Ortega stared into the now-comforting chaos of Stasis-Space. “Not a chance,” he said finally. “If we go straight to Dugl, they’re almost certain to believe that our first appearances were some kind of mistake. And if the Doogs here know we fled the robot mines, they’ll leave the mines on automatic at Dugl, and then our chances will be totally non-existent. We’ve got to find some way of communicating with the Doogs here, despite the mines. Question is, how? I….”
“Wait a minute!” cried Palmer. “I think I have it! It’s a long shot, but…. Those mines will report contact, won’t they?”
“Ours do, anyway,” said Ortega. “I think we can assume that the Duglaari robot mines will do the same.”
“So there’ll be a Duglaari patrol out to investigate, right?” said Palmer.
“Go on, Jay.”
“Well, this is going to be pretty hairy, but if we can come put of Stasis-Space behind the first Doog patrol, then the Duglaari ships will screen us from the mines. They must have some device which prevents them from firing on their own ships, and if the Doog ships are between us and the mines…. Of course, there’ll probably be a second wave of Doog ships, and we’ll be sandwiched between them, but we ought to have a minute or so before we have to go into Stasis-Space, if it’s timed just right….”
“Man, that’s using your head!” exclaimed Ortega. “Maybe you’ve got it in you to become a Gamemaster.”
Palmer grinned. “After all,” he said, “I was a pretty good Fleet Commander before I became an expendable General.”
“Dirk, you think you can do it?” Ortega asked.
Lingo pursed his lips. “I hope so,” he said. “Anyway, we’re going to try it. Let’s see…the Doog patrol should be on its way by now…. Fran, give me an estimated time on our crossing the Doog patrol’s trajectory, assuming that we continue217;ve gotasis-Space at our current heading, and assuming that the Doogs started out from the orbit of the outermost planet, say three minutes ago.”
Palmer winced. The idea of submitting such a problem to a human being went against his grain. It was strictly a job for a ship’s computer.
But Fran Shannon was the closest thing to a computer that the Solarian ship had. She leaned back inertly in her seat, staring off blankly into space, and although she moved not a muscle, Palmer could sense the furious activity going on in her Edetic brain.
Finally she looked up.
“Come out of Stasis-Space exactly five and a half minutes from now, Dirk,” she said. “Of course, there’s no way to be sure, since we’re cut off from all external observations when we’re in Stasis-Space, but that’s the best estimate I can give you.”
“It had better be good enough,” Lingo said grimly. “Jay, get ready at the mike. You’re going to have to do some mighty fast talking.”
With thirty seconds to go, Lingo began a countdown. “Start talking as soon as we’re out of Stasis-Space, Jay,” he said. “Don’t even wait to see if the Doogs are there. Twenty-five…twenty…fifteen…ten…five…three…two…one….”
Lingo pressed the button, and they were in normal space.
“This is General Jay Palmer, Ambassador-Plenipotentiary of the Combined Human Military Command….”
As he spoke as rapidly as possible, Palmer could see that there was a flotilla of Duglaari ships between them and the robot mines. It had worked!
“…On our way to Duglaari to surrender the Human Confederation to the Kor….”
He glanced in the direction of the Doog sun, and…there was another formation of Doog ships headed outward! They were boxed in, all right. The inner Duglaari ships fired a salvo of nuclear missiles. They had spotted the ship already! In about a minute and a half, the missiles would be on them!
“This is Ambassador Palmer…” he continued, trying to speed up the set speech as much as possible.
Now the outer Doog flotilla must’ve spotted them, for they had stopped, turned, and were hurtling towards them. They too let loose a barrage of missiles. The Solarian ship was between two opposing waves of nuclear missiles, like a fly between two immense clapping hands….
“…to the Kor….”
“That’s all, brother!” cried Lingo, stabbing the button.
They were back in Stasis-Space. And tey were in one piece!
And Ortega was laughing.
“You’ve got one strange sense of humor, Raul,” Palmer said. “We come within seconds of being pulverized, and that’s funny?”
