“Six…seven…eight…”
Now the Doogs were catching up! The great Fleet Resolution Field was accelerating the warships far faster than the Solarian ship could accelerate, and the gap of safety was rapidly closing.
“…nine…ten…now!”
Lingo pressed the button under his left hand. There was an agonizing minute’s delay as the Stasis-Field generator warmed up, as the deadly, clutching amoeba that was the Duglaar Fleet reached out to englobe them in its grip of death….
Then the Doogs, Dugl, and the stars themselves were suddenly gone, replaced by a swirling maelstrom of color. They were safely in Stasis-Space.
Lingo heaved a deep sigh. “We’re on our way!” he said.
“On our way where?” Palmer asked sourly.
“Why where else, Jay? Fortress Sol, of course!”
Chapter X
LINGO locked the controlips far d walked over to the dummy pilot’s seat into which Palmer was tied.
“I want to thank you, Jay,” he said. “We all owe you our lives.”
“I don’t want your thanks, Lingo,” Palmer snapped. “I saved this ship for only one reason—I had the misfortune to be on it. As you pointed out, suicide is an insane act. But as for you traitors, you can go….”
“Don’t go off half-cocked,” Lingo said with careful mildness. “We’re still your friends. We’ve got a long voyage ahead, and we’d like it to be as pleasant as possible. We don’t want you for an enemy, Jay. We want you to feel a part of our Group. You did once before.”
“And of course, as a token of your affection, you’re keeping me tied in this seat. I’m deeply touched.”
“We tied you up only to protect the ship,” Lingo said, still patiently. “You’ve got no weapons, and there’s no place for you to go. If you’ll promise not to get violent, I’ll untie you.”
Palmer shrugged as best he could in his bonds. “Okay,” he said. “Obviously I can’t go all the way to Sol trussed up like a turkey. No rough stuff. But please, no more phony buddy-buddy lies either.”
“Have it your own way,” Lingo said, untying Palmer. “You’ll have a good long time to simmer down.”
Palmer stood up shakily, rubbing the circulation back into his limbs. Then he pointedly turned his back on Lingo and started for the control room door.
“Where are you going, Jay?”
“To my cabin, if you don’t mind. There seems to be an unpleasant odor in here. As our friend Koris would say, ‘I feel undesirable twinges beginning in my digestive tract.’ “
Palmer lay on his bunk for hours, staring bleakly at the wall. The trip to Sol would take weeks; it might as well be centuries.
A week in this nest of traitors is as bad as a millenium, he thought bitterly. Why was I such a damned coward? I should’ve let the Doogs crush this filty ship like a walnut. It would’ve been all over in a minute or so. All I did was prolong the agony.
After all, what had he really gained by saving the ship and his own life? A few more weeks cooped up with the Solarian traitors, a few more weeks, maybe, on Earth, and then the Duglaari would descend on Sol in overwhelming numbers. Man’s home system would be completely annihilated.
Maybe that’s something to look forward to, after all, he thought bitterly. The pleasure of seeing Fortress Sol die.
But he knew that it would be a holl satisfaction indeed, for the death of Sol, in the long run, would be the death of the entire human race. For three centuries, the myth of Fortress Sol had sustained the Human Confederation in the face of defeat after defeat, in the face of computations that promised certain extinction within a century. All the hope of all men everywhere had been placed in Fortress Sol. It was the last and greatest hope of the human race, the bastion, the Rock of Ages, the Citadel of Man.
And Fortress Sol was nothing but a lie.
Palmer felt alone, more finally alone than any other man had ever been. He was alone with the unacceptable truth that Man’s last god had died, with the knowledge that that god too, like all the others, had been the bastard child of hope and fear, the futile denial of the final reality—that the human race itself, like all of its members, was mortal and doomed to die.
He thought of the great, dead mass of the Galaxy, through which the ship was hurtling; billions of stars, millions of planets. A cold, dead void ruled with an iron hand by the impersonal laws of physics.
