yah.”
He made an intuitive leap. “Check our course.”
She threw him an odd look, then nodded and went to work.
He couldn’t help. He had spent part of the first day and all of the next using learning tapes; he now had a good classroom education in how to fly, maintain, and repair a Belt cargo spacecraft. But Alice knew the instruments. He left her to it.
He felt it when the change came — a little more weight settling on his shoulders, a faint creaking in the fabric of the ship. He saw the fear in her eyes, and be said nothing.
Some time later she said, “We are no longer moving toward Persephone.”
“Ah.” He felt cold fear within him.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“I guessed. But it makes sense. Brennan’s got generated gravity; we’ve been assuming that. If we were in a strong gravitational field, there might be a tidal effect.”
“Oh. Well, that’s what’s happened. It didn’t register on the autopilot, of course. Which means I’ll have to get our new course by triangulation. It’s for sure we’re going wide of Persephone.”
“What can we do about it?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t believe her. They’d planned it all in such vast detail. “Nothing?”
She turned around in her seat. “You may remember that we were going to blast up to a peak velocity of fifty-six hundred miles per second, then coast. We’ve got enough fuel to do that twice, once going, once coming.”
“Sure.” Two hundred and fifty-six hours accelerating, the same decelerating, about a hundred hours coasting. And if they had to use some fuel exploring, they’d come back at lower peak velocity. He ought to remember. They’d worked out dozens of possibilities. They’d taken a cargo ship to carry the extra fuel, lasers to cut away the empty cargo hold if things really went wrong and they had to save the weight. And the lasers would double as weapons.
All the planning, and now what? He’d sensed it then, and said nothing. He sensed it now, before she finished speaking -
“We’re moving at about twenty-two thousand miles per second now. I haven’t got it exactly — that’ll take hours — but as it stands we’ve got almost enough fuel to bring us to a complete stop.”
“Out in the cometary belt?”
“Out in the ass end of nowhere, right.”
— that there was something dreadfully wrong in making plans against Brennan. Brennan was beyond planning.
His mind planned anyway. There were old stories… men had survived emergencies in space… Apollo Thirteen, and the voyage of Four Gee Jennison, and Eric the Cyborg… “We could blast laterally to reach Persephone, then whip around the planet in a hyperbola. At least it’d send us back into the solar system.”
“We might have enough fuel for that. I’ll do a course analysis. Meanwhile—” She played with the controls.
The feel of gravity slowly died away.
The vibration of the drive was gone. It left a silence in his head.
Elroy Truesdale is less predictable than Brennan. Of the several choices that face him now, one is clearly best; but how can Brennan count on his following it? Breeders often don’t. Worse, he may have a companion aboard that big ship. Female and Belter: Truesdale is at least that predictable. But how can Brennan predict the whims of a girl he never met?
It’s like that with Truesdale’s weaponry. Lasers, of course. Lasers are too useful as an all-purpose tool to leave behind. He’d pick lasers, and one other weapon. Grenades, bullets, sonic stunners, plastic explosive? There are about four good choices. One best choice, except that Brennan might anticipate it. Truesdale’s logical move is to flip a coin, twice. Brennan knows that he is bright enough to realize it.
So he flipped a coin twice before takeoff. Which way did it fall, Brennan? Brennan laughs inside his head, though his face does not move. When Truesdale is clever, Brennan is pleased.
And what will he do now? Brennan mulls the point. Fortunately it does not matter. Nothing Truesdale can do will take him out of range of Brennan’s oddball telescope… the same instrument he used to alter Truesdale’s course. Brennan turns to other things. In a few days.