The Only Neat Thing to Do

A last flicker of caution reminds her that, whatever her goal, her first outward leg must be the beacon route to Ace's. At the first beacon turn, she'll have time to think it over and really make up her mind.

She finds that CC-One has been skidded out of Fuels and onto the edge of the standard-thrust takeoff area. She hikes out and climbs in, unaware that she's broadcasting a happy hum. This is IT! She's really, really, at last, on her way!

Strapping in, preparing to lift, she takes out a ration snack and bites it open. She was too broke to eat at Base. Setting course and getting into drive will give her time to digest it; she has a superstitious dislike of going into cold-sleep with a full tummy. Absolutely nothing is supposed to go on during cold-sleep, and she's been used to it since she was a baby, but the thought of that foreign lump of food in there always bothers her. What puts it in stasis before it's part of her? What if it decided to throw itself up?

So she munches as she sets the holochart data in her computer, leaving FedBase 900 far below. She's delightedly aware that the most real part of her life is about to begin. Amid the radiance of unfamiliar stars, the dark Rift in her front view-ports, she completes the course to Beacon 900-One AL, and listens to the big c-skip converters, the heart of her ship, start the cooling-down process. The c-skip drive unit must be supercooled to near absolute zero to work the half-understood miracle by which reciprocal gravity fields will be perturbed, and CC-One and herself translated to the target at relativistic speed.

As the first clicks and clanks of cooling resound through the shell, she hangs up her suit, opens her small-size sleep chest, gets in, and injects herself. Her feelings as she pulls the lid down are those of a child of antique earth as it falls asleep to awake on Christmas morning. Thank the All for cold-sleep, she thinks drowsily. It gave us the stars. Imagine those first brave explorers who had to live and age, to stay awake through all the days, the months, the years….

She wakens in what at first glance appears to be about the same starfield, but when she's closed the chest, rubbing her behind where the antisleep injections hit she sees that the Rift looks different.

It's larger, and — why, it's all around the ship! Tendrils of dark almost close behind her. She's in one of the fringy star-clumps that stick out into the Rift. And the starfield looks dull, apart from a few blazing suns — of course, there aren't any nearby stars! Or rather, there are a few very near, and then an emptiness where all the middle-distance suns should be. Only the far, faint star-tapestry lies beyond.

The ship is full of noise; as she comes fully awake she understands that the beacon signal and her mass- proximity indicator are both tweeting and blasting away. She tunes them down, locates the beacon, and puts the ship into a slow orbit around it. This beacon, like FedBase, is set on a big asteroid that gives her just enough g's to stabilize.

Very well. If she's going to Ace's Landing, she'll just set in the coordinates for Beacon 900-Two AL, and go back to sleep. But if she's going to look at those yellow suns, she must get out her charts and work up a safe two- or three-leg course to one of them.

She can't simply set in their coordinates and fly straight there, even if there were no bodies actually in the way, because the 'skip drive is built to turn off and wake her up if she threatens to get too deep in a strong gravity field, or encounters an asteroid swarm or some other space hazard. So she has to work out corridors that pass really far away from any strong bodies or known problems.

Decide. …But, face it, hasn't she already decided, when she stabilized here? She doesn't need that much time to punch in Beacon Two! …Yes. She has to go somewhere really wild. A hut on Ace's Landing is just not what she came out here for. Those unknown yellow suns are … and maybe she could do something useful, like finding the missing men; there's an off chance. The neat thing to do might be to go by small steps, Ace's Landing first — but the really neat course is to take advantage of all she's learned and not to risk being forbidden to come back. Green, go!

She's been busy all this while, threading cassettes and getting them lined up for those GO suns. As Charts had warned her, edges don't fit well. She's working at forcing two holos into a cheap frame made for one, when her mass-proximity tweeter goes off.

