"Stand back," said Randy, warning the bearded man. He activated the transfer switch and the pod shot through the hole in the Silverhair and disappeared.
"I feel a lot better with her out of danger," said Randy.
"Me too," said the bearded man.
The two looked at each other. Randy was used to being alone, but it would be nice to have some company.
"Why don't you stay here in comfort while we catch up to the warpmouths you left behind?" said Randy. "I get to use the master bed and the study, however."
"And the recliner near the fireplace," added the bearded man. "As a mere guest, I wouldn't want to deprive the master of the house of his favorite chair—he might be a little short with me."
"Stop that—" shouted Randy, laughing in spite of himself. He went to the controls and collapsed the warpgate through the Silverhair.
Still laughing, the two men got out the poof-ball and started an exhausting game of "keep-away" with the gigantic alien.
Chapter 11
Timetrap
FOR OSCAR, the days stretched into weeks. Slowly, slowly ... the Animal Avenger made its wide turn and started to creep up on the three ships moving at nearly light-speed toward Tau Ceti. To counter the boredom of high-gee flight, Oscar interrogated the ship's computer about the workings of timelinks. As usual, the ship's computer had practically everything that had ever been recorded in human history in its data files. Since it was a Reinhold Astroengineering Company spacecraft, it also had all the nonconfidential company files, too. Using obvious keywords, Oscar soon found a series of tutorial memos from one Stephen Wisneski. The memos were not easy to understand, but Oscar was not dumb, and had plenty of time to puzzle out the terms and understand their implications.
The timelink, which gave Randy indirect control of the past by messages sent through time, had been set up when Randy's ship got near UV Ceti and could receive messages from the future. Since then, however, Reinhold Astroengineering Company employee C.C. Wong had arrived at Tau Ceti, which was also Randy's destination. Suddenly, the horrible truth dawned on Oscar. If Randy were allowed to reach his destination, then he could use the space warp on his ship and the space warp that C.C. Wong had set up in the Tau Ceti system to create, not a timelink, but a timegate that would allow a person to go back and forth in time.
That's his secret plan! Oscar thought. I knew he had something up his sleeve. Once he can send himself back into the past, there would be no limit to the power he could grab. He became furious at the thought and his speculations grew wilder. Randy would control everything! The world ... the solar system ... the entire universe ... for all time! His wild imaginings drove Oscar even crazier. He can't be allowed to do it. I'll kill him first! he vowed.
Suddenly, his stomach wrenched and he vomited up blood, which mixed with the oxygenated fluid in his helmet.
Damn! he thought. I'll just have to take more antinausea medication. Holding his breath to prevent the blood from being drawn into his lungs, he lowered the acceleration level from thirty gees to one and climbed laboriously out of the protection tank. He coughed his lungs clear—his coughs alternating with strained attempts to vomit. The robomechanic was waiting with the medical kit, its yellow manipulator holding a nearly empty bottle of antinausea medicine.
"This is the last of the medicine aboard," said the robomechanic. "It is strongly recommended that you abort this mission and warp back to Earth for medical treatment."
"No!" said Oscar angrily.
"Then it is recommended that you stop acceleration so that additional medicine can be warped in from Earth," continued the robot.
"Little chance of them doing that for me," Oscar mumbled. "I'm going on, I tell you!" Oscar was worried now. He had to be in good shape during the attack, since the ship's computer would refuse to help and he would have to do it himself. He must save the last of the antinausea medicine for then.
That meant, however, he couldn't use the acceleration tank. He would have to use the acceleration couch, where vomiting blood only meant dealing with a mess, not pneumonia. He stumbled to the bathroom to wash off the oxygenated protection fluid and get into some dry clothing. He washed his hair, and strands of it came off in his hands. His body, emaciated from his inability to keep food down, was covered with boils and sore spots. He tried not to think what the spots would turn into. After a long, hot shower, he donned a clean jumpsuit, then automatically stepped to the mirror, pocket comb in hand. His hand stopped—there was practically nothing left to comb. Even his eyebrows were gone. Oscar looked at the ugly, hollow-cheeked, balding head with the sunken, dead-tired eyeballs.
"I curse you, Randy," he rasped. "Look what you've done to me!" He slipped into another ZED flashback. Eyes flickering back and forth rapidly, he strode quickly to the acceleration couch, buckled himself in, eyes still flickering wildly. He rammed the joyball to its five-gee limit.
"I'll get you!" he screamed as the pain hit him.
"THERE IT is ... the timetrap!" said the bearded man proudly. The two men had just finished a leisurely dinner of Chateaubriand together, and Randy was getting out some glasses and the decanter of port from the liquor cabinet while the bearded man set up the living-room view-wall to show Randy what he had arranged.
Timemaster was approaching the region where the warpgate pair had been dropped off. The two artificial warpgates were now very much larger and thicker, and the large pentagonal openings could easily be seen in the long-range telescope. The bearded man manipulated the icons on his cuff-comp and the view zoomed to one of the warpmouths, then to a tiny icosahedral structure nearby with a multitude of flexible metal hoses coming from each of its triangles.
