“I presume you wish to know whether your program has been unambiguously comprehended.
Yes.”
“Good.” Falkayn patted the nearest console and smiled through his gathering, half gleeful tension. “We come through this, and you can have your gold-plated regulators. If need be, I’ll pay for them out of my own account.”
There was no perceptible change of forces within the ship, nor in the configuration of light-years-remote stars or the luridness of Beta Crucis. But meters said the ship was slowing down. Magnifying viewscreens showed the glints that were Gahood’s vessels growing into slivers, into toys, into warcraft.
“I’ve got it!” ripped from Chee.
“Huh?” Falkayn said.
“The coordinates. In standard values. But he’s spinning off into shock. I’d better concentrate on keeping him alive.”
“Do. And, uh, don safety harness. We may dive right into Satan’s atmosphere. The compensators may get overloaded.”
Chee was quiet a moment before she said: “I see your plan. It is not a bad one.”
Falkayn gnawed on his pipe. This was the worst part, now, this waiting. Gahood must have detected the change of vector, must see what was like an attempt to rendezvous, must know about at least one of the communication beams on different bands that probed toward his flagship. But his fleet plunged on, and nothing spoke to Falkayn save a dry cosmic hiss.
If he’ll try to talk . . . if he’ll show any sign of goodwill . . . Judas, we don’t want a battle—
Whiteness flared in the screens, momentarily drowning the constellations. Alarm bells rang. “We were struck by an energy bolt,” Muddlehead announced. “Dispersion was sufficient at this range that damage was minimal. I am taking evasive action. A number of missiles are being released from the fleet. They behave like target-seekers.”
Doubts, terrors, angers departed from Falkayn. He became entirely a war animal. “Go hyper to Satan as instructed,” he said without tone. “One-tenth drive.”
The wavering sky, the keening noises, the shifting forces: then steadiness again, a low throb, Beta Crucis swelling perceptibly as the ship ran toward it faster than light.
“So slow?” Chee Lan asked.
“For the nonce,” Falkayn said. “I want to keep a close watch on what they do.”
Only instruments could tell, the fleet being already lost in millions of kilometers. “They aren’t going hyper immediately,” Falkayn said. “I expect they’re matching our kinetic velocity first, more or less. Which suggests they intend to start shooting again at their earliest opportunity.”
“Whether or not we have reinforcements at Satan?”
“Whether or not. I imagine the battleship will bring up the rear, though, at a goodly distance, and wait to see how things develop before making any commitment.” Falkayn laid his pipe aside. “No matter how hot-tempered he is, I doubt if Gahood will rush into an unknown danger right along with his robots. They’re more expendable than him. Under present conditions, this fact works in our favor.”
“Hyperdrive pulses detected,” the computer said a few minutes later.
Falkayn whistled. “Can they normal-decelerate that fast? Very well, open up, flat out. We don’t want them to overtake us and maybe phase-match before we reach Satan.”
The engine pulse became a drumbeat, a current, a cataract. The flames of Beta Crucis seemed to stretch and seethe outward. The computer said: “All but one unit, presumably the largest, are in pursuit. The cruisers are lagging behind us but the destroyers are gaining. However, we will reach goal several minutes in advance of them.”
“How much time do you want for scanning the planet and picking us a course down?”
Click. Click-click. “A hundred seconds should suffice.”
“Reduce speed so we’ll arrive, let’s see, three minutes before the leading destroyer. Commence descent one hundred seconds after we’re back to normal state. Make it as quick as possible.”
The power-song dropped a touch lower. “Are you in your own harness, David?” Chee asked.
“Uh . . . why, no,” Falkayn suddenly realized.
“Well, get into it! Do you think I want to scrub the deck clean of that clabbered oatmeal you call brains? Take care of yourself!” Falkayn smiled for half a second. “Same to you, fluffykins.”
“Fluffykins—!” Oaths and obscenities spattered the air.
Falkayn sat down and webbed in. Chee needed something to take her mind off the fact that in this hour she could do nothing about her own fate. It was a condition harder for a Cynthian to endure than a human.
