Children of the Comet

by Donald Moffitt

  “You better make it soon. If we’ve miscalculated, we’ll shoot right past the Milky Way on the way to infinity.”

  Alten got up. “I’ll get on it right away. Get ready to cut off the Higgs drive at short notice.”

  “Don’t overlook Karn’s people either. They’ve had over twenty years to become disaffected. You might seek out that cosmology apprentice who was so worried about sterilizing Rebirth with the Higgs exhaust—what was his name? Daniel something.”

  Alten paused on the way out to take a last look at the distorted galaxy on the display, squeezed to a thin line between the fore and aft blind spots compressing the narrowing starbow. To an observer in 3C-295, if such a thing were possible, Time’s Beginning and everyone in it, including himself, would seem to be a wafer-thin disc in the direction of its flight. The thought never failed to astonish him. He didn’t feel at all like a paper cutout. Funny, but he felt normal. Yet eons were ticking by in mere seconds as he paused to look back at his father, fiddling worriedly with dials at the console. Once the ship turned over and began to decelerate, the blind spots would start to shrink and the rainbow hoops of stars would expand again. By the time they reached the vicinity of Sol, the Universe would have regained its multicolored glory.

  The display abruptly disappeared. His father had found it too unsettling. Alten couldn’t blame him. It was a reminder that the ship had been pushed to within a sliver of its limits and that Karn wanted to push it still further.

  “Keep her on course, Skipper,” he said at the door.

  Joorn yawned and rubbed his eyes. It was ship’s night, and all the interior lights had dimmed themselves hours ago. He had been at the console for fourteen hours straight.

  “Why don’t you knock off and get some sleep, Skipper,” said his first officer, a young physics apprentice named Chu. “I can handle it.”

  Chu was a promising aspirant from the ranks of the new generation who had been born during the homeward flight, and he was both bright and impatient. He had been twiddling his thumbs for the last two hours.

  “Alten should have been back by now,” Joorn said. “And I can’t seem to raise him on his talkie.”

  “He’s wise,” Chu said. “He probably has it turned off.”

  “What do you mean?” Joorn had confided in Chu, telling him all about Alten’s suspicions and about what they were going to have to do if they proved correct. He was grooming Chu to captain the ship himself someday, and in any case, with turnaround almost upon them, Chu needed to be au courant.

  “Oliver’s guys have been acting antsy the last few days. As if something’s up. They broke up a meeting of the physics club two days ago. They’d been eavesdropping on our chatter, and something was making them nervous. Those antiquated tough guys and the silly tabards they wear! They even roughed up a couple of our guys for talking back. We couldn’t believe it! It was sort of like the way my dad describes the old days, when we started out from Rebirth. I get hassled once in a while too. Oliver Twisty—that’s what some of our guys call him—isn’t too happy about my being first officer. He wants to put in his own man.”

  “I wonder if Alten made contact with Daniel,” Joorn said.

  “Oh, the guy you mentioned? Daniel Petrocelli, one of the Old Guard physicists who doesn’t dance to Oliver’s tune anymore. I don’t know if that was a good idea. They might be watching him. I think he was starting to come around. He was coming to the physics club meetings for a while like some of the others that age, the tired-out gaffers who want to stop gallivanting around the Universe with Karn and settle down. Then he stopped coming. Maybe he just got scared. Or maybe he’s a fink.”

  Joorn tapped in to the running estimate of the deceleration needed to come to a stop at the Milky Way if Alten’s original estimate was correct. It still was only a hair over one gravity, but as he watched, a digit four places past the decimal point ticked over.

  “I think we’d better …” he began.

  The door to the control room was flung wide open, and a dozen men crowded into the compartment. Chu started to get up, but he was immediately surrounded by shadowy figures.

  “Stay where you are, and don’t move, Mr. Chu,” Oliver’s voice ordered. One of the figures brandished a pipe for emphasis.

  Joorn didn’t try to get up. He swiveled around in his seat and said, “What do you want, Oliver? And where’s Alten?”

