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Ben Bova - (Exiles Trilogy 01) Flight of Exiles v0.5 (1971).html

 

To the Pratt family, with thanks for fine times.

 

 

1

 

 

 

"Fire... it's on fire !"

 

 

"EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY."

 

 

"Attention everyone. Emergency in cryonics area six. Damage Control and Life Support groups to cryonics area six

immediately. Emergency."

 

 

"The whole area's a mass of flames! The standby equipment is out! Get more men up here, quick!"

 

 

The starship had no name. The people aboard merely called it "the ship." It had originally been a huge artificial satellite

orbiting around Earth, a minor city in space, hugging close to the Mother World. Then it was made into a prison for

thousands of the world's best scientists and their families. Now it was a starship, coasting silently from the solar system

toward the triple star system, Alpha Centauri.

 

 

Inside the main control center, things were anything but quiet.

 

 

"There are fifty men and women in cryosleepers in number six area. If you can't get that fire under control they'll die."

 

 

Larry Belsen was standing up on the ship's bridge. It was actually a long curving row of desk consoles, where seated

technicians worked the controls that watched and directed every section of the mammoth ship. Larry's job was as close to a

ship's captain as any job on the ship; he was in charge of this Command and Control center, he had a finger on every

pulsebeat in the ship.

 

 

The technicians were hunched over the keyboards, fingers flying over the buttons that electronically linked all of the great

ship's machinery and people. In frontof each of their desks were

 

 

viewscreens that showed them pictures, graphs, charts, every kind of information from each compartment and piece of

equipment aboard engines, computers, life support, living quarters, work areas, cryonics units, power systems, all on view

in the hundreds of screens

 

 

Normally, Larry thought of the curving ring of screens as the eye of a giant electronic insect, multifaceted to see into all

the areas of the ship He had studied about Earth's insects briefly in a biology course, on the learning tapes But now his

attention was riveted to one particular screen, where the fire was raging in cryonics area six There wasn't much he could

see smoke obscured almost everything

 

 

He put a hand on the shoulder of the girl working that console

 

 

"Can't you get the emergency equipment functioning?"

 

 

She was a thin, dark-skinned girl, with close-cropped hair Glancing up at Larry, "It should've gone on automatically But it

 

 

 

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won't respond at all I've tried . " Her eyes were wide with fear, anxiety

 

 

"It's not your fault," Larry said calmly "Don't blame yourself "

 

 

"But there are fifty sleepers in there!"

 

 

Larry shook his head Without bothering to go across to the life support displays, he said, "They must be dead by now,

Tania No sense tearing yourself up over it"

 

 

He took a step to the guy sitting at the next desk console "You in touch with the Damage Control group?"

 

 

"Yes they've plugged into a wall phone out in the main corridor, just outside area six "

 

 

"Who's in charge?"

 

 

"It's Mort Campbell's unit, but he's not the one on the phone "

 

 

"Let me talk "

 

 

"Is it cryonics six?"

 

 

Larry turned to see Dan Christopher at the door down at the far end of the bridge For an instant, everything seemed to

stand still people frozen at the console desks, communications speakers quiet, viewscreens stilled

 

 

The two of them looked almost like brothers, at first glance Larry was tall and slim with dark hair that he kept clipped

fairly

 

 

short His eyes, though, were a cold gray, like a granite rock floating in space far from the warmth of a star Dan was the

same height and also youthfully slim His hair was a lighter shade, and almost shoulder length It curled slightly His eyes

were fiercely black, deep and flashing Both of them were wearing workshift coveralls, Larry's the blue-gray shade of the

ship's Command and Control personnel, Dan's the howling orange of the Propulsion and Power section

 

 

"Is it six?" Dan demanded, his voice rising

 

 

Larry didn't answer, he merely nodded slowly

 

 

"My father's in there!"

 

 

By now Larry had crossed the plastic tiled floor of the bridge and was within arm's reach of Dan He took him by the arm

 

 

"So is mine! There's nothing you can do, Dan The Damage Control group's already there, but

 

 

"My father!"

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Dan pulled loose and yanked the door open Larry stood there and watched him disappear down the corridor running, until

the door automatically slid shut again

 

 

With a sad shake of his head, Larry went back to the control desks and viewscreens

 

 

"You still in contact with the Damage Control party?"

 

 

The fellow nodded and pointed to the main screen over his desk, in the center of a group of seven screens A scared-looking

teenager was in view He was looking somewhere off camera, coughing in the smoke that was drifting past him

 

 

"What's going on up there?" Larry asked sharply

 

 

The kid in the screen seemed to jerk with surprise Then turning full face toward the screen, he said

 

 

"Mr Campbell and the crew are in there I saw flames coming through the main hatch a few minutes ago, but there's only

smoke now "

 

 

"Is anybody hurt?"

 

 

"I don't know They're all inside there nobody's come out"

 

 

"Did they have smoke masks?"

 

 

"Yeah "

 

 

"Where's yours?" Larry asked

 

 

The kid looked startled again "I uh yeah, it's right here I got it

 

 

More gently, Larry said, "Don't you think it might be a good idea to put it on? It can't protect you while it's zipped to your

belt."

 

 

Larry found that he was bending over the shoulder of the seated technician. He straightened up and glanced at the life

support screens on the next console. They were blank, dead.

 

 

Fifty people in there. Dan's father... and my own.

 

 

"Larry... look."

 

 

He turned his attention back to the viewscreen. The Damage Control group was trudging wearily back into the corridor.

Their faces' were smudged, their coveralls blackened. The foamers and other fire-fighting equipment they dragged seemed

to weigh tons.

