MOTHER IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

“Signal coming in now, ’Spector.”

The Coronis operator showed the pink of her tongue to the ugly man waiting in the Belt patrolboat, half a megamile downstream. All that feky old hair, too, she thought. Yick. She pulled in her tongue and said sweetly, “It’s from —oh—Franchise Twelve.”

The man in the patrolboat looked uglier. His name was Space Safety Inspector Gollem and his stomach hurt.

The news that a Company inspector was in pain would have delighted every mollysquatter from Deimos to the Rings. The only surprise would be the notion that Inspector Gollem had a stomach instead of a Company contract tape. Gollem? All the friends Gollem had could colonize a meson and he knew it.

His stomach was used to that, though. His stomach was even getting used to working for Coronis Mutual, and he still hoped it might manage to survive his boss, Quine.

What was murdering him by inches was the thing he had hidden out beyond Franchise Fourteen on the edge of Coronis sector.

He scowled at the screen where Quine’s girl was logging in the grief for his next patrol. Having a live girl-girl for commo was supposed to be good for morale. It wasn’t doing one thing for Gollem. He knew what he looked like and his stomach knew what the flash from Twelve could be.

When she threw it on the screen he saw it was a bogy complaint, all right. Ghost signals on their lines.

Oh, no. Not again.

Not when he had it all fixed.

Franchise Twelve was West Hem Chemicals, an itchy outfit with a jillabuck of cyborgs. They would send out a tracker if he didn’t get over there soon. But how? He had just come that way, he was due upstream at Franchise One.

“Reverse patrol,” he grunted. “Starting Franchise Fourteen. Purpose, uh, unscheduled recheck of aggregation shots in Eleven plus expedited service to West Hem. Allocate two units additional power.”

She logged it in; it was all right with her if Gollem started with spacerot.

He cut channel and coded in the new course, trying not to think about the extra power he would have to justify to Quine. If anyone ever got into his console and found the bugger bypass on his log he would be loading ore with electrodes in his ears.

He keyed his stomach a shot of Vageez and caught an error in his code which he corrected with no joy. Most Belters took naturally to the new cheap gee-cumulator drive. Gollem loathed it. Sidling around arsy-versy instead of driving the can where you wanted to go. The old way, the real way.

I’m the last machine freak, he thought. A godlost dinosaur in space…

But a dinosaur would have had more sense than to get messed up with a dead girl.

And Ragnarok.

His gee-sum index was wobbling up the scale, squeezing him retrograde in a field stress-node—he hoped. He slapped away a pod of the new biomonitor they had put in his boat and took a scan outside before his screens mushed. Always something to see in the Belts. This time it was a storm of little crescents trailing him, winking as the gravel tumbled.

In the sky with diamonds…

From Ragnarok’s big ports you could see into naked space. That was the way they liked it, once. His Iron Butterfly. He rubbed his beard, figuring: five hours to Ragnarok, after he checked the squatternest in Fourteen.

The weathersignal showed new data since he’d coded in the current field vortices and fronts. He tuned up, wondering what it must be like to live under weather made of gales of gas and liquid water. He had been raised on Luna.

The flash turned out to be a couple of rogue males coming in from Big J’s orbit. Jup stirred up a rock now and then. This pair read like escaped Trojans, estimated to node downstream in Sector Themis. Nothing in that volume except some new medbase. His opposite number there was a gigglehead named Kara who was probably too busy peddling mutant phage to notice them go by. A pity, Trojans were gas-rich.

Feeding time. He opened a pack of Ovipuff and tuned up his music. His music. Old human power music from the frontier tune. Not for Gollem, the new subliminal biomoans. He dug it hard, the righteous electronic decibels. Chomping the paste with big useless teeth, the cabin pounding.

I can’t get no—satisFACTION!

The biomonitor was shrinking in its pods. Good. Nobody asked you into Gollem’s ship, you sucking symbiote.

The beat helped. He started through his exercises. Not to let himself go null-gee like Hara. Like them all now. Spacegrace? Shit. His unfashionable body bucked and strained.

A gorilla, no wonder his own mother had taken one look and split. Two thousand light-years from home… what home for Gollem? Ask Quine, ask the Company. The Companies owned space now.

It was time to brake into Fourteen.

Fourteen was its usual disorderly self, a giant spawn of mollybubbles hiding an aggregate of rock that had been warped into synch long before his time. The first colonists had done it with reaction engines. Tough. Now a kid with a gee-cumulator could true an orbit.

Fourteen had more bubbles every time he passed—and more kids. The tissue tanks that paid the franchise were still clear but elsewhere the bubbles were layers deep, the last ones tethered loose. Running out of rock for their metabolite to work on. Gollem hassled them about that every time he passed.

“Where are your rock nudgers?” he asked now when the squatterchief came on his screen.

“Soon, soon, ’Spector Gollem.” The squatterchief was a slender skinhead with a biotuner glued to one ear.

“The Company will cancel, Juki. Coronis Mutual won’t carry you on policyholder status if you don’t maintain insurable life-support.”

Juki smiled, manipulated the green blob. They were abandoning the rocks all right, drifting off into symbiotic spacelife. Behind Juki he saw a couple of the older chiefs.

“You can’t afford to cut the services the Company provides,” he told them angrily. Nobody knew better than Gollem how minimal those services were, but without them, what? “Get some rock.”

He couldn’t use any more time here. As he pulled away he noticed one of the loose bubbles was a sick purple. Not his concern and not enough time.

Cursing, he eased alongside and cautiously slid his lock probes into the monomolecular bubbleskin. When the lock opened a stink came in. He grabbed his breather and kicked into the foul bubble. Six or seven bodies were floating together in the middle like a tangle of yellow wires.

He jerked one out, squirted oxy at its face. It was a gutbag kid, a born null-gee. When his eyes fanned open Gollem pushed him at the rotting metabolite core.

“You were feeding it phage.” He slapped the boy. “Thought it would replicate, didn’t you? You poisoned it.”