  “Alten’s locked up where he can’t cause any trouble,” Oliver said. “He won’t be harmed as long as he behaves himself. I can’t say the same for that turncoat, Petrocelli.”

  “What’s going to happen to Petrocelli?” Joorn said evenly.

  “He’s going to be hanged when we get around to it,” Oliver said. He smiled humorlessly, a flash of white teeth in the dim lighting. “Fortunate that we’re going to maintain our one-G acceleration, isn’t it?”

  “On what charge? And who made you the law aboard my ship?”

  “What charge?” Oliver savored the question. “Why, consorting with the enemy.”

  Joorn had trouble containing his fury. “Enemy? My son? Me?”

  “Control yourself, Captain Gant. Captain no more, I’m afraid. I’m captain now.”

  “What does Professor Karn have to say about this?

  “Professor Karn will be informed in due course. At the moment he’s busy, thinking great thoughts.”

  Joorn put all the authority he could muster into his voice. “Professor Karn and I made an agreement when we left Rebirth. He’ll have the ship when we disembark at Sol.”

  Oliver laughed. “The professor never intended to keep that agreement. He’s not willing to lose the built-up gamma factor we’ve reached so far. He’s an old man, and he’s afraid he won’t live to achieve his dream if he does. We’ve been feeding you doctored data for two decades. You would have figured it out sooner or later. Now it’s too late.”

  “Not yet!” Joorn heaved himself out of his chair and lunged for Oliver. A titanium pipe caught him in the midsection and drove the air out of him. He sank back in his chair, gasping and nauseous. He was dizzily aware that Chu had tried to get up to help him and that Oliver’s thugs were beating him senseless.

  “Careful, Captain,” Oliver said. We don’t want to hurt you. Professor Karn wouldn’t like it. We might need you again.”

  Chu was being dragged from his chair now, limp and bloody, but conscious. Oliver nodded at one of his cohorts, a middle-aged, pot-bellied man who’d been standing to one side while the others worked Chu over.

  “Okay, Shenk, why don’t you try the second seat on for size?” Oliver said. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Don’t touch anything. We’re still at one G. I don’t think the captain here did anything yet to start the turnover procedure.”

  A pair of Oliver’s aging thugs had a rubber-legged Chu on his feet, supporting him on either side. Two others bracketed Joorn and started to pull him upright. He shook off their hands and stood up by himself. Oliver motioned, and the two started herding Joorn toward the door after Chu and his captors.

  “Put them in the lockup with the others,” Oliver said. “Nobody talks to them. If anybody gets too curious, lock them up too.”

  The passageways were practically empty this time of night. The few people they passed, most of them solitary or in twos, glanced at them, but nobody tried to approach the odd procession. Joorn thought there was a kind of hush in the atmosphere, but perhaps he was imagining it.

  Wherever they were taking him, it couldn’t be too far; Chu was in no condition to stay on his feet long, and he doubted they’d want to carry him. He kept looking around, but he saw no way to get control of the situation.

  Then he thought he saw an opportunity—a slim one, but maybe the only chance he’d get. They were headed toward the door of what looked like a storeroom, and for some reason a small crowd had gathered there—not more than twenty or thirty people. A
big redheaded young fellow, with two or three other youngsters of his generation joining in, was arguing with the tabard-bedecked quartet who were stationed in front of the door.

  “We demand to see them!” he was yelling. “You had no right to lock them up!” There were mutters of agreement from the crowd. The quartet of guards, beefy men from Oliver’s generation, were looking uncomfortable and fingering their titanium pipes.

  By that time, some in the crowd had become aware of the approaching entourage. Several of them recognized Chu and yelled out to him. Chu raised his bloodied head and responded with what was evidently a slogan of the younger generation: “Screw the Trogs!” Joorn assumed it meant troglodytes. The crowd started to take up the chant, and things began to look ugly.

