Title: The Snowbank Orbit
Author: Leiber, Fritz
Language: English
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                          THE SNOWBANK ORBIT

                            BY FRITZ LEIBER

                   Earth could not stop the Enemy's
                    remorseless advance from outer
                    space. Neither could the Enemy!

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
             Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans,
but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and
Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear
blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your
Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague,
spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling
around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on
the black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of the
Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman....

Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and
the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going
to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve
breaking around Uranus--and so what! He shivered to get a little heat
and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through
_Prospero's_ bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary
diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed--a glint almost lost in
pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through
the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing
the star on a mirage trajectory--and at least its depth agreed with
the time since rim contact.

At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen
soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for
the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.

Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The
captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and
Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary
entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the
captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination
when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in
the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the
worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing
on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better
than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six
minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,
stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic--strange how
he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and
blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining
them on.

The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge
spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a
water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked
bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna
seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,
where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a
second--a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly
green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.

Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they
whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small
as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward
course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able
to slow _Prospero_ and her sister ships or turn them back at their 100
miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly
distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were
too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above
the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet
were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be
Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of
her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas--but it had always
been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus
Expedition.

Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the
curving star-bordered forward edge of _Prospero's_ huge mirror and the
thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages
below the spaceshield.

Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for
helium to crawl, if you had some helium. _Prospero's_ insulation,
originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in
reverse.

Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of
Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.

Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser
with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag
out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.

Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.

The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue--one
each for _Caliban_, _Snug_, _Moth_, and _Starveling_, following
_Prospero_ in line astern on slave automatic--though for months inertia
had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,
but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.

The gages still showed their last maximums. Skin 793 Kelvin, Cabin
144 Fahrenheit, Gravs 3.2. All of them hit almost a year ago, when
they'd been ace-ing past the sun. Grunfeld's gaze edged back to the
five bulbous pressure suits, once more rigidly upright in their braced
racks, that they'd been wearing during that stretch of acceleration
inside the orbit of Mercury. He started. For a moment he'd thought
he saw the dark-circled eyes of the captain peering between two of
the bulging black suits. Nerves! The captain had to be in his cabin,
readying alternate piloting programs for Copperhead.

Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield--so
violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite
direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing
near the margin of the planet--bright green, viridian, far vivider than
that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly
studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much
nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The
next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind
retreated to the circumstances that had brought _Prospero_ (then only
_Mercury One_) out here.


                                  II

When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's
nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of
Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard,
spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England
and the other mega-powers.

During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black
cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them
to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening
degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon
was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an
effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also
used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use
radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in
strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their
gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness
of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended
to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this
effective invisibility, based on light-control, which allowed them to
penetrate the Solar System as deep as Earth's orbit undetected, rather
than any power of travel in time or sub-space, as was first assumed.
Earthmen could only guess at the physical appearance of the Enemy,
since no prisoners were taken on either side.

Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was
oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big
gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as
if having some way of fueling from them.

Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying
Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though
sharing its tide-lockedness--a circumstance that led to a sortie by
Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.

At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in
part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated.
No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged--except
for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed
anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to "burn," meaning that it
suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling
rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the "stupidity"
of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their
allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths
began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.

Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran
spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great
caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as
if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going
ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore
line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite
rocketyards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space--with one
exception.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space
Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up
satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation
of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton
five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar
drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight
inside Earth's orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times
the length of the ship's hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen
which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship
likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms
and carried as ship's launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable
as a fusion-headed torpedo.

After Far Side, this "tin can" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury
and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because
that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently
on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two
nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the
relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.

However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the
fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The
five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's
high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most
material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal
hydrogen storage tanks--like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture
and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course
that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a
hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.

In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the
crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more
heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet--a battle that proved to be
only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.

Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite
useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together
the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became
months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At
least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.

Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball
of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the
fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet
was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the
interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....

       *       *       *       *       *

Unless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by
ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking
on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a
year ago--a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane
and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery
new-fallen snow.

Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction
mass, _Prospero_ could have shed her present velocity in five hours,
decelerating at a comfortable one G.

But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'
frigid soupy atmosphere--and that might be dipping very close to
the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral
core--_Prospero_ would have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.

