"You mean neutron stars?" Lisele said. "Black holes?"
Delarov's hand waved the question aside. "Those are just labels. Guesses about various stages of things nobody's ever seen, close up. Or come back to tell about, at least. But yes-that's roughly the class of phenomenon the doctor had in rnind."
"But supposing it's not the same in all directions?" Arlen said it. "How does that explain anything?"
Lisele knew the answer, but shut up to let the captain say, "Well, think back to the magnet your colleague mentioned. If you spin that around one of its short axes, the magnetic poles whizzing along at the ends of the rotation, at any outside point you're going to notice a big variation in magnetic attraction."
"Oh, sure," said Arlen . "That's how we get AC current."
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He frowned. "You mean, a neutron star could be long and skinny, spinning like this magnet Lisele mentioned?"
Delarov sighed. "I haven't the faintest idea. Read Hoyfarul, if you can penetrate his math; I can't."
Carefully, Lisele said, "Anisotropic doesn't have to be size or shape. Arlen, you want to read that book along with me, if the captain would lend it?"
Arlen nodded, and Delarov agreed. But as it happened, the anomaly never gave them time to do any such reading.
When the crunch hit, Hare was too close, going too fast, and pointing too near the anomaly. Delarov relieved Arlen Limmer at the Nav seat and ran the Drive's decel up past redline to absolute max. And still it wasn't working; the deadly thing out there, whatever it was, still pulled the ship closer and closer. The screens sputtered with ionization; if it weren't for the Drive field's shielding effect, Lisele knew, they d all be fried by now, from sheer radiation density.
She punched into Tinhead and plotted the ship's trajectory. No good; it ended inside the anomaly. We're all dead.
"I'm afraid you're right," said Katmai Delarov. "But what is there to do about it?"
Lisele hadn't realized she'd spoken aloud. She had, though-so now she had to back her words. Her mind searched wildly; a thought came. "What Tregare would. The power sling!"
It took some explaining: if you can't pull away, you dive at the damn thing, a little off to the side, accel all the way, and use its own grav to build enough Vee to sling you free and away. Many's the time Bran Tregare in his pirate days had used the move, not to escape a natural force but to evade UET pursuers. Once around a star or giant planet, he cut Drive and coasted, letting UET whistle for his spoor and head for all the wrong places. Or sometimes he cut Drive and did a dead sling. But even discounting the hell of radiation out there, in a gravity well as steep as this one, that option wouldn't work.
Interrupting a lot at first, then listening more carefully, finally Katmai Delarov nodded. "Yes, I see it. But child, I've never done any such thing. I don't know the parameters."
"I do." Calm and assured on the outside, she hoped, all ice inside but refusing to shiver, Lisele stood. "I've run
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Tregare's logs a lot, on computer sim. The figures are different; he never tackled this kind of gravs. But the equations are the same; it should work."
So Captain Delarov vacated the pilot-navigator seat, and let Liesel Selene Moray sit down. "I hope you're right."
The words sounded cold, but Delarov's hand brushing across the top of Lisele's head didn't feel that way.
Lisele cranked up, at the periphery of her main visual screen, all the figures she might need. For starters: distance, velocity, decel. Angle, of coarse, from center of the anomaly.
Now what? Oh, sure: third-derivative, the rate of change of accel or decel. And curvature of the ship's course, which was reciprocal to the radius from the anomaly's center, and then the rates of change analogous to Vee and accel. Third derivative on this, too? She shook her head. If she needed to know that, they might just as well all go out the airlock.
So she took her readings and called the Drive room. "Pope? Houk? Moray here. On captain's authority, get ready for Turnover. To swing ship and accelerate ahead. Acknowledge?"
"Are you crazy?" Both voices shouted from downship- and there was more, until Captain Delarov confirmed the order. Then, after time for a hasty attempt at battening down for Turnover, the Drive cut. For moments that seemed interminable, everyone sagged against seat harnesses in zero G. With the Drive field's protection gone and only the weak transverse nodes swinging ship as fast as she could manage it, Lisele tried not to think of the radiation they were taking. Then the Drive, sputtering momentarily before taking solid hold, pushed again.