The boy’s eyes crossed, then straightened. Probably didn’t get a word, the dialect of Fourteen was drifting fast. Maybe some of them truly were starting to communicate symbiotically. Vegetable ESP.

He pushed the boy back into the raft and knocked the dead metabolite through the waster. The starved mollybubble wall was pitted with necrosis, barely holding. He flushed his CO2 tank over it and crawled back to his boat for a spare metabolite core. When he got back the quasi-living cytoplasm of the bubbleskin was already starting to clear. It would regenerate itself if they didn’t poison it again with a CO2-binding mutant. That was the way men built their spacehomes now, soft heterocatalytic films that ran on starlight, breathed human wastes.

Gollem rummaged through the stirring bodies until he found a bag of phage between a woman and her baby. She whimpered when he jerked it loose. He carried it back to his boat and pulled carefully away, releasing a flow of nutrient gel to seal his probe-hole. The mollybubble would heal itself.

At last he was clear for Ragnarok.

He punched course for Twelve and then deftly patched in the log bypass and set his true trajectory. The log would feed from his cache of duplicates, another item nobody had better find. Then he logged in the expendables he’d just used, padding it a piece as always. Embezzlement. His stomach groaned.

He tuned up a rock storm to soothe it. There was an old poem about a man with a dead bird tied around his neck. Truly he had his dead bird. All the good things were dead, the free wild human things. He felt like a specter, believe it. A dead one hanging in from the days when men rode machines to the stars and the algae stayed in pans. Before they cooked up all the metabolizing Martian macromolecules that quote, tamed space, unquote. Tame men, women and kids breathing through ’em, feeding off ’em, navigating and computing and making music with ’em—mating with them, maybe!

Steppenwolf growled, worried the biomonitor. His metal-finder squealed.

Ragnarok!

Time shivered and the past blazed on his screens. He let himself have one quick look.

The great gold-skinned hull floated in the starlight, edged with diamonds against the tiny sun. The last Argo, the lonesomest Conestoga of them all. Ragnarok. Huge, proud, ungainly star machine, blazoned with the symbols of the crude technology that had blasted man to space. Ragnarok that opened the way to Saturn and beyond. A human fist to the gods. Drifting now a dead hulk, lost in the sea she’d conquered. Lost and forgotten to all but Gollem the specter.

No time now to suit up and prowl over and around her, to pry and tinker with her archaic fitments. The pile inside her was long dead and cold. He dared not even try to start it, a thing like that would set off every field-sounder in the zone. Quine’s stolen power in her batteries was all that warmed her now.

Inside her also was his dead bird.

He coasted into the main lock, which he had adapted to his probe. Just as he hit he thought he glimpsed a new bubble firming up in the storage cluster he had hung on Ragnarok’s freightlock. What had Topanga been up to?

The locks meshed with a soul-satisfying clang of metal and he cycled through, eye to eye with the two old monster suits that hung in Ragnarok’s lock. Unbelievable, so cumbersome. How ever had they done it? He kicked up through dimness to the bridge.

For one moment his girl was there.

The wide ports were a wheeling maze of starlight and fire-studded shadows. She sat in the command couch, gazing out. He saw her pure, fierce profile, the hint of girl-body in the shadows. Star-hungry eyes.

Then the eyes slid around and the lights came up. His star girl vanished into the thing that had killed her.

Time.

Topanga was an old, sick, silly woman in a derelict driveship.

She smiled at him from the wreckage of her face. “Golly? I was remembering—” What an instrument it was still, that husky voice in the star haze. The tales it had spun for him over the years. She had not always been like this. When he had first found her, adrift and ill—she had still been Topanga then. The last one left.

“You were using the caller. Topanga, I warned you they were too close. Now they’ve picked you up.”

“I wasn’t sending, Golly.” Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen.

He began to check the telltales he had hung on her console leads. Hard to believe those antiques were still operational. Completely inorganic, a ton of solid-state circuitry. Topanga claimed she couldn’t activate it, but when she had had her first crazy fit he had found out otherwise. He’d had her parked in Four then, in a clutch of space-junk. She started blasting the bands with docking signals to men twenty years dead. Company salvage had nearly blown her out of space before he got there—he’d had to fake a collision to satisfy Quine.

A telltale was hot.

“Topanga. Listen to me. West Hem Chemicals are sending a hunter out to find you. You were jamming their miners. Don’t you know what they’ll do to you? The best —the very best you’ll get is a geriatric ward. Needles. Tubes. Doctors ordering you around, treating you like a thing. They’ll grab Ragnarok for a space trophy. Unless they blast you first.”

Her face crumpled crazily.

“I can take care of myself. I’ll turn the lasers on ’em.”

“You’d never see them.” He glared at the defiant ghost. He could do anything he wanted here, what was stopping him? “Topanga, I’m going to kill that caller. It’s for your own good.”

She stuck up her ruined chin, the wattles waving.

“I’m not afraid of them.”

“You have to be afraid of a jerry ward. You want to end as a mess of tubing, under the gees? I’m going to dismantle it.”

“No, Golly, no!” Her stick arms drummed in panic, trailing skin. “I won’t touch it, I’ll remember. Don’t leave me helpless. Oh, please don’t.”

Her voice broke and so did his stomach. He couldn’t look at it, this creature that had eaten his girl. Topanga inside there somewhere, begging for freedom, for danger. Safe, helpless, gagged? No.

“If I nudge you out of West Hem’s range you’ll be in three others. Topanga, baby, I can’t save you one more time.”

She had gone limp now, shrouded in the Martian oxyblanket he had brought her. He caught a blue gleam under the shadows and his stomach squirted bile. Let go, witch. Die before you kill me too.

He began to code in the gee-sum unit he had set up here. It was totally inadequate for Ragnarok’s mass but he could overload it for a nudge. He would stabilize her on his next pass-by, if only he could find her without wasting too much power.

From behind him came a husky whisper. “Strange to be old—” Ghost of a rich girl’s laugh. “Did I ever tell you about the time the field shifted, on Tethys?”

