The Currents Of Space

It was hours before he found out that he had made a horrible mistake.

Rik said, "Lona!"

He tugged at her elbow, pointed quickly and whispered, "That one!"

Valona looked at the indicated ship doubtfully. It was much smaller than the ship in Berth '7, for which their tickets held good. It looked more burnished. Four air locks yawned open and the main port gaped, with a ramp leading from it like an outstretched tongue reaching to ground level.

Rik said, "They're airing it. They usually air passenger ships before flight to get rid of the accumulated odor of ca

Valona stared at him. "How do you know?"

Rik felt a sprig of vanity grow within himself. "I just know. You see, there wouldn't be anyone in it now. It isn't comfortable, with the draft on."

He looked about uneasily. "I don't know why there aren't more people about, though. Was it like this when you used to watch it?"

Valona thought not, but she could scarcely remember. Childhood memories were far away.

There was not a patroller in sight as they walked up the ramp on quivering legs. What figures they could see were civilian employees, intent on their own jobs, and small in the distance.

Moving air cut through them as they stepped into the hold and Valona's dress bellied so that she had to bring her hands down to keep the hemline within bounds.

"Is it always like this?" she asked. She had never been on a spaceship before; never dreamed of being on one. Her lips stuck together and her heart pounded.

Rik said, "No. Just during aeration."

He walked joyfully over the hard metallite passageways, inspecting the empty rooms eagerly.

"Here," he said. It was the galley.

He spoke rapidly. "It isn't food so much. We can get along without food for quite a while. It's water."

He rummaged through the neat and compact nestings of utensils and came up with a large, capped container. He looked about for the water tap, muttered a breathless hope that they had not neglected to fill the water tanks, then gri

"Now just take some of the cans. Not too many. We don't want them to take notice." uk tried desperately to think of ways of countering discovery. Again he groped for something he could not quite remember. Occasionally he still ran into those gaps in his thought and, cowardlike, he avoided them, denied their existence.

He found a small room devoted to fire-fighting equipment, emergency medical and surgical supplies, and welding equipment.

He said with a certain lack of confidence, "They won't be in here, except in emergencies. Are you afraid, Lona?"

"I won't be afraid with you, Rik," she said humbly. Two days before, no, twelve hours before, it had been the other way around. But on board ship, by some transmutation of personality she did not question, it was Rik who was the adult, she who was the child.

He said, "We won't be able to use lights because they would notice the power drain, and to use the toilets, we'll have to wait for rest periods and try to get out past any of the night crew."

The draft cut off suddenly. Its cold touch on their faces was no longer there and the soft, steady humming sound, that had distantly accompanied it, stopped and left a large silence to fill its place.

Rik said, "They'll be boarding soon, and then we'll be out in space."

Valona had never seen such joy in Bik's face. He was a lover going to meet his love.

If Rik had felt a man on awaking that dawn, he was a giant now, his arms stretching the length of the Galaxy. The stars were his marbles, and the nebulae were cobwebs to brush away.

He was on a ship! Memories rushed back continuously in a long flood and others left to make room. He was forgetting the kyrt fields and the mill and Valona crooning to him in the dark. They were only momentary breaks in a pattern that was now returning with its raveled ends slowly knitting.

It was the ship!

If they had put him on a ship long ago, he wouldn't have had to wait so long for his burnt-out brain cells to heal themselves.

He spoke softly to Valona in the darkness. "Now don't worry. You'll feel a vibration and hear a noise but that will be just the motors. There'll be a heavy weight on you. That's acceleration."

There was no common Floririian word for the concept and he used another word for it, one that came easily to mind. Valona did not understand.

She said, "Will it hurt?"

He said, "It will be very uncomfortable, because we don't have anti-acceleration gear to take up the pressure, but it won't last. Just stand against this wall, and when you feel yourself being pushed against it, relax. See, it's begi

He had picked the right wall, and as the thrumming of the

thrusting hyperatomics swelled, the apparent gravity shifted, and what had been a vertical wall seemed to grow more and more diagonal.

