"So we're dead!" Viktor snapped.
Bu gazed at him with the sightless eyes. Viktor averted his gaze, but the captain's face was almost smiling. "If you're dead," he said, "you might as well be frozen."
"What?"
"The freezers are still working, aren't they? And even blind, I think I can get the two of you stowed away."
"Captain!" Reesa gasped. "No! What would happen to you?"
"Exactly what will happen to all of us if we do nothing," Captain Bu said comfortably. "Frozen, you have a chance to survive until—" He shrugged. "To survive for a while, anyway. Don't worry about me. It's a captain's job to be the last to leave— and anyway, I have faith, you see. The Lord promised salvation and eternal bliss in heaven. I know He was telling the truth." He grimaced against the pain, and then said in a businesslike way, "Now! You two get out the preparation boxes and the rest of the freezer equipment, and show me where everything is. If you start it, I think I can finish the job by touch."
"Are you sure?" Reesa began doubtfully, but Viktor caught her arm.
"If he can't, how are we worse off?" he demanded. "Here, Bu. This is the perfusor, these are the gas outlets …"
And he let the blind man do his job, fumblingly as he did, even while the hulk of the old ship shook every now and then with some new blow or some fresh excursion of the control rockets. It was the only chance they had—but he knew it was a forlorn hope. It was being done wrong, all wrong …
And it was wrong, a lot wronger still, when he opened his caked, sore eyes and looked up into the eyes of a red-haired woman in a black cowl. It wasn't until she said, "All right, Vik, can you stand up now?" that he realized she was his wife.
"You aren't Captain Bu," he told her.
"Of course not," she said, sobbing. "Oh, Viktor, wake up! Captain Bu's been dead for ages. Everybody has! It's been four hundred years."
CHAPTER 13
The slow approach of old Ark didn't frighten the matter-copy on Nebo. Still, caution was built into Five, and it watched the thing very carefully.
Five had plenty of time for watching. Once its little fleet of stars was well launched on its aimless flight—really aimless, because it was not to anywhere, simply away—Five had very little to do.
That wasn't a problem. Five didn't become bored. It was very good at doing nothing. It simply waited there on its slowly cooling little planet, observing the dimming of its star as the stellar energies were drained away into the gravitational particles that drove the cluster along. Five didn't have much in the way of "feelings," but what it did have was a sort of general sense of satisfaction in having accomplished the first part of its mission. It did, sometimes, wonder if there was meant to be a second part. For Five the act of "wondering" did not imply worry or speculation or fretting over possibilities; it was more like a self-regulating thermostat constantly checking the temperature of its process batch, or a stockbroker glancing over his stack of orders before leaving for the day, to make sure none remained unexecuted. Five was quite confident that if Wan-To wanted anything else from it, Wan-To would surely let it know.
All the same, it was, well, not "startled," but at least "alerted to action," when it detected the presence of an alien artifact approaching its planet.
Five knew what to do about it, of course. Its orders included the instruction to protect itself against any threat; so when the thing fired a piece of itself toward the planet's surface, Five simply readjusted some of its forces and fired high-temperature blasts of plasma at both the object in orbit and the smaller one entering the atmosphere. When it was sure neither was functioning any longer, Five deployed a small batch of graviphotons to move the larger object away from its presence—not far; just in a sort of elliptical orbit that would keep it out at arm's length.
That left the part that was already in Nebo's atmosphere.
It was obviously too small and too primitive to be dangerous anymore. Five caught the falling thing in a web of graviscalars and lowered it to the surface of Nebo for examination.
That was when Five discovered that the object was hollow—and that it contained several queer things that moved about on their own. They weren't metallic. They were composed of soft, wet compounds of carbon, and they made acoustic sounds to each other.
They seemed almost to be alive.
That was a bit of a problem for the little homunculus called Five. Its instructions had never foreseen any such bizarre situation as this. It almost wished it dared contact Wan-To for instructions.
That contact was a while in coming, because Five was not very frequently on Wan-To's mind.
Wan-To's mind was rather troubled, in fact. He didn't like to speak to his sibling/rivals, because there was always the risk of giving away some bit of strategic information to the wrong one. But he wanted something interesting to do.
His billions of years of boredom had caused him to produce a lot of entertainments, and one of them was just to wonder. In that way too he was very like the human beings he had never heard of: he was insatiably curious.
One of the things he wondered about (like the humans) was the universe he lived in. Wan-To was more fortunate than the humans in that way. He could see better than they, and he could see a lot farther.
Of course, Wan-To himself couldn't "see" diddly-squat outside his own star, because the close-packed ions and nuclear fragments of his core certainly didn't admit any light from outside. It would have been far easier to peek through sheets of lead than to see through that dense plasma.
When you think of it, though, human astronomers aren't much better off. The part of them that wonders is the human brain, and the brain can't see anything at all. It needs external organs—eyes—to trap the photons of light. Even the eyes don't really "see," any more than the antenna on your TV set "sees" Johnny Carson flipping his pencil at your screen. All the human eye does is record the presence or absence of photons on each of its rods and cones and pass on that information, by way of neurons and their synapses, to the part of the human brain called the visual cortex. That's where the images from the rods and cones are reconstituted into patterns, point by point. The "seeing" is a joint effort between the photon gatherers, the pattern recognizers—and, finally, the cognitive parts of that wet lump of flabby cells the human being thinks with. So, in his own way, it was with Wan-To.
It should not be surprising that Wan-To's immensely greater brain could see immensely more.
Wan-To's eyes didn't look like any human's baby blues. They didn't look like anything much at all; they were simply the clouds of particles, sensitive to radiation of any kind, that floated outside the photosphere of his star.
Sometimes he worried about having them out there, because it was possible that a risk could be involved. The detector clouds were not a natural part of any star and it was just barely possible that one of his colleagues might find some way of detecting their presence … and thus of locating precious him. But the "eyes" were so frail and tenuous that they were not at all easy to spot. Anyway, Wan-To didn't have any choice, because he had to have the eyes—needed them for survival; after all, he had always to be watchful, for defense and for potential gain. So the small risk was worth taking. It brought the great gain of helping to ease his permanent itch of curiosity.
So Wan-To was quite happily employed, for long stretches of time, peering out at the great cosmic expanse all around him and trying to figure out what it all meant—very like those never-encountered humans.