And as they stood there, Viktor felt Reesa's hand creep into his.
He didn't respond. He didn't pull away, but he left his hand limp and uncooperative in hers.
She removed it and turned to look at him. "Is something wrong?" she asked.
He was stubbornly mute. He didn't even look at her. He kept his eyes on the screen.
"Come on, Viktor," she said, her tone unfriendly. "Are you pissed because I kissed Jake Lundy good-bye?" She was scowling now. "He's going into real danger, damn it! I would've kissed Rodericks if it'd been him!"
Viktor allowed his gaze to turn to her. "Would you have been off in a corner whispering with Rodericks all this time, too?"
"Viktor! What the hell are you talking about? Are you jealous?"
"I thought you were my wife, not his," he said stiffly.
"I am your wife, damn you! I'm not your possession. But I'm your wife, all right!"
"A wife is supposed to be true to her husband," he pointed out. "You agreed to that."
"Viktor!" she blazed, flushed with anger. "What do you think we were doing? He wanted someone to talk to—who better than me? Oh, Viktor," she said, her voice thick, "you're a dirty, suspicious man. I don't want to talk about it now. I don't want to talk to you at all! We'll have to settle this later."
"We certainly will," Viktor said grimly. But he didn't know, neither of them knew, how much longer "later" was going to be …
A shout of shock and anger from Bu took their minds off the quarrel. "The lander! It's been hit!" he cried; and the others watching the wall screens were shouting, too—and then everything went bad at once.
The radio communications from the lander stopped in the middle of a sentence, and a vast warbling sound filled the speakers.
On the phosphor screen Viktor and Reesa watched in horror as, from the surface of the planet, an intolerably bright orange-red light winked at them—brighter than they had ever seen on a screen—so bright that the screen shut down in automatic self-defense.
And a shock shook the Ark as though it had been rammed by a truck.
Captain Bu, at the fiber-optic periscope, screamed in pain, as that intolerable brightness, unfiltered by electronics, struck his eyes. The metallic voice of the ship's warning system spoke up from behind Viktor: Sensor lock lost. Sensor lock lost. Sensor … At the same time, another machine voice, deeper and calmer, announced Thruster controls inoperative over and over, while still a third cried, Systems malfunction!
It seemed that every emergency system in Ark was announcing trouble at once. The crunching came again—then once more; and this time Ark itself jerked under them, sending them flying, while the last of the damage reporters cried, Air pressure dropping!
There was no doubt that was true. Viktor could hear the scream of escaping air from somewhere. His ears were popping. His lungs hurt until he exhaled, and then as he tried to breathe in he was gasping. There was a faint, frightening pressure behind his eyes.
Reesa turned from trying to help the moaning, blinded Captain Bu. "Something's shooting at us!" she gasped. "Oh, God! Those poor people down there! Jake'll never get back now!"
And even in the shock and terror of that moment Viktor heard her use his name.
"We ought to get into space suits," Viktor bawled, and then cursed himself. What space suits? They had all gone down to the surface with the landing party.
It was Captain Bu who best kept his head, in spite of terrible pain. He cupped his hands over his blasted eyes and shouted orders, instructions, and demands to be told what was going on.
There was a well-ordered drill for air-loss incidents. True, the drill assumed that the full ship's company would be present to slap on the sticky patches and trigger the airtight door closings. Also true, the drill had been set up for a wholly different Ark, one that had not existed for decades, an Ark with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the ship, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage spaces had been lost, or shifted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed.
And it no longer mattered, really. Patches wouldn't do the job. Ark had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the ship was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the ship was bent; airtight doors weren't airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity—almost maintained it—was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut.
"Wait!" Viktor cried. "What about Rodericks and the others?"
"Didn't you see? They're dead! Close that hatch!" Reesa shouted. And, when Viktor had it clamped, it was just in time. The air in the cryonics deck was thin, but at least its pressure remained steady.
"If those shots ever hit the antimatter …" Reesa whispered, and didn't finish.
She didn't have to. If whatever it was that was firing on them from the surface fired again, and if that shot were to strike the antimatter containment—then nothing else would count. There wasn't much antimatter left in Ark's fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose Ark would become a mere haze of ions.
She turned to the blinded Bu, while Viktor prowled restlessly around the freezer compartment, looking for he knew not what. A weapon? But there was no one nearer than the surface of Nebo to fight. No one had dreamed that Ark might ever need long-range weapons.
And no one had dreamed, either, that anything on the surface of Nebo might try to kill them. Viktor wondered if anyone in the lander had survived. More likely, they were dead already—as he and Reesa and Bu were likely to be, at any moment.
Then a thought struck him. Ark did have one serious weapon, of course …
He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu Wangzha's burned-out eye sockets. "We could blow up the antimatter ourselves!" he cried.
Reesa turned and stared at him. "The radiation," he explained. "If we set the antimatter off, the radiation would burn half the planet clean!"
She was staring at him unbelievingly. But she didn't have to answer. Captain Bu spoke for her. "Let go of me, Reesa," he said, sounding quite normal. He sat up, his hands over his destroyed eyes. He breathed hard for a moment, and then said, "Viktor, don't be a fool. In the first place, we're cut off from the controls. There isn't any air there. And we shouldn't blow up the planet anyway."
Viktor averted his gaze from the horrible eye sockets. "At least we'd hurt them!" he said savagely.
Bu shook his sightless head. "We couldn't destroy the whole planet. The most we could do is prove that we're dangerous—and what if they then decide that the people on Newmanhome have to pay for our act? What chance would they have against something like those lasers?"
"What chance do they have now?" Viktor snarled.
"Not much," Bu said calmly, "but better than we have up here. The air won't last forever, and there's no way we can get out of here."