These are nonhuman themselves: the small, quick, short-tempered Cynthian xenobiologist Chee Lan, and the gigantic, placid, dragonlike planetologist Adzel from Woden. They fret a little at the delay, but not too much. Veronica frets more, since Falkayn has stood her up; her interest in him has become personal rather than professional.
At the castle, Falkayn meets three other SI stockholders: Kim Yoon-Kun, Anastasia Herrera, and the wife of Hugh Latimer. Latimer himself, and Thea Beldaniel’s sister, are absent “on business.” Though his hosts try to prevent it, he sees the lift-off of an interstellar ship that he is certain contains those two. It becomes plain that he was invited here simply to get him out of the way while something else happens. Thea tries to allay his suspicions with a story about the background of her group—their shipwreck as children, their adoption by kindly nonhumans who want to stay outside of Technic civilization but who did send them back with a grubstake of rare metals and later supplied them with computer parts. This only makes Falkayn warier. When he declares that he will leave, he is taken prisoner.
Chee Lan and Adzel try repeatedly to call him in the following days. At last they are granted an audiovisual contact. Falkayn tells them he is quitting Solar S & L, joining SI, and marrying Thea. His comrades are convinced that he has been made a puppet by brainscrub techniques. Getting no satisfaction from the Lunar police—who much favor well-behaved SI over the rowdy remainder of the League—they appeal to Nicholas van Rijn.
He agrees that Falkayn probably is controlled. Formal action will take too long to organize. A rescue mission, therefore, will be extremely illegal. Van Rijn can stall off the authorities for a while. But Chee and Adzel must risk their lives and liberty to get their friend back.
Using their fast, well-armed exploratory ship Muddlin’ Through, they succeed. Adzel breaks in and seizes Falkayn, then Chee pulls both of them out. In the course of the raid, several castle guards are killed. Van Rijn orders Chee to take Falkayn away into space. She can cure him with equipment already loaded aboard, and go investigate whatever it was he learned at SI. Clearly his supposedly private conference with the computer there was spied on, and the facts revealed were so tremendous as to force SI into actions that the League would never tolerate. Doubtless the information brokers have been spies all along for some unidentified but hostile power. Latimer and Thea’s sister are known to have left the Solar System, surely to carry word to their masters. Speed is vital.
Adzel has gathered proof that Falkayn was indeed brainscrubbed. Van Rijn does not show it to the police. Instead, he lets Adzel be arrested. Meanwhile he uses the evidence to bargain with the SI owners still in Lunograd. He forces them to sell their holdings to a trustworthy group—paying him a fat commission—and assist in concocting a story which gets Adzel freed. All but Thea promptly leave. She remains, to help negotiate the sale and later guide van Rijn to a rendezvous. There, on the advice of her associates, her masters may or may not come parley with him. He agrees to preserve secrecy for the time being; he doesn’t trust any government, or the League as a whole, to deal with a situation as dangerous as this, at least not until it has been made less obscure.
Restored, but deeply embittered by his experience, Falkayn arrives with Chee Lan at Beta Crucis. They find the rogue planet. It is approaching periastron. Under the rays of the blue giant, its cryosphere is boiling into gas and water. Conditions are so chaotic and hazardous that Falkayn names it Satan; and violence waxes hourly. After gathering and integrating a vast amount of data in orbit, Muddlehead—the ship’s computer “brain”—does manage to land. This will soon be impossible because of storms, and remain that way for years, until the planet has moved far back toward interstellar space.
Nonetheless, Satan is potentially of fabulous worth: as a site for the large-scale industrial synthesis of rare isotopes. Having verified that, Falkayn and Chee are about ready to go home. Then Muddlehead detects a sizable flotilla of spaceships, coming in fast from the unexplored Circinus region.
They must belong to Si’s masters, responding to Latimer’s report. It seems unlikely that Muddlin’ Through can either hide until they leave, or outrun them once she herself is detected. But her hyperdrive “wake” can cover that of a message capsule, sent back toward Sol with an account of what has hitherto been learned. Falkayn and Chee dispatch such a one, and go on out to meet the strangers.