  It was now or never. Joorn eyed his guards. They were thoroughly distracted, not paying any attention to him. All four were of Oliver’s generation: overweight, jowly, and out of shape. Joorn was older than any of them, but he had kept himself fit. He whirled and pushed one of his unwanted escorts with both hands as hard as he could. The man toppled over and hit the floor. Joorn didn’t wait to see if he’d hit his head. With the momentum of the same whirling motion, he chopped the other man in the face, just below the nose, with the edge of a clenched fist. The other two dropped Chu and were on him in a second. The titanium pipes came out, and Joorn never saw the one that hit him alongside the head.

  Joorn came to, his head throbbing and his vision blurred. He was lying on some kind of hard surface—the lid of a plastic crate. A woman was sponging his head and the side of his face. He was aware of blood trickling down into the collar of his uniform.

  “Don’t try to move yet, Captain,” the woman said.

  He ignored her and sat up. It was too quick, and there was a moment of dizziness. It passed, and his vision cleared.

  He was in a dim, smallish room crowded with irregular piles of goods. About two dozen people were interned with him, sitting on crates or standing around. The men were mostly young, with close-cropped beards or scraggly attempts at them. The women, fewer of them, were in the same age group but more kempt.

  Alten’s face swam into view. He leaned over Joorn and said, “Take it easy, Father. How do you feel?”

  “Rotten. What happened?”

  “After they dumped you and Chu inside with the other unreliables? They started arresting people outside and shoving them in here with us. They stopped that business pretty quick. I think they’re afraid to open the door now. The crowd’s growing.”

  The redheaded agitator who’d been haranguing the Karnites loomed behind Alten. He moved closer. He had a black eye and a split lip. “They’re spreading the word outside. We’re not going to let the Trogs get away with this, Captain. Not this time. Their day is past.” He grinned and his lip started bleeding again. “We’ve even got some of them on our side.”

  “Like Petrocelli,” Alten said grimly.

  Joorn raised himself on one elbow and looked around. “Where’s Chu?”

  “He’s right over there, Captain Gant,” said the woman who was sponging the blood off his contusions. “We think he has a couple of cracked ribs, but he’ll be all right. No, don’t try to get up.”

  Joorn craned his neck to see Chu. The first officer was lying on a crate a short distance away. His head was wrapped in makeshift bandages that looked like ripped-up sheets. A couple of women were attending to him. They had his shirt off, and one of the women was winding a bandage around his torso.

  “What did they do to Petrocelli?” Joorn said.

  “They roughed him up pretty good,” Alten said. “Then they took him away someplace. They kept telling him he was going to get a one-gravity necktie. They must have had a tag on him all along because they were all over us about five minutes after we met. So he didn’t have a chance to say too much, and he was very nervous. But I got the impression that he wanted to come over to the Homegoer side.”

  “Yeah,” the big agitator put in. “That’s what we thought too. He was very cagey with us after the physics club raid, but we thought he was one of those who’d come around in the end. He was one scared little guy, but he had guts.”

  “This is Leonard Ryan,” Alten said. “His specialty is multiverse theory. When he’s not busy stirring up trouble.”

  Ryan grinned at Alten. “I’m working with your boy on a paper on quantum chromodynamics. We’re going to stir up a lot of trouble there too.”

  “We’re applying QCD to the problem of the Higgs boson and hadronic photons,” Alten explained.

  “Karn double-crossed us,” Joorn told them. “He never had any intention of dropping us off at Sol. Oliver and a flunky named Shenk are up in the control room right now. They’re kidnapping us all over again.”

  Ryan grew serious. “I know Shenk. He tried to present some kindergarten version of string theory at the physics club, and when the reviewers turned him down, he got Oliver to force a presentation. He doesn’t know a black hole from a hole in the ground, and he doesn’t know anything about the Higgs field except that it works when you press the right button.”

  “He especially doesn’t know what would happen to a planet if a Higgs drive got within sneezing distance when a ship was decelerating,” Alten said grimly.

