Christine was close behind him when he reached the cavernous shade of the hangar deck, and she caught his arm. “What’s all this stuff about funking out, big man?”
“Did I cause offence?” Surgenor looked politely apologetic. “I’m sorry. It was just that you seemed a little nervous down there.”
Christine stared at him with narrowed eyes which were almost on a level with his own. “I get it. You identify with this beat-up old scow—you actually identify with it. Boy, you really are in a mess!” She brushed past him before he could reply and marched towards the metal stair which led to the upper decks.
Surgenor gaped at her departing figure, outraged, then looked all around as though seeking a witness to the wrong which had been done him. The six survey modules crouched in their stalls gazed back at him with cyclopean headlights, noncommittal, uninvolved.
The take-off from Delos, in contrast to what was to follow, was a routine affair.
The Sarafand floated clear of the ground and rose steadily to a height of fifty metres, at which point—in compliance with interstellar quarantine regulations—she paused and electrostatically cleansed herself of the dust, pebbles and spacefield litter which were swirling within her counter-gravity field. There followed a one-gravity ascent to one hundred kilometres, and a second electrostatic purge which dispersed the last traces of captured atmosphere into the void. The ship was now set to make the first tentative beta-space jump, a short one which would take her clear of the gravitational complexities of the local sun and planetary system.
Surgenor knew that Aesop, using a part of his “mind’ which was inaccessible to the understanding of the crew members, was testing his environment, surveying the invisible slopes of space, making ready to perform geometric miracles. From his seat in the observation room, Surgenor stared down at the curving blue-white expanses of Delos and waited for the planet to vanish. As ever, in spite of all the years, he felt a slow build-up of excitement and his heart began a measured pounding.
He glanced along the row of swivel seats, taking stock of the company in which he was once again to leap into the unknown. Of the eleven other people present, only four—Victor Voysey, Sig Carlen, Mike Targett and Al Gillespie—were long-term veterans with the Sarafand. Some of the remainder had picked up limited experience on other ships before transferring to the Sarafand, and the rest, as was the case with Christine Holmes, were still in the novice stage.
Officially speaking, lack of service time or an abundance of it was of little importance—a newcomer to the job received virtually the same pay as an old hand—but Surgenor persisted in believing that experience was valuable, and he would have preferred a higher proportion of veterans in the crew. It occurred to him as he waited that he was becoming morbidly conscious of risk factors—something which had not bothered him unduly in the old days. Was that why he had, so uncharacteristically, lost his temper with Christine Holmes?
A frisson of excitement rippled through the room as the curving bright solidity of the planet Delos flicked out of existence, causing a sudden drop in the light intensity. In its place a fiercely concentrated point of brilliance stood out against the background of stars. Surgenor knew he had travelled upwards of half a light-year in the instant of change, and that Aesop—immune to fear, untouched by wonder—was calmly preparing for the next leap, a huge one this time which would carry the Sarafand deep into unknown space. It was heading outwards from the plane of the Milky Way, its destination a loose grouping of five suns which burned like look-out fires on the edge of intergalactic space.
Even on Delos, Surgenor had been accutely aware of the sparseness of stars in that quarter of the night sky which lay to the galactic north—now the realization loomed large in his mind that, on the completion of the next beta-space jump, there would be nothing between him and the great void. The observation room had two hemispherical viewing screens, and while one of them overflowed with the profuse suns of the galaxy which had almost been left behind, the other would be empty except for the dim, blurry specks of distant island universes.
The Bubble is getting too big, Surgenor mused uneasily. It was true that the sphere of man’s activity only extended through the thickness of the galactic wheel—and that most of its diameter, with all the multitudinous star systems of the hub—lay beyond his domain, but a boundary had been reached just the same. It was a reminder that the galaxy was finite. And that jaunty, querulous, presumptuous homo sapiens had a taste for the infinite…
“Hey, Dave!” Victor Voysey leaned across from the next chair and spoke in a whisper. “I’ve just had a dust-up with Marc’s replacement. I thought somebody said she was a woman.”
“She’s had a rough time,” Surgenor said, glancing along the row. In profile Christine’s shadow-eyed face looked almost haggard.
“That’s as may be, but…Christ…I only told her nobody’s allowed to smoke in the clean air rooms.”
Surgenor repressed a smile. “Look out, infinity—some of us are coming to flick ash on you.”
“You feeling all right Dave?”
“Some day, Victor, maybe you’ll learn not to rush in where…’ Surgenor gripped the arms of his chair as, within two seconds, the brilliant nucleus of the far-off sun of Delos snapped out of being, was replaced by an all-enveloping blackness in which a few misty blurs of light hovered like fireflies, then was replaced yet again by a different pattern of misty specks. Finally a wild extravagance of star fields—glittering and crowded, filling both hemispheres of vision—came blazing into existence.
Surgenor’s heart seemed to stop beating altogether as it became obvious that something had gone wrong with the beta-space jump. It was totally unknown for a ship to make three transitions in rapid succession; and it was apparent that their present location, where ever it might be was not on the brink of starless deeps.
“Dave?” Voysey kept his voice low. “Have we been on a joyride?”
“Joyride?” The inappropriateness of the word dragged at Surgenor’s lips. “I hope I’m wrong, but I got the impression that…just for a second or so…we were outside.”
“But Aesop wouldn’t go out. It says in all the books that the graviton flux is too strong out there for a ship to have any kind of control. I mean, if we went out we wouldn’t be able to…”
“Let’s discuss it later,” Surgenor said, inclining his head towards the other crew members. “If something has gone wrong in Aesop’s astrogation cabinets it can’t be too serious, and there’s no point in starting a panic.”
“Why doesn’t Aesop make an announcement?”
“He mightn’t think it’s worth while.” Surgenor looked along the row again and saw that both Carlen and Gillespie had half-risen from their seats and were frozen in that position, staring at him. “Let’s go to my room and quiz Aesop in private.” He walked to the door of the gallery-like observation chamber followed by Voysey and, at a greater distance, Carlen and Gillespie.
“Where are you guys going?” The voice, laden with discords of nervous stress, belonged to Billy Narvik, a wispy-bearded twenty-year-old, who had joined the Sarafand two trips back.
“To have a quiet drink,” Surgenor told him. “We’ve seen all this star-jumping stuff before.”
“Don’t try to gas me, Dave—you never saw anything like that before.” A general murmur of unease followed Narvik’s words, and Surgenor wished the youngster would sit down and keep his mouth shut.
“What do you think you saw?”
“I saw three or four jumps, all on top of each other. There were galaxies, nothing but galaxies, and now this.” Narvik gestured at the surrounding star fields. “This isn’t the Five Suns group.”