“You told me.”

Ragnarok was stirring.

“Stars,” she said dreamily. “Hart Crane was the first space poet. Listen. Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. O silver sinewy—”

Gollem heard the hull clang.

Someone was trying to sneak out of Ragnarok.

He launched himself downshaft to the freightlock, found it cycling and jacknifed back to get out through his boat at the main lock. Too late. As he sprang into his cabin the screens showed a strange pod taking off from behind that new bubble.

Dummy, dummy—

He suited up and scrambled out across Ragnarok’s hull. The new bubble was still soft, mostly nutri-gel. Pushing his face into it he cracked his breather.

He came back to Topanga in a blue rage.

“You are letting a phage-runner park on Ragnarok.”

“Oh, was that Leo?” She laughed vaguely. “He’s a courier from the next zone—Themis, isn’t it? He calls by sometimes. He’s been beautiful to me, Golly.”

“He is a stinking phage-runner and you know it. You were covering for him.” Gollem was sick. The old Topanga would have put “Leo” out the trash hole. “Not phage. Not phage on top of everything, Topanga.”

Her ancient eyelids fell. “Let it be, Golly. I’m alone so long,” she whispered. “You leave me for so long,”

Her withered paw groped out, seeking him. Brown-spotted, criss-crossed with reedy pulses. Knobs, strings. Where were the hands of the girl who had held the camp on Tethys?

He looked up at the array of holographs over the port and saw her. The camera had caught her grinning up at black immensity, the wild light of Saturn’s rings reflected in her red-gold hair….

“Topanga, old mother,” he said painfully. “Don’t call me mother, you plastic spacepig!” she blazed. Her carcass jerked out of the pilot couch and he had to web her back, hating to touch her. A quarter-gee would break these sticks. “I should be dead,” she mumbled. “It won’t be long, you’ll be rid of me.”

Ragnarok was set now, he could go.

“Maintain, spacer, maintain,” he told her heartily. His stomach knew what lay ahead. None of it was any good.

As he left he heard her saying brightly, “Gimbals, check,” to her dead computer.

He took off high-gain for Franchise Twelve and West Hem. Just as he had the log tied back into real time his caller bleeped. The screen stayed blank.

“Identify.”

“Been waitin’ on you, Gollem.” A slurred tenor; Gollem’s beard twitched.

“One freakin’ fine ship.” The voice chuckled. “Mainmouth by Co’onis truly flash that ship.”

“Stay off Ragnarok if you want to keep your air,” Gollem told the phage-runner.

The voice giggled again. “My pa’tners truly grieve on that, ’Spector.” There was a click and he heard his own voice saying, “Topanga, baby, I can’t save you one more time.”

“Deal, ’Spector, deal. Why we flash on war?”

“Blow your clobbing tapes,” Gollem said tiredly. “You can’t run me like you run Hara.”.

“ ‘Panga,” the invisible Leo said reflectively. “Freakin’ fine old fox. She tell I fix her wire fire?”

Gollem cut channel.

The phager must have made a circuit smoke to win her trust. Gollem’s stomach wept acid. So vulnerable. An old sick eagle dead in space and the rats have found her….

They wouldn’t quit, either. Ragnarok had air, water, power. Transmitters. Maybe they were using her caller, maybe she’d been telling the truth. They could take over. Shove her out through the lock….

Gollem’s hand hovered over his console.

If he turned back now his log would blow it all. And for what? No, he decided. They’ll wait, they’ll sniff around first. They want to take me too. They want to see how much squeeze they have. Pray they don’t find out.

He had to get some power somewhere and jump Ragnarok out. How, how? Like trying to hide Big Jup.

He noticed that he had punched the biomonitor into a sick yellow blob and hurled it across the cabin…. How much longer could he cool Coronis?

Right on cue, his company hotline Watted.

“Why aren’t you at Franchise Two, Gollem?”

It was marnmouth Quine himself. Gollem took a deep breath and repeated his course reversal plan, watching Quine’s little snout purse up.

“After this clear with me. Now hear this, Gollem,” Quine leaned back in his bioflex, pink and plump. Coronis was no hardship station. “I don’t know what you think you’re into with Franchise Three but I want it stopped. The miners are yelling and our Company won’t tolerate it.”

Gollem shook his shaggy head like a dazed bull. Franchise Three? Oh yeah, the heavy metal-mining outfit.

“They’re overloading their tractor beams for hot extraction,” he told Quine. “It’s in my report. If they keep it up they’ll have one bloody hashup. And they won’t be covered because their contract annex specifies the load limits.”

Quine’s jowls twitched ominously. “Gollem. Again I warn you. It is not your role to interpret the contract to the policyholder. If the miners choose to get their ore out faster by abrogating their contract that’s their decision. Your job is to report the violation, not to annoy them with technicalities. Right now they are very angry with you. And I trust you don’t imagine that our Company“—reverent pause—”appreciates your initiative?”

Gollem made an inarticulate noise in his throat. He should be used to this. Coronis wanted its piece quickly and it wanted to avoid paying compensation when the thing blew. The miners got paid by the shuttle load and most of them couldn’t tell a contract annex from a flush valve. By the time they found out they’d be dead.

“Another item.” Quine was watching him. “You may be getting some noise from Themis sector. They seemed to be all sweated up about a bit of rock.”

“You mean those Trojans?” Gollem was puzzled. “What’s there?”

“Have you been talking to Themis?”

“No.”

“Very well. You will not, repeat not, deviate from your patrol. You are on a very thin line with us, Gollem. If your log shows anything whatever in connection with Themis you’re out of the Company and there will be a lien against you for your overdrawn pension. And there will be no transport rights. Do I make myself clear?”

Gollem cut channel. When he could control his hands he punched Weather for the updated rogue orbits. Both rocks were now computed to node in sector Themis, but well clear of Themis main. He frowned. Who was hurting? His ephemeris showed only the new medbase in the general volume, listed as Nonaffiliated, no details. It seemed to be clear, too. If that polluted Hara…

Gollem grunted. He understood now. Quine was hoping for some hassle in Themis which might persuade Ceres Control to reassign part of that sector to him. And the medbase wasn’t Company, it was expendable for publicity purposes. Truly fine, he thought. Much gees for Quine if it works.