“No…no…” roared Ortega. “The Doogs! The outer Duglaari ships fired a salvo of missiles at us; so did the inner Doogs. We’re not there anymore, but those missiles sure are! They’re headed straight for the two Doog fleets!” He clapped his hands together. “Pow!” he cried. “I suppose only a few missiles will really get through, but those Doog commanders reacted a little too quick. They’re going to have some mighty fancy explaining to do about why they shot up each other’s fleets!”
“My heart bleeds for ‘em!” said Palmer.
“Well, thanks to you, Jay,” said Lingo, “we’ve won the cat and mouse game handily. But that’s only round one. Next stop—Dugl!“
Chapter VII
EVERYONE was gathered in the control room. Lingo and Fran were in their control seats. Robin Morel and Linda Dortin sat in the dummies. Max Bergstrom stood next to Linda and Ortega and Palmer flanked Lingo.
This was it.
The long voyage was moments away from being over. When Lingo presses the button, Palmer thought, we’ll be right outside the Dugl system. He glanced at each of the Solarians in turn. Max and Linda were wrapped up in each other. Fran Shannon studied her control panel. Robin’s lips overlapped slightly as she stared at the base- of Lingo’s head. Ortega was gazing blankly into the meaningless chaos of Stasis-Space, his mind busy elsewhere.
Lingo’s eyes were on his instruments; his finger poised over the button that would snap them back into normal space.
Much to his own surprise, Palmer felt a wave of affection for the six Solarians sweep over him. He recognized the emotion; he had felt it many times before, just before going into battle with his old Fleet. It was the tight-knit comradeship of men who have faced death together before and are about to face it again; the silent, unspoken group loyalty of a battle-blooded crew.
Whatever was going to happen, whatever the rest of the enigmatic Solarian plan might be, he and the Solarians had faced the Doogs together, and, fighting together, they had survived. Whatever the vast gap in their cultures was, they were all human beings, and they were going to the very midst of the enemy, alone and together.
In a sudden burst of insight, Palmer understood what it must be like to truly be a part of an Organic Group. It was this pre-battle feeling, this closeness forged by the imminence of mortal danger, this unvoiced mutual trust and dependence, not for a moment, not only in the face of death, but always and forever. It was something very alien.
But it was good.
“Okay,” said Lingo, a microphone in one hand, the other poised over the button, “this is it.”
He pressed the button and they were in normal space.
The first thing that caught Palmer’s eye was Dugl. A yellow sun, slightly smaller than Sol, with six planets. The second planet of that inconspicuous little star had spawned an incomprehensible race, an empire dedicated to the extermination of all men everywhere. Either the children of the second planet of Dugl must perish, or the children of the third planet of Sol must face extinction.
The second thing he saw was ships.
Hundreds of ships; the bulgy, dead-black, somehow-unlikely-looking warships of the Duglaari Empire. They were arranged in an immense hollow hemisphere between the Solarian ship and their home sun.
Palmer gasped in dismay. There must be three full Fleets combined in that formation, he thought. Three full Fleets combined into one super-Fleet, with a Fleet Resolution Field that could crush this one little ship into a tiny ball of fused metal in less than a minute, if it ever englobed them.
Lingo stared coldly at the great hemisphere of ships, the mike in his hand activated, but his voice silent.
Like a great, grabbing amoeba, the Duglaari Fleet began to move.
Straight for them, it came, accelerating under full Fleet Resolution Field power, faster and faster, straight at them, until it was a vast wall of ships, filling the entire field of vision of the huge hemispherical viewscreen. Closer and closer, expanding towards them like the vast cloud of superheated gas and deadly radiation of ah exploding star.
Finally, Lingo spoke. His voice was filled with a cold, terribly inhuman, preternatural power.
“Soldiers of the Duglaari Empire! This is a peaceful mission. This ship carries an Ambassador-Plenipotentiary from the Human Confederation come to discuss surrender with the Kor of all the Duglaari. This is a peaceful mission; we have no desire to fight.”
A new note of ghastly, contemptuous arrogance came into Lingo’s voice, as if he had suddenly been possessed by some omnipotent demon.