"This is one of the feeders," he said. "The hoses carry positively charged negmatter to the vertices of one mouth of the timetrap. There is another feeder whose hoses carry negatively charged negmatter to the other mouth." He manipulated an icon on his cuff-comp, and the image on the viewscreen zoomed away from the feeder and followed a set of hoses leading to the large dodecahedral structure in the distance.
"This is the 'past' end to the timetrap," he said.
Randy began to appreciate the immensity of the structure when he noticed how large it was compared to the tiny robomechanics that were monitoring the feeding of the outputs of the twenty hoses into the twenty vertices on the gigantic frame.
"By the time they finish," the bearded man continued, "it'll be two thousand kilometers across."
"Why so big?" asked Randy.
"So the warpgate can pass a whole spaceship without causing too much compression of the ship's magnetic-field shielding," the other man said. "Besides, we have to make the opening big to make sure the rat falls through the trap without hitting the frame." He manipulated his cuff-comp again and the view zoomed away toward another structure in the distance. As the view enlarged, Randy could see it was another dodecahedral artificial warpmouth.
"This is the 'future' end to the timetrap," the bearded man said. "The two ends of the timetrap are separated by one-point-six seconds in time, and one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers in space—ten times the diameter of the Earth. Before I started the growing process, I took one warpmouth on a short trip and 'younged' it compared to the other end."
"Amazing!" said Randy, impressed by the future engineering.
"Now," said the bearded man, "in order to bait the trap, we want to bring our three ships to a halt near the center, flying in formation inside the protective region of the timetrap. But be careful that you move slowly as you go between the two warpmouths of the timetrap. There is a very low probability that your ship will activate the trap as it approaches, but if you are going very slowly, you won't get hurt even if it does go off."
"How does the trap work?" asked Randy.
"It's really fascinating to watch," the bearded man said with a smile. "But instead of spoiling it by telling you ahead of time, I'll just let Oscar demonstrate it for you."
/> "Well ... OK," said Randy, a little disappointed. "Since we have to match speeds with the timetrap, and the trap is just coasting along, we'll have to drop into free-fall. I'd better have the robomechanics close down the ship, especially the waterfall in the garden."
The bearded man leaned back on the sofa. "No need to do that, me boy. Just put Timemaster in a planetless orbit. Get it moving in a large circle, say a thousand miles in radius, and turn on your drive so the acceleration is inward. You'll go into an orbit with a comfortable rotation period of about a half hour, while you enjoy one gee on board."
"Of course!" said Randy. "I did something like that when I took the family on that orbital tour of the planet Rose—but I never thought of doing it with no planet at the center at all."
"You just did," the bearded man reminded him.
"Stop that," said Randy, rolling his eyes in mock exasperation.
The bearded man downed the last of his port and got up from the sofa. "Got to go," he said. "The timetrap is about finished and I need to retract the hoses and pack up the feeders. I'll be done in a few weeks, and then we can wait and watch the rat get trapped."
FOR OSCAR, the weeks turned into months, but slowly he was gaining on his objective. The three ships ahead of him were now undergoing a crazy circular motion that had Oscar suspicious. It looked like they might be trying to confuse him with a new version of the old shell game: "Which ship holds the Randy?"
As Oscar approached the trio, he left the ship's sensors at high sensitivity, keeping a watch out for anything emitted by the three ships, or for any other approaching ships trying to deflect him from his course. The sensors found two large structures with unusual reflection characteristics. They were on opposite sides of the three twirling ships, but were quite far away. Oscar had the ship's sensors add the two strange objects to their watch routine, and changed the course of Animal Avenger slightly to stay equally far away from both of them.
"I'd better make sure my gun is loaded before I start trying to use it," he said, putting the ship in free-fall.
He switched his virtual helmet and gauntlets from the task of operating the pilot's console to that of operating one of the android roustabouts. He took the robot out into space and had it float along the kilometer-long spar coming from the nose of the ship, checking each of the electromagnetic accelerators. One of them wasn't working right, but all he had to do was disconnect it from the power feed. The supermagducting ore bucket would just fly on to the next accelerator and the only net result would be a slightly lower muzzle velocity.
"Damn! Only two hundred forty-nine buckets left!" he cursed, after using the robot to count the buckets in the rapid-load mechanism. "But the gun is loaded and ready. I'd better get moving again."
He switched the virtual helmet and gloves back to the pilot's console and jammed the joyball up to its five-gee limit again. The android, abandoned in space, was left behind.
"HERE HE comes," said the bearded man. "He must have had some trouble with the high-gee protection tank. His acceleration for the past few months has been only five gees. Even though he's going at over ninety-eight-percent cee, his relative velocity with respect to us is only four percent of cee."
"That's still pretty damn fast!" said Randy. "Don't you think that we ought to be in the control room in our tightsuits and helmets, at least?"
"Naw," said the bearded man with obvious unconcern. "Nothing is going to happen to us, and the view-wall here in the living room will give us a panoramic view of the action." He leaned back in the sofa. He was wearing Randy's "cricket outfit" again, and had an ice-cold long-neck bottle of Bud Classic in one hand and a bunch of pretzels in the other.
"Our lives are in danger, and you sit there like a sofa sausage watching Sunday afternoon football!" Randy exploded.