Part 3
XIV
Stars glittered in their prismatic colors and multiple thousands, Beta Crucis little more than the brightest among them; the Milky Way spilled around crystal darkness; the far cold whirlpools of a few sister galaxies could be seen: when the League ship made contact with the strangers.
Falkayn sat in the bridge, surrounded by outside views and engine murmur. Chee Lan was aft, in the fire-control center. Either one could have been anywhere aboard, to receive information from the computer and issue it orders. Their separation was no more than a precaution in case of attack, and no wider than a hull permeated by light-speed electronic webs. But loneliness pressed in on Falkayn. The uniform he wore beneath his space armor, in place of a Long John, was less a diplomatic formality than a defiance.
He stared through his helmet, which was still open, first at the screens and then at the instruments. His merely flesh-and-blood organism could not apprehend and integrate the totality of data presented, as the computer could. But an experienced eye took in a general picture.
Muddlin’ Through was plunging along a curve that would soon intercept one of the fleet’s outriders. She must have been detected, from the moment she went on hyperdrive. But none of those vessels had altered course or reckless pseudospeed. Instead, they proceeded as before, in a tighter formation than any Technic admiral would have adopted.
It looked as if the alien commander wouldn’t grant his subordinates the least freedom of action. His entire group moved in a unit, one hammer hurled at target.
Falkayn wet his lips. Sweat prickled along his ribs. “Damnation,” he said, “don’t they want to parley? To find out who we are, if nothing else?”
They didn’t have to, of course. They could simply let Muddlin’ Through pass between them. Or they might plan on a quick phase-match and assault, the moment she came in ready range—so quick that her chance of shifting the phase of her own quantum oscillations, thus becoming transparent to whatever they threw at her, would be slight.
“They may not recognize our signal for what it is,” Chee Lan suggested. Her voice on the intercom made Falkayn visualize her, small, furry, and deadly . . . yes, she’d insist on operating one gun by hand, if battle broke—
“They know enough about us to establish spies in our home territory. So they know our standard codes,” Falkayn snapped. “Give ’em another toot, Muddlehead.”
Viewscreens flickered with the slight alterations in hypervelocity imposed by the outercom as it modulated drive vibrations to carry dots and dashes. That system was still new and crude—Falkayn could remember when, early in his career, he had been forced to turn his engines themselves on and off to transmit a message—but the call was simple. Urgent. Assume normal state and prepare for radionic communication on standard band.
“No response,” the computer said after a minute.
“Cease transmission,” Falkayn ordered. “Chee, can you think of any motive for their behavior?”
“I can imagine quite a number of different explanations,” the Cynthian said. “That’s precisely the trouble.”
“Uh, yeh. Especially when they are not apt to be right. One culture’s rationality isn’t quite the same as another’s. Though I did think any civilization capable of space flight must necessarily—No matter. They obviously aren’t going to detach a ship for talkie-talkie. So I don’t propose to steer into a possible trap. Change course, Muddlehead. Run parallel to them.”
Engines growled. Stars swung around the screens. The situation stabilized. Falkayn gazed toward the unseen strangers. They were crossing the clouded glory of Sagittarius . . . “w
e may learn a bit by analyzing their ‘wake’ patterns, now that we’re close enough to get accurate readings,” he said. “But we hardly dare follow them clear to Satan.”
“I don’t like accompanying them any distance,” Chee said. “They travel too bloody-be-gibbeted fast for this kind of neighborhood.”
Falkayn reached out an ungauntleted hand for the pipe he had laid on a table. It had gone cold. He made a production of rekindling it. The smoke gave tongue and nostrils a comforting love-bite. “We’re safer than they are,” he said. “We know more about the region, having been here a while. For instance, we’ve charted several asteroid orbits, remember?”
“You don’t believe, then, they had a scout like ours, who paid a visit before we arrived?”