“Do not disturb the peace of this mission,” he said, speaking as if it were an order. “You attack this ship at your own peril. We bear an Ambassador from the Human Confederation, yes. But this is not a Confederal ship.
“This ship is from Fortress Sol”
Palmer stared at Lingo in rapture. There was a terrible quality of command in that voice, the kind that men follow to the death, the kind no one can but obey. It certainly awed him. But how would it effect the Doogs?
For a few moments, the Duglaari Fleet continued its inexorable engulfment. Then it slowed, and finally it stopped. The great Duglaari Fleet hung motionless in space, dead still and silent.
The hush in the control room seemed one with the stillness outside.
Ortega stared at the immobile Duglaari warships, black and menacing. “Well,” he finally said, “we’re obviously still alive. I think we can assume that the Doog commander is talking it over with Duglaar, and probably with the Council of Wisdom itself. Question is, will the Kor be curious enough now to let us through?”
“Don’t you think Dirk layed it on a bit thick, Raul?” Palmer said. “After all, it was all a bluff. Wouldn’t the Kor be prone to call it, more than anything else?”
“You’re thinking like a human being, Jay,” said Ortega. “You’re attributing human emotions to a Doog. Talk that way to a man and he’ll probably take a swing at you. But a Doog will weigh the situation logically. One: we’ve engaged in two skirmishes already, and we’ve made no hostile move. Two: we’re sticking our heads in the lion’s mouth deliberately—they could destroy us any time they want to, and we must know it. Three: Dirk’s manner of speaking completely contradicts points one and two. Therefore, no logical conclusion is possible. This should bother the Duglaari no end, because the concept of bluff is something they just don’t have. And the Doogs are very cautious types. I don’t think they’ll want to destroy an enigma until they understand it. At least, let’s hope so….”
“Look!” cried Robin.
One of the Duglaari ships was breaking formation and moving slowly towards them.
“Looks like the flagship,” Palmer muttered.
“This is it.”
The Duglaari flagship stopped about halfway between the Doog fleet and the Solarian ship.
Suddenly a voice came in over the radio, a strange, flat voice, curiously devoid of overtones and emotionally dead:
“Sol vermin that to Dugl itself do come, there their surrender to the will of the Kor to make, this ship to Duglaar follow must you, there your fate from the Council of Wisdom to learn.”
“We’re in!” shouted Ortega and Lingo.
“Yeah,” grunted Palmer dubiously. “But the question is, in what?“
The Duglaari flagship began to accelerate inward towards gl. Lingo activated the Solarian ship’s Resolution Field Generator, and the ship followed in the Doog flagship’s wake, taking care not to lag too far behind nor to approach too closely.
They had only been under way for a few minutes when Palmer saw that the huge Duglaari Fleet was also beginning to move.
“Look at that, Lingo!” Palmer said, pointing to the Duglaari Fleet. The great hollow hemispherical formation of Duglaari ships was creeping up behind them. Now the great ring of ships that was the leading edge of the hemispherical formation had actually passed them and was closer to the flagship than they were, so that the Solarian ship was now cupped deep within the great hollow of the Duglaari formation like a pea at the focus of a radar dish.
“You know what this means?” Palmer said. “It means that they can englobe us any time they want to now. In a matter of less than a minute—we’d never have enough warning to warm up our Stasis-Field Generator in time. We’re completely in their power.”
“Of course,” said Ortega. “Did you expect them to let us into the Dugl system under any other conditions? They’re playing it completely safe, just in case we got any ideas of trying to nova Dugl by turning on our Stasis-Field Generator. It takes about a minute or so for the Generator to warm up, and by that time they’d have detected it and crushed us with their Fleet Resolution Field. You’ve got to admire their thoroughness.”
“You admire it,” said Palmer. “It scares me silly.”
“Know thy enemy,” said Ortega. “Do you realize that we’re now closer to Duglaar than any human beings have ever been before?”
“Bully for us,” muttered Palmer. “Somehow, it reminds me of a bunch of guinea pigs sneaking into a laboratory.”
