All would have been well had the Mannschenn Drive not broken down in actuality; that makeshift wiring installed by Hodge had been rather too makeshift. Grimes was not in his quarters when it happened; he was in the control room with the Battle of Wittenhaven set up in the chart tank, trying to make it come out differently from the way that it had in historical fact.
He suddenly realized that Commodore van der Bergen's squadron, as represented by red sparks in the screen, was in full retreat instead of closing in for the kill. Testily he manipulated the controls but the knurled knobs seemed to have a will of their own, were turning the wrong way under his fingers.
The Manschenn Drive, he thought. "The governor. . . ."
Obviously it had ceased to function and equally obviously the temporal precession field was building up to a dangerous level. There should have been an automatic cut-off of power to the drive but the fail-safe device had just . . . failed. (It usually did; there were so many paradoxes involved that even a simple on-off switch would do the wrong thing.)
Grimes hoped that the remote controls were still operable. He fought his way to the command chair; it seemed to him that he was having to climb up a deck tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, that he was almost having to swim through an atmosphere congealed to the consistency of treacle. (Illusion it may have been but he was sweating profusely.) The command chair, with the essential ship-handling controls set in its wide arms, seemed to recede to a remote distance, to dwindle, as he straggled toward it. And then, with a bone-braising collision, he was falling over it.
He stabbed, almost blindly, with a stiffened index finger, hoping that he was hitting the right button. It was like spearing a fish at the bottom of a clear stream and trying to allow for refraction.
The thin, high Mannschenn whine deepened in pitch from the almost supersonic to the normally sonic, deepened further still to a low humming, ceased. With an almost audible snap, perspective and color resumed normality. Outside the viewports the stars were once again hard, multi-hued points of light in the interstellar blackness.
He wasted no time looking out at them. He hurried from the control room, took the elevator down to the engine compartments. (Now that he was alone in the ship the cage was always where he wanted it.) Blue smoke still lingered in the Mannschenn Drive room, in spite of the forced ventilation. There was a stink of burned insulation. The cause of the trouble was obvious enough. The protective coating of one of the wires installed by Hodge had chafed through and the wire itself had been melted by the arc between it and sharp-edged metal. The power supply to the governor had been cut. In theory this should have resulted in a loss of power to the complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes but Hodge had done his best to convey the impression of a rewiring job having been done by somebody without much of a clue as to what he was doing.
Grimes found a length of wire in the spares locker. He removed the two ends of burned cable, substituted the replacement. He went to the local control switchboard and—wondering if he were doing the right thing—switched on. He heard the low hum as the rotors began to spin, heard the noise rise in pitch. The green indicator light at which he was staring took on the appearance of a luminous fire opal, seemed to expand to the likeness of some great, blazing planet toward which he was plunging.
Then, suddenly, it was no more than a little, innocuous emerald light.
He turned to look briefly (very briefly), to stare too long at those tumbling, ever-precessing, always-on-the-verge-of-vanishing rotors is to court disaster. All seemed to be well.
He returned to the control room to check the ship's position by means of Carlotti bearings and then to make the necessary adjustment of trajectory.
He told himself, I could do with a drink.
He went down to his day cabin.
He noticed the smell at once; it was the same mustiness that he had sniffed in the . . . operating theatre back on Joognaan. He looked at his desk top. The solidograph of Maggie still stood there but the bottle in which the likeness of Susie had been suspended was now no more than a scattering of jagged shards. Fluid had dripped from the deck on to the carpet, staining it badly. Among the broken glass was a formless pink blob.
He felt a stab of regret.
So this, he thought, was the last of Susie. It was a great pity that she had not given him a conventional solidograph; such a portrait would have survived the breakage of its container. He sighed audibly—and it seemed to him that the wide mouth of the miniature Maggie, standing proudly in her transparent cube, was curved in a derisive smile.
He looked closely at the mess on the desk, being careful not to touch it. He did not know what the fluid in the bottle had been or what effect it would have on the skin of his fingers. He prodded the fleshy blob cautiously with a pen from the rack, turned it over. Yes, there was the hair where hair should have been, and that little streak of scarlet must have been the mouth and those two, tiny pink spots the nipples. . . . Perhaps if he put it into another container it would regain its shape. . . . But in what fluid? Distilled water? Alcohol?
He could imagine it—her?—suspended in a medium that would become murkier and murkier, with parts of her dropping off perhaps. . . .
It was a horrid thought.
He went through to his bathroom to collect a generous handful of tissues, returned to gingerly pick up the amorphous blob of . . . flesh? pseudo-flesh? and then carried it to the toilet bowl. Oddly, he felt no sentimental regrets as he flushed it away. It was too ugly, was no more than an obscene mess. The broken glass he disposed of down the inorganic waste chute.
When he was finished he noticed dark moisture on the carpet under the closed door of his grog locker. He investigated. The remaining bottles of the wine from Joognaan had shattered. He felt a surge of relief. Until this moment the frightening suspicion had lurked in the back of his mind that when the temporal precession field intensified the homunculus had somehow become really alive, had burst out of its glass prison from the inside. But it had been the painfully high pitch of the sound emanating from the Drive that had done the damage; Joognaanard glassware, all too obviously, was not as tough as that normally supplied to spaceships.