Nova

But Lorq was leaning back on the seat, looking through the ceiling. The lights about the field left only the hundred brightest stars visible. On the ceiling, the kaleidoscopic wind-iris was shutting. Centered among the blue, purple, and vermilion vanes was a star.

“Say, Captain, if you want to go up in the balcony…”

On the second level of the bar, visible through falling water, the freighter officers and some of the liner crew mixed with the sportsmen discussing currents and cosmic conditions. The lower level was crowded with mechanics and commercial studs. Card games progressed in the corner.

“I got to get me a job, Captain. Letting me sleep in the back chamber of Caliban, then getting me drunk every night doesn’t help much. I’ve got to turn you loose.”

Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the star. “Dan, have you,” Lorq mused, “ever realized that every sun, as we travel between them, is a furnace where the very worlds of empire are smelted? Every element among the hundreds is fused from their central nuclear matter. Take that one there—” He pointed at the transparent roof. “—or any one: gold is fusing there right now, and radium, nitrogen, antimony, in amounts that are huge—bigger than Ark, bigger than Earth. And there’s Illyrion there too, Dan.” He laughed. “Suppose there were some way to dip into one of those stars and ladle out what I wanted.” He laughed again; the sound caught in his chest, where anguish, despair, and fury fused. “Suppose we could stand at the edge of some star gone nova and wait for what we wanted to be flung out, and catch it as it flamed by—but novas are implosions, not explosions, hey, Dan?” He pushed the stud’s shoulder playfully. Drink sloshed from the mug’s rim.

“Me, Captain, I was in a nova, once.” Dan licked the back of his hand.

“Were you now?” Lorq pressed his head against the cushion. The haloed star flickered.

“Ship I was on got caught in a nova—must be about ten years ago.”

“Aren’t you glad you weren’t on it.”

“I was. We got out again too.”

Lorq looked down from the ceiling.

Dan sat forward on the green bench, knobby elbows on his knees; his hands wrapped the mug.

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Dan glanced at his shoulder where the broken lace on his vest was clumsily knotted. “We fell in, and we got out.”

Puzzlement surfaced on Lorq’s face.

“Hey, Captain! You look fierce, don’t you!”

Five times now Lorq had passed his face in a mirror, thinking it bore one expression, to discover the scar had translated it into something that totally amazed. “What happened, Dan?”

The Australian looked at his mug. There was only foam at the bottom of the glass.

Lorq pressed the order plate on the bench arm. Two more mugs circled toward them, foam dissolving,

“Just what I needed, Captain,” Dan reached out his foot. “One for you. There you go. And one for me.’

Lorq sipped his drink and stuck his feet out to rest on the sandal heels. Nothing moved on his face, Nothing moved behind it.

“You know the Alkane Institute?” Dan raised his voice above the cheers and laughter from the corner where two mechanics had begun wrestling on the trampoline. Spectators waved their drinks. “On Vorpis in Draco they got this big museum with laboratories and stuff, and they study things like novas.”

“My aunt’s a curator there.” Lorq’s voice was low, words clearing beneath the shouts.

“Yeah? Anyway, they send out people whenever they get reports of some star acting up—”

“Look! She wi

“No! He her arm watch pull!”

“Hey, Von Ray, you the man or woman will win think?” A group of officers had come down the ramp to watch the match. One slapped Lorq’s shoulder, then turned his hand up. There was a ten-pound @sg piece in his palm.

“I not tonight wager make.” Lorq pushed the hand away.

“Lorq, I double this on the woman lay—”

“Tomorrow your money I take,” Lorq said. “Now you go.”

The young officer made a disgusted sound and drew his finger down his face, shaking his head to his companions.

But Lorq was waiting for Dan to go on.

Dan turned from the wrestling. “It seems a freighter got lost in a tidal drift and noticed something fu

Lorq nodded.

“They still can’t judge exactly when a nova that they’ve been watching is going to go. Now I don’t understand it exactly, but somehow the sun we were coming to went up just before we reached our stop-off station. Maybe it was a twist in space itself, or a failure of instruments, but we overshot the station and went right on into the sun, during the first hour of implosion.” Dan lowered his mouth to sip off foam.

“All right,” Lorq said. “From the heat, you should have been atomized before you were as close to the sun as Pluto is from Sol. You should have been crushed by the actual physical battering. The gravitational tides should have torn you to pieces. The amount of radiation the ship was exposed to should have, first, knocked apart every organic compound in the ship, and second, fissioned every atom down into ionized hydrogen—”

“Captain, I can think of seven more things without trying. The ionization frequencies should have—” Dan stopped. “But none of them did. Our ship was fu

“What’s the explanation?”

Dan shrugged. “They came up with a lot of suggestions when Alkane got hold of us. They got these bubbles, see, exploding on the surface of any sun, two or three times the size of medium-sized planets, where the temperature is as low as eight hundred or a thousand degrees. That sort of temperature might not destroy a ship. Perhaps we were caught in one of those and carried on through the sun. Somebody else suggested perhaps the energy frequencies of a nova are all polarized in one direction while something caused the ship’s energies to polarize in another so that they sort of passed through one another just like they didn’t touch. But other people came up with just as many theories to knock those down. What seems most likely is that when time and space are subjected to such violent strains like you got in a nova, the laws that govern the natural machinery of physics and physical happenings as we know them just don’t work right.” Dan shrugged again. “They never did get it settled.”