Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One Read Free Page A

histories. You’ve been out on five recon missions with Malko and me. Do you think Earthmen are cowards?”
    Staeen knew they were not. Fear, if present, would beat against him like a storm tide on an ocean shore. No such waves emanated from them.
    “If they had been threatened, they would have fought,” Malko said. “If they had to outrun something, why the life boats? Why not the ship itself? There was nothing wrong with it! Nothing! All that damage was done after they left, because they left.”
    Conly returned to his contour seat, kicked it and then let himself drop to it. He stared at the control panel and said heavily, “Let’s give her one more going over, then we turn back.”
    Malko grunted; his finger combed through his beard abstractly. Staeen could feel their disappointment and restlessness. Like children, he thought again. If they could not have the answer, they did not want the question. Unlike his own people who loved paradoxes and puzzles for their own sake, the Flonderans grew annoyed with unanswered questions. It was because of their short lives, he decided. They knew they could not afford the thousands of years it sometimes took to find the answer.
    “How many small craft were aboard the mother ship?” he asked.
    Conly shifted to stare at him. His voice was a snarl when he said, “We should have thought of that! They took every lifeboat, scout, landing craft, everything! There were eighteen to twenty lifeboats and half a dozen other miscellaneous craft aboard. They knew they couldn’t last more than four days in the landing craft…”
    “Even the repair boats,” Malko said. “They’re gone. Six hours, eight at the most in space in one of those…”
    Staeen looked at the hairy man and felt waves of dread coming from him. Six to eight hours in space, and then death from anoxia. He shuddered inside his mantle.
    Brusquely Conly said, “Okay, let’s get back. This time we split up and go through private quarters. Try to find a note, a scrap of paper, a scrawl on the wall, anything that might give us a clue. Staeen—”
    “I too can search,” Staeen said.
    Alone inside the great ship, Staeen let himself go, let it come to him. Hanging in a corridor with the oval doors, he thought of nothing, not even the sensations he received. He looked like a black shadow unanchored to reality as he hung there, shiny black slowly changing to a duller shade as his mantel adapted to the radiation. From a distance he felt echoes of doubts and apprehensions: Malko’s waves.
    From another direction came fainter wafts of determination mixed with the same doubts, perhaps even a touch of fear, formless and unnamed as yet. For a brief time he was one with the ship: unguided, unmanned, alone in space on a course that would take it beyond the galaxy to the nothingness that lay between the oases of life. He shuddered with the ship, feeling the vibration of the metal under the impacts from meteorites, sharp-edged bits of metallic ores set loose in space to roam forever until captured or destroyed.
    He felt the weight of the galaxy weighing on himself as bits and pieces of space debris hit the ship and clung, giving it mass. He knew that one day there would be enough mass so that planetoids could be captured, under pressure the ship at the core would be crushed and finally molten. It would sweep the path of its trajectory and its gravitational field would reach out father and farther, insatiably then, and in a million years, or one thousand million, it would be caught by a hungry sun. Resisting for a while the end of its freedom in space, it would refuse a stable orbit, but in time would become a captive like all planets. Staeen wondered if it would give birth to creatures who would pose questions of cosmology, wondering at the earth below them, at its origin, its eventual death.
    Staeen continued to hang in the corridor, and now sensations too faint to be identified drifted to him. The temptation to strain to receive