What was Man, what was life itself, but a trace element, an insignificant contaminant in the vast, dead universe? In the whole of the Galaxy, life was statistically insignificant. The total mass of all living protoplasm since the dawn of time did not equal the mass of one unimportant, dead dwarf star. And sentience was but the billionth part of all the life in the universe.
The part that cared, the part that gave the dead rock and the fiery gas meaning.
And the part that clung so madly to each hour of its existence that it would sacrifice anything for a few more months of life.
That was the crime of Fortress Sol.
Dirk Lingo had done the impossible—he had invented a new sin. A sin not against men or gods, but against life itself. The universe, after all, was a vast battlefield where life warred against death, where awareness, sentience, intelligence, fought for survival in an infinite sea of nothingness.
And Fortress Sol had gone over to the enemy. No greater treason was possible. For the Duglaari Empire was not on the side of life; it was an agent of nothingness, of death.
Only now could Palmer understand the true nature of the enemy he had spent his life fighting. The Doogs were a thing insane. They did not fight to extend their territory, or increase their wealth or seed the dead universe with life. Death itself was the only Duglaari goal—the extinction of all other intelligent life. And when that mad goal was finally achieved, would the Doogs themselves have anything left to live for? Might not the Council of Wisdom simply shut itself down, and might not the Doogs themselves follow their computer into the final oblivion?
And nothing would remain anywhere, but flaming gas, and cold, cold rock, and hundreds of trillions of cubic miles of dead nothingness….
Palmer shook himself fearfully. He felt himself teetering on the edge of madness. These waters were too deep for any man to safely fathom alone….
And quite suddenly he knew that whatever his feelings, whatever his hate, he would sooner or later have to make at least a temporary peace with the Solarians. No man could bear to die this way, bereft of all human contact.
The Solarians were cowards, they were traitors, they were things unnameable, but at least they were human beings.
And whatever their sins, whatever hate there might be between them, they might very well be the last human beings he would ever see.
There was a knock on the door.
“Go away!” he snapped.
The knock became insistent.
“Go away, damn you!” Later, he knew, he would have to face them, but now hate was all that he could feel, and he wanted to be alone with the dying embers of his fury.
“It’s me,” said the voice of Robin Morel.
Who else? he thought grimly. The one he hated most, with the possible exception of Lingo, and of course the one he would be least able to turn away.
“All right, all right,” he muttered, “come on in.”
Robin kicked open the door and stood there, with an unbearable look of understanding and compassion on her face and a drink in either hand.
“Raul mixed us a couple of Supernovas,” she said, sitting down on the bed beside him. “Have one. It’ll make you feel a lot better.” She held out the small glass of blue liquid in her right hand.
“How do I know it’s not poison?” Palmer snapped sullenly.
“Don’t be juvenile, Jay. If we wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t have to resort to trickery to do it.”
“I’ve learned not to think I can understand the Solarian mind,” he said bitterly.
“Jay….” she sighed resignedly, and then gave a little lau
gh. “An old, old Terran toast,” she said, switching glasses. “If there be poison in thy wine, let my life pay for thine.”
Smiling, she downed the drink she had first offered him.
Palmer felt infinitely foolish and embarrassed, but also, somehow, quite touched. Wordlessly, he took the second glass.
Remembering the Nine Planets he had drunk, he was prepared for almost anything as he drank the clear blue liquid—anything but whash turned out to be like. It had no taste at all; it was exactly like a cool drink of water.
It glided tastelessly down his throat and into his belly. Suddenly he felt a strange sensation, as if a part of him were diffusing into the drink, rather than the drink diffusing into his bloodstream. He felt his emotions, his hate and fear and fury being leached from him, being compacted into an insufferable, dense, massive ball of emotional turmoil which seemed to be located in the pit of his stomach.
The rest of him, his freshly purged mind, now seemed cool, detached, insanely unemotional and objective, observing the burning, seething miniature sun that his emotions had become from an outside point of view, as a half-amused and half-repelled bystander.
