Chapter 6
GRIMES TOOK Little Sister upstairs. It was his first lift-off in her—his first lift-off, that is, prior to a deep space voyage. While the pinnace had been attached to The Far Traveller she had been used mainly as an atmosphere flier. This occasion seemed wrong, somehow. In a spaceship down and aft should be co-directional. Here—unless the interior of the pinnace were entirely rearranged—the little spacecraft’s progress in space would always be along her short axis.
He would get used to it, he supposed. With the inertial drive hammering healthily he lifted through the pouring rain, losing sight of Port Muldoon when he was less than a kilometer up. He missed the auxiliary reaction drive that was a standard fitting in most spaceships. It was supposed to be for emergency use only, but the majority of Survey Service Captains employed it, blasting off, when they were a safe distance from the ground, like an archaic rocket. He was not sure that he liked having a woman, even an attractive woman, in the seat by his, watching his every move with intelligent interest. Still, he grudgingly admitted to himself, she wasn’t as bad as the Baroness had been. She did not object to his smoking. He noticed that she had a cigarillo between her full lips, its acrid fumes competing with the incinerator reek of his pipe. She should have asked permission before lighting up, he thought, but was not prepared to make an issue of it.
Little Sister broke through into the clear air above the cloud cover. The light—from Tiralbin’s sun and reflected from the cloudscape—-was briefly dazzling until the ports automatically polarized. She drove up through the thinning atmosphere, through near-vacuum, into the almost complete vacuum of outer space. Below her Tiralbin could have been a giant pearl displayed on black velvet, the surface featureless save for the occasional rift in the overcast, the spiral pattern, near the equator, of a revolving storm.
Up she drove, up. Lights flared briefly on the console marking the pinnace’s passage through the Van Allens. Grimes adjusted his seat so that he was almost on his back, looking straight upwards through the transparency now uncovered in the roof of the control cab. He had no trouble finding the first target star; it was a blue luminary in the constellation called on Tiralbin Muldoon’s Cat. He was rather surprised that the Tiralbinians had ever gotten around to naming their constellations, but supposed that the skies would be clear during the Dry Season.
He asked, “Who was Muldoon?”
“Huh? Muldoon? Oh, I see what you mean . . .” She had adjusted her own chair so that her body was parallel to his. “That Muldoon. He was captain of the First Ship, the Lode Caravel. The story goes that he had a pet cat . . .”
“Such is fame,” said Grimes.
He concentrated on bringing The Cat’s Eye into the center of the cartwheel sight engraved in the overhead port. In a real ship he would have been employing gyroscopes to swing the hull about its various axes, here he was having to do it by adjusting the thrust of the inertial drive. It was a ticklish job. Finally he had the target star centered, then allowed it to fall a degree off to port.
“You had it right,” she complained. “Now you’ll have to do it again.”
“Galactic Drift,” he said, “has to be allowed for. Now, stand by for free fall. I’m cutting the drive.”
“Why?”
He ignored her. The drumming of the inertial drive fell silent, was replaced by the humming of the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the mini-Mannschenn, the humming that rapidly rose in pitch to a thin, high whine. Grimes was used—as much as anybody can get used—to the distortions of light and sound, to the crazy perspective, to the uncanny sensation of deja vu. Sometimes there was prevision, a glimpse of the future, or of a possible future, sometimes only a haunting unease. This time there was only, for him, the unease.
Things snapped back to normal. He touched the control that brought the back of his chair upright and, with the other hand, restarted the inertial drive. There was acceleration again, substituting for gravity. Up was up and down was down.
He looked to his passenger. She was still in the reclining position. Her face was very pale. He said, “Don’t look through the ports if it frightens you.” He touched the switch that opaqued the transparencies. He went on, “Space from a ship under interstellar drive is a scary sight, especially for the first time . . .”
She said, “But I haven’t looked out of the ports. It was just a . . . It was . . . real. What happened . . .” She looked at him, then down at herself. “But it couldn’t have been, could it?”
He said, “I should have warned you. Quite often when the interstellar drive is started, when the temporal precession field is building up, there are these . . . flashes of precognition.” He smiled reassuringly. “But don’t worry, it may never happen. From every now there’s an infinitude of futures.”
She said, “I’m not worried. I was just . . . startled. Now, if you’ll unshield the ports, I’ll have a look at what space is like when it’s warped out of all recognition.”
She stared out at the dim, coruscating nebulosities that should have been hard, bright stars and then, when Grimes rolled the pinnace slightly, down at Tiralbin, which had the appearance of a writhing, roughly spherical, luminescent amoeba.
She shuddered. “Don’t you spacemen,” she asked, “usually celebrate the start of a voyage with a stiff drink?”
“It has been done,” conceded Grimes, letting her precede him into the main cabin.