Alien Emergencies - James White [40]
“If I might offer a suggestion, friend Conway,” said Prilicla, “the job of finding the being Sutherland would be accomplished much more simply and quickly if I were to accompany you.”
Conway thought of the tangle of metal plating and structural members that lay beneath the hull of the derelict, of the danger of rupturing their spacesuits practically every foot of the way, and of the other dangers they could not even guess at. He wondered what had become of the celebrated Cinrusskin cowardice, which in that incredibly fragile species was its most important survival characteristic.
“You would come with me?” Conway asked incredulously. “You are offering to come with me?”
Prilicla responded timidly. “Your emotional radiation is somewhat confused, friend Conway, but on the whole flattering to myself. Yes, I shall go with you and use my empathic faculty to help find Sutherland, if he is still alive. However, you already know that I am not a brave person, and I reserve the right to withdraw from the search should the element of risk pass beyond what I consider acceptable limits.”
“I’m relieved,” said Conway. “For a moment there I was worried about your sanity.”
“I know,” said Prilicla, beginning to add items to its own spacesuit.
They exited by the small personnel lock forward, the main one being connected to the Tenelphi, and had to listen to Captain Fletcher worrying out loud about the situation for several interminable minutes. Then they were outside, and the hull of the derelict was spread out ahead and all around them like a gigantic wall, so pitted and torn and ruptured by centuries of meteorite collisions that at close range the spherical shape of the enormous vessel was not apparent. As they guided themselves towards it, there was a sudden dizzying change of perspective. The derelict was no longer a vertical wall but a vast, metallic landscape on which they were about to touch down, and the two coupled ships were hanging in the sky above it.
Conway found it much easier to guide himself down to the marked area than to control his emotions at the thought of landing on one of the legendary generation ships. But it was likely that his emotional radiation would not inconvenience Prilicla too much because the empath’s feelings would be very similar—even though it was physiologically impossible for a Cinrusskin to experience goose bumps or to have the non-existent hair at the back of its neck prickle with sheer wonder.
This was one of the generation ships which, before the discovery of hyperdrive, had carried colonists from their home worlds to the planets of other stars. All of the technologically advanced species of what was now the Galactic Federation had gone through their generation-ship phase. Melf, Illensa, Traltha, Kelgia and Earth had been among the scores of cultures which—between the time of their developing chemical-or nuclear-powered interplanetary travel and virtually instantaneous interstellar flight via the hyperdimension—had flung these planetary seed pods into space.
When a few decades or centuries later the cultures concerned had perfected hyperdrive or received it from one of the species of the emerging Galactic Federation, they had gone looking for these lumbering sub-light-speed behemoths and had rescued the majority of them a few decades or centuries after they had been launched.
This could be accomplished because the courses of the generation ships were known with accuracy, and their positions at any time during their centuries-long voyages could be computed with ease. Provided no physical or psychological catastrophe had occurred in the meantime—and some of the non-physical things that had gone wrong in the generation ships had given the would-be rescuers nightmares for the rest of their lives—the colonists were transferred to their target worlds within a matter of days rather than centuries.
Conway knew that the last of the generation ships to be contacted had been cleared, their metal and reactors salvaged. A few of them had been converted for use as accommodation for