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“I think,” Lance said, looking on her sitting frozen in her chair, “that Vivien pla
Of course that was true. Poor Vivien, I thought. All her plans. All her work. She stayed blanked, and kept at it, and finally Lance went over to her and patted her shoulder, so that she came out of it. But she slipped back again at once.
“It’s a ship,”Percivale’s voice broke over the intercom uninvited. “It’s another ship we’re headed for.”
That brought my lady and Griffin out of their bedroom refuge, all in a rush of moved chairs. “Signal it!” my lady ordered, looking up at the sitting room speaker panel as if it could show her something. “Contact it!”
Evidently they were doing something on the bridge, because there was silence after, and the lot of us stood there—all of us on our feet in the sitting room but Viv. Lance was shaking her shoulder and trying to get through her blankness to tell her there was some hope.
“We’re not sure about the range,” Modred reported finally. “We’ll keep trying as we get nearer.”
Griffin and lady Dela settled on a couch there near us, and we turned from Vivien to try to make them comfortable. Lady Dela looked very pale and drawn, which with her flaxen hair was pale indeed, like one of the ladies in the fantasies she loved; and Griffin too looked very shaken. “Get wine,” I said, and Lance did that. We even poured a little for ourselves, Lance and I, out of their way, and got some down Vivien, holding the glass in her hand for her.
“We don’t seem to be moving rapidly in relation to it,” came one of Modred’s calm reports, in the aching long time that passed.
“We are in Hell,” my lady said after yet another long time, speaking in a hoarse, distant voice. This frightened me on the instant, because I had heard about Hell in the books, and it meant somewhere after dying. “It’s all something we’re dreaming while we fall, that’s what it is.”
I thought about it: it flatly terrified me.
“A jump accident,” Griffin said. “We are somewhere. It’s not the between. Our instruments are off, that’s all. We should fix on some star and go to it. We can’t have lost ourselves that far.”
There were no stars in the instruments I had seen on the bridge. I swallowed, recalling that, not daring to say it.
“We have died,” my lady said primly, calmly, evidently having made up her mind to that effect, and perhaps after the shock and the wine she was numb. “We’re all dead from the moment of the accident. Brains perhaps function wildly when one dies ... like a long dream, that takes in everything in a lifetime and stretches a few seconds into forever ... Or this is Hell and we’re in it.”
I shivered where I sat. There were a lot of things that tapes had not told me, and one of them was how to cope with thoughts like that. My lady was terrifying in her fantasies.
“We’re alive,” Lance said, unasked. “And we’re more comfortable than we were.”
“Who asked you?” Dela snapped, and Lance bowed his head. We don’t talk uninvited, not in company, and Griffin was company. Griffin seemed to be intensely bothered, and got up and paced the floor.
It did not help. It did not hasten the time, which crept past at a deadly slow pace, and finally Griffin spun about and strode out the door.
“Griffin?” my lady Dela quavered.
I stood up; Dela had; and Lance. “He mustn’t give orders,” I said, thinking at least where I would be going if I were Griffin, and we heard the door to the outside corridor open, not that to his own rooms. “Lady Dela, he’s going to the bridge. He mustn’t give them orders.”
My lady stared at me and I think if she had been close enough she might have hit me. But then her face grew afraid. “They wouldn’t pay any attention to him. They wouldn’t.”
“No, lady Dela, but he’s strong and quick and I’m not sure they could stop him.”
Dela stirred herself then and made some haste. Lance and I seized up Viv and drew her along in Dela’s wake, out into the corridors and down them to the bridge. It was all, all too late if Griffin had had something definite in mind; but it was still peaceful when we arrived, Griffin standing there in the center of the bridge and the crew with their backs to him and working at their posts. Griffin was ominous looking where he was, in the center of things, hands on hips. None of the crew was particularly big ... only Lance was that, the two of them like mirrors, dark and gold, the lady’s taste ru
“Well?” Dela asked.
“We don’t have contact,” Percivale said, beside Modred. “We keep sending, but the object doesn’t respond. We were asked about range: we don’t know that either. Everything has failed.”
“Where isthis thing we’re talking about?” Dela asked, and Modred reached and punched a button. It came up on the big screen, a kind of a cloud on the scope, all gridded and false, just patches of something solid the computer was trying to show us.
“I think we’re getting vid,” Percivale said, and that image went off, replaced with another, in all the flare of strange colors and shapes that drifted where there ought to be stars, in between blackness measled with red spots like dapples that might be stars or just the cameras trying to pick up something that made no sense. And against that backdrop was something that might be a misshapen world in silhouette, or a big rock irregularly shaped, or something far vaster than we wanted to think, no knowing. It was flattened at its poles and it bristled with strange shapes in prickly complexity.
“We’ve been getting nearer steadily,” Modred said. “It could be our size or star-sized. We don’t know.”
“You’ve got the scan on it,” Griffin snapped at him. “You’ve got that readout for timing.”
“Time is a questionable constant here,” Modred said without turning about, keeping at his work. “I refrained from making unjustified assumptions. This is new input on the main screen. I am getting a size estimate.—Take impact precautions. Now.”
Near ... we were coming at it. It was getting closer and closer on the screen. My lady caught at Griffin, evidently having given up her theory of being dead. “Use the engines,” Griffin yelled at Gawain and Ly
“We are,” Gawain said calmly.
We grabbed at both Dela and Griffin, Lance and I, and pulled them to the cushioned corner and got the bar down and the straps round them, then dragged Vivien, who was paralyzed and nearly blanked, with us to the remaining pad. The crew was putting the safety bars in place too, all very cool. That we couldn’t feel the engines ... no feel to them at all ... when normally they should have been kicking us hard in some direction....
Screens broke up. We were just too close to it. It had filled all our forward view and the last detail we got was huge. Something interfered with the pickup. I wrapped the restraints about myself while Lance did his, and all the while expected the impact, to be flung like some toy across a breached compartment on a puff of crystalizing air.... I didn’t know what was out there, but the most horrible fate of all seemed to me to be blown out of here, to be set adrift naked in that, whatever that stuff was out there. This little ship that held our lives also held whatever sanity we had been able to trick our eyes into seeing, and what was out there—I wondered how long it took to die in that stuff. Or whether one ever did.
The last buckle jammed. I refitted it, in sudden tape-taught calm. I was with the ship and my lady. I had my referents. My back was to the wall and my most favorite comrades were with me. I didn’t want to end, but there was comfort in company—far better, I co