Then they were upon the rogue. Then they flashed into relativistic state. Then engines roared, hull structure groaned and shuddered, while the last adjustments in velocity were made, within seconds.
They were not far out, just enough so that most of the daylit hemisphere could be observed. Satan loomed frightful, filling the screens, storm clouds, lightnings, winds gone crazy, volcanoes, avalanches, floods, mountainous waves raised on the oceans and torn into shreds of spume, air nearly solid with rain and hail and flung stones, one immense convulsion beneath the demon disk of the star. Momentarily Falkayn did not believe there was any spot anywhere on the globe where a ship might descend, and he readied himself for death.
But the League vessel sprang ahead. On a cometlike trajectory, she arced toward the north pole. Before reaching it, she was in the upper atmosphere. Thin it might be, but it smote her so the hull rang.
Darkness, lit with explosions of lightning, rolled beneath. Falkayn glanced aft. Did the screens truly reveal to him the shark-shape destroyers of Gahood? Or was that an illusion? Torn clouds whipped across sun and stars. Thunder and shrieking and the cry of metal filled his ship, his skull, his being. The interior field regulators could not handle every shock, as Muddlin’ Through staggered downward. The deck pitched, yawed, swayed, fell away, rose savagely again. Something crashed off something else and broke. Lights flickered.
He tried to understand the instruments. Nuclear sources, behind, coming nearer . . . yes, the whole nineteen, stooping on their quarry!
They were meant for aerodynamic work. They had orders to catch and kill a certain vessel. They were robots.
They did not have sophontic judgment, nor any data to let them estimate how appalling these totally unprecedented conditions were, nor any mandate to wait for further instructions if matters looked doubtful. Besides, they observed a smaller and less powerful craft maneuvering in the air.
They entered at their top atmospheric speed.
Muddlehead had identified a hurricane and plotted its extent and course. It was merely a hurricane—winds of two or three hundred kilometers per hour—a kind of back eddy or dead spot in the storm that drove across this continent with such might that half an ocean was carried before it. No matter how thoroughly self-programmed, on the basis of how much patiently collected data, no vessel could hope to stay in the comparatively safe region long.
The destroyers blundered into the main blast. It caught them as a November gale catches dead leaves in the northlands of Earth. Some it bounced playfully between cloud-floor and wind-roof, for whole minutes, before it cast them aside. Some it peeled open, or broke apart with the meteoroidal chunks of solid matter it bore along, or drowned in the spume-filled air farther down. Most it tossed at once against mountainsides. The pieces were strewn, blown away, buried, reduced in a few weeks to dust, mud, atoms locked into newly forming rock strata. No trace of the nineteen warships would ever be found.
“Back aloft!” Falkayn had already cried. “Locate those cruisers. Use cloud cover. With this kind of electric noise background, they aren’t likely to detect us fast.”
A roll and lurch rattled his teeth together. Slowly, fighting for every centimer, Muddlin’ Through rose. She found a stratospheric current she could ride for a while, above the worst weather though beneath a layer where boiled-off vapors were recondensing in vast turbulent masses that, from below, turned heaven Stygian. H
er radars could penetrate this, her detectors pick up indications that came to her. The three cruisers were not supposed to make planetfall. Obviously, they were to provide cover against possible space attack. Their attention must be almost wholly directed outward. They orbited incautiously close, in inadvisably tight formation. But they were also robots, whose builders had more faith in strength than in strategy.
Falkayn sent off three of his nuclear torpedoes. Two connected. The third was intercepted in time by a counter-missile. Reluctantly, he ordered the fourth and last shot. It seemed to achieve a near miss and must have inflicted heavy damage, judging by what the meters recorded.
And . . . the cruiser was limping off. The battleship, whose mass made ominous blips on half a dozen different kinds of screen, was joining her. They were both on hyperdrive—retreating—dwindling to ward the Circini region.
Falkayn whooped.
