Polaris (34 page)

Help wasn't going to arrive in time. So I began working on the assumption we'd have to save ourselves. To that end, I pulled up everything we had on pulsars in general and Ramses in particular. I'd never really had any cause to concern myself with pulsars. The only bit of information I thought I
needed was pretty basic: Stay away from them. “It has an extremely strong magnetic field,” I told Alex. “It says here that it bounces around a lot, the magnetic field, sometimes close to light speed. It interacts with the magnetic poles, and that's what generates what you're looking at.”

“The lights?”

“Yep. They're
cones.
” We still had the frozen image on one of the screens. “There are two of them. Ramses is a neutron star. It spins pretty fast, and the cones rotate with it.”

“Must be
damned
fast. They're a blur.”

“It rotates once in about three-quarters of a second.”

“You mean the star
spins
on its axis at that rate?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell's that possible?”

“It's small, Alex. Like the one that hit Delta Kay. It's only a few kilometers across.”

“And it spins like a banshee.”

“You got it. This is a slow one. Some of them do several hundred revolutions per second.” The two shafts of blue light both originated on the neutron star. Their narrow ends pointed toward the pulsar.

I've discovered since then that, like any superdense star, a pulsar has trouble supporting its own weight. It keeps squeezing down until it achieves some sort of stability. And the more it squeezes, the faster it spins. The point is that as the pulsar gets smaller, its magnetic field becomes more compressed. Stronger. It becomes a dynamo.

“Sons of bitches,” said Alex. “I hope we can get our hands on the people who did this.”

“Consider yourself lucky the quantum drive isn't too precise. Or they'd have shipped us right into the thing. As it is, at least we got some breathing space.”

We were 60 million klicks from the pulsar. The cones at that range were almost 6 million kilometers in diameter. And they were directly in front of us, dancing all over the sky.

Hull temperature was up, but within levels of tolerance. Internal
power was okay. Attitude thrusters had fuel left. The AI was dead. We had some computer power available, off-line from the AI.

So how do you change the course of a starship when you can't run the engines?

“Maybe,” suggested Alex, “we could start heaving furniture out the airlock.”

We imagine that we have some control over events. But in fact we are all adrift in currents and eddies that sweep us about, carrying some downstream to sunlit banks, and others onto the rocks.

—Tulisofala,
Mountain Passes
(Translated by Leisha Tanner)

By any reasonable definition of a star, Ramses was dead. Collapsed. Crushed by its own weight. Its nuclear fires were long since burned out. But its magnetic field had intensified. It was a trillion times stronger than Rimway's. Or Earth's. It was throwing out vast torrents of charged particles.

Most of the particles escaped along magnetic field lines. They came off the surface in opposite directions from the north and south magnetic poles. Which meant there were two streams, accounting for the two light cones. They were necessarily narrow at the source, but they got wider as they moved out into space. It was those streams, more or less anchored on a wildly rotating body, that produced the lighthouse effect. But Ramses was a lighthouse spinning so swiftly and so wildly that even the beams of light got confused.

“That's why the cones are twisted at intervals,” I told Alex. “Ramses spins like a maniac, and the light cones are millions of kilometers long. But the particles can only travel at light speed, so they become spirals.” I'd been punching data into the processing unit and was starting to get results. “Okay,” I said, “we're not in orbit. But we're going to go right through the circus.”

The link dinged. Transmission from Arapol. It was a bit like awaiting sentence.

I activated it. A short dumpy man appeared up front. “Belle-Marie,
this is Arapol. Emergency unit
Toronto
is on the way. Forward situation and location to us for relay to rescue vessel. Radio transmissions are negative your area. Too much interference from Ramses. ETA
Toronto
nine hours from time of transmission this message. Do not go near the pulsar. I say again, do not approach the pulsar.
”

“Nine hours,” said Alex. “Call him back. Tell him that's not good enough.”

“Alex,” I said, “they could get here during the next ten minutes, and they wouldn't be able to find us in time.” With radio transmissions wiped out by the pulsar, it could take
weeks.

I wasn't feeling very well. “Me neither,” said Alex. “You don't think any of that radiation's getting in, do you?”

