The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [12]
He orbited the spaceship. On the side of her turned away from Skink the cargo ports were still open. It all looked very unspacemanlike—but why bother to batten down when the ship is going to be destroyed minutes after you have left her? She hadn't been destroyed, of course, but she should have been, would have been if some firing device had not malfunctioned.
He said, "I'll bring us around to the after airlock. Suit you?"
"Suits me. But be careful, John. Don't forget that there's an armed bomb aboard that ship. Anything, anything at all, could set it off."
"Yes, teacher. I'll be careful, very careful. I'll come alongside so carefully that I wouldn't crack the proverbial egg." He reached out for the microphone of the Carlotti transceiver; at this distance from the courier, with Mannschenn Drive units in operation, the N.S.T. suit radios were useless. He would have to inform Frankie Delamere and his own officers of progress to date and of his intentions. With his chin he nudged the stud that would cause the faceplate of his helmet to flip open. His thumb pressed the transmit button. And then it happened.
Aboard the ship, for many, many months, the miniaturized Carlotti receiver had been waiting patiently for the signal that, owing to some infinitesimal shifting of frequencies, had never come. The fuse had been wrongly set, perhaps, or some vibration had jarred it from its original setting, quite possibly the shock initiated by the explosion of either of the two warning bombs. And now here was a wide-band transmitter at very close range.
Circuits came alive, a hammer fell on a detonator, which exploded, in its turn exploding the driving charge. One sub-critical mass of fissionable material was impelled to contact with another sub-critical mass, with the inevitable result.
As a bomb it lacked the sophistication of the weaponry of the armed forces of the Federation—but it worked.
Grimes, with the dreadful reality blinding him, remembered his prevision of the light too bright to be seen. He heard somebody (Una? himself?) scream. This was It. This was all that they would ever be. He was a dead leaf caught in the indraught of a forest fire, whirling down and through the warped dimensions to the ultimate, blazing Nothingness.
Chapter 7
She said, "But we shouldn't be alive . . ."
He said, "But we are." He added, glumly, "But for how long? This boat must be as radioactive as all hell. I suppose that it was the bomb that went off."
"It was," she told him. "But there's no radioactivity. I've tested. There is a counter in my bomb disposal kit."
He said, "It must be on the blink."
"It's not. It registers well enough with all the normal sources—my wristwatch, against the casing of the fusion power unit, and so on."
He said doubtfully, "I suppose we could have been thrown clear. Or we were in some cone of shadow . . . . Yes, that makes sense. We were toward the stern of the ship, and the shielding of her power plant must have protected us."
She asked, "What now?"
Grimes stared through the viewports of the control cabin. There was no sign of Skink. There was no sign of any wreckage from Delta Geminorum. The stars shone bright and hard in the blackness; the mini-Mannschenn had stopped and the boat was adrift in the normal Continuum.
He said, "We stay put."
She said, "Shouldn't Delamere be sniffing around to pick up the pieces?"
"Delamere's sure that there aren't any pieces," he told her, "just as I should be sure if I were in his shoes. And, in any case, he's in a hurry to get to Olgana. He knows we're dead, vaporized. But he'll have used his Carlotti to put in a report to Base, giving the coordinates of the scene of the disaster. When anything of this kind happens a ship full of experts is sent at once to make an investigation." He