 

 

There was hardly any smoke coming from the hatch now. The last man to step out into the corridor slowly undipped his

smoke mask. Larry recognized him as Mort Campbell stocky, slow-moving but always sure of himself, one of the oldest

 

 

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men working on this shiftnearly thirty.

 

 

Then Dan Christopher came dashing into view. He pushed wordlessly past the first few men of the Damage Control group,

his eyes wild, his mouth open in silent frenzy.

 

 

Campbell stopped him at the hatch. Dan tried to dodge around him, but Campbell grabbed Dan by his slim shoulders and

held him firmly.

 

 

"Don't go in there. It's not pretty."

 

 

"My father..."

 

 

"They're all dead."

 

 

Watching them in the viewscreen, Larry felt his insides sink. You knew he was dead, he told himself. But knowing it in

your head and feeling it in your guts are two entirely different things.

 

 

He knew all the technicians, all up and down the long row of consoles, were staring at him now. He stood unmoved, his

face frozen into a mask of concentration, and kept his eyes on the viewscreen. Inside his head, he was telling himself

overand over, You never knew him. He was frozen before you were old enough to remember him. There's no reason for you

to break up.

 

 

Dan's reaction was very different.

 

 

"NO!" he screamed, and he twisted out of Campbell's grasp and darted into the still smoky cryonics area. The older man

slipped his face mask back on and went in after him.

 

 

"The cameras inside the cryonics area aren't working now," the girl tech said quietly, her fingers still tapping on her

keyboard, trying to coax life back into the dead machines.,

 

 

"Never mind," Larry said woodenly. "There's nothing in there that we should see."

 

 

2

 

 

 

Larry sat in his living quarters, in the dark. It was a single compartment, barely big enough for a bunk, a desk, and a chair.

The bunk and desk were molded into the curving walls of the compartment. Drawers and sliding partitions to the closet and

sanitary blended almost invisibly with the silvery metal of the walls.

 

 

In the darkness, as he sat in the only chair and stared at nothing, there was only the residual glow of the viewscreen at the

foot of the bed and the faint fluorescence of the wall painting that'Valery had done for him years ago, when he had first

been assigned a compartment of his own.

 

 

So you've lost a father you've never known, Larry still argued with himself. You're not the only one. Every one of those fifty

frozen people was a father or mother to somebody aboard the ship. Look at Dan; it's hit him a lot harder.

 

 

 

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But as he thought about it, slowly Larry began to realize that something else was bothering him. It wasn't the deaths. Not

really. That left nothing but a cold emptiness inside him. It was something else

 

 

What caused the fire?

 

 

According to the ship's computer records, they had been crawling through the huge gulf of space for nearly fifty years.

Twenty-some thousand human beings, exiles from Earth, on their way to Alpha Centauri in a giant pinwheel of a ship.

Nearly fifty years. Almost there.

 

 

But the ship was starting to die.

 

 

The men and women who had started on this long, long voyage were exiles. They had been scientistsmolecular

 

 

geneticists, most of them. The world government had rounded them up and placed them in a prison, this ship, which was

then only a mammoth satellite orbiting Earth. Earth was overcrowded, it needed peace and above all it needed stability.

The scientists represented the forces of change, not stability. The geneticists and their colleagues offered the ability to alter

the human race, to make every baby intoa superman ora slave, into a genius or a moron. On demand. Pay your money and

take your choice.

 

 

The world government was humane. And very human. Its leaders decided such power would be too tempting, too easy to

corrupt. So, as humanely as possiblebut with thorough swiftnessthey arrested all the scientists who were involved in

genetic engineering and exited them to the satellite. Their knowledge was never to be used to alter the precious, hard-won

peace and stability of Earth.

 

 

It had been Dan Christopher's fatherwith the help of Larry's fatherwho worked out the idea of turning their satellite

prison into a starship. The Earth's government agreed, reluctantly at first, but then with growing enthusiasm. Better to get

rid of the troublesome scientists completely. Let them go toward Alpha Centauri. Whether they make it or not, they will no

longer bother the teeming, overcrowded Earth.

 

 

But the ship itself was overcrowded. Twenty thousand people can't be kept alive for year after year, decade after decade,

for half a century or more. Not on a spacecraft. Not on the ship. So most of the people were frozen in cryogenic deepsleep,

suspended animation, to be reawakened when they reached Alpha Centauri, or when they were needed for some special

reason. The ship was run by a handful of peopleno more than a thousand were allowed to be awake and active at one

time. All this Larry knew from the history tapes. Much of it he had learned side by side with Dan, his best friend, when

they were kids studying together. Both their mothers had died of a virus infection that killed hundreds of people before the

medics figured out a way to stop it. Their fathers had handed the infant sons over to friends to be raised, and went into

cryogenic sleep, to be awakened when they reached their destination. If they made it. The people who had built this ship

were engineers of Earth.

 

 

The people who lived in it, riding out to the stars, were mostly scientists and their children. The ship had to operate far

more than fifty years, if they were all to stay alive. The time was almost over, and the ship's vast intricate systems were

starting to break down, to fail. Youngsters trained as engineers and technicians had all the learning that the tapes could

provide. But could they keep the ship going indefinitely?

 

 

A month ago it was the main power generator that failed, and they began to ration electrical power. Last week it was a

pump in the hydroponics section; if they hadn't been able to repair the pump they would have lost a quarter of their food

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production, plus the even more important oxygen-recycling ability of the green plants that grew in the long troughs of

chemical nutrients. And now the fire. Fifty people dead.

 

 

Will any of us make it?

 

 

A soft tapping at his door. Fingernails on plastic. Valery.

 

 

"Come in," Larry said, getting up from his chair.

 

 

The door slid open and she stood there framed in the light from the corridor.

 

...