Two minutes--at 150 Gs.

Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.

But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way
to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to
one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90
seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.

The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.
He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale
planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.


                                  III

In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket
around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker
turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.

"Captain won't like that," plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from
where he floated in womb position across the cabin. "Enemy can feel
a candle of _our_ light, captain says, ten million miles away." He
rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a
polly-wog's.

"And Jackson hears the Enemy think ... and Heimdall hears the grass
grow," Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. "Isn't an Enemy for
a billion miles, Ness." He launched aft from the hammock. "We haven't
spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them."

"There's the far side of Uranus," Ness pointed out. "That's less than
ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there."

"Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity,"
Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding
momentum. "That's likely, isn't it, when they didn't have time for us
back in the Belt?" He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk
than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full
moon pouring from it--too much light to look at comfortably. He began
to button the inner cover over the port.

"Don't do that," Ness objected without conviction. "There's not much
heat in it but there's some." He hugged his elbows and shivered. "I
don't remember being warm since Mars orbit."

"The sun gets on my nerves," Croker said. "It's like looking at an
arc light through a pinhole. It's like a high, high jail light in a
cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire." He
continued to button out the sun.

"You ever in jail?" Ness asked. Croker grinned.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little
light at the head of Jackson's hammock, flicking his hands from the
wrists like flippers. "I got one thing against the sun," he said
quietly. "It's blanketing out the radio. I'd like us to get one more
message from Earth. We haven't tried rigging our mirror to catch radio
waves. I'd like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter."

"If we won it," Croker said.

"Our telescopes show no more green around Jove," Ness reminded him. "We
counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers 'burning.' Captain verified the
count."

"Repeat: if we won it." Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the
hammock. "If there was a real victory message they'd push it through,
even if the sun's in the way and it takes three hours to catch us.
People who win, shout."

Ness shrugged as he paddled. "One way or the other, we should be
getting the news soon from Titania station," he said. "They'll have
heard."

"If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station," Croker
amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the
hammock. "Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived.
At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the
War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if
they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania--or Ariel or Oberon
or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station that could
raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing _Prospero_ hasn't heard
anything ... and we're getting close."

"I won't argue," Ness said. "Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be
hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report."

"And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per
man as the station fades." Croker frowned and added, "If Captain had
cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this
express train at Uranus."

"Tell me how," Ness asked drily.

"How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with
the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it
between the ship and the launch."

"I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,"
Ness said, referring to _Prospero's_ piloting robot. "Fully fueled, one
of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per
second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken 30 from 100. The
launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a
second."

"You didn't hear all my idea," Croker said. "You put piggyback tanks
on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four
launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking _and_ a maneuvering reserve.
You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close
circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for
Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver
four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed
it."

"Cute," Ness conceded. "Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same
we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of
the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus--Copperhead
really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit--that we may need a
sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup
at our 100 mps--"

Croker shrugged. "We still could have dropped a couple of us," he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet," Ness said. "You're
beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld--or the captain
himself."

"But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do
the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to
Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out
after us. _If_ we've won the War."

"But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And
we've lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself," Ness asserted
owlishly. "Captain's got to look after the whole fleet."

"Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age
in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the
Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest
star--except we aren't headed for her--at our 100 mps? Eight thousand
years!"

"That's a lot of time to kill," Ness said. "Let's play chess."

Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face
above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids.
Croker said, "Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?"

"I suppose," Ness said. "When he talks about them it's as if he was
their interpreter. How about the chess?"

"Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three."

"Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor."

"Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D," Croker objected.

"That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really
visualized in my head than the game's over."

"I don't want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours
away."

Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. "They...." he
breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. "They...."

"I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy's mind?" Ness said.

"He thinks he speaks for them," Croker replied and the next instant
felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw
dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a
tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always
know when Jackson's going to talk?

"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus," Jackson
breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little
louder, though his eyes stayed shut. "They're welcoming us, they're
our brothers." The smile died. "But they know they got to kill us, they
know we got to die."

The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and
he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch
leading forward.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw
the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was
circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought
he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a
jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his
shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.

"Ambush," he said. "At least two cruisers."

He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he
could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself
if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.

The blue telltales for _Caliban_ and _Starveling_ began to blink.

