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we usually do. You're counting down and you're at fifty. Take the count, Sam."
He began counting, from fifty down. His eyes were open, staring straight
ahead. The direction of his gaze just skimmed my hairline. I looked up into
his face.
When he reached twenty I told him we were coming off-balance. At ten I told
him the accelerator wasn't boosting the synchrotron enough. At five I told him
the gap was getting critical. At minus two I told him we missed transfer and
were bleeding forty-five per and increasing.
All the while I could feel his hands straining at the two fake levers. I
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could feel his hesitations, his uncertainties, his mistakes. When it was all
over and I told him to let go, his hands began shaking.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It doesn't mean a thing," protested Mina.
"It would be exactly the same with the Swan's drive," I said. "You've got to
realise that Sam didn't learn to fly from the instruction book. He doesn't do
it by the manual; he does it by feel. He becomes part of his machine. He
doesn't think about what he's doing-he's not a computer who can just be
reprogrammed to respond to a whole new set of signals and stimuli. If you
stood behind him and told him what was on a dial, you wouldn't just be doing
something for him that he'd normally do himself. Sam doesn't read the dials...
when the dials move, so does he. He's a part of the whole system. He acts with
it, not upon it. I'm sorry, Sam, but it's not just a matter of lending you a
pair of eyes. It can't be done. We can't make an engineer out of someone
peering over your shoulder. It's not on."
"Sorry," said Sam.
"Not your fault," I told him. "Mine."
"No," he said.
"I'm the captain of this ship," I told him. "I'm responsible for the crew. I
knew your eyes were going the moment I clapped my own eyes on you. I took the
risk. I lost. Not you."
There was a momentary silence.
"We're trapped," said Mina.
"It's not easy," I confirmed.
"What do we do?" asked Sam, sounding as if it didn't matter the least. They
both had that kind of look about them.
"We sleep," I said. "We all need it. We recover ourselves, so far as we can.
Then we attack the problem. Whatever we can do, we do. Wherever the best
chance is, that's the way we take. Simple as that."
Simple it was, but as I said, it wasn't easy. The Hooded Swan was a great
ship, but also she was by no means the kind of thing a kid of six could handle
right off the bat. Where a man like Rothgar had failed to cope, any
experienced and competent engineer could be in deep trouble. A dilettante
would be a non-starter. But when the choice lies between a blind man and a
moron, who do you choose?
I needed sleep. I needed a revelation, a miraculous inspiration. I should
have known that sleep was no place to go looking for it.
I made Mina and Sam go to their beds, and I went to mine. I had to take a
shot, but even so I had bad dreams. In fact, I had nightmares.
There were ghostly voices inside my head. Echoes. My dreams were filled with
weird images that weren't mine at all, but his. He wasn't there. He was dead.
But all that earthly remains...
I'd never hear his voice again. The inside of my head would be silent as the
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tomb during all my waking moments. But retreating into my subconscious,
sagging back from my senses, I'd find his bleaching bones. The wreckage of a
second mind. Memories. Shards. An immortal soul... ?
The cross that I had put upright on Lapthorn's grave refused to stay that
way. I could have laid it down instead, laid it flat, or I could have thrown
it away altogether. What did a cross mean to Lapthorn? Or to me? But no. The
soil at the head of the grave was too shallow and too dry, but I kept standing
that cross up and making it stay. Until the wind came and blew it down.
Why did I bother? I just don't know. It didn't mean a thing. Lapthorn had
never been confined by that cross. He'd haunted me, one way or another. And
now the wind... the wind who rode the wind who blew the cross down and down
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