Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (love novels in english txt) 📗

Resolution surged. “Aowrrgh!” he shouted. “Whatever this be, we’ll master it! It’s ours now!”

Time crept. Nordbo realized he was hungry. Was that right? Why hadn’t grief filled him to the brim? He had lost his loves, twenty-odd years of their lives at least, and he felt hungry and ragingly curious.

Well, but they wouldn’t expect him to wallow in self-pity, would they? Despicable emotion. Let him take whatever anodyne that work offered. He could do nothing else about his situation.

Yet.

It was actually no long spell until the boat, at a safe distance, snared the capsule. Although its screen fields had degraded incoming data, a shipboard computer could restore much. Transmission commenced at once. In minutes numbers and images were appearing on screens.

Blue-white hell-flame streamed from a ragged hole in the shell, meters wide. The color was nothing but ghost-flicker, quanta given off by excited atoms. The real glow was the gamma light of annihilation, matter and antimatter created, meeting, perishing in cascade after curious cascade until the photons flew free in search of revenge.

“Yes,” Nordbo whispered, “I think the source does emit in all directions. The output—fantastic. On the order of terawatts, no, I suspect magnitudes higher than that. The material enclosing it, though, that is what’s truly incredible. It stops those hard rays, it’s totally opaque to them, damps them down to infrared before it lets them go . . . But after billions of years, even it has worn thin and fragile. Something, a large meteoroid or something, finally punched through at one point, and there the radiation escapes unchecked. Elsewhere—”

“Can we make contact?” Yiao-Captain screamed. “Can we land and take possession?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to study, probe, set up models and run them through the computer. My guess at the moment is that probably we can, if we choose the place well and are careful. No promises, understand, and not soon.”

“Get to work on it! Immediately! Go!”

Nordbo obeyed, before Yiao-Captain should lose his temper and give him the claws.

He’d been granted a comparatively free hand to carry on research, with access to a laboratory and the production shop, assistance if necessary, provided of course that he remained properly servile. On a ship like this, those facilities were improvised, tucked into odd corners, so cramped that as a rule only one individual at a time could use them. That suited Nordbo fine.

First he required nourishment. He made for the food synthesizer. What it dispensed was as loathsome to the kzinti as to him, albeit for different reasons. Irritable at the lack of fresh meat, a spacehand kicked the man aside. Nordbo crashed against a bulkhead. The bruises lasted for days. “Keep your place, monkey! You’ll swill after the wakened Heroes have fed.”

“Yes, my master. I am sorry, my master.” Nordbo withdrew on hands and knees, as became an animal.

A thought that he had borne along from Wunderland crystallized. He’d be modifying apparatus, or making it from scratch, as occasion arose. Contemptuous, the kzinti, including the scientists, would pay scant heed. Yiao-Captain might be the exception, but he’d have plenty of other demands on his attention. With caution, patience, piecemeal labor, it should be possible to fashion some kind of weapon—a knife, if nothing else—and keep it concealed under a jumble of stuff in a cabinet or box.

Chances were he’d never use it. What could he win? But the simple knowledge of its existence would help him get through the next months. If he could at last endure no longer, if nothing whatsoever remained to lose, maybe he could wreak a little harm, and die like a man.

Chapter IX

Having left Alpha Centauri far enough behind, Rover phased into hyperspace and commenced the long haul. “We’ll go about four and a half light-years, emerge, and see what our instruments can tell us at that distance,” Saxtorph had decided. “When we’ve got a proper fix on the whatchamacallit, we’ll approach by short jumps, taking new observations after each one.”

“Jamais l’audace,” Dorcas had laughed.

“Huh? Oh. Oh, yah. Caution. Finagle knows what we’re letting ourselves in for, but I’ll bet my favorite meerschaum that Murphy will take a strong interest in the proceedings.”

In the galley, on the second day under quantum drive, Ryan exclaimed, “Hey, you really are handy with the tools.”

Tyra trimmed the last creamfruit and dropped it in a bowl. “One learns,” she said. “I am not a bad cook, either. Maybe sometime you will let me make us a meal.”

“M-m, you cook for yourself a lot?”

She nodded. “Eating out alone very much is depressing. Also, some of the places I have been, nobody but a local person or a berserker would go into a restaurant. Or else it is machines programmed for the same menus that bore me everywhere in known space.”

“Adventurous sort. Well, sure, I’d be glad to take a chance on you, if you’d like to try being more than the bull cook.” Ryan cocked his head and ran his glance up, down, and sideways across her. “For which job, strictly speaking, you lack certain qualifications anyway. Not that I object, mind you.”

The blue eyes blinked. “What?” Now and then an English idiom eluded her.

“Never mind. For the moment. Uh, you are quite sweet, helping out like this. You aren’t obliged to, you know, our paying passenger.”

“What should I do, sit yawning at a screen? I wish I could find more to keep me busy.”

“I’d be delighted to see to that, after hours,” he proposed.

She colored slightly, but her tone stayed calm and her smile amicable. “I suspect Pilot Fenger would complain. It could be safer to offend a keg of detonite.”

“You’ve noticed, have you?” he replied, unembarrassed. “I guess in your line of work you develop a Sherlock Holmes kind of talent. Well, yes, Carita and I do have a thing going. Have had for years. But it’s just friendly, no pledges, no claims. She’s not possessive or jealous or anything.” He edged closer. “This evening watch after dinner? Your cabin or mine, whichever you prefer. I’ll bring a