As he watched the seething, churning, glowing ball of hate and fury and fear that was his own emotions, it seemed a thing apart, something alien and ludicrous.
Then it exploded.
For one terrible, nauseating instant, he felt the awful, monstrous, irresistible blast of his own hate sheer through his being like hard radiation through paper. Then it was past him and it was gone.
Completely gone. He felt cleansed by the fire of its passing; cleansed and tranquil and open. The hate had not been a part of himself; it had been the product of the confluence of outside forces beyond his control, and when it had exploded in a blast of cleansing fire, it had expended itself and left him a creature of his own ego and will once more.
Robin laughed softly.
“And that.” she said, “is why it’s called a Supernova.”
He looked at her with his calm new eyes, and he saw not a traitor, but simply a human being, a woman. She too might’ve been in the thrall of outside forces somehow lodged, horrid and alien and inescapable within her, but whatever she and the other Solarians had done, however black their crime, they too were in a sense victims. Victims and victimizers in one body, light and darkness in one mind—they were human beings, after all.
“I guess I’ve been acting pretty melodramatically,” Palmer said, rather sheepishly.
“No more than we have been,” she answered. “The difference is that we were doing it for a reason. But then part of the reason was so that you would act the way you did.”
“This thing must’ve really made me drunk. I don’t understand you at all.”
She laughed, but there was something sad behind it. “No, Jay,” she said. “You’re not drunk. A Supernova doesn’t get you drunk; what it does is let you see your emotions as something apart from the rest of you for a while. It sort of lets you see them from the outside, as if your mind were a detached observer. It isolates your emotions and calms you down. If anything, you’re more sober now than before you drank it.”
“If I’m not drunk, then what in blazes did you mean about your doing what you did so that I’d do what I did? Sounds like a lot of doubletalk to me.”
She seemed to be studying him carefully, almost clinically. “I guess you’re ready to hear the truth,” she said. “At least part of it.”
“That’s all I get around here,” he snapped. “Little pieces of the truth and great big slices of lies.”
She smiled sardonically. “I see that the drink is already beginning to wear off,” she said. “Too bad the effects can’t be made permanent. Just try to remember how you felt without your emotions clouding your mind.”
Suddenly Palmer realized that he did feel different again. He was no longer completely and coldly rational. Once more, he felt the old mixture of confusion, fury and hate. But it was different now; it could never again be completely the same. He had seen that there was another side to his feelings, that the situation did look different when he saw it completely stripped of his emotions. And even though his emotions were fast returning, he realized that the memory of that other, now-alien, point of view had muted and softened them permanently.
“You’ve been playing games with my mind all along, haven’t you?” he said. “From the first minute I boarded this ship. Why? What do you have to gain?”
Robin sighed deeply, and her face and posture seemed to relax, as if a great burden had at last been lifted from her.
“Yes…” she murmured. “In a way we have been…changing you. But largely for your gain, not ours. Try to think of yourself as you were at the beginning, before you met us, and then compare that memory with what you are now. Don’t you approve of the changes?”
He thought back…and the weeks seemed as years. He realized that he had expanded his mental universe; experienced more, in terms of new human relationships, learned more, deepened more, grown more, in these few weeks than he had in the entire previous decade. He felt ten years older; not ten years more tired, but ten years more mature. Though he had been breveted to the largely meaningless rank of general, he had still had the mentality of a Fleet Commander. Now he understood things about the Duglaari, The War, the human mind, Sol, that not even a Confederal High Marshal could fathom. The rank of general was no longer an empty mockery; it was now merely his due.
He had changed, and he found that he did approve of the changes, for the changes had been growth.
“It startles you, when you turn around and look behind you, doesn’t it?” Robin said. “You really are a better man now than the one you started as. For instance, you would not have doubts about your fitness now, were you to become Confederation Commander-in-Chief, as you someday may. Because you know that you’n now thg enough man for the job now. If anything, the job is too small for you.”