I'd been watching the numbers. Radiation levels outside were still rising, would continue to rise as long as we kept getting nearer the pulsar. But they weren't yet close to being a problem. “No,” I said, “we're fine.” But my head was starting to spin, and my stomach was sliding toward throw-up mode.

“Good.” He looked terrible. “Back in a minute.” He released himself from his harness and pulled himself out of the chair.

I watched him stagger toward the hatch. “Be careful.”

He left without answering.

The washroom door closed. A few minutes later, when he came back, he still looked pale. “I wonder,” he said, “if they did something to life support, too?”

I ran an environment check. “I don't see anything,” I said.

“I'm glad to hear it. But something's wrong.”

I saw nothing on the status boards. No evidence of a radiation leak. The ship was holding steady. What was making us sick?

“Alex,” I said, “I'm going to shut everything down for a minute.” He nodded, and I killed the power. The lights went off. And the fans. And gravity. Backup lamps blinked on. We drifted silently through the night.

And there it was. “Feel it?” I asked.

“Something,” he said.

It had a rhythm. Like a tide rolling in and out.

“Are we tumbling?”

“No. It's more like a pulse. A heartbeat.”

I wished I knew more about pulsars. We'd done a segment on them at school, but I never expected to go anywhere near one. Nobody
ever
goes near one. My kabba cup was a small metal container with a straw. I removed the cup from its holder and released it.

In the zero-gee environment, it floated away, drifting toward the open hatchway. It disappeared out into the common room. I repeated the experiment with a metal clip. It also went out through the hatch.

“What are you doing?” asked Alex.

“Just a moment.” I tried a handkerchief. Held it out. Let it go. It went nowhere. Just floated there at arm's length. So we had two metal objects that had gone aft, and a handkerchief that simply stayed adrift.

“Which tells us what?” asked Alex.

I brought the systems back up, turned the lights on, but left the gravity off. “The magnetics are screwed up.” I got grip shoes out for both of us so we could get around. Then I gave myself a crash course on pulsars.

After an hour or so, and several trips to the washroom to throw up, I thought I knew what was happening. The axis of the magnetic field was well off the spin axis of the pulsar. More than thirty degrees. The plane of our vector almost aligned with the spin axis. So the magnetic field, as far as we were concerned, was off center. Ramses was also oscillating, and it was strong. The magnetic forces were rocking the ship.

Alex made an animal sound. “I'm not following.”

“We're getting eddy currents in the hull. They keep changing our orientation. We have too much movement in too many directions.”

“Well, whatever. Can we do anything about it?”

“No. But the good news is that it's slowing us down.” The hull was warm. “It's heating up,” I said.

“Praise be!” Alex looked delighted. “We get a break! Enough that the
Toronto
will be here before we go into the soup?”

“No. Unfortunately not. But it's going to give us”—I tapped a key and studied the result—“another two hours.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't see how that helps. It's just two extra hours to be sick.” Then he brightened. “Wait a minute. How about the shuttle? It's got a full tank. Why don't we use it to clear out? Leave the ship?”

I'd already considered it and discarded the idea. “Its hull is too thin. If we go out in that, we'd be fried in about two minutes.”

“Then how about transferring its fuel? To the mains? Can we do that?”

“Different kind of fuel. And not enough to do any good anyhow.”

“So what do we have left, Chase?” he asked.

“Actually, the shuttle might come in handy. It uses a superconductor system during launch. And we've got some spare wire for it in cargo.”

“How does that help us?”

“Superconductors, at least some of them, don't like external magnetic fields. It's the way glide trains work. You turn it on, and it automatically removes itself from a region of high field strength to low field strength. It's called the Meissner Effect.”

“So we are going to—”

“—Do a little electrical work.”

We had about sixty meters of superconducting wire in storage. We brought it out and cut it in half. We took one segment to cargo, which was located beneath the bridge, to the point farthest forward in the ship. We fastened it to the leading bulkhead with magnetic staples. “In a spiral,” I told him, adding, “I think.”

“You're not sure, Chase?”

“Of course I'm not sure. I've never done anything like this before.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to take over—”

“No. I'm sorry. I wasn't criticizing. Listen, get us clear of this, and you get a bonus.”

“Thank you.”

“You can
name
the bonus.”