He was coming into West Hem Chemicals. Before he could signal, his audio cut loose with curses from the cyborg chief. Gollem swerved to minimize his intrusion on their body lines and the chief cooled down enough to let him report that he had killed their bogy.

“It was an old field-sounder,” Gollem lied. Had they identified Ragnarok?

“Slope out. Go.” The old cyborg op couldn’t care less. He had electrode jacks all over his skull and his knuckles sprouted wires. Much as Gollem loved metal, this was too much. He backed out as gingerly as he could. The men—or maybe the creatures—in there were wired into the controls of robot refining plants on all the nearby rocks, and he was hashing across their neural circuit. Wouldn’t be surprising if they fired on him one day.

His next stop was the new aggregation franchise in Eleven. It was a slow-orbit complex on the rim of the Kirkwood Gap, a touchy location to work. If they started losing rocks they could spread chaos in the zone.

Aggregation meant power units, lots of them. Gollem began figuring Ragnarok’s parameters. His stomach also began to gripe him; the outfit that had leased Eleven had big plans for a self-sustaining colony on a slim budget. They needed those units to bring in gas-rich rocks.

When he got inside Gollem saw they had other problems too.

“We’ve computed for two-sigma contingency,” the Eleven chief repeated tiredly. They were standing beside a display tank showing the projected paths of the rocks they intended to blast.

“Not enough,” Gollem told him. “Your convergence-point is smeared the hell all over. You lose a big one and it’ll plow right into Ten.”

“But Franchise Ten isn’t occupied,” the chief protested.

“Makes no difference. Why do you think you got this franchise cheap? The Company’s delighted to have you aggregating this lode, they’re just waiting for you to lose one rock so they can cancel and resell your franchise. I can’t certify your operation unless you recompute.”

“But that means buying computer input from Ceres Main!” he yelped. “We can’t afford it.”

“You should have looked ,at the instability factors before you signed,” Gollem said woodenly. He was wishing the chief didn’t have all his hair; it would be easier to do this to a skinhead.

“At least let me bring in the rocks we have armed,” the chief was pleading.

“How many one-gee units have you got out there?” Gollem pointed.

“Twenty-one.”

“I’ll take six of them and certify you. That’s cheaper than recomputing.”

The chief’s jaw sagged, clenched in a snarl.

“You polluted bastard!”

Suddenly there was a squeal behind them and the commo op tore off her earphones. The chief reached over and flicked on the speaker, filling the bubble with an allband blare. For a minute Gollem thought it was a flarefront, and then he caught the human scream.

“MAYDAY! MA-A-Y-DAY-AAY! GO-OLLEE—”

Oh no! Oh Jesus, no. He slammed down the speaker, the sweat starting out all over him.

“What in space—” the chief began.

“Old beacon in the Gap.” Gollem bunted through them. “I have to go kill it.”

He piled into his boat and threw in the booster. No time for power units now. That yell meant Topanga was in real trouble, she wasn’t calling dead men.

If he tied in the spare booster he could override the field-forms for a straighter course. Strictly verboten. He did so and then opened his commo channels. Topanga wasn’t there.

Fire? Collision? More like, Leo and friends had made their move.

He hurtled downstream in a warp of wasted power, his hands mechanically tuning the board in hopes of pulling in some phagers’ signals, something. He picked up only far-off mining chatter and a couple of depot ops asking each other what the Mayday was. Someone in Sector Themis was monotonously calling Inspector Hara. As usual Hara wasn’t answering, there was only the automatic standby from Themis main. Gollem cursed them all impartially, trying to make his brain yield a plan.

Why would the phagers move in on Ragnarok so fast? Not their style, confrontation. If he blew they’d lose the ship, they’d have to cope with a new inspector. Why risk it when they had him by the handle already?

Maybe they figured it was no risk. Gollem’s fist pounded on the tuner in a heavy rhythm. Paint it black…. But they have to keep her alive till I get there. They want me.

What to do? Would they believe a threat to call Ceres Control? Don’t bother to answer. They know as well as I do that a Company bust would end with Topanga in a gerry ward, Ragnarok in Quine’s trophy park and Gollem in a skull-cage…. How to break Topanga loose from them? If I try to jive along the first thing they’ll do will be to shoot us both up on phage. Addicition dose. Why, why did I leave her there alone?

He was going around this misery orbit for the nth time when he noticed the Themis voice had boosted gain and was now trying to reach Coronis, his home base. Correction, Quine’s home base. No answer.

Against his stomach’s advice he tuned it up. “Medbase Themis to Coronis main, emergency. Please answer, Coronis. Medbase Themis calling Coronis, emergency, please—”

The woman was clearly no commo op. Finally Quine’s girl chirped: “Medbase Themis, you are disturbing our traffic. Please damp your signal.”

“Coronis, this is an emergency. We need help—we’re going to get hit!”

“Medbase Themis, contact your sector safety patrol officer, we have no put-of-sector authorization. You are disturbing our traffic.”

“Our base won’t answer! We have to have help, we have casualties—”

A male voice cut in. “Coronis, put me through to your chief at once. This is a medical priority.”

“Medbase Themis, Sector Chief Quine is outstation at present. We are in freight shuttle assembly for the trans-Mars window, please stand by until after launch.”

“But—”

“Coronis out.”

Gollem grimaced, trying to picture Quine going outstation.

He went back to pounding on his brain. The Themis woman went on calling. “We are in an impact path, we need power to move. If anyone can help us please come in. Medbase Themis—”

He cut her off. One Ragnarok was enough and his was just ahead now.

There was a faint chance they weren’t expecting him so soon. He powered down and drifted. As his screens cleared he saw a light move in the bubbles behind the freightlock.

