“If we didn’t have to worry about Brennan, I know just what we’d be doing,” said Alice. “We’d be decelerating, and blasting out a help call. In a few months someone would mount an expedition and pick us up.”
They were in Roy’s hammock, loosely moored against free fall. They had spent more and more time in the hammocks these last few days. They slept more. They had sex more often, for love or for reassurance or to end the occasional snappish quarrels, or because there was nothing constructive to be done.
“Why should anyone come for us?” Roy asked. “If we were damn fools enough to come—”
“Money. Rescue fees. It would cost us everything we own, of course.”
“Oh.”
“Including the ship. Which would you rather be, Roy? Broke or dead?”
“Broke,” he said immediately. “But I’d rather not have the choice. And I don’t. You’re the Captain, as per agreement. What are we going to do, Captain?”
Alice shifted against him, and reached around him to tickle the small of his back with her fingernails. “I don’t know. What do you want to do, my loyal crew?”
“Count on Brennan. But I hate it.”
“Do you think he’ll put you back twice?”
“Brennan’s got a pretty good record for… humanitarianism. When I turned down his bribe it went to Criminal Rehabilitation Studies. Before that it was going to medical research in prosthetics and alloplasty.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“You wouldn’t. Belter. On Earth there was this thing going with organ banks. Everyone wanted to live forever, I guess, and the easiest way to get enough transplants for all the sick people was to use condemned criminals. They were imposing the death penalty for anything and everything, including too many traffic violations. That was when Brennan was plowing money into other kinds of medical research.”
“We never had that problem,” Alice said with dignity, “because we decided not to. We never turned our criminals into donors.”
“Granted. You got through that period on pure moral fiber.”
“I’m serious.”
“We got through it because medical research found better ways of doing things. Brennan was backing that research. Now we’ve got live felons again, and they’ve got to be returned to society somehow.”
“And Brennan’s backing that. And this is the same soft-hearted Snatcher who’s bound to put us back on Earth if we don’t do anything in our own behalf.”
“You asked my opinion, my Captain. You have no reason to treat my answer as mutiny.”
“At ease, my loyal crew. I just—” Her hand clenched into a fist. He felt it against his back. ” — don’t mucking like to depend on someone—”
“Neither do I.”
“—someone with as much arrogance as the Brennan-monster. Maybe he really does see us as animals. Maybe he just — threw us away because we were coming to bother him.”
“Maybe.”
“I still haven’t seen anything ahead of us.”
“Well, wherever we’re going, we’re going a hell of a lot faster than we planned.”
She laughed. Her fingernails drew circles on the small of his back.
There was something ahead of them. It was invisible to telescope and radar, but it registered, barely, on the mass detector. It might have been a stray comet, or a flaw in the mass detector, or — something else.
They had been falling for six days. Now they were 7x109 miles from Sol — as far as Persephone. Now the mass indicator showed a tiny, distinct image. It was smaller than any moon a gas giant ought to have. But matter was so thin out here — almost as thin as interstellar space — that by long odds they should have been falling toward nothing at all.
They thought it was Brennan. They took hope, and fear.
And the telescope showed nothing.
He wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He listened to the silence, he looked about him in the half-light…
Alice was sagging forward against the restraining straps around her hammock, hanging toward the ship’s nose. As was he.
He had learned his lesson well. He had his pressure suit in hand before he released the straps. He clutched them as an anchor and donned the suit one-handed. The pull was a few pounds, no more. Alice was ahead of him again, drifting down the ladder toward the nose.
The mass detector was going crazy. Beyond the porthole was a wilderness of fixed stars.
“I can’t do a course estimate out here,” said Alice. “There aren’t any reference points. It was bad enough back there, two days out from Sol.”
“Okay.”
She slammed a fist into the porthole glass. “It’s not okay. I can’t find out where we are. What does he want with us?”
“Easy, easy. We came to him.”
“I can do a Doppler shift on the sun. At least it’ll give us our radial velocity. I can’t do that with Persephone, it’s too goddamn dim—” She turned away suddenly, her face convulsed.
“Take it easy, Captain.”
She was crying. When he put his arms around her she beat gently on his shoulders with her fists. “I don’t like this. I hate depending on someone—” She sobbed rackingly.
She had more responsibility than he. More stress.
And — he knew it was true — she couldn’t make herself depend on anyone. Within his big family Roy had always had someone to run to in an emergency. He’d felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have such a failsafe in his life.
Love was an interdependence kind of thing, he thought. What he and Alice had wouldn’t ever quite be love. Too bad.
Which was a silly thing to be thinking while they waited the whim of Brennan, or the Snatcher, or Vandervecken, or whatever was out there: a flimsy chain of reasoning, and something that moved spacecraft about like toys on a nursery floor. And Alice, who had her head buried in his shoulder as if trying to blot out the world, still had them anchored to a wall by one hand. He hadn’t thought of it.
She felt him stiffen and turned too. A moment she looked, then moved to the telescope controls.
It looked like a distant asteroid.
It was not where the mass indicator had been pointing, but behind that point. When Alice threw the image on the screen, Roy couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like a sunlit landscape in fairyland, all grass and trees and growing things, and a few small buildings in soft organic shapes; but it was as if a piece of such a landscape had been picked up and molded by the hands of a playful topologist.
It was small, much too small to hold the film of atmosphere he could see around it or the blue pond gleaming across one side. A modeling-clay donut with depressions and bulges on its surface, and a small grass-green sphere floating in the hole, and a single tree growing out of the sphere. He could see the sphere quite clearly. It must have been huge.
And the near side of the structure was all bathed in sunlight. Where was the sunlight coming from?
“We’re coming up on it.” Alice was tense, but there were no tears in her voice. She’d recovered fast.
“What do we do now? Land ourselves, or wait for him to land us?”
“I’d better warm up the drive,” she said. “His gravity generator might kick up storms in that artificial atmosphere.”
He didn’t ask, How do you know? She was guessing, of course. He said, “Weapons?”
Her hands paused on the keys. “He wouldn’t — I don’t know.”
He pondered the question. Thus he lost his chance.