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digits of inert material. Michel reeled the stuff in, looking for the
fasteners, his fingers probing and sliding through the familiar smooth gauze,
tracing out one nexus of quiescent force after another. At last a clasp
materialized within his grasp. This was the one, he thought, that should go
round his neck.
At Moonbase and on Miranda there had always been a squad of fitters ready to
help him put on Lancelot and take it off. Here he had no help. But by now he
had learned something, and had forgotten nothing, about how Lancelot ought to
be worn.
When he had found the five essential fasteners and clasped them snugly to his
arms and legs and neck, he undid the restraints of his chair and stood up. The
room was full of electrical noise, and smoke, the monotonous throbbing of
several alarms, the sound of a fire trying to get started. Michel moved at
once for the control room door. It was jammed, but Lancelot wrenched it open.
"Elly "
He called again, louder. Somewhere air was leaking out, a windy shine. In the
near absence of gravity, an inert human form came drifting down a cross
corridor, moving in the direction of the leak. Stal's booted feet dragged a
little as if in reluctance to face the great nothingness that made the air
itself scream so.
Not until Michel himself could get outside would he be able to tell just what
had happened to the ship, and see what other craft might be nearby. But even
before doing that, he had to see what had happened to to Elly.
He found her in her small cabin, where she had been too late in trying to get
herself strapped into a berth. There was blood in the air and on her clothing,
and Michel thought from the limpness of her drifting frame that other damage
must have been done as well. Probably some bones were broken. She was
unconscious. Michel tried to shut the cabin door tightly again to save some
air, but Lancelot had broken the latch in getting him in, and it would not
close properly. He could feel a steady continuing drop in pressure. Near
panic, Michel tore up handfuls of bedding and tried to stuff space at the edge
of the door with it. Then he gave that up.
"Elly? Don't, don't die, Elly. I'm going to put you in the lifeboat."
She wouldn't answer. Her face was strange and still how could he be sure she
wasn't dead already? Somehow, choking himself though not for any want of air,
stumbling, punching ferociously at any obstacle that threatened to impede
their progress, he got her out of the cabin as carefully as he could, and down
the corridor to where the lifeboat was berthed.
A minor booby-trap went off in his/Lancelot's face as soon as he started to
open the boat's entry hatch; no damage done. Within a minute he had Elly
inside, the hatch shut again behind them, air pressure building from the
emergency supply to somewhere around Earth or Alpine normal. Gravity she was
not going to need. Just as in the lifeboats of adventure stories, there was a
medirobot here, and with fumbling fingers Michel attached its tentacles to
Elly's arm and throat; it ought to be able to manage more connections for
itself, as needed.
Half a dozen people could have managed to fit, rather uncomfortably, inside
the lifeboat's passenger space. There was only a single berth. Before Michel
had quite finished fastening her into this, Elly regained consciousness.
"Michel?" Her voice was weak, but it sounded almost happy.
Relief made him feel weak himself. "Elly, hang on. Don't bother trying to
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talk. Human ships are going to be here soon. You're going to be all right."
"You look so& you're my boy." Her voice was empty space, tinged with a little
tenderness.
Then it suddenly developed purpose. "Ought to tell you. Your father. Is Frank
Marcus."
At the moment, the words seemed to convey no meaning. "Don't worry now," was
all that
Michel said, a couple of seconds later. "I'm going to launch us now. This boat
should bring us out near our own ships. They should be searching "
Just outside the boat, metal was yielding to a slow, grinding pressure. It
made a scraping on the boat's small hull. Something was deforming the launch
cradle underneath it, methodically, too methodically by far to be accidental.
Michel shot an arm toward the launch button, held it poised in air for four
seconds of agonized, half-instinctive thought, then twisted the timer for a
half-minute's delay, and hit the
button.
Out of here, he thought next, commanding Lancelot. But let no air escape.
There was a confused glimpse of the exit hatch hurtling toward his face, and
then
He was outside the boat, in the corridor of the dying goodlife ship. Behind
him the lifeboat's hatch was still closed, or closed again. Around
him/Lancelot the noises of tortured machinery rose and fell, and smoke stained
the flying, failing air.
Beneath the lifeboat, a surviving robot crouched, exerting all its strength on
the launch rails.
Lancelot flowed in movement. Some object that had been hard and strong
convulsed in
Lancelot's double grip, melting and crumpling at the same time, before it was
flung aside.
Then Michel/Lancelot bent to the rails, straightening them, restoring
function. The launching, when it came, surprised Michel with a great flash of
light. But it left him still safe, spinning in free space a hundred meters or
so from the ship. He looked at once for the lifeboat, but it was nowhere to be
sensed. There was only its vanishing zigzag track, which only Lancelot's
inhuman senses could detect, a marked trail into layers of spacetime that
until now Michel had been unable to perceive, running at right angles to
ordinary distance. His momentary will to follow that trail was rebuffed. If
c-plus travel would be possible for Lancelot at all, it would take time to
learn.
Instead, Michel darted around the heavily damaged ship at a distance of a
kilometer or so, reconnoitering nearby space. That the lifeboat had gone
without him did not alarm him greatly; he was still expecting human ships to
appear on the scene at any moment, and even if their arrival took considerable
time he felt confident about his own survival as long as he was garbed in
Lancelot.
Meanwhile, though, the more he looked about, the more he was convinced that
this was not the same stellar neighborhood in which the ruined berserker-base
lay and where the human ambush had been sprung. The relatively nearby stars
were simply not the same. Yes, his memory assured him that several c-plus
jumps had taken place during the fighting; but he had been assuming that under
combat conditions none of those jumps could have been very long&
For the first time, now, it occurred to Michel as a serious possibility that
the human forces were not going to be able to follow and find him here. The
Co-ordinator's last desperate attempt at evading them might have succeeded.
There remained the possibility, also, that berserker reinforcement might
arrive instead of, or before, the human force.
While he was pondering this, radio brought him the Co-ordinator's voice,
sounding no different than before: "Michel. Michel, come back." It was so like
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a deliberate mechanical parody of Tupelov that Michel had to fight down a
near-hysterical giggle.
"You have nowhere to go. Michel. Come aboard the ship again, and you and I can
work together for survival. You really have no choice."
He drifted, scanning space and stars. There were bright nebulae nearby nearby
as interstellar ranges went.
"You have nowhere else to go, Michel. Our last jump was a long one. No human
search is going to find you now. And there are no worlds habitable by humans
within a hundred parsecs of this point."
There was no way to tell from a berserker's voice whether or not it lied. But
as he drifted closer to the wrecked ship he could detect another sort of
change inside it. The drive was running, storing energy, charging some
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