Valona whimpered once, then lapsed into a hard-breathing silence. Their throats rasped as their chest walls, unprotected by straps and hydraulic absorbers, labored to free their lungs sufficiently for just a little air intake. uk managed to pant out words, any words that might let Valona know he was there and ease the terrible fear of the unknown that he knew must be filling her. It was only a ship, oniy a wonderful ship; but she had never been on a ship before.

He said, "There's the jump, of course, when we go through hyperspace and cut across most of the distance between the stars all at once. That won't bother you at all. You won't even know it happened. It's nothing compared to this. Just a little twitch in your insides and it's over." He got the words out syllable by grunted syllable. It took a long time.

Slowly, the weight on their chests lifted and the invisible chain holding them to the wall stretched and dropped off. They fell, panting, to the floor.

Finally Valona said, "Are you hurt, Rik?"

"I, hurt?" He managed a laugh. He had not caught his breath yet, but he laughed at the thought that he could be hurt on a ship.

He said, "I lived on a ship for years once. I didn't land on a planet for months at a time."

"Why?" she asked. She had crawled closer and put a hand to his cheek, making sure he was there.

He put his arm about her shoulder, and she rested within it quietly, accepting the reversal.

"Why?" she asked.

111k could not remember why. He had done it; he had hated to land on a planet. For some reason it had been necessary to stay in space, but he could not remember why. Again he dodged the gap.

He said, "I had a job."

"Yes," she said. "You analyzed Nothing."

"That's right." He was pleased. "That's exactly what I did. Do you know what that means?"

He didn't expect her to understand, but he had to talk. He had to revel in memory, to delight drunkenly in the fact that he could call up past facts at the ffick of a mental finger.

He said, "You see, all the material in the universe is made up of a hundred different kinds of substances. We call those substances elements. Iron and copper are elements."

"I thought they were metals."

"So they are, and elements too. Also oxygen, and nitrogen, carbon and palladium. Most important of all, hydrogen and helium. They're the simplest and most common."

"I never heard of those," Valona said wistfully.

"Ninety-five per cent of the universe is hydrogen and most of the rest is helium. Even space."

"I was once told," said Valona, "that space was a vacuum. They said that meant there was nothing there. Was that wrong?"

"Not quite. There's almost nothing there. But you see, I was a Spatio-analyst, which meant that I went about through space collecting the extremely small amounts of elements there and analyzing them. That is, I decided how much was hydrogen, how much helium and how much other elements."

"Why?"

"Well, that's complicated. You see, the arrangement of elements isn't the same everywhere in space. In some regions there is a little more helium than normal; in other places, more sodium than normal; and so on. These regions of special analytic makeup wind through space like currents. That's what they call them. They're the currents of space. It's important to know how these currents are arranged because that might explain how the universe was created and how it developed."

"How would it explain that?"

Rik hesitated. "Nobody knows exactly."

He hurried on, embarrassed that this immense store of knowledge in which his mind was thankfully wallowing could come so easily to an end marked "unknown" under the questioning of

•.. of •.. It suddenly occurred to him that Valona, after all, was nothing but a Florinian peasant girl.

He said, "Then, again, we find out the density, you know, the thickness, of this space gas in all regions of the Galaxy. It's different in different places and we have to know exactly what it is in order to allow ships to calculate exactly how to jump through hyperspace. It's like…" His voice died away.

Valona stiffened and waited uneasily for him to continue, but only silence followed. Her voice sounded hoarsely in the complete darkness.

"Rik? What's wrong, Rik?"

Still silence. Her hands groped to his shoulders, shaking him. "Rik! uk!"

And it was the voice of the old Rik, somehow, that answered. It was weak, frightened, its joy and confidence vanished.

"Lona. We did something wrong."

"What's the matter? We did what wrong?"

The memory of the scene in which the patroller had shot down the Baker was in his mind, etched hard and clear, as though called back by his exact memory of so many other things.

He said, "We shouldn't have run away. We shouldn't be here on this ship."

He was shivering uncontrollably, and Valona tried futilely to wipe the moisture from his forehead with her hand.

"Why?" she dem~nded. "Why?"

"Because we should have known that if the Bak~~ were willing to take us out in daylight he expected no trouble from patrollers. Do you remember the patroller? The one who shot the Baker?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember his face?"

"I didn't dare look."