Inward they sped, past the tiny, airless outpost rock that was Dugl VI, the outermost planet of the Dugl system. They passed close by to the base, and Palmer could see that a great part of the tiny planet was a deepspace field, thick with hundreds of ships.
Dugl V and Dugl IV were great gas giants, with extensive systems of satellites, much like Jupiter and Saturn. Still they sped inward, ever closer to Duglaar itself, and as they approached the home planet of the Duglaari, Palmer felt his uneasiness growing. At least the Solarians knew what they were going to try to do, once they reached Duglaar. But he knew nothing. The Solarians had one unknown to deal with: the Duglaari. He had two. He felt more estranged from the Solarian Group than at any time since that night with Robin. But he had to trust them, or be trapped between two groups of aliens. This was the payoff, the climax of the whole mission. He only wished he knew what the mission was.
Dugl III was an Earth-sized planet, about an A.U. and a half from Dugl, and about the temperature of Mars. Palmer could see that great domed cities were laid out regularly on its surface, making weirdly regular geometric designs. Great green rectangles, hundreds of miles long, alternated on its surface with similar rectangles of what looked like yellow desert. It was as if the entire planet were being farmed according to a single, unified master plan.
As they crossed the orbit of Dugl III, Lingo checked his instrument panel, and looked up with a grim smile.
“Well, they’ve finally done it,” he said to Ortega.
“Done what?” asked Palmer.
Lingo pointed to a series of dials which were fluctuating wildly and glowing red. “Those are our counter-peepers,” he said. “According to them, the Doogs are now giving the ship a thorough going-over with radiation detectors. They’re making sure we don’t have a critical mass of radioactives aboard. Making sure we don’t have a fusion bomb.”
“They think of everything, don’t they?” said Palmer.
“Everything but the unthinkable,” Ortega replied enigmatically.
The planet was shrouded in a heavy cloud cover, so heavy that its surface features were almost entirely obscured.
“Solarians!” said the voice of the Doog Commander. “You this ship to the landing place follow must. A thousand lase-cannon trained on you are. Any deviation from approved course your destruction immediately resulting in will.”
“His English may be lousy,” said Lingo, “but he makes himself very clear.”
The Doog flagship began to spiral do
wnward into the atmosphere of Duglaar, with the Solarian ship following closely. At about ten thousand feet, they broke through the cloud cover, and the surface of Duglaar was visible to human eyes for the first time in history.
It was, of course, an anti-climax. All inhabited planets look very much alike from ten thousand feet up.
Palmer could see a coast—water looked like water everywhere. The Duglaari ship descended towards a large city on the flat coastal plain. There was something very strange about the city that he could not quite put his finger on. It was somehow too…too geometric. As they got closer, he could see that the city was arranged in inhumanly neat concentric circles, with arterial roadways radiating from the periphery of the smallest and innermost circle at regular intervals, like the degree markings on a compass. It looked more like a diagram of a city than a city itself.
The innermost circle was perhaps a mile or two in radius, and the Duglaari flagship headed straight for it, coming in to a neat landing a few hundred yards from a huge, ugly, boxlike building.
Lingo followed it down, and landed the ship beside it. Human beings had at last reached the surface of Duglaar.
From the ground, the capital of the Duglaari Empire was a singularly ugly and unimpressive sight. Architecture, as an art, seemed totally unknown. They were on a large open landing field, enclosed by a very functional-looking fence running around the entire circumference of the innermost circle.
Within the circle was a gigantic glass box of a building, flanked by accretions of smaller buildings, which varied only in size from the main structure. Scattered among them for variety were several large silvery globes on stilts.
The rest of the large city, stretching out beyond the horizon in all directions, seemed merely an endless repetition of the buildings within the fence. Great glass boxes and silvery globes on stilts, mile upon mile of them, varying only in size, as far as the eye could see, completely uniform in shape and ugliness. The sky was a dull blanket of thick cloud, diffusing the light of Dugl into a dirty, gray, colorless wash.
The Solarians Page 10