"Relax ..." said the bearded man, stuffing another pretzel in his mouth and watching the wall-sized screen. "The only one getting kicked around today is Oscar." He sat up suddenly. "He's opened fire!"
OSCAR was more careful with his firing this time. Instead of holding down the firing button and spraying a spiral of buckets, he carefully pointed the nose of his ship and emplaced bucket after bucket in a programmed pattern that would produce a maximum probability of a hit on each of the three ships.
Done! he thought grimly after a few minutes of firing. I only wish I had more buckets ...
With three ships, any one of which could be holding Randy, Oscar was forced to distribute his buckets equally among the three, and the probability of striking all three had been lowered to about seventy percent. That meant there was about a thirty-percent chance that one of the ships would escape.
And with the luck I've been having, Randy would be in the one ship that wasn't hit. His sunken eyes burned fiercely behind the contact lenses in his immersion helmet. But he won't escape me even then!
In preparation for the attack, Oscar had taken the remainder of his antinausea medicine and a dangerous amount of stimulant to flag his failing body into one last spurt of activity. In case the silver bullets didn't do their job, he was prepared to ram the ship that survived. There wasn't much hope that he would survive the ramming, but Oscar had tried to increase his chances by climbing into the high-gee protection tank and breathing protection fluid instead of air. Standing by outside were the three robomechanics, each holding an open rescue ball with spare tanks of oxygen. If he had to ram, and he somehow survived the collision, he could breathe the oxygenated fluid in his tank helmet until the robomechanics could stuff him into a rescue bag. His ship's warpgate, being made of rigid negmatter and protected by its suspension system, had a good chance of surviving the collision. The robots were programmed to haul him to the warpgate in the rescue bag and shove the bag through the warpgate back to Earth.
Watching the receding buckets on the virtual screen in the immersion tank, Oscar felt a desire to retch. He willed it down. The three clusters of silvery buckets moved closer to their targets. Suddenly an alarm buzzer went off and Oscar looked at a blinking circle on the lower part of the virtual screen.
"What the hell ..." he gurgled in his fluid-filled throat. The blinking circle surrounded one of the large, strange structures far off in the distance. A cluster of dots was coming out from one of the pentagons in the structure!
It's some sort of gun, he thought. He activated the ship's defense subroutine, and it automatically predicted trajectories for the incoming missiles. Oscar relaxed as he realized that the missiles were not aimed at him. Another cluster, then a third, emerged from the strange gun.
They're aimed at my buckets! he realized in alarm, then watched in frustration as the missiles from the strange object struck each and every one of his buckets, deflecting them away from their targets.
"Damn!" Oscar muttered in his throat. There is now only one thing left to do ...
"BEAUTIFUL!" cried the bearded man as he watched each bucket being deflected by its twin. "Their high acceleration capability and the built-in magnetic 'spring' surrounding them make them nearly ideal billiard balls."
"That kind of precision is impossible!" said Randy, staring in disbelief as bucket after bucket was deflected in exactly the same direction.
"Improbable things become probable once warpgates exist," the bearded man reminded Randy. "Now, watch ... He's going to have to duck ..."
THEY'RE coming right at me! thought Oscar in panic. He activated the ship defenses at the same time that he jammed the joyball to maximum side thrust to avoid the incoming projectiles. He was successful in avoiding most of them, and the automatic laser cannon took care of the few that came near him. The immediate danger over, Oscar looked around. The silver bullets he had previously fired, which had been deflected by the swarm of missiles that had just passed him, were now off at a great distance, all traveling in the same direction.
They're going directly to that other gun structure, he thought. At least they're going to hit something. He then watched in bewilderment as they all passed through one of the p
entagonal holes in the structure and disappeared.
It acts like a warpgate mouth! he thought, and for a moment he tried to puzzle out the strange behavior. Never mind! he remonstrated. You 've got more important things to think about! He moved his joyball back to high gees again, and drove the Animal Avenger at the larger of the three ships.
One chance out of three ... to save the universe from this madman!
"NOW THE timetrap is going to act in earnest," said the bearded man as he intently watched the action on the view-screen. He turned to Randy.
"Remember, now. Oscar is bringing this all on himself. If he wasn't intent on ramming your ship at high speed in order to kill you, then nothing would happen to him."
He turned to look back at the screen. "He's avoiding getting near either of the warpmouths and is coming straight at us. He is coming in along the plane that is equidistant between the two warpmouths, and we are right at the center. Now, if he isn't trying to ram us, just come real close and scare us, say, the timetrap won't activate. His ship will take the high-probability path, which is the obvious one. He will shoot through between the two warpmouths, pass real close to us at the center, and continue on out."
"But what if he intends to kill me?" asked Randy. "Then what happens?"
"Something is going to happen to save you," replied the bearded man. "Something that normally is very unlikely to happen. But in order to maintain self-consistency in the universe, that highly unlikely event is about to take place. Watch the younger warpmouth on the left of the screen."
"There is a spaceship coming out of it!" said Randy in amazement.
"A copy of Oscar's ship," said the bearded man. "From the future ..."
Timemaster Page 25