And in the forward screen, closer to center than Lisele would have liked, glowed the malevolent thing that drew March Hare ever closer.
VI
Checking the numbers on that screen, Lisele didn't like them much. She had accel at redline max and it wasn't going
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to be enough. She punched estimates into Tinhead and got an answer that didn't stay constant. Well, of course: as the gravitational force varied, so did the need for acceleration. She couldn't follow those changes herself; she'd always be one jump behind. So she set up the requirements and punched for vector solutions.
Then she sat back and watched. The captain reached and nudged her. "Why aren't you doing anything? Are we getting enough velocity yet?"
"Velocity, by itself, isn't the point. I'm having Tinhead regulate the Drive, balancing V-squared-over-R against whatever the gravity well is doing. And-" She waved off further conversation, because there was a flaw in her setup: it wasn't heading March Hare at an angle that would pass the anomaly, at closest approach, by any chance of a safe distance.
"Oh, peace take the thing!" She only muttered it, but saw Katinai Delarov frown with anxiety. So as she made new adjustments to her program, Lisele explained. "I have to throw more side vector, tilt the ship at an angle to our course. And that means that for building Vee, we don't get the full effect of our Drive force."
"Yes, of course." Delarov nodded. "Only the normal accel value times the cosine of your tilt angle."
Well, just because the captain hadn't done sling turns, didn't mean she was ignorant! Lisele swung March Hare half a radian, cosine nearly point-eight-eight. And the tilt wasn't enough; Tinhead said so, in numbers Lisele couldn't refute.
A full radian, then, and after looking at the screen, she knew this was the angle she'd have to go with. Only fifty-four percent of Drive power pushing on-line, not enough to build the necessary Vee. And also giving, at that angle, a minimum of safety clearance when they passed the anomaly.
Not enough, either way. But Lisele had one more move left. She turned to Delarov. "We'll have to go to max accel. Full max, not safety redline. I know it's not safe. But if the Drive holds, we might get away from this peace-waster!"
Except for Darwin Pope and deWayne Houk, down in the Drive room, all unfrozen personnel were gathered in Control, seated peripherally to the positions occupied by the captain and Lisele. Eduin Brower sat at Comm as though, in this situation, he could perform any function there. Mei
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Lu-teng and Arlen Limmer had taken aux-position seats; sidelong vision showed Lisele that the two, white-knuckled, were holding hands. Not for romance, she figured, but merely to share human comfort.
As the grav-field varied, March Hare bucked and shuddered. On the screen, both forward view and numbers showed the ship edging slowly away from collision course, and building Vee toward the figure that might mean safety.
Lisele felt an ache in her hand. Looking, she found she had her fingers crossed so tightly that she was cutting off their circulation.
As the hellhole loomed, closer and greater, Lisele couldn't make herself believe. This had to be a nightmare; how could it be real? The screen, its inputs overloaded, now showed the anomaly only as a black wavering circle, haloed with the ravening jets of its emissions. Inside the ship, even protected by the shielding of its own Drive field, came occasional pale blue sparkings of ionization. Enough radiation to be lethal? Lisele shook her head. Right now she had enough to worry about, that one would have to wait its turn.
Periastron neared; in Control, ionization built to a blue crackling haze, so that Lisele could barely read the screen. She didn't need it, though, to feel Drive shudder and hesitate, before the blazing horror slid off her forward screen, moved across the side monitors, and then in the rear pickup began to shrink.
An hour later, everyone still sitting and watching, the screen image again showed the anomaly as they had first seen it: a flaming ball, throwing gouts of more flame. One could touch metal, now, without drawing sparks. But somehow, ever since Lisele had run the Drive up to full max, no one had said a word.
She'd cut the tilt angle gradually, as the need for side thrust lessened. Now the ship was heading straight away, no tilt necessary. It was time, then, for Lisele to recheck Tinhead s parameters and see when she could safely cut Drive activity below all-out max.
But just as the numbers began to arrange themselves on her screen, a great clang ran through the entire ship. And as Lisele shook her head, trying to regain her senses after that jolt, she realized that Hare was in free fall.