“No. That’d imply their home sun—or at least a large outpost of their domain—is nearby, as cosmic distances go. Now the Beta Crucis region isn’t what you’d call thoroughly explored, but some expeditions have come through, like the one from Lemminkainen. And explorers always keep a weather eye out for signs of atomic-powered civilizations. I feel sure that somebody, sometime, would’ve identified the neutrino emission from any such planet within fifty light-years of here. True, conceivably those nuclear generators weren’t yet built fifty years ago and the neutrinos haven’t arrived yet. But on the other hand, voyages have been made beyond this star. Altogether, every probability says these characters have come a considerable ways. The messenger ship from Luna must barely have had time to notify them about the existence of the rogue.”
“And they committed a whole fleet immediately—with no preliminary investigation—and it’s roaring down on goal as if this were clear one-hydrogen-atom-per-cc. space—and not even trying to discover who we are? Ki-yao!”
Falkayn’s grin was taut and brief. “If a Cynthian says an action is too impulsive, then by my battered halidom, it is.”
“But these same beings . . . presumably the same . . . they organized Serendipity . . . one of the longest-range, most patiencedemanding operations I’ve ever heard of.”
“There are parallels in human history, if not in yours. And humans—more or less humans—were involved in our case . . .”
The computer said: “Incoming hypercode.” The display screen blinked with a series that Falkayn recognized: Request for talk acknowledged. Will comply. Propose we rendezvous ten astronomical units hence, five hundred kilometers apart.
He didn’t stop to inform Chee—the ship would do that—nor shout his own astonishment, nor feel it except for an instant. Too much work was on hand. Orders rapped from him: Send agreement. Lay appropriate course. Keep alert for treachery, whether from the vessel that would stop and parley or from the rest of the fleet, which might double back under hyperdrive.
“The entire group remains together,” Muddlehead interrupted. “Evidently they will meet us as one.”
“What?” he choked. “But that’s ridiculous.”
“No.” Chee’s voice fell bleak. “If twenty-three of them fire on us simultaneously, we’re dead.”
“Perhaps not.” Falkayn clamped the pipe more firmly between his jaws. “Or they may be honest. We’ll know in another thirty seconds.”
The ships cut off their quantum oscillators and flashed into the relativistic state of matter-energy. There followed the usual period of hastily calculated and applied thrust, until kinetic velocities were matched. Falkayn let Muddlehead take care of that and Chee stand by the defenses. He concentrated on observing what he might about the strangers.
It was little. A scanner could track a ship and magnify the image for him, but details got lost across those dimly lighted distances. And details were what mattered; the laws of nature do not allow fundamental differences between types of spacecraft.
He did find that the nineteen destroyers or escort pursuers or whatever you wanted to call them were streamlined for descent into atmosphere: but radically streamlined, thrice the length of his vessel without having appreciably more beam. They looked like stiffened conger eels. The cruisers bore more resemblance to sharks, with gaunt finlike structures that must be instrument or control turrets. The battleship was basically a huge spheroid, but this was obscured by the steel towers, pillboxes, derricks, and emplacements that covered her hull.
You might as well use naval words for yonder craft, even though none corresponded exactly to such classes in the League. They bristled with guns, missile launchers, energy projectors. Literally, they bristled. Falkayn had never before encountered vessels so heavily armed. With the machinery and magazines that that entailed . . . where the devil was room left for a crew?
Instruments said that they employed force screens, radars, fusion power—the works. It was hardly a surprise. The unorthodox, tight formation was. If they expected trouble, why not disperse? One fifty-megaton warhead exploding in their midst would take out two or three of them directly, and fill the rest with radiation. Maybe that wouldn’t disable their computers and other electronic apparatus—depended on whether they used things like transistors—but it would give a lethal dose to a lot of crewfolk, and put the rest in hospital.
Unless the aliens didn’t mind X-rays and neutrons. But then they couldn’t be protoplasmic. With or without drugs, the organic molecule can only tolerate a certain bombardment before it shatters. Unless they’d developed some unheard-of screen to deflect uncharged particles. Unless, unless, unless!