His one possible break, if they hadn’t yet moved that phage inboard.

He grabbed the wrecking laser controls and kicked the patrolboat straight at Ragnarok’s main lock. The laser beam fanned over the bubbles, two good slices before he had to brake. The crash sent him into his boards. The docking probes meshed and he sprang headfirst into Ragnarok’s lock. As it started to cycle he burned the override, setting off alarms all over the ship. Then he was through and caroming up the shaft. Among the hoots he could hear more clanging. Phagers were piling out through the freightlock to save their bubbles. If he could get to the bridge first he could lock them out.

He twisted, kicked piping and shot into the bridge, his arm aimed at the emergency hatch-lock lever. It hadn’t been used for decades—he nearly broke his wrist, yanking the lever against his own inertia and was rewarded by the sweet grind of lock toggles far below.

Then he turned to the command couch where Topanga should be and saw he was too late.

She was there all right, both hands to her neck and her eyes rolling. Behind her a lank hairless figure was holding a relaxed pose, in his fist a wirenoose leading around Topanga’s throat.

“Truly fine, ’Spector.” The phager grinned.

For a second Gollem wondered if Leo hadn’t noticed the hand-laser Gollem pointed. Then he saw that the phagehead was holding a welder against Topanga’s side. Its safety sleeve was off.

“Deal, Gollyboy. Deal the fire down.”

No way. After a minute Gollem sent his weapon drifting by Leo’s arm. Leo didn’t take the bait.

“Open up.” The phager jerked his chin at the hatch lever and Topanga gave a bubbling whine.

When Gollem opened the hatch the game would be over all the way. He hung frozen, his coiled body sensing for solidity behind him, measuring the spring.

The phager jerked the wire. Topanga’s arms flailed. One horrible eye rolled at Gollem. A spark in there, trying to say no.

“You’re lolling her. Then I tear your head off and throw you out the waster.”

The phager giggled. “Why you flash on killin’?” Suddenly he twisted Topanga upside down, feet trailing out toward Gollem. She kicked feebly. Weird, her bare feet were like a girl’s.

“Open up.”

When Gollem didn’t move the phager’s arm came out in a graceful swing, his fingers flaring. The welding arc sliced, retraced, sliced again as Topanga convulsed. One girlish foot floated free, trailing droplets. Gollem saw a white stick pointing at him out of the blackened stump. Topanga was quiet now.

“Way to go.” The phager grinned. “Truly tough old bird. Open up.”

“Turn her loose. Turn her loose. I’ll open.”

“Open now.” The welder moved again.

Suddenly Topanga made a weak twist, scrabbling at Leo’s groin. The phager’s head dipped.

Gollem drove inside his arm, twisted it against momentum. The welder rocketed out around the cabin while he and the phager thrashed around each other, blinded by Topanga’s robe. The phager had a knife now but he couldn’t get braced. Gollem felt legs lock his waist and took advantage of it to push Topanga away. When the scene cleared he clamped the phager to him and began savagely to collect on his investment in muscle-building.

Just as he was groping for the wire to tie up the body something walloped him back of the ear and the lights went out.

He came to with Topanga yelling, “Val, Val! I’ve got em!”

She was hanging on the console in her hair using both hands to point an ancient Thunderbolt straight at him. The muzzle yawned smoke a foot from his beard.

“Topanga, it’s me—Golly. Wake up, spacer, let me tie him up.”

“Val?” A girl laughing, screaming. “I’m going to finish the murdering mothers, Val!”

Valentine Orlov, her husband, had been in the snows of Ganymede for thirty years.

“Val is busy, Topanga,” Gollem said gently. He was hearing hull noises he didn’t like. “Val sent me to help you. Put the jolter down spacegirl. Help me tie up this creep. They’re trying to steal my boat.”

He hadn’t had time to lock it, he remembered now.

Topanga stared at him.

“And why do I often meet your visage here?” she croaked. “Your eyes like unwashed platters—”

Then she fainted and he flung himself downshaft to the lock.

His patrolboat was swinging away. Tethered to it was the phage-runners’ pod.

He was stranded on Ragnarok.

Rage exploded him back to the bridge consoles. He managed to send one weak spit from Ragnarok’s lasers after them as they picked up gees. Futile. Then he pulled the phager’s head over his knee and clouted it and turned to setting up Topanga with an i.v. in her old cobweb veins. How in hell had-those claws held a jolter? He wrapped a gel sheath over her burns, grinding his jaw to still the uproar in his stomach. He completed his cleaning by towing the phager and the foot to the waste lock.

With one hand on the cycle button he checked frowning. He could use some information from Leo—what were they into in his patrol sector?

Then his head came together and his fist crunched the eject. His patrol sector?

If the Companies ever got their hands on him he’d spend the rest of his life with his brains wired up, paying for that patrolboat. If he were lucky. No way, no where to go. The Companies owned space. Truly he was two thousand light-years from home now—on a dead driveship.

Dead?

Gollem threw back his lank hair and grinned. Ragnarok had a rich ecosystem, he’d seen to that. Nobody but the phagers knew she was here and he could hold them out for a while. Long enough, maybe, to see if he could coax some power out of that monster-house without waking up the sector. Suddenly he laughed out loud. Rusty shutter sliding in his mind, letting in glory.

“Man, man!” he muttered and stuck his head into the regeneration chamber to check the long trays of culture stretching away under the lights.

It took him a minute to understand what was wrong.

No wonder the phagers came back so fast, no wonder he was laughing like a dummy. They’d seeded the whole works with phage culture. A factory. The first trays were near sporing, the air was ropy. He hauled them out, inhaled a clean lungful and jettisoned the ripe trays.

Then he crawled back in to search. On every staging the photosynthetic algae were starting to clump, coagulating to the lichen-like symbiote that was phage. Not one clean tray.

In hours Ragnarok would have no more air.

But he and Topanga wouldn’t care. They’d be through the walls in phagefreak long before.

He was well and truly shafted now.