She glances up, ready to duck or deflect a sky-rock. Amazed, she sees something unmistakably artificial ahead. A ship? It grows larger — but not large enough, not at the rate it's coming. It'll pass her clean. Whatever can it be? Visions of the mythical tiny ship full of tiny aliens jump to her mind.

It's so small — why, she could pick it up! Without really thinking, she spins CC-One's attitude and comes parallel, alongside the object. She's good at tricky little accelerations. The thing seems to put on speed as she idles up. Touched by chase fever, she mutters, 'Oh, no, you don't!' and extrudes the rather inadequate manipulator arm.

As she does so, she realizes what it is. But she's too excited to think, she plucks it neatly out of space, and after a bit of trying, twists it into her cargo lock, shuts the port behind it, and refills with air.

She's caught herself a message pipe! Bound from the gods know where to FedBase. It was changing course at Beacon One, like herself, hence moving slowly. Has she committed an official wrong? Is there some penalty for interfering with official commo?

Well, she's put her spoon in the soup, she might as well drink it. It'll take a while for the pipe to warm to touchability. So she goes on working her charts, intending merely to take a peek at the message and then send the little thing on its way. Surely such a small pause won't harm anything— pipes are used because the sender's out of range, not because they're fast.

She hasn't a doubt she can start it going, again. She's seen that it's covered with instructions. Like all Federation space gear, it's fixed to be usable by amateurs in an emergency.

Impatiently she completes a chart and goes to fish the thing out of the port while it's still so cold she has to put on gloves. When she undogs its little hatch, a cloud of golden motes drifts out, distracting her so that she brushes her bare wrist against the metal when she reaches for the cassette inside. Ouch!

She glances at her arm, hoping she hasn't given herself a nasty cold-burn. Nothing to be seen but an odd dusty scratch. No redness. But she can feel the nerve twitch deep in her forearm. Funny! She brushes at it, and takes out the cassette with more care. It's standard record; she soon has it threaded in her voder.

The voice that speaks is so thick and blurry that she backs up and restarts, to hear better.

'Supply and Recon Team Number 914 B-K reporting,' she makes out. Excitedly she recognizes the designation. Why, that's the missing ship! That is important. She should relay it to Base at once. But surely it won't hurt to listen to the rest?

The voice is saying that a new depot has been established at thirty-twenty north, forty-two-twenty-eight west, RD Thirty. That's one of the yellow suns' planets, and the coordinates Coati has on her wrist. 'Ninety-five percent terraform.' The voice has cleared a little.

It goes on to say that they will work back to FedBase, stopping to check a highly terraform planet they've spotted at eighteen-ten north, twenty-eight-thirty west, RD Thirty, in the same group of suns. 'But — uh—' The voice stops, then resumes.

'Some things happened at thirty-twenty. There're people there. I guess we have to report a, uh, First Contact. They—'

A second voice interrupts abruptly.

'We did just like the manual! The manual for First Contacts.'

'Yeah,' resumes the first voice. 'It worked fine. They were really friendly. They even had a few words from Galactic, and the signals. But they—'

'The wreck. The wreck! Tell them,' says the other voice.

'Oh. Well, yeah. There's a wreck there, an old RE. Real old. You can't see the rescue flag; it has big stuff growing on it. We think it's Ponz. So maybe it's his First Contact.' The voice sound unmistakably downcast. 'Boss can decide. …Anyway, they have some kind of treatment they give you, like a pill to make you smart. It takes two days; you sleep a lot. Then they let you out and you can understand everything. Imean — everything! It was — we never had anything like that before. Everybody talking and understanding everybody! See how we can talk now? But it's funny. …Anyway, they helped us find a place with a level site, and we fixed up a fuel dump really nice. We—'

'What they looked like!' the other voice bursts in. 'Never mind us. Tell about them, what they looked like and how they did.'

'Oh, sure: Well. Big white bodies with fur all over. And six legs — they mostly walk on the back four; the top two are like arms. They have like long bodies, long white cats, big; when they rear up to look, they're over our