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CHAPTER III

The At Venture lifted noiselessly on gravity beams, and the sky darkened and Nerthus became a great cloudy shield in a cold magnificence of stars. Davis Bertram let the autopilot do the work, plotting a course and steering it, and didn't bother to check the data. The robots were always right—almost always. He sat watching Carsten's Star dwindle and felt the loneliness close in.

At the appropriate distance, the ship went into hyperdrive and outpaced light, reaching for the Wolf's Head constellation. It would be about ten days to his goal.

He had intended to study advanced astrogational theory on the way. The tapes were there, and nothing to distract him; he couldn't even tune in a radio any more. But there was also a supply of stereofilms, and he might as well relax.

One of them looked interesting: Murder Strikes Twice. But it was from Earth, and turned out to be a symbolic verse drama in the ancient, rigidly stylized form of the Retribution. Davis swore and opened another spool.

On the third day he started his textbook work, and wrestled with the first problem given him for a good two hours. It was fun to start, but when he couldn't solve it he knocked off for a beer and somehow never got back to it. After all, he had a hundred and fifty years ahead of him, if the vortex didn't grab him off.

Conscientiously every watch, he set the internal field at two gravities and went through a routine of calisthenics. It bored him stiff, it always had, but a body in good trim was an asset.

Who had ever begun the idea that spacefaring was one long wild adventure?

Davis had spent enough time in flight, including the cruises of cadet days, to know how empty the hours could become. But he had always vaguely assumed that on his ship it would be different.

He broke out his paints and brushes, set up a canvas, and started a portrait of Doris from memory. The art courses in the Earth schools had been among the few he really enjoyed. The academy on Thunderhouse had a mural of his in the messhall, a view from the inner moon.

It took him only a few hours to discover that painting a portrait of Doris from memory was a mistake. She had an interesting face, but the rest of her had been still more interesting. Davis suddenly realized he had spent nearly a whole watch period in reminiscences. He looked at the charcoal sketch he had made almost without thinking, blushed, and wiped his canvas clean. Too bad Doris wasn't here to pose. Only then he wouldn't be getting much painting done either. He recalled various psychopedagogues in his boyhood who had told him he must always be firm and upright, and brought his mind to heel. When he got back, rich and famous, there would be time enough for gynecological studies. Meanwhile, he'd better do something neutral, like a landscape.

Space itself, with no planets in view, nothing but a million unwinking stars and the great curdled rush of the Milky Way and the far cold coils of the galaxies . . . could not be painted. He was honest enough with himself to realize that.

On the eighth Earth-day, a frantic buzzing and a seasick quiver brought him out of his bunk, blind with panic. He had touched the vortex.

It wasn't close enough to matter. The thing was behind him in seconds. But he needed a depressor pill to stop shaking.

Uneasily, he looked up trepidation vortices in the Manual. It taught him nothing he didn't already know. For some little understood reason, there were traveling sections where the geometry of the continuum was distorted. The primary effect was that of violently shifting gravitational fields, and a big one could disturb a planet sufficiently to make the rotation period fluctuate by a few seconds. A spaceship on hyperdrive, its discontinuous psi functions meshing with those of the vortex, could be ripped to pieces—or flung a thousand light-years off course.

Space was unthinkably enormous. Even the largest vortex was not likely to encounter a ship by chance. But there had been vessels in the past, before the storms were known to exist, which had simply disappeared. There were suns and clusters today, interdicted because a vortex was in the neighborhood.

Well . . . this one hadn't hurt him. And it had saved Delta Capitis Lupi for his personal exploration!

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Framed