He flushed some oxy into the ventilators and kicked back to the bridge. Get some clean metabolite or die.

Who would give him air? Even if he could move Ragnarok, the company depots and franchises would be alerted. He might just as well signal Coronis and give himself up. Maybe Quine wouldn’t bother to reach him and Topanga in time. Maybe better so. Wards. Wires,

Topanga groaned. Gollem felt her temples. Hot as plasma, old ladies with a leg shortened shouldn’t play war. He rummaged out biogens, marveling at the vials, ampoules, tabs, hyposprays. Popping who knew what to keep alive. Contraband she and Val had picked up in the old free days, her hoard would stock a…

Wait a minute.

Medbase Themis.

He tuned up Ragnarok’s board. The Themis woman was still calling, low and hoarse. He cranked the antennae for the narrowest beam he could get.

“Medbase Themis, do you read?”

“Who are you? Who’s there?” She was startled out of her code book.

“This is a spacesweep mission. I have a casualty.”

“Where—” The male voice took over.

“This is Chief Medic Kranz, spacer. You can bring in your casualty but we have a rogue headed through our space with a gravel cloud. If we can’t get power to move the station in about thirty hours we’ll be holed out. Can you help us?”

“You can have what I’ve got. Check coordinates.” The woman choked up on the decimals. No use telling them he couldn’t do them any good. The gee-sum unit he had in Ragnarok wouldn’t nudge that base in time for Halley’s comet. And Ragnarok’s drive—if it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch. But their air could help him.

The drive> He bounced down the engineway, knowing the spring in his muscles was partly phage. Only partly. A thousand times he had come this way, a thousand times torn himself away from temptation. Gleefully now he began to check out the circuits he had traced, restored the long-pulled fuses. There was a sealed hypergolic reserve for ignition. A stupefying conversion process, a plumber’s nightmare of heat-exchangers and back-cycling. Crazy, wasteful, dangerous. Enough circuitry to wire the Belt. Unbelievable it had carried man to Saturn, more unbelievable it would work today.

He clanked the rod controls. No telling what had crystallized. The converter fuel chutes jarred out thirty years’ accumulated dust. The ignition reserve was probably only designed for one emergency firing. Would he be able to ignite again to brake? Learn as you go. One thing sure, when that venerable metal volcano burst to life every board from here to Coronis would be lit.

When he got back to the bridge Topanga was whispering.

“We left the haven hanging in the night— O thou steel cognizance whose leap commits—”

“Pray it leaps,” he told her and began setting course, double-checking everything because of the phagemice running in the shadows. He wrapped Topanga’s webs.

He started the ignition train.

The subsonic rumble that grew through Ragnarok filled him with terror and delight. He threw himself into the webs, wishing he had said something, counted down maybe. Blastoff. Go. The rumble bloomed into an oremill roar. Gees smashed down on him. Everything in the cabin started raining on the deck. The web gave sideways and the roar wound up in a scream that parted his brain and then dwindled into silence.

When he struggled back to the board he found the burn had cut right. Ragnarok was barreling toward Themis. He saw Topanga’s eyes open.

“Where are we headed?” She sounded sane as soap.

“I’m taking you over to the next sector, Themis. We need metabolite, oxygen. The phagers ruined your regenerators.

“Themis?”

“There’s a medbase there. They’ll give us some.”

Mistake.

“Oh, no—no!” She struggled up. “No, Golly! I won’t go to a hospital—don’t let them take me!”

“You’re not going to a hospital, Topanga. You’re going to stay right here in the ship while I go in for the cores. They’ll never know about you. We’ll be out of there in minutes.”

No use.

“God hate you, Gollem.” She made an effort to spit. “You’re trying to trap me. I know you! Never let me free. You won’t bury me here, Gollem. Rot in Moondome with your ugly cub—I’m going to Val!”

“Cool, spacer, you’re yawing.” He got some tranks into her finally and went back to learning Ragnarok. The phage was getting strong now. When he looked up the holographs were watching him drive their ship. The old star heroes. Val Orlov, Fitz, Hannes, Mura, all the great ones. Sometimes only a grin behind a gold-washed headplate, a name on a suit beside some mad hunk of machine. Behind them, spacelost wildernesses lit by unknown moons. All alive, all so young. There was Topanga with her arm around that other spacegirl, the dark Russian one who was still orbiting lo. They grinned past him, bright and living.

When they start talking, we’ve had it….

He set the gyros to crank Ragnarok into what he hoped was attitude for the retro burn. If he could trust the dials, there was enough ignition for braking and for one last burn to get out of there. But where would he go from Medbase? Into the sky with diamonds…

He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was.

Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadows?…

When he began hearing the Stones he went down and threw out half the trays. The three remaining oxy tanks struck him as hilarious. He cracked one.

The oxy sobered him enough to check the weather signal. The Medbase woman was still trying to raise Themis Main. He resisted the impulse to enlighten her about the Companies and concentrated on the updated orbits of the Trojan rogues. He saw now what had Medbase sweating. The lead rogue would miss them by megamiles but it was massive enough to have stirred up a lot of gravel. The small rogue behind was sweeping up a tail. The rock itself would go by far off—but that gravel cloud would rip their bubbles to shreds.

He had to get in there and out again fast.

He sniffed some more oxy and computed the rogue orbits on a worst-contingency basis. It looked O.K.—for him. His stomach flinched; even under phage it had an idea what it was going to be like when those medics found out they were wasted.

He saw Topanga grinning. The phage was doing her more good than the tranks.

“Not to worry, star girl. Golly won’t let ’em get you.”

“Air.” She was trying to point to life-support, which had long since gone red.

“I know, spacer. We’re getting air at Medbase.”

She gave him a strange un-Topanga smile. “Whatever you say, little Golly.” Whispering hoarsely, “I know— you’ve been beautiful—”

Her hand reached, burning. This he positively could not take. Too bad his music was gone.

“Give us verses as we go, star girl.”

But she was too weak.

“Read me—”

Her scanner was full of it.

