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more remote. His arms that had been half lifted were going down slowly to his
sides. His face was still turned up. "I didn't want to be out at night, in the
open...but it's all right. There's the Dipper, tipped to spill...follow the
handle south, there's Arcturus. There's Bo-oh-teez, Libra, Virgo, Sirius, that
blue-white spike, I thought once that it was coming after me, it's on the
other side of the sun this season. Canopus, that we like to lock our sensors
on, it's somewhere underfoot, you never see it this far north. Yeah, Mars,
there's the pock-
marked bastard now, coming on to opposition. I really don't mind looking any
more. You can't see much from our little place under all the air."
In her little voice the blond girl said: "I know now who you are..."
He was standing straight, his head thrown back. "The star-clouds, God, in
Sagittarius. Stars like snowflakes in a blizzard. They look like they're
frozen stiff, not moving. Flying around at hundreds of miles a second, and so
far apart, so far away from us, that you can't see them move. From our place
here or Mars, you see them from the exact same angle. So far away. They were
there for me to look at, the whole time out and back."
"...the astronaut. The one who was alone for two years after the accident.
Alone all the way to Mars and back."
His straightness was that of a statue, standing for a billion years and
keeping on even terms of stubbornness, so far, with stars.
"Nature," he said. "Wilderness. My God, all wilderness."
PATRON OF THE ARTS
After some hours work, Herron found himself hungry and willing to pause for
food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the
sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line!
Aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the
critic might be praising something good.
Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his
captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm's length behind him, for all
the world like some human kibitzer.
He had to chuckle. "I suppose you've some idiotic suggestion to make?"
The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a
speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it,
going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out
from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and
captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to
learn his way around.
It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it-it was meant to be a
place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew
weary of staring at pictures. The Frans Hals had been built as a traveling
museum; then the war of life against berserker machines had grown hot around
Sol, and BuCulture had wrongly decided that Earth's art treasures would be
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safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Frans was ideally suited for such a
mission, and for almost nothing else.
Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that
the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to
look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as
in-different to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Frans's
crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to
fight off the berserker's boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred
death to capture.
Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being-apart from
a few bacteria-within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that
his situation did not terrify him; that his long-growing weariness of life was
not just a pose to fool himself.
His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the
kitchen devices to work.
"Still no suggestions?" Herron asked it. "Maybe you're smarter than I
thought."
"I am what men call a berserker," the man-shaped thing squeaked at him
suddenly, in an in-effectual-sounding voice. "I have captured your ship, and I
will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my
meaning?"
"I understand as well as I need to." Herron had not yet seen the berserker
itself, but he knew it was probably drifting a few miles away, or a few
hundred or thousand miles, from the ship it had captured. Captain Hanus had
tried desperately to escape it, diving the Frans into a cloud of dark nebula
where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage
in speed lay with the smaller hull.
The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain
in normal space, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids
and gas-wisps as well as the Frans's radar-computer system could maneuver the
fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up
the chase, and the weaponless Frans had had no chance.
Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron
bowed to the machine. "Will you join me?"
"I need no organic food."
Herron sat down with a sigh. "In the end," he told the machine, "you'll find
that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I'm not
right." He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought.
Evidently his body still feared death-this surprised him a little.
"Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?" the machine asked.
"No," he said, making himself chew and swallow. "I'm not much good at pushing
buttons." A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When
capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the
control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft
past all the stored art treasures.
"Herron, listen-if we don't make it, see here?" Tooling open a double hatch in
the stern com-partment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short
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padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drainpipe. "The regular lifeboat won't
get away, but this might."
"Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?"
"There's room for only one, you fool, and I'm not the one who's going."
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