After a while, he recovered his wits sufficiently to order: “Get us into clear space again, Muddlehead. Barely outside the atmosphere. Take orbit, with systems throttled down to minimum. We don’t want to remind Gahood of us. He could change his mind and return before he’s too far off ever to catch us.”
“What does he believe happened?” Chee asked, so weakly she could barely be heard.
“I don’t know. How does his psyche work? Maybe he thinks we have a secret weapon. Or maybe he thinks we lured his destroyers down by a suicide dive, and we’ve got friends who fired those torps. Or maybe he’s guessed the truth, but figures that with his fleet essentially gone, and the possibility that a League force might soon arrive, he’d better go home and report.”
“Lest we outfox him again, eh?” Exhausted and battered though she was, Chee began to have a note of exultation in her voice.
Likewise Falkayn. “What do you mean, ‘we,’ white puss?” he teased.
“I obtained those coordinates for you, didn’t I? Bloodiest important thing we’ve accomplished this whole trip.”
“You’re right,” Falkayn said, “and I apologize. How’s Latimer?”
“Dead.”
Falkayn sat straight. “What? How?”
“The life-support apparatus got knocked out of kilter, by that battering we took. And in his weakened condition, with his whole organism fighting itself—Too long a time has passed now for resuscitation to mean anything.” Falkayn could imagine Chee Lan’s indifferent gesture, her probable thoughts. Pity for us. Oh, well, we got something out of him; and we’re alive.
His went, surprisingly to himself: Poor devil. I have my revenge. I’ve been purged of my shame; and I find it didn’t really matter that much.
Quietness grew around the ship, the stars trod forth, and she reentered open space. Falkayn could not stay sorry. He felt he ought to, but the knowledge of deliverance was too strong. They’d give their foeman an honorable burial, an orbit straight into yonder terrible, glorious sun. And they’d steer for Earth.
No. The realization struck like a fist. Not that. We can’t go home yet.
The work of survival had barely been started.
XVIII
Well-established laws of nature are seldom overthrown by new scientific discovery. Instead, they turn out to be approximations, or special cases, or in need of rephrasing. Thus—while a broader knowledge of physics permits us to do things he would have considered impossible, like traversing a light-year in less than two hours—Einstein’s restrictions on the concept of simultaneity remain essentially valid. For no matter how high a pseudovelocity we reach, it is still finite.
So did Adzel argue. “You may not correctly ask what our friends are doing ‘now,’ when interstellar distances separate us from them. True, after they have rejoined us, we can compare their clocks with ours, and find the same time-lapse recorded. But to identify any moment of our measured interval with any moment of theirs is to go beyond the evidence, and indeed to perpetrate a meaningless statement.”
“Hokay!” Nicholas van Rijn bawled. He windmilled his arms in the air. “Hokay! Then give me a meaningless answer! Four weeks, close as damn, since they left. Couldn’t need much more than two for getting at Beta Crosseyes, ha? They may be finding thawed-out glaciers of beer and akvavit, we haven’t heard diddly-dong from them yet?”
“I understand your concern,” Adzel said quietly. “Perhaps I feel a little more of it than you do. But the fact is that a message capsule is slower than a ship like Muddlin’
Through. Had they dispatched one immediately upon arrival, it would barely have gotten to the Solar System by today. And they would not logically do so. For surely David, after he recovered, credited you with the ability to pry as much out of the SI computer as it gave him. Why, then, should he waste a capsule to confirm the mere fact of the rogue’s existence? No, he and Chee Lan will first have gathered ample data. With luck, they need not have taken the trouble and risk of interception involved in sending any written report. They ought to be returning home . . . quite soon . . . if at all.”
His huge scaly form got off the deck where he rested. His neck must bend under the overhead, his tail curl past a corner. Hoofs rattled on steel. He took several turns around the command bridge before he stopped and gazed into the simulacrum of the sky that made a black, bejeweled belt for this compartment.
