“Perhaps observation of these extreme conditions at that close range will yield data of military value. It is sure that nothing like my mission has ever been attempted before.
“Glory to the race!”
He switched off and looked straight at Shayin-Mate. “Will that do?” he asked: a sarcasm, for it had better.
The other dropped his gaze. “Thanks and honor to our captain.”
Rach-Scientist said nothing. En route he had expressed doubts about the utility of the scheme. The passage between star and planet would take less than four hours. What few instruments could endure the environment must be rugged, heavily shielded, basically simple, and therefore of very limited capabilities. His class was necessarily allowed a certain latitude, and Ghrul-Captain had been content to override his objections. But to pursue them, especially now, would be insolence meriting punishment.
And, yes, in the end he wanted to fare along. He too was a kzin. “I go, then,” said Ghrul-Captain. To linger when the game was afoot did not become a Hero.
He strode down passageways and sprang down companionways to the portside boat lock. Firehunter waited alongside. A guard made obeisance as he reached the gang tube between. He passed on.
The control den, the only section of the vessel with life support, was a hemispherical space less than five meters across, crammed with equipment and storage lockers, just enough room free for a kzin to curl up on a pad and get a little sleep—hardly a fit prison cell. The air hung chill and stale-smelling. Yet in the viewscreen above the main control panel blazed his goal. He exulted while he settled into the command seat, activated the systems, heard the purr of power and felt the slight tug on him when his craft cast free.
Heavily burdened with her surrounding shell of water, she could not accelerate as fiercely as he would have wished. But her speed did mount, second by second, sunward bound. Ghrul-Captain hissed his satisfaction.
11
Tyra and Craig would be alone aboard Caroline Herschel. They could take several days, perhaps as much as a week, depending on what they found. “Not long enough,” he grumbled, “not by half. Well, I'll come back, make better arrangements, and set forth again.”
“I don't think this arrangement is a bad one,” Tyra purred.
He laughed. “Nor do I. But the idea is to do science.”
“Don't worry, dear, I won't get in the way. Not of the science, at least. Remember, I'm supposed to report it. We won't be tied down twenty-four hours per daycycle, though, will we?”
“M-m, no. The instruments will generally operate themselves. I'm basically to oversee, and make decisions when the inevitable surprises jump at us. Otherwise… we'll often sit goggle-eyed, I'm sure. But no, not the whole time.”
“Don't worry,” she said demurely. “Some happenings won't be reported.” She could not have been accommodated in Henrietta Leavitt, in any case. That boat would be crowded with scientists and their equipment. The Dalmadys did best to stay aboard Freuchen, working up what results they had obtained so far. Likewise, Padilla was fully occupied with the data flooding in from probes and observatories. Verwoort remained also, having lost a coin toss with Takata; it was unwise to send both planetologists together, and he'd have more than enough to keep him busy.
Henrietta departed in the prograde direction, boosting to a path that would take her as far sunward as was deemed safe. A boat from Samurai went along, just in case, and to keep a better eye on the kzin mother ship, orbiting ninety degrees ahead of her. Mainly, Bihari wanted her to follow the progress of the sundiver lately detected on a course for Pele itself. Furthermore, the navy craft had capabilities that would be substantially helpful to the scientists. None accompanied Caroline. She was going retrograde, to study from a different angle what happened in the star rather than to the planet. The only kzin vessel she would see, and that from a considerable distance, was the sundiver when it swung half around Kumukahi and came out of the glare on a hurtling hyperbolic trajectory. Carrying two people, the boat could readily hold everything Raden needed for his work.
She even offered some extra space. He came upon Tyra when she was stowing a portable cooker-washer, kitchenware, tableware, and assorted things to eat. “What the deuce?” he asked.
She grinned. “I'll have more leisure to spare than you,” she explained. “I want to show you I can cook too. I wheedled Marcus out of this—yes, the chill cabinet has room for it—and we'll have beer and wine as well. No need for us to pig it on dry rations and recycled water.” She sighed. “Alas, no candles available.”
“Well, we can turn the lighting way low—”
“Or block off the sun. Simply the stars… No, maybe that's best for later.”
He cocked his head at her. “D'you know, you're the damnedest combination of the romantic and the practical.”
“We women have to be.”
“And we men get to enjoy it. How I pity the kzinti!”
Thus they took off merrily. The last thing they heard before the airlock closed behind them was Verwoort's bawdy farewell.
The next few days were sheer wonder. Personal joys became not separate, but integral with the whole. Tyra had an educated person's knowledge of science. Fascinated by what Raden told, especially about what was being newly revealed to him, she found that talking with her stimulated his thinking; she actually made a few suggestions that he called excellent. It was happiness merely to see and feel his glee; she could watch him in his preoccupation for hours, as she used to watch the sea at her childhood home or could lose herself in the splendor of open space. However, she seldom indulged idleness. Besides her cuisine and a few other minor things, there was her writing. How to find words for what she beheld, how to tell it? Personal impressions, text for a documentary, background for a novel, a cycle of poems—nothing could ever really capture truth, but the thrill of the quest was upon her.
A hundredth of Pele's mass skimmed around it and had begun to rain down into it. Incandescent tides raged, brewing maelstroms that crashed together and spouted monstrous plasmas; blaze scudded like spindrift; invisibly, magnetic lines twisted around each other till they snapped and energies exploded that dwarfed whatever mortals knew to touch off; the deeper layers roiled, and maybe certain atomic nuclei were fusing in strange ways: mystery, mystery, unfolding in fury. The sun was not shaken to the core, Raden said. These were transient effects. In the course of the next century or two, they would die down, leaving little other than a slightly changed chemical composition and thereby, perhaps, a mainsequence evolution slightly hastened. Nor was this present chaos quite akin to a storm such as humans knew. However mighty it appeared from afar, it was gases in a soft vacuum. The deadliness lay in the radiation, charged particles, searing infrared, blinding light, lethal X-rays. Heavily protected, a spacecraft might still pass quickly through unscathed.
Might. Nobody knew. Nobody before them had been this close to this kind of catastrophe.
Tyra's mind dwelt more on Kumukahi. A planet, no matter how huge and alien, was closer kin to home than any star. Whenever it swung into view and she had the use of the screens, she strained at the magnified image, gripped, half terrified.
Pele had drawn the spheroid into a teardrop, but a living and throbbing one. The extended tip seethed and surged like a monstrous, fluid volcano. Hydrogen-helium smoke poured as from a nozzle, redly and restlessly aglow with fluorescence. It rushed ahead, girdling the planet's slayer with a ring that wound into a spiral whirling ever inward. Sparks and gouts flew free, knots of momentary concentration, like lava bombs. The titanic outpouring shuddered, shifted, ever changeable, spurted lesser eruptions of moon size, wrapped itself in clouds that then boiled away to give sight anew of the cataract streaming upward. Everywhere else churned chaos. All was red, a thousand shades never the same for two instants, from murky roan through carmine to blood damasked with blue-white. Kumukahi's dying in style! thought Tyra once; and then: That's how Robert would put it.