“Are you in communication with any of their mechanisms?” Falkayn asked.
“No,” Muddlehead answered. “They are simply decelerating as they would have had to sooner or later if they wish to take orbit around Satan. The task of matching velocities is left to us.”
“Arrogant, aren’t they?” Chee said.
“With an arsenal like theirs, arrogance comes easy.” Falkayn settled into his chair. “We can play their game. Hold off on the masers. Let them call us.” He wondered if his pipe looked silly, sticking out of an open space helmet. To hell with it. He wanted a smoke. A beer would have been still more welcome. The strain of wondering if their weapons were about to cut loose on him was turning his mouth dry.
An energy blast would smite before it could be detected. It might not penetrate the armor too fast for Muddlin’ Through to go hyper and escape. That would be determined by various unpredictables, like its power and the exact place it happened to strike. But if the aliens want to kill us, why bother to revert? They can overhaul us, maybe not their capital ships, but those destroyers must be faster. And we can’t stay out of phase with nineteen different enemies, each trying to match us, for very long.
Yet if they want to talk, why didn’t they answer our call earlier?
As if she had read her companion’s mind, Chee Lan said: “I have an idea that may account for parts of their behavior, Dave. Suppose they are wildly impulsive. Learning about Satan, they dispatch a task force to grab it. The grabbing may be away from members of their own race. We don’t know, how unified they are. And they can’t have learned that Serendipity’s cover is blown. Nor can they be sure that it isn’t.
“Under those circumstances, most sophonts would be cautious. They’d send an advance party to investigate and report back, before committing themselves substantially. Not these creatures, though. These charge right ahead, ready to blast their way through any opposition or die in the attempt.
“And they do find someone waiting for them: us, one small ship, cheekily running out to make rendezvous. You or I would wonder if more vessels, bigger ones, aren’t lying doggo near Satan. Our first thought would be to talk with the other. But they don’t emote that way. They keep on going. Either we are alone and can safely be clobbered, or we have friends and there will be a battle. The possibility of retreat or negotiation isn’t considered. Nor do they alter any vectors on our account. After all, we’re headed straight for them. We’ll bring ourselves in killing range.
“Well, we fool them, changing over to a parallel course. They decide they’d better hear us out; or, at least, that they
might as well do so. Maybe it occurs to them that we could perhaps get away, bring word back to Earth, in spite of everything. You see, they’d have to detach one or more destroyers to chase us down. And their formation suggests that, for some reason, they’re reluctant to do this.
“In short, another lightning decision has been made, regardless of what may be at hazard.”
“It sounds altogether crazy,” Falkayn objected.
“To you, not me. Cynthians are less stodgy than humans. I grant you, my people—my own society—is forethoughtful. But I know other cultures on my planet where berserk action is normal.”
“But those’re technologically primitive, Chee. Aren’t they? Hang it, you can’t operate an atomic-powered civilization that way. Things’d fall apart on you. Even Old Nick doesn’t have absolute authority in his own outfit. He has to work with advisers, executives, people of every kind and rank. The normal distribution curve guarantees enough naturally cautious types to put the brakes on an occasional reckless—” Falkayn broke off. The central receiver was flickering to life.
“They’re calling us,” he said. His belly muscles tightened. “Want an auxiliary screen to watch?”
“No,” Chee Lan answered starkly. “I’ll listen, but I want my main attention on our weapons and theirs.”
The maser beams locked on. Falkayn heard the report, “Their transmission is from the battleship,” with half an ear. The rest of him focused on the image that appeared before him.
A man! Falkayn almost lost his pipe. A man, lean, with gray-speckled hair, smoldering eyes, body clad in a drab coverall . . . I should’ve guessed. I should’ve been prepared. Scant background was visible: an instrument console of obviously non-Technic manufacture, shining beneath a hard white light.
Falkayn swallowed. “Hello, Hugh Latimer,” he said most softly.
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