“In oil-rinsed circles of blind ecstasy.” Hard to dig, until the strobing letters suddenly turned to music in his throat. “Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!” he chanted, convoyed by ghosts.

“—What marathons new-set among the stars!… The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches, already knows the closer clasp of Mars—”

…It was indeed fortunate, he discovered, that he had set the autopilot and stayed suited up.

His first clear impression of Medbase was a chimpanzee’s big brown eyes staring into his under a flashprobe. He jerked away, found himself peeled and tied on a table. The funny feeling was the luxury of simulated gravity. The chimpanzee turned out to be a squat little type in medwhites, who presently freed him.

“I told you he wasn’t a phager.” It was the woman’s voice.

Craning, Gollem saw she was no girl-girl and had a remarkable absence of chin. The chimpanzee eventually introduced himself as Chief Medic Kranz.

“What kind of ship is that?” the woman asked as he struggled into his suit.

“A derelict,” he told them. “Phagerunners were using it. My teammate’s stoned. All he needs is air.”

“The power units,” said Kranz. “I’ll help you bring them over.”

“No need for you to go in—I’ve got them ready to go. Just give me a couple of metabolite cores to take back to start the air cleaning.”

Unsuspicious, Kranz motioned the woman to show the way to their stores. Gollem saw that their base was one big cheap bubble behind a hardwalled control module. The molly hadn’t even seamed together under the film; a couple of pebbles would finish them. The ward had twenty-odd burn cases in cocoons. Themis didn’t bother much with burns.

An old spacerat minus a lot of his original equipment came wambling over to open up. Gollem loaded as much metabolite as he could carry and headed for the lock. At the port the woman grabbed his arm.

“You will help us?” Her eyes were deep green. Gollem concentrated on her chin.

“Be right back.” He cycled out.

Ragnarok was on a tether he didn’t recall securing. He scrambled over, found the end fouled in the lock toggles. If there had been tumble—bye-bye.

When he got inside he heard Topanga’s voice. He hustled up the shaft.

Once again he was too late.

While he’d been in the stores unsuspicious Chief Medic Kranz had suited up and beat him into Ragnarok.

“This is a very sick woman, spacer,” he informed Gollem.

“The legal owner of this derelict, doctor. I’m taking her to Coronis Base.”

“I’m taking her into my ward right now. We have the facilities. Get those power units.”

He could see Topanga’s eyes close.

“She doesn’t wish to be hospitalized.”

“She’s in no condition to decide that,” Kranz snapped.

The metabolite was on board. Doctor Chimpanzee Kranz appeared to have elected himself a driveship ride to nowhere. Gollem began drifting toward the ignition panel, beside Topanga’s web.

“I guess you’re right, sir. I’ll help you prepare her and we’ll take her in.”

But Kranz’s little hand had a little stungun in it.

“The power units, spacer.” He waved Gollem toward the shaft.

There weren’t any power units.

Gollem backed into the metabolite, watching for the stunner to waver. It didn’t. There was only one chance left, if you could call it a chance.

“Topanga, this good doctor is going to take you into his hospital,” he said loudly. “He wants you where he can take good care of you.”

One of Topanga’s eyelids wrinkled, sagged down again. An old, battered woman. No chance.

“Can you handle her, doctor?”

“Get that power now.” Kranz snapped the safety off.

Gollem nodded sourly and started downshaft as slowly as he could. Kranz came over to watch him, efficiently out of reach. What now? Gollem couldn’t reach the ignition circuits from here even if he knew how to short them.

Just as he turned around to look for something to fake a power cell it happened.

A whomp like an imploding mollybubble smacked into the shaft. Chief Medic Kranz sailed down in a slow cartwheel.

“Good girl!” Gollem yelled. “You got him!” He batted the stunner out of Kranz’ limp glove and kicked upward. When his head cleared the shaft he found he was looking into the snout of Topanga’s jolter.

“Get out of my ship,” she rasped. “You lying suitlouse. And take your four-eyed, needle-sucking friend with you!”

“Topanga, it’s me—it’s Golly—”

“I know who you are,” she said coldly. “You’ll never trap me.”

“Topanga!” he cried. A bolt went by his ear, rocking him.

“Out!” She was leaning down the shaft, squeezing on the jolter.

Gollem backed slowly down, collecting Kranz. The witch figure above him streamed biotape and bandages, the hair that once shone red standing up like white fire. She must be breathing pure phage, he thought.

Can’t last long. All I have to do is go slow.

“Out!” She screamed. Then he saw she had Kranz’s oxy tube clamped under one arm. This seemed to be his day for underestimating people.

“Topanga,” he began to plead and had to dodge another jolt-bolt. She couldn’t go on missing forever. He decided to haul Kranz out and cut back into the ship through the emergency port. He recalled seeing a welding torch in the medbase port rack.

He boosted Kranz along the tether and into the medbase lock. The woman was waiting on the other side. As the port opened he pushed Kranz at her and grabbed the welder. The chinless wonder learned fast—she flung herself on the welder and started to wrestle. There was solid woman-muscle under her whites, but he got a fist where her jaw should have been and threw himself back into the lock.

As it started to cycle he realized she had probably saved his life.

The outer lock had a viewport through which he could see Ragnarok’s vents. The starfield behind them was dissolving.

He let out an inarticulate groan and slammed the reverse cycle to Jet himself back into Medbase. As soon as it cracked he bolted through, carrying the medics to the deck. The port behind him lit up like a solar flare.

They all stared at the silent torrent of flame pouring out of Ragnarok. Then she was moving, faster, faster yet. The jetstream swung and the port went black.

“It’s burning! Get the foam!”

Kranz grabbed a sealant cannister and they raced to the edge of the hardwall area, where Ragnarok’s exhaust had seared the bubble. When the burns were sealed the ship was a dwindling firetail among the stars.

“Topanga doesn’t like hospitals,” Gollem told them.

“The power units!” Kranz said urgently. “Call her back!”

They were pushing Gollem toward the commo board.