The ship was on gravdrive, accelerating outward. Earth and Luna had shrunk to a double star, blue and gold, and Sol had visibly dwindled. Ahead glistened the southern stars. An X etched into the bow section of the continuous screen centered on a region near the constellation Circinus. But Adzel’s gaze kept straying to another point of brilliance, second brightest in the Cross.
“We could return and wait,” he suggested. “Maybe Freelady Beldaniel can nonetheless be induced to withdraw her threat to cancel the meeting. Or maybe the threat always an empty one.”
“No,” said van Rijn from the chair he overflowed, “I think not. She is tough, I found out while we haggled. Ja, I bet she puts spaghetti sauce on barbed wire. And best we believe her when she says her bosses is not terrible anxious to talk with us anyways, and she can’t guarantee they will come to the rendezvous, and if we do anything they don’t like—or she don’t like so she is not enthusiastic about telling them they should negotiate—why, then they go home in a huff-puff.”
He drew on his churchwarden, adding more blue reek to that which already filled the air. “We know practicalistically nothings about them, they know lots about us,” he went on. “Ergo, where it comes to meetings and idea exchanges, we is buyers in a seller’s market and can’t do a lot else than ask very polite if they mind using not quite so big a reamer on us. Q.,” he finished gloomily, “E. D.”
“If you worry about David and Chee,” Adzel said, “you might get on the radio before we go hyper, and dispatch another ship or two for reinforcement to them.”
“No pointing in that unless we get a holler for help from them, or a long time has gone by with no word. They are good experienced pioneers what should could handle any planet by their own serfs. Or if they got hurt, too late now, I am afraid.”
“I was thinking of assistance against hostile action. They may encounter armed forces, alerted by the first two Serendipity partners who left several weeks ago.”
“To fight, how much power we need send? No telling, except got to be plenty.” Van Rijn shook his head. “They don’t give out second prizes for combat, dragon boy. We send less fighting power than the enemy, we don’t likely get none back. And we can’t spare enough warcraft for making sure of victories over these unknown villains trying to horn us out of our hard-begotten profit.”
“Profit!” Adzel’s tailtip struck the deck with a thud and a dry rattle. Unwonted indignation roughened his basso. “We’d have plenty of available power if you’d notify the Commonwealth, so regular naval forces could be mobilized. The more I think about your silence, the more I realize with horror that you are deliberately letting whole planets, a whole civilization, billions upon billions of sentient beings, lie unsuspecting and unp
repared . . . lest you miss your chance at a monopoly!”
“Whoa, whoa, horsey.” Van Rijn lifted one palm. “It’s not that bad. Look here, I don’t make no money if my whole society goes down guggle-guggle to the bottom. Do I?
And besides, I got a conscience. Bent and tobacco-stained, maybe, but a conscience. I got to answer to God my own poor self, someday.” He pointed to the little Martian sandroot statuette of St. Dismas that usually traveled with him. It stood on a shelf; candles had been overlooked in the haste of departure, but numerous IOU’s for them were tucked under its base. He crossed himself.
“No,” he said, “I got to decide what gives everybody his best chance. Not his certainty—is no such thing—but his best chance. With this tired old brain, all soggy and hard to light, I got to decide our action. Even if I decide to let you do the deciding, that is a deciding of mine and I got to answer for it. Also, I don’t think you would want that responsibility.”
“Well, no,” Adzel admitted. “It is frightful. But you show dangerous pride in assuming it unilaterally.”
“Who else is better? You is too naive, too trusting, for one exemplar. Most others is stupids, or hysterics, or toot some political theory they chop up the universe to fit, or is greedy or cruel or—Well, me, I can ask my friend yonder to make interceding in Heaven for me. And I make connections in this life too, you understand. I am not playing every card alone; no, no, I got plenty good people up my sleeve, who is being told as much as they need to know.”
Van Rijn leaned back. “Adzel,” he said, “down the corridor you find a cooler with beer. You bring me one like a good fellow and I review this whole affair with you what has mostly waited patient and not sat in on the talks I had. You will see what a bucket of worms I must balance on each other—”
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