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Then the screaming ended and became a throaty roar of power and the
vibration left the ship entirely. From one corner of his eye he saw the
lights of the spaceport swinging over gently on their side.
Carefully, slowly, be pulled himself along the steel until he had a
better grip upon the rung, but even with the better grip he had the feeling
that some great hand had him in its fist and was swinging him in anger in a
hundred-mile-long arc.
Then the tubes left off their howling and there was a terrible silence
and the stars were there, up above him and to either side of him, and they
were steely stars with no twinkle in them. Down below, be knew, a lonely
Earth was swinging, but he could not see it.
He pulled himself up against the rung and thrust a leg beneath it and
sat up on the hull.
There were more stars than he'd ever seen before, more than he'd
dreamed there could be. They were still and cold, like hard points of light
against a velvet curtain; there was no glitter and no twinkle in them and it
was as if a million eyes were staring down at him. The Sun was underneath
the ship and over to one side; just at the edge of the left-hand curvature
was the glare of it against the silent metal, a sliver of reflected light
outlining one edge of the ship. The Earth was far astern, a ghostly
blue-green ball hanging in the void, ringed by the fleecy halo of its
atmosphere.
It was as if he were detached, a lonely, floating brain that looked out
upon a thing it could not understand nor could ever try to understand; as if
he might even be afraid of understanding it - a thing of mystery and delight
so long as he retained an ignorance of it, but something fearsome and
altogether overpowering once the ignorance had gone.
Richard Daniel sat there, flat upon his bottom, on the metal hull of
the speeding ship and he felt the mystery and delight and the loneliness and
the cold and the great uncaring and his mind retreated into a small and
huddled, compact defensive ball.
He looked. That was all there was to do. It was all right now, he
thought. But how long would he have to look at it? How long would he have to
camp out here in the open - the most deadly kind of open?
He realized for the first time that he had no idea where the ship was
going or how long it might take to get there. He knew it was a starship,
which meant that it was bound beyond the solar system, and that meant that
at some point in its flight it would enter hyperspace. He wondered, at first
academically, and then with a twinge of fear, what hyperspace might do to
one sitting naked to it. But there was little need, he thought
philosophically, to fret about it now, for in due time he'd know, and there
was not a thing that he could do about it - not a single thing.
He took the suction cups off his body and stowed them in his kit and
then with one hand he tied the kit to one of the metal rungs and dug around
in it until he found a short length of steel cable with a ring on one end
and a snap on the other. He passed the ring end underneath a rung and
threaded the snap end through it and snapped the snap onto a metal loop
underneath his armpit. Now he was secured; he need not fear carelessly
letting go and floating off the ship.
So here he was, he thought, neat as anything, going places fast, even
if he had no idea where he might be headed, and now the only thing he needed
was patience. He thought back, without much point, to what the religico had
said in the study back on Earth. Patience and humility and prayer, he'd
said, apparently not realizing at the moment that a robot has a world of
patience.
It would take a lot of time, Richard Daniel knew, to get where he was
going. But he had a lot of time, a lot more than any human, and he could
afford to waste it. There were no urgencies, he thought - no need of food or
air, or water, no need of sleep or rest... There was nothing that could
touch him.
Although, come to think of it, there might be.
There was the cold, for one. The space-hull was still fairly warm, with
one side of it picking up the heat of the Sun and radiating it around the
metal skin, where it was lost on the other side, but there would be a time
when the Sun would dwindle until it had no heat and then he'd be subjected
to the utter cold of space.
And what would the cold do to him. Might it make his body brittle? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]