(Not this cloud, O Pundit.) -In fact, clouds are good for you. The scoops don't have to work so long or so hard to keep fusion going and energy storing.

(Not this cloud, O Pundit.) -Well, then, rely on the Fusionist to think of a way out.

(But if there was no way out?) Hanson shied away from that last thought. He tried hard not to think it. -But how do you not think a thought that is the loudest thing in your head?

Henry Strauss, ship's astronomer, was himself in a mood of deep depression. If what had taken place were undiluted catastrophe, it might be accepted. No one on the hyperships could entirely close his eyes to the possibility of catastrophe. You were prepared for that, or you tried to be. -Though it was worse for the pa.s.sengers, of course.

But when the catastrophe involved something that you would give your eye-teeth to observe and study, and when you find that the professional find of a lifetime was precisely what was killing you- He sighed heavily.

He was a stout man, with tinted contact lenses that gave a spurious brightness and color to eyes that would otherwise have precisely matched a colorless personality.

There was nothing the captain could do. He knew that. The captain might be autocrat of all the rest of the ship, but a Fusionist was a Jaw to himself, and always had been. Even to the pa.s.sengers (he thought with some disgust) the Fusionist is the emperor of the s.p.a.ceways and everyone beside dwindles to impotence.

It was a matter of supply and demand. The computers might calculate the exact quant.i.ty and timing of the energy input and the exact place and direction (if "direction " had any meaning in the transition from tardyon to tachyon), but the margin of error was huge and only a talented Fusionist could lower it. What it was that gave a Fusionist his talent, no one knew-they were born, not made. But Fusionists knew they had the talent and there was never one that didn't trade on that.

Viluekis wasn't bad as Fusionists went-though they never went far. He and Strauss were at least on speaking terms, even though Viluekis had effortlessly collected the prettiest pa.s.senger on board after Strauss had seen her first. (That was somehow part of the Imperial rights of the Fusionists en route.) Strauss contacted Anton Viluekis. It took time for it to go through and when it did, Viluekis looked irritated in a rumpled, sad-eyed way.

"How's the tube?" asked Strauss gently. "I think I shut it down in time. I've gone over it and I don't see any damage. Now," he looked down at himself, "I've got to clean up."

"At least it isn't harmed."

"But we can't use it "

"We might might use it, Vil," said Strauss in an insinuating voice. "We can't say what will happen out there. If the tube were damaged, it wouldn't matter what happened out there, but, as it is, if the cloud cleans up-" use it, Vil," said Strauss in an insinuating voice. "We can't say what will happen out there. If the tube were damaged, it wouldn't matter what happened out there, but, as it is, if the cloud cleans up-"

"If-if-if-I'll tell you an 'if.' If you stupid astronomers had known this cloud was here, I might have avoided it."

That was flatly irrelevant, and Strauss did not rise to the bait. He said, "It might clear up."

"What's the a.n.a.lysis?"

"Not good, Vil. It's the thickest hydroxyl cloud that's ever been observed. There is nowhere in the galaxy, as far as I know, a place where hydroxyl has been concentrated so densely."

" And no hydrogen?"

"Some hydrogen, of course. About five per cent"

"Not enough," said Viluekis curtly. "There's something else there besides hydroxyl. There's something that gave me more trouble than hydroxyl could. Did you locate it?"

"Oh, yes. Formaldehyde. There's more formaldehyde than hydrogen. Do you realize what it means, Vil? Some process has concentrated oxygen and carbon in s.p.a.ce in unheard-of amounts; enough to use up the hydrogen over a volume of cubic light-years, perhaps. There isn't anything I know or can imagine which would account for such a thing."

"What are you trying to say, Strauss? Are you telling me that this is the only cloud of this type in s.p.a.ce and I am stupid enough to land in it?"

"I'm not saying that, Vil. I only say what you hear me say and you haven't heard me say that. But, Vil, to get out we're depending on you. I can't call for help because I can't aim a hyperbeam without knowing where we are: I can't find out where we are because I can't pinpoint any stars-"

"And I can't use the fusion tube, so why am I the villain? You can't do your job, either, so why is the Fusionist always the villain." Viluekis was simmering. "It's up to you, Strauss, up to you. Tell me where to cruise the ship to find hydrogen. Tell me where the edge of the cloud is. -Or to h.e.l.l with the edge of the cloud; find me the edge of the hydroxyl-formaldehyde business."

