Golden Fleece

field wires extending outward from the funnel was invisible. Girdling the inside of the funnel cone halfway down was the magnetic torus; girdling the outside at the same location was the windowless ring-shaped habitat, painted a sea green in color, its plated walls looking like a sheet-metal quilt. Most of the remainder of Argo’s three-kilometer length was a cylindrical silver shaft, interrupted here and there by gold and black tanks and compressors. At the end of the shaft was the tight cluster of cylindrical igniters, the bulbous, copper-colored fusion chamber, and the corrugated, flared fusion-shield assembly. In front of Argo, I added a tiny silver angle-bracket representing the runaway lander.

“Orpheus’s velocity?” asked Aaron.

“Sixty-three meters per second and slowing,” I said through the speaker on the console before him.

“She’s moving perpendicular to the ramfield’s magnetic lines of force, yes?” said Chang, the words coming out of him like machine-gun fire. “That’s dragging her down.”

“Will Orpheus collide with us?” asked Mayor Gorlov.

“No,” I said. “My autonomic meteor-avoidance system angles the ramfield away from us whenever a metallic object enters it. Otherwise, Orpheus would have hurled down the funnel and destroyed our ramjet.”

“We need that ship back,” said Gorlov.

“That ship?” Aaron swiveled his chair to face the little man. The underscoring squeak of its bearings made his exclamation sound shrill. “What about Di?”

The mayor was twenty centimeters shorter than Aaron, and massed only two-thirds what he did, but there was nothing tiny about Gorlov’s voice. I often had to run a convolution algorithm on it to clear out distortion. “Wake up, Rossman,” he bellowed. “It’s suicide to enter the ramfield.” Gorlov’s campaign had not been won on the basis of his gentle manners.

Kirsten laid a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, one of those nonverbal gestures that seemed to communicate so much for them. Her touch did have a slightly calming effect on his vital signs, although, as always, the change was difficult to measure. He squeaked back to face the viewer and scooped a calculator off an adjacent console, cupping it in his palm. I swiveled three of my lens assemblies to look at it, but none of them could make out what he was typing.

“Orpheus’s engines have stopped firing, yes?” asked Chang, his eyes looking up at the ceiling. Such an expression usually meant they were addressing me, although my CPU was actually eleven levels below and clear around on the other side of the habitat torus from where Chang happened to be standing. I’d once mistaken one of those uplifted-eyes questions as being asked of me, when really it was a spoken prayer. I’ve yet to see a more violent flurry of medical-telemetry changes than at the moment I began responding to the question.

“Yes,” I said to Chang. “All shipboard systems went dead when Orpheus entered the ramfield.”

“Is there any chance that we can pull her back in?” asked Gorlov, typically loud.

“No,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not!” Aaron swung around, his chair squeaking like an injured mouse. “By God, we can bring her back!” He handed the calculator to Chang, who took it in his upper right hand. I zoomed in on its electroluminescent display, four lines of proportionally spaced sans-serif text. Damn him….

Chang looked dubiously at Aaron’s calculations. “I don’t know…”

“Dammit, Wall,” Aaron said to the big man. “What have we got to lose by trying?”

Chang’s telemetry, not so different from an average man’s despite his modifications, showed considerable activity as he studied the display some more. Finally: “JASON, angle the ramfield as Aaron has suggested, yes?” He held the calculator up to one of my pairs of eyes. “Constrict it as much as possible so as to deflect Orpheus into the shadow cast by the ramscoop funnel.”

All attention focused on my viewscreen display. I overlaid a graphic representation of the field lines in a cool cyan. As I tightened the field, its intensity increased. Orpheus slowed, caught in the net. Aaron brought his hand up to his shoulder, interlacing his fingers with Kirsten’s.

“Can you raise her yet?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“What about remote control?”

“Even if I could get a signal through, I wouldn’t be able to take control. The onslaught of incoming hydrogen ions will have scrambled Orpheus’s electronics.”

On screen, Orpheus started moving past the rim of the funnel, crossing it on the outside. Barely at first, then with more speed, then—

Aaron studied the monitor. “Now!” he snapped. “Switch the ramfield back to its normal orientation.”

I did so. The monitor showed the blue field lines dancing like a cat’s cradle being manipulated. Orpheus was no longer being pulled magnetically. Instead, it was simply hurtling toward us under its own inertia.

“Once she slips into the lee of the funnel,” Aaron said, “she’ll be shielded from the induced cosmic rays, and she’ll be out of the magnetic field. Orpheus’s systems should stabilize and you should be able to fire her engines at that point.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said.

Closer. Closer. The tiny angle-bracket rushed toward the ring-shaped habitat. It would smash through the sea-green hull in sixty-seven seconds.

“Here she comes!” bellowed Gorlov. Chang was wringing all four of his hands.

“Now, JASON!”

Closer. Closer still. The point of the boomerang was aimed directly at the hull, the swept-back wings rotating slowly around the lander’s axis, a slight spin having been induced by the magnetic field.

“Now!”

My radio beam touched Orpheus, and the lander obeyed my command. “Firing attitude-control jets,” I said. The partial pressure of C0₂ in the room rose perceptibly: everyone exhaling at once.

Gorlov and Chang wiped sweat from their brows; Aaron, as always, wore an expression that gave no insight into what he was feeling. He gestured out the observation window to the hangar deck below. “Now maneuver her back here.”

Even as he spoke, the boomerang-shaped lander, its silver hull now burnished to a dull reflectiveness, appeared through the open hangar door. It looked insignificant against the spectral backdrop of the glowing starbow.

THREE

The hangar-deck flooring cracked like thunder with each footstep. A spliced-together biosheeting grew here so football games could be played in the bay, but it had flash-frozen during its brief exposure to vacuum and was just now beginning to warm up. Kirsten Hoogenraad carried a well-worn medical bag as she and Aaron Rossman walked toward Orpheus. Both had on silvery radiation-opaque suits overtop of fluorescent orange parkas. Each had a wrist Geiger counter. Kirsten had had the good sense to strap hers onto the wrist that didn’t have my biosensor implanted in it; Aaron had covered up his sensor. That didn’t impede my ability to read its telemetry, but it did obscure the watch display.

The cracking sounds made it hard to keep up any conversation, but they tried anyway, using the radio circuit between their helmets. “No,” he said firmly, as he passed the forty-yard line. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe Di would kill herself.” He walked a few paces ahead of Kirsten. I assumed he did that so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes.

Kirsten exhaled noisily. “She was pissed off when you didn’t renew your marriage contract.” She was forcing herself to sound angry, but her medical telemetry suggested she was more confused than anything else.

“Weeks ago,” said Aaron, his footfall putting a sharp period after the pair of words. The overlapping echoes