"They've seen it too," the captain said. He snatched up the mike and
his next words rang through the _Prospero_.

"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.
Grunfeld, raise the fleet."

Aft, Croker muttered, "Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and
firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets."

Ness said, "Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history
has to end some time."


                                  IV

Three quarters of a day later Grunfeld felt a spasm of futile fear and
revolt as the pressure suit closed like a thick-fleshed carnivorous
plant on his drugged and tired body. Relax, he told himself. Fine thing
if you cooked up a fuss when even Croker didn't. He thought of forty
things to re-check. Relax, he repeated--the work's over; all that
matters is in Copperhead's memory tanks now, or will be as soon as the
captain's suited up.

The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides--the best attitude,
except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the
ship herself didn't start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor
hadn't closed in on his face--translucent hand-thick petals as yet
unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips
monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles
of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the
high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.

He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of
Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through
the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson--just
the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,
pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the
captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side
as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and
the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.

Beyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it
still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with
the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled
richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed
curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought,
or they'd already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like
water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still
half out of his suit.

There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill
up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port
covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of
their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.
Its robot pilots were set to follow _Prospero_ and imitate, nothing
else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....

Grunfeld wet his lips. "Captain," he said hesitantly. "Captain?"

"Thank you, Grunfeld." He caught the edge of the skull's answering
grin. "We _are_ beginning to hit hydrogen," the quiet voice went on.
"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K."

Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared
bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began
to talk dreamily from his suit.

"They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a
little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their
ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it
knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than
passengers...."

The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and
felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up,
carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from
solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.

The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter
stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green
segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front
of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of
green--_bright_ green as it narrowed to a thread--then for a few
seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and
semi-circles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted
interior cabin lights glowed on.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jackson droned: "They and their ships come from very far away, from the
edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the ... discontinuum,
where they don't have stars but something else and where gravity is
different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the
other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn't want
to...."

And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it--the first faint thrill,
less than a cobweb's tug, of _weight_.

The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld's suit had begun to revolve
slowly on a vertical axis.

For a moment he glimpsed Jackson's dark profile--all five suits were
revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in
them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn't pull forward at
high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.

The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld's forehead. And now he was sure he
felt weight--maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was _up_. It was as
if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.

A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.
He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized
it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the
atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let
them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the
great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the
other ships--the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.

The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on
his face like layers of pliable ice.

Jackson called faintly, "_Now_ I understand. Their ship--" His voice
was cut off.

Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as
the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy
air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an
extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.

But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now ... now on Mars ...
now back on Earth....

The weight was stifling now, crushing--a hill of invisible sand.
Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had
red fringe around it. It grew.

There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the
ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't.

The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out
thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a
larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery
wind on numb humps and ridges--the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld
decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and
in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.
Or did it?

He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward
again? If they'd actually come through--

There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after
frictional heating?

There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few
Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?

He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined
retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the
meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin
lights were broken.

The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his
body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top
of his opening suit.

Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the
spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex
upward, _that must_, he realized, _be the dark side of Uranus_.

Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and
pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.

The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a
curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.

A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps
of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must
have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence
of decel.

New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature
907 K, Gravs 87.

Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw
the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering
brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish
phosphorescing.

"The torps got to 'em," Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to
the right.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I did find out at the end," Jackson said quietly from the left, his
voice at last free of the trance-tone. "The Enemy ships weren't ships
at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've
always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was
inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues
through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the
same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call 'em?) space-whales.
Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate
hydrogen (that's the only way I know to say it) and spat light to
move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their
parasites."

"That's crazy," Grunfeld said. "All of it. A child's picture."

"Sure it is," Jackson agreed.

From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, "Quiet."

The radio came on thin and wailing with static: "Titania Station
calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are
dead--the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have
jeep fueled and set to go--"

Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and
last blue telltales still glowed for _Caliban_ and _Starveling_.
Breathe a prayer, he thought, for _Moth_ and _Snug_.

Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be
wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.

The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,
which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A
bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the
jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into
their eyes.

They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.

The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only
the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the
monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject
the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken
from their max.

He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of
Uranus.

But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as
dark as those of _Moth_ and _Snug_.

Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Snowbank Orbit" ***

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