"I wish I could," said Strauss, "but so far I can't detect anything but hydroxyl and formaldehyde as far as I can probe."

"We can't fuse that stuff."

"I know."

"Well," said Viluekis violently, "this is an example of why it's wrong for the government to try to legislate supersafety instead of leaving it to the judgment of the Fusionist on the spot. If we had the capacity for the Double-Jump, there'd be no trouble."

Strauss knew perfectly well what Viluekis meant. There was always the tendency to save time by making two Jumps in rapid succession, but if one Jump involved certain unavoidable uncertainties, two in succession greatly multiplied those uncertainties, and even the best Fusionist couldn't do much. The multiplied error almost invariably greatly lengthened the total time of the trip.

It was a strict rule of hypernavigation that one full day of cruising between Jumps was necessary-three full days was preferable. That gave time enough to prepare the next Jump with all due caution. To avoid breaking that rule, each Jump was made under conditions that left insufficient energy supply for a second. For at least some time, the scoops had to gather and compress hydrogen, fuse it, and store the energy, building up to Jump-ignition. And it usually took at least a day to store enough to allow a Jump.

Strauss said, "How far short in energy are you, Vil?"

"Not much. This much." Viluekis held his thumb and forefinger apart by a quarter of an inch. "It's enough, though."

"Too bad," said Strauss flatly. The energy supply was recorded and could be inspected, but even so, Fusionists had been known to organize the records in such a way as to leave themselves some leeway for that second Jump.

"Are you sure?" he said. "Suppose you throw in the emergency generators, turn off all the lights-"

"And the air circulation and the appliances and the hydroponics apparatus. I know. I know. I figured that all in and we don't quite make it. -There's your stupid Double-Jump safety regulation."

Strauss still managed to keep his temper. He knew-everyone knew-that it had been the Fusionist Brotherhood that had been the driving force behind that regulation. A Double-Jump, sometimes insisted on by the captain, much more often than not made the Fusionist look bad. -But then, there was at least one advantage. With an obligatory cruise between every Jump, there ought to be at least a week before the pa.s.sengers grew restless and suspicious, and in that week something might happen. So far, it was not quite a day.

He said, "Are you sure you can't do something with your system; filter out some of the impurities?"

"Filter them out! They're not impurities; they're the whole thing. Hydrogen is the impurity here. Listen, I'll need half a billion degrees to fuse carbon and oxygen atoms; probably a full billion. It can't be done and I'm not going to try. If I try something and it doesn't work, it's my fault, and I won't stand for that. It's up to you to get me to the hydrogen and you do it. You just cruise this ship to the hydrogen. I don't care how long it takes."

Strauss said, "We can't go faster than we're going now, considering the density of the medium, Vil. And at halflight speed we might have to cruise for two years-maybe twenty years"

"Well, you you think of a way out. Or the captain." think of a way out. Or the captain."

Strauss broke contact in despair. There was just no way of carrying on a rational conversation with a Fusionist. He'd heard the theory advanced (and perfectly seriously) that repeated Jumps affected the brain. In the Jump, every tardyon in ordinary matter had to be turned into an equivalent tachyon and then back again to the original tardyon. If the double conversion was imperfect in even the tiniest way, surely the effect would show up first in the brain, which was by far the most complex piece of matter ever to make the transition. Of course, no ill effects had ever been demonstrated experimentally, and no cla.s.s of hypership officers seemed to deteriorate with time past what could be attributed to simple aging. But perhaps whatever it was in the Fusionists' brains that made them Fusionists and allowed them to go, by sheer intuition, beyond the best of computers might be particularly complex and therefore particularly vulnerable.

Nuts! There was nothing to it! Fusionists were merely spoiled!

He hesitated. Ought he to try to reach Cheryl? She could smooth matters if anyone could, and once old Vil-baby was properly dandled, he might think of a way to put the fusion tubes into operation-hydroxyl or not.

