Detringer’s Sportster

Detringer’s Sportster is a small, underpowered spacecraft whose failing energy systems and scant fuel make it both a refuge and a looming coffin. Cast adrift in the void with Detringer and his mechanical servant Ichor aboard, it carries them through a storm into a distant planetary system and eventually lands on a world where they can survive but cannot readily escape. Its importance lies in that repeated reversal: the ship first seems to deliver its occupants toward death, then gives them a precarious chance to begin again.

Exile and the failing craft

After Detringer’s banishment from Ferlang, a starship carried him deep into the void between galaxies and set him adrift in the Sportster. Ichor voluntarily accompanied him. The little vessel was not built to cross such a vast emptiness unaided: its energy systems inexorably ran down, and Detringer shut off its engines almost immediately rather than waste the limited fuel. He reserved what remained for planetary maneuvering, should an unlikely opportunity to reach a world ever arise.

The ship’s material limits shape the conditions of exile. Detringer endured hunger, cold, thirst, and the throbbing headache of oxygen deprivation while imposing strict rations on himself. With the engines silent and the deadness of space surrounding them, the Sportster offered no ordinary passage through time or distance. Detringer instead organized life around the routines still possible aboard the dying vessel: he attended to its minutest workings, exercised, meditated, and gave a concert for Ichor, his tone-deaf companion. The rituals could not restore the ship, but they helped him resist despair while its resources dwindled.

A narrow course to the fifth planet

An electrical storm eventually swept the Sportster through the void and into another planetary system. After the storm subsided, Detringer crossed the orbit of the system’s outermost planet. He recharged Ichor from the ship’s accumulators, despite Ichor’s concern that the current should be saved for a possible emergency. The emergency soon became plain: Detringer’s reading indicated that the fifth planet was the only world in the system capable of supporting his life without imported artificialities, but the Sportster lacked the fuel to reach it by a direct journey.

Waiting for another current or storm might have carried them onward, but there was no assurance that one would arrive before their supplies ran out, or that it would push them in a useful direction. Detringer chose the more active risk. By plotting an economical course and metering the fuel by hand, he brought the ship within two hundred million miles of the planet. He then shut down the engines, leaving only about an hour’s fuel for maneuvering inside an atmosphere. The ship continued toward its destination so slowly that, without a change in circumstances, it would take a thousand years merely to reach the planet’s atmospheric limits.

The apparent end of the voyage did not immediately change Detringer’s conduct. He resumed exercise, concerts, meditation, and solitary rituals, even as Ichor judged these activities unsuitable to their predicament. Detringer insisted that they would face their fate as equals if they died, while still regarding death as doubtful. Then a strong inbound current arrived just as their energy resources were nearly gone. It supplied the motion the engines could no longer provide, and Detringer piloted the Sportster down onto the fifth planet’s green surface. When he finally shut the engines off, roughly thirty-eight seconds of fuel remained.

Refuge without a way home

The planet could sustain life: its necessities were available with moderate effort, though it offered few amenities. But the same landing that ended the immediate crisis exposed the ship’s deeper limitation. The planet had no civilization, no sign of intelligent beings, and no apparent source of the complex fuel required by the Sportster’s engines. Escape was therefore impossible without technological assistance. Ichor accepted the prospect of spending the rest of his lifespan there and urged Detringer to do the same, reasoning that even a successful refueling would leave them searching the stars for an advanced civilization. Detringer preferred to search and risk death rather than remain alive in stagnation.

The vessel’s condition thus divides survival from escape. On the planet, it can no longer function as a dependable means of travel: its remaining fuel is negligible, and the necessary replacement cannot be made locally. Yet the ship remains the focus of Detringer’s refusal to treat the landing as a final settlement. Its stranded state makes the choice stark—accept a life on the planet or seek a way to restart the journey.

Refueling and departure

The prospect of departure changes when a human arrives at the Sportster carrying a canister of fuel. Detringer tells him to set it down, but the man insists on carrying it through the tiny cabin and pouring it into the tank, explaining that he is following the Colonel’s orders. Detringer treats the delivery as a beginning and estimates that about sixty more cans will be needed. The slow, one-can-at-a-time process underlines how little the ship’s renewed movement depends on its own reserves: its immediate hope now comes from assistance supplied by the planet’s inhabitants.

Before leaving an Earth ship, Detringer speaks openly about the enormous size and complex weaponry of Ferlang’s interspatial armed forces, but the account is a deliberate fabrication. At nightfall he blasts off in the Sportster with Ichor, who is now more faithful than ever after discharging his compulsion. When Ichor asks where they are going, Detringer presents the destination as a marvelous new world; Ichor also allows for the possibility that it will be their deaths. The ship has carried them out of exile, into apparent imprisonment, and back into space, but departure promises neither a known destination nor safety.