“What does that matter now, even if it is true?” he snapped. “The War’s lost. Sol is about to be destroyed, and when that news gets to the Confederation, there won’t be any will to fight left. Thanks to you.”
“You don’t know it all yet, Jay. I think you’re ready for the rest—at least a good part of it. It’s time you spoke to Dirk. He’s got an apology to make.”
“An apology? How do you apologize for treason?”
She shrugged. “Go on up to the control room and find out,” she said.
Lingo was alone in the control room, staring out into the meaningless swirl of Stasis-Space, a strange half-bitter, half-triumphant smile on his face.
“Sit down, Jay,” he said, easing himself into his pilot’s seat.
Palmer sat down next to Lingo. “Robin said you had an apology to make,” he said tonelessly. “I suppose you know where you can stick your apology. How can you apologize for your stupidity—trying to sell out the human race?”
Lingo laughed harshly. “Traitor, I can understand…” he said, “but I’m injured when you accuse me of stupidity.”
“Come off it, Lingo!” Palmer snapped. “You know damn well you blew it. I can understand what you were trying to do, even if it does turn my stomach. Bluff the Duglaari into leaving Sol alone, even using the entire Human Confederation as a kind of consolation prize to the Doogs. Then, if those super-weapons do have time to be developed, when all mankind is dead but you…. But you were a little too smart, weren’t you? You got the Doogs a little too scared, didn’t you? And now you’ll never have a chance to build any superweapons.”
Lingo turned to Palmer, his face convulsed with laughter. “So you believed it too!” he finally said. “Let me congratulate myself! Jay, weren’t all those superweapons somehow familiar? Didn’t they sound terribly like the sort of nonsense the Confederation propaganda section is always churning out? They should, you know, since they were lifted verbatim from Confederation propaganda. Each and every one of them was a lie. No one will be able to build weapons like those for centuries, if ever. Let me
tell you, Jay, four hundred Duglaari warships would have little trouble defeating the forces of Fortress Sol, let alone four thousand.”
“Then what in blazes can you find to laugh about? So it was all a bluff to make the Doogs think Sol was too tough a nut to crack, and it backfired! Now the Duglaari will attack Sol with ten times the force necessary to wipe you out. By your own admission, you’ve outsmarted yourself!”
Lingo shook his head. “Ah, Jay,” he said, “surely you are capable of more subtlety than that! Haven’t you ever heard of Brer Rabbit?”
“Who?”
“Brer Rabbit. An ancient Terran folk legend. Brer Rabbit was a machiavellian little bunny who lived in a thorny briar patch. One careless day, he was captured by his arch-enemy, Brer Fox. Brer Fox amused himself by reciting a long catalogue of atrocities he was going to inflict on his victim. But instead of the expected reaction—fear and hate—poor Brer Fox found himself being thanked by Brer Rabbit for his infinite mercy. Finally, Brer Fox demanded to know why he was being thanked for his promise to skin Brer Rabbit alive and boil him in oil. To which our hero replied: You promised you’d only boil me in oil, skin me alive, and eat me. But thank you, Brer Fox! At least you’re not going to throw me into that awful briar patch.”
“So? What does that have to do with….?”
“Really, Jay!” sighed Lingo. “Can’t you guess what Brer Fox did then? He threw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, of course! Exactly what our clever little bunny was angling for all along.”
Palmer’s jaw fell. “You mean….?”
“What else?” said Lingo, with a shrug and a grin. “From beginning to end, everything went exactly according to plan.”
He sighed, frowned, and stared at Palmer with a sad, contrite expression.
“And that’s what I want to ask you to forgive me for, Jay,” Lingo said. “You were used. You were part of the plan too. Did you ever ask yourself what in blazes we needed a so-called Ambassador from the Confederation for? After all, if, as we told Kurowski, the whole surrender business was simply a ruse to get to see the Kor, we could’ve faked an ambassador too, couldn’t we?”
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