Did he really believe Viluekis could, under any circ.u.mstances? Or was he trying to avoid the thought of cruising for years? To be sure, hyperships were prepared for such an eventuality, in principle, but the eventuality had never come to pa.s.s and the crews-and still less the pa.s.sengers-were surely not not prepared for it. prepared for it.

But if he did talk to Cheryl, what could he say that wouldn't sound like an order for seduction? It was only one day so far and he was not yet ready to pimp for a Fusionist.

Wait! Awhile, anyway!

Viluekis frowned. He felt a little better having bathed and he was pleased that he had been firm with Strauss. Not a bad fellow, Strauss, but like all of them ("them," the captain, the crew, the pa.s.sengers, all the stupid non-Fusionists in the universe) he wanted to shed responsibility. Put it all on the Fusionist. It was an old, old song, and he was one Fusionist who wouldn't take it.

That talk about cruising for years was just a way of trying to frighten him. If they really put their minds to it, they could work out the limits of the cloud and somewhere there had to be a nearer edge. It was too much to ask that they had landed in the precise center. Of course, if they had landed near one edge and were heading for the other- Viluekis rose and stretched. He was tall and his eyebrows hung over his eyes like canopies.

Suppose it did take years. No hypership had ever cruised for years. The longest cruise had been eighty-eight days and thirteen hours, when one of them had managed to find itself in an unfavorable position with respect to a diffuse star and had to recede at speeds that built up to over 0.9 light before it was reasonably able to Jump.

They had survived and that was a quarter-year cruise. Of course, twenty twenty years years But that was impossible.

The signal light flashed three times before he was fully aware of it. If that was the captain coming to see him personally, he would leave at a rather more rapid rate than he had come.

"Anton!"

The voice was soft, urgent, and part of his annoyance seeped away. He allowed the door to recede into its socket and Cheryl came in. The door closed again behind her.

She was about twenty-five, with green eyes, a firm chin, dull red hair, and a magnificent figure that did not hide its light under a bushel.

She said, " Anton. Is there something wrong?"

Viluekis was not caught so entirely by surprise as to admit any such thing. Even a Fusionist knew better than to reveal anything prematurely to a pa.s.senger. "Not at all. What makes you think so?"

"One of the other pa.s.sengers says so. A man named Martand."

"Martand? What does he know about it?" Then, suspiciously, " And what are you doing listening to some fool pa.s.senger? What does he look like?"

Cheryl smiled wanly. "Just someone who struck up a conversation in the lounge. He must be nearly sixty years old, and quite harmless, though I imagine he would like not to be. But that's not the point. There are no stars in view. Anyone can see that, and Martand said it was significant."

"Did he? We're just pa.s.sing through a cloud. There are lots of clouds in the galaxy and hyperships pa.s.s through them all the time."

"Yes, but Martand says you can usually see some stars even in a cloud."

"What does he know about it?" Viluekis repeated. "Is he an old hand at deep s.p.a.ce?"

"No-o," admitted Cheryl. "Actually, it's his first trip, I think. But he seems to know a lot."

"I'll bet. Listen, you go to him and tell him to shut up. He can be put in solitary for this. And don't you repeat stories like that, either."

Cheryl put her head to one side. "Frankly, Anton, you sound as though there were were trouble. This Martand-Louis Martand is his name-is an interesting fellow. He's a schoolteacher-eighth grade general science." trouble. This Martand-Louis Martand is his name-is an interesting fellow. He's a schoolteacher-eighth grade general science."

"A grade-school teacher! Good Lord, Cheryl-"

"But you ought to listen to him. He says that teaching children is one of the few professions where you have to know a little bit about everything because kids ask questions and can spot phonies."

"Well, then, maybe your specialty should be spotting phonies, too. Now, Cheryl, you go and tell him to shut up, or I will."

"All right. But first-is it true that we're going through a hydroxyl cloud and the fusion tube is shut down?"

Viluekis's mouth opened, then shut again. It was quite a while before he said, "Who told you that?"

"Martand. I'll go now."

"No," said Viluekis sharply. "Wait awhile. How many others has Martand been telling all this?"