We took the rest of the wire back into the engine room, at the aft end of the ship, and put it up the same way, on the rearmost bulkhead. “Now,” I said, “we need current, the more the better. And a sink.”

He frowned. “A washbasin?”

“No. A place to put the electricity after it runs through the coils.”

He stood there, looking puzzled.

The gravity control was our best bet. Artificial gravity requires substantial power, and the system has robust cells, which would be sufficient to absorb the dump.

“Why do we need to drain the power?” he asked.

“Because superconductors are a bit different from ordinary circuits. It's easy to get the current going, but to shut it down, we need a place that can drain it off.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'm glad one of us knows this stuff.”

“Alex,” I said, “this is all theory to me. I may be missing something. But it has a decent chance to work.”

Over his shoulder I could see one of the monitors. The light cones flickered across the screen. They were velvet blue. Lovely. Almost enticing.

The quantum drive uses a slide control device to monitor and regulate the power feed. After we had the coil in place, I removed it, and collected the backup unit from storage. I wired each spiral into one of the slide controls and connected the controls to the AG generator. “Center position,” I told Alex, “is neutral. No power. Up, the current runs clockwise; down is counterclockwise. When it's powered up, it should make the ship a large magnet, with north at the bow and south at the tail. Or vice versa.”

“Or vice versa? You don't know?”

It was as if by explaining it, I gained real control over events. Describe the procedure, and it has to be so. “We need to align our north to the pulsar's south. And our south to its north. If we can do that, the magnetic field will push us clear.”

“Good. That seems simple enough.”

“Okay. Hang on.” We belted down, and I put the pulsar on the navigation screen. “First step: Line up.”

I used the alignment thrusters to turn
Belle
around. Get us angled parallel with the north–south axis of the pulsar. Tail up, nose down. When I had it as close as I could get it, I prepared to initiate step two.

“What's step two?” he asked.

“Activate.”

I pushed the sliders up. Current flowed into the system. The ship lurched.

I was thrown sharply against the harness. Then shaken. Up and down, back and forth. Lots of stops and jolts. It was like being on one of those three-dimensional bumper rides in an amusement park, where the bumper car takes you ahead and bangs to a stop and takes you ahead again and bangs to another stop. Except this was serious stuff. We were tossed every which way, jerked back, forth, and sideways, thrown relentlessly against the harnesses. “No!” I screamed.

Alex was telling me to shut it down. It felt as if
Belle
was coming apart. I switched off the power, and it stopped.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Maybe the current needs to go the other way.”

We tried it, with a similar result.

I went back to my data. Eventually I figured out what had happened. “The magnetic axis at Ramses is thirty degrees off the spin axis,” I told Alex. “I should have realized that would blow the program.”

“Why?”

“When we turned on the power, the ship aligned with the magnetic field, which it was supposed to do. But because it's thirty degrees off center, the magnetic field kept changing as the pulsar spun. Every three-quarters of a second. That was what banged us around.

“Can we fix it?” Alex asked hopefully. “Try it again?”

“I have no idea how to compensate.”

“So,” he said, “what now?”

We were down to about five hours.

On the
Belle-Marie,
the shuttle was launched from the starboard side, and the main airlock was to port. That suggested another possibility.

I reactivated the gravity. I also killed the monitors so we didn't have to watch the two sabers getting brighter and bigger.

The bulkheads were continuing to heat up, and the eddy forces were
becoming more pronounced. On the bridge, we developed a drag
forward.
But if we went back to the washroom, which was located at the rear of the living quarters, the effect went in the opposite direction: Metal objects were pulled farther aft.

A buzzer sounded. I shut it off. “Yellow alert,” I explained. “Radiation.”

Alex nodded, but said nothing. Occasionally I caught him watching me, waiting for me to come up with something. And I sat there while forces that felt like tides dragged and pushed. I tried to put it out of my mind, to concentrate on what we needed to do. The critical point was that magnetic fields
do
push against one another.

Finally, I thought I had worked out another approach.

“I hope it's better than last time,” Alex said. He must have seen that the comment was irritating because he immediately apologized.

“It's okay,” I said. “The first thing we need is some wire.”

“We've got plenty of it stapled to the bulkheads. Fore and aft.”