“No way. She just blew the last ignition charge. Where she’s headed now she goes.”

“What do you mean? To Coronis?”

“Never.” He rubbed his shaggy head. “I—I don’t recall exactly. Mars, maybe the sun.”

“With the power units that would have saved these people.” Kranz’s face had the expression he probably used on gangrene. “Thanks to you. I suggest that you remove yourself from my sight for the remainder of our joint existence.”

“There never were any power units,” Gollem said, starting to go out. “The phagers got my boat and you saw for yourself what that drive was like. Her acceleration would have broken you apart.”

The woman followed him out.

“Who was she, spacer?”

“Topanga Orlov,” Gollem said painfully. “Val Orlov’s wife. They were the first Saturn mission. That was their ship, Ragnarok. She was holed up in my sector.”

“You just wanted air.”

Gollem nodded.

They were by the base display tank. The computer was running a real-time display of the uncoming Trojans. The green blip was Medbase and the red blip with the smear was the smaller Trojan and attendant gravel tail. He studied the vectors. No doubt

It was now dark-period. Sleep time coming up. The people here might eat breakfast, but for true they wouldn’t eat lunch. By noon or thereabouts Medbase ould be organic enrichment on a swarm of space ice.

So would ex-Inspector Gollem.

The two medics went out on the wards and Kranz unbent enough to accept Gollem’s offer to man the commo board. The spacer wobbled in to watch him. The sight of Ragnarok’s blast-out had lit his fires.

Gollem taped a routine red-call and began to hunt across the bands. The old man mumbled about ships. Nobody was answering, nobody would. Once Gollem thought he heard an echo from Topanga, but it was nothing. Her oxy must be long gone by now, he thought. A mad old phage-ghost on her last trip. Where had he computed her to? He seemed to recall something about Mars. At least they wouldn’t end in some trophy-hunter’s plastic park.

“You know what they got in them cocoons? Squatters!” The old man squinted out of his good side to see how Gollem took this. “Skinheads. Freaks ’n’ crotties. Phagers, even. Medics, they don’t care.” He sighed, scratched his burned skin with his stump.“Grounders. They won’t last out here.”

“Too right,” Gollem agreed. “Like maybe tomorrow.” That tickled the old man.

Toward midnight Kranz took over. The woman brought in some hot redeye. Gollem started to refuse and then realized his stomach wasn’t hurting any more. Nothing to worry about now. He sipped the stimulant. The woman was looking at a scanner.

“She was beautiful,” she murmured.

“Knock it off, Anna,” Kranz snapped.

She went on scanning and suddenly caught her breath.

“Your name. It’s Gollem, isn’t it?”

Gollem nodded and got up to go look at the tank.

Presently the woman Anna came out after him and looked at the tank, too. The old spacer was asleep in the corner.

“Topanga was married to a George Gollem once,” Anna said quietly. “They had a son. On Luna.”

Gollem took the scanner cartridge out of her hand and nipped it into the wastechute. She said nothing more. They both watched the tank for a while. Gollem noticed that her eyes were almost good enough to make up for her chin. She didn’t look at him. The tank didn’t change.

Around four she went in and took over from Kranz and the men settled down to wait.

“Medbase Themis calling, please come in. Medbase Themis calling anyone,” the woman whispered monotonously.

Kranz went out. It seemed a lot of work to breathe.

Suddenly Kranz snapped his fingers from the next room. Gollem went to him.

“Look.”

They hung over the tank. The red smear was closer to the green blip. Between them was a yellow spark.

“What is that?”

Gollem shrugged. “A rock.”

“Impossible, we scan-swept that area a dozen times.”

“No mass,” Gollem frowned. “It’s a tank ghost.”

Kranz began systematically flushing the computer input checks. The woman left the board and came to lean over the tank. Gollem watched absently, his brain picking at phage-warped memories. Something about the computer.

On impulse he went to the commo board and ran the receiver through its limits. All he got was a blast of squeals and whistles, the stress-front of the incoming rocks.

“What is it?” Anna’s eyes were phosphorescent.

“Nothing.”

Kranz finished his checks. The yellow ghost stayed in, sidling toward the red smear. If that were a rock, and it had about a hundred times more mass than it could have, it just might deflect the Trojan’s gravel swarm. But it didn’t.

Gollem played monotonously with the board. The old spacer snored. The minutes congealed. Kranz shook himself, took Anna out to tour the wards. When they came back they stopped at the tank.

The whatever-it-was stayed in, closing on the Trojan.

Sometime in the unreal dimlight hours Gollem caught it, wavering on a gale of space noise:

“I have contact! Val! I’m coming—”

They crowded around him as he coaxed the tuners but there was nothing there. Presently a ripple of relays tripped off in the next room and they all ran to the tank. It was dead; the computer had protected itself against an induction overload.

They never knew exactly what happened.

“It’s possible,” Gollem admitted to them. It was long after noon when they decided to eat.

“While we were on the way here I know I computed that Trojan all the way to Medbase, before that I got really bombed. Maybe I threw a bridge into the course computer, maybe it was already in. Say she took off with no course setting. Those old mechs are set to hunt. It’s possible it inverted and boosted straight back out that trajectory to the rock.”

“But your ship had no mass,” Kranz objected.

“That thing was a space-scoop feeding a monster drive. The pile dampers were cheese. Ragnarok could have scooped herself solid right through the gravel cloud and blown as she hit the Trojan. You could get a pocket sun.”

They went over it again at dark-period. And again later while he and Anna looked at nothing in particular out the ports. A long time after that he showed her a script he’d fixed for the wall of Medbase Free Enclave: Launched in abyssal cupolas of space Toward endless terminas, Easters of speeding light—— Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace On clarion cylinders pass out of sight.

• • •

Nobody seems to have noticed that Hart Crane really was the first space poet; he envisioned space-flight with only the first planes of the 1920’s as evidence. The quotes here are from the full text of THE BRIDGE, of which only snippets appear in most anthologies. Crane suicided in 1932. Poets extrapolate.

—The Author

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