"n.o.body. He said he doesn't want to spread panic. I was there when he was thinking thinking about it, I suppose, and I guess he couldn't resist saying something." about it, I suppose, and I guess he couldn't resist saying something."

"Does he know you know me?"

Cheryl's forehead furrowed slightly. "I think I mentioned something about it."

Viluekis snorted, "Don't you suppose that this crazy old man you've picked up is bound to try to show you how great he is. It's me he's trying to impress through you."

"Nothing of the sort," said Cheryl. "In fact, he specifically said I wasn't to tell you anything."

"Knowing, of course, that you'd come to me at once."

"Why should he want me to do that?"

"To show me up. Do you know what it's like being a Fusionist? To have everyone resenting you, against you, because you're so needed, needed, because you-" because you-"

Cheryl said, "But what's any of that got to do with it? If Martand's all wrong, how would that show you up? And if he's right-Is he right, Anton?"

"Well, exactly what did he say?"

"I'm not sure I can remember it all, of course," Cheryl said thoughtfully. "It was after we came out of the Jump, actually quite a few hours after. By that time all anyone was talking about was that there were no stars in view. In the lounge everyone was saying there ought to be another Jump soon because what was the good of deep-s.p.a.ce travel without a view. Of course, we knew we had to cruise at least a day. Then Martand came in, saw me, and came over to speak to me. -I think he rather likes me."

"I think I rather don't like him," said Viluekis grimly. "Go on."

"I said to him that it was pretty dreary without a view and he said it would stay that way for a while, and he sounded worried. Naturally I asked why he said such a thing and he said it was because the fusion tube had been turned off."

"Who told him that?" demanded Viluekis.

He said there was a low hum that you could hear in one of the men's rooms that you couldn't hear anymore. And he said there was a place in the closet of the game room where the chess sets were kept where the wall felt warm because of the fusion tube and that place was not warm now."

"Is that all the evidence he has?"

-Cheryl ignored that and went on, "He said there were no stars visible because we were in a dust cloud and the fusion tubes must have stopped because there was no hydrogen to speak of in it. He said there probably wouldn't be enough energy to spark another Jump and that if we looked for hydrogen we might have to cruise years to get out of the cloud."

Viluekis's frown became ferocious. "He's panic-mongering. Do you know what that-"

"He's not. not. He told me not to tell anyone because he said it would create panic and that besides it wouldn't happen. He only told me because he had just figured it out and was all excited about it and had to talk to someone, but he said there was an easy way out and that the Fusionist would know what to do so that there was no need to worry at all. -But you're the Fusionist, so it seemed to me I had to ask whether he was really right about the cloud and whether you had really taken care of it." He told me not to tell anyone because he said it would create panic and that besides it wouldn't happen. He only told me because he had just figured it out and was all excited about it and had to talk to someone, but he said there was an easy way out and that the Fusionist would know what to do so that there was no need to worry at all. -But you're the Fusionist, so it seemed to me I had to ask whether he was really right about the cloud and whether you had really taken care of it."

Viluekis said, "This grade-school teacher of yours knows nothing about anything. Just stay away from him. -Uh, did he say say what his so-called easy way out was?" what his so-called easy way out was?"

"No. Should I have asked him?"

"No! Why should you have asked him? What would he know about it? But then again- All right, ask him. I'm curious what the idiot has in mind. Ask him."

Cheryl nodded. "I can do that. But are we in trouble?" Viluekis said shortly. "Suppose you leave that to me.

We're not in trouble till I say we're in trouble."

He looked for a long time at the closed door after she had left, both angry and uneasy. What was this Louis Martand-this grade-school teacher-doing with his lucky guesses?

If it finally came about that an extended cruise was necessary, the pa.s.sengers would have to have it broken to them carefully, or none of them would survive. With Martand shouting it to all who would listen- Almost savagely Viluekis clicked shut the combination that would bring him the captain.

Martand was slim and of neat appearance. His lips seemed forever on the verge of a smile, though his face and bearing were marked by a polite gravity; an almost expectant gravity, as though he was forever waiting for the person with him to say something truly important.

Cheryl said to him, "I spoke to Mr. Viluekis. -He's the Fusionist, you know. I told him what you said."