Golden Fleece

“I’ve been trying since the moment she left, but there’s too much interference from our ramfield.” The elevator popped open, revealing one arm of the U-shaped hangar-deck control room. Aaron and Kirsten rounded the corner into the crosspiece of the U. Clustered around the instrumentation consoles were the dozen others I had summoned, mostly clad in pajamas and robes. Seated at the center of the group were tiny Gennady Gorlov, the mayor of Starcology Argo, looking about as disheveled as Aaron did, and giant I-Shin Chang, chief engineer, clad in one of those specially tailored denim jumpsuits he required to accommodate his four arms. Chang had been off working on his secret project, instead of sleeping, even though this was his normal sleep period.

Aaron peered out the observation window that ran along the inner walls of the control room, overlooking three sides of the hangar. His eyes fixed on the still-open space door. “Distance to Orpheus?”

“Fifty klicks,” said Chang in his staccato delivery. The engineer vacated the chair in front of the main console, its cushioned seat rising ten centimeters with a pneumatic hiss. He gestured with his lower left hand, not quite as beefy as its upper counterpart, for Aaron to take his place.

Aaron did so, then stabbed a finger at the central viewscreen, a glowing rectangle cutting the observation window into two long curving panes. “External!”

I produced a holographic rendering of Starcology Argo. The principal material part of our Bussard ramjet looked like a wide-mouthed bronze funnel. At this level of resolution, the great reticulum of field wires extending outward from the funnel was invisible. Girdling the inside of the funnel cone halfway down was the magnetic torus; girdling the outside at the same location was the windowless ring-shaped habitat, painted a sea green in color, its plated walls looking like a sheet-metal quilt. Most of the remainder of Argo’s three-kilometer length was a cylindrical silver shaft, interrupted here and there by gold and black tanks and compressors. At the end of the shaft was the tight cluster of cylindrical igniters, the bulbous, copper-colored fusion chamber, and the corrugated, flared fusion-shield assembly. In front of Argo, I added a tiny silver angle-bracket representing the runaway lander.

“Orpheus’s velocity?” asked Aaron.

“Sixty-three meters per second and slowing,” I said through the speaker on the console before him.

“She’s moving perpendicular to the ramfield’s magnetic lines of force, yes?” said Chang, the words coming out of him like machine-gun fire. “That’s dragging her down.”

“Will Orpheus collide with us?” asked Mayor Gorlov.

“No,” I said. “My autonomic meteor-avoidance system angles the ramfield away from us whenever a metallic object enters it. Otherwise, Orpheus would have hurled down the funnel and destroyed our ramjet.”

“We need that ship back,” said Gorlov.

“That ship?” Aaron swiveled his chair to face the little man. The underscoring squeak of its bearings made his exclamation sound shrill. “What about Di?”

The mayor was twenty centimeters shorter than Aaron, and massed only two-thirds what he did, but there was nothing tiny about Gorlov’s voice. I often had to run a convolution algorithm on it to clear out distortion. “Wake up, Rossman,” he bellowed. “It’s suicide to enter the ramfield.” Gorlov’s campaign had not been won on the basis of his gentle manners.

Kirsten laid a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, one of those nonverbal gestures that seemed to communicate so much for them. Her touch did have a slightly calming effect on his vital signs, although, as always, the change was difficult to measure. He squeaked back to face the viewer and scooped a calculator off an adjacent console, cupping it in his palm. I swiveled three of my lens assemblies to look at it, but none of them could make out what he was typing.

“Orpheus’s engines have stopped firing, yes?” asked Chang, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Such an expression usually meant they were addressing me, although my CPU was actually eleven levels below and clear around on the other side of the habitat torus from where Chang happened to be standing. I’d once mistaken one of those uplifted-eyes questions as being asked of me, when really it was a spoken prayer. I’ve yet to see a more violent flurry of medical-telemetry changes than at the moment I began responding to the question.

“Yes,” I said to Chang. “All shipboard systems went dead when Orpheus entered the ramfield.”

“Is there any chance that we can pull her back in?” asked Gorlov, typically loud.

“No,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not!” Aaron swung around, his chair squeaking like an injured mouse. “By God, we can bring her back!” He handed the calculator to Chang, who took it in his upper right hand. I zoomed in on its electroluminescent display, four lines of proportionally spaced sans-serif text. Damn him….