  “Nothing that hasn’t already happened to Earth during the sun’s red giant phase, Alten,” Ryan reminded him.

  “That’s moot,” Joorn said. “Oliver doesn’t plan to decelerate. We may zip past the Milky Way altogether if we don’t make a course correction now. The question is: How do we stop them?”

  “We can take them, Captain,” Ryan said.

  “We’re locked up,” Joorn said savagely. “Besides, we may outnumber them, but we’re not exactly a fighting force, are we?”

  He looked around pointedly at the people in the storeroom. There was Chu with his bloody bandages, not to mention himself. There was a preponderance of young men and women, most of them students—impractical and ideal­istic, some of them showing signs of mistreatment by the thugs outside and doubtless intimidated by them. And there was a handful of bewildered oldsters, would-be Earthbound returnees who’d been swept up in the confusion of Oliver’s takeover.

  “Listen,” Ryan said urgently, “by now those goons out there have sent for reinforcements. The crowd’s getting out of hand.”

  Joorn listened to the noise outside. It was getting louder. There was a dangerous rumble, punctuated by angry shouts.

  They were throwing things now. Joorn heard a thunk as something breakable hit the storeroom door. After a moment in which the beleaguered guards must have done something retaliatory, there was a surge in crowd noise.

  “They’re getting panicky,” Ryan said. He turned his head and called, “Any moment now, people! Take your positions.”

  Joorn watched in amazement as a number of the young people, including the two women who’d been doing the nursing, separated from the prisoners and flattened themselves against the bulkhead on either side of the door, as if they’d rehearsed. To his further surprise, a couple of the Earthborn oldsters conferred briefly and joined them.

  After a minute or two, the door handle rattled and the door sprang open. A couple of people from the crowd were propelled inside with enough force to send them sprawling. The men who had pushed them followed, brandishing their lengths of pipe. On their heels came the other two guards, manhandling two more struggling protesters.

  There was no time for them to react. They were immediately engulfed by the people who’d been hiding on either side of the door. Their titanium pipes were plucked from their hands before they knew it, and they found themselves face down on the floor with enough feet on their backs and necks to keep them from getting up. The mild young woman who’d been nursing Joorn was holding one of the titanium pipes and eyeing it speculatively when Ryan reached her side, saying, “No, Maryann, no.”

  In moments t
he room was flooded with people from outside. There were lots of hugs and a few tears. Ryan’s voice cut through the din.

  “Come on, people, we’ve got to get out of here before the reinforcements arrive!”

  The crowd broke up and swirled through the door. Ryan was nodding to people here and there, and Joorn saw a couple of them improvising a stretcher from the lid of a storage bin and loading Chu onto it. Then Ryan was at Joorn’s side.

  “Can you walk, Captain?”

  “I can walk,” Joorn said tightly.

  Ryan nodded again, and a couple of his stalwarts helped Joorn to his feet and supported him. They joined the crowd that was now pouring out the door.

  “Where are we going?” Joorn said.

  “The control room,” Ryan replied.

  The corridors were filling with people as the crowd went swarming by. The corridor lights were still dimmed for the night, but doors to living compartments were opening as they passed and bleary-eyed people, some of them still struggling into their clothes, were adding to their numbers.

  “The word’s out,” Ryan said.

  It wasn’t far to the control room, and they only encountered one of Oliver’s corridor patrols. There were only three of them, sloppy fellows with their best years behind them, if they had ever had any best years. They were deep in some halfhearted argument raised only to dispel after-hours boredom, and when they saw the mob surging toward them, they looked at each other and took off without further discussion.

  The door to the control room was locked or barricaded, but a couple of Ryan’s hefty young stalwarts kicked it open in short order. Some kind of advance squad rushed with them into the control room, while others held back the crowd.

  Joorn tried to break loose from his attendants, but they held on to him. “Not yet, Captain,” one of them said. “Wait till we know it’s safe.”

  There was the sound of what might have been a scuffle inside the control room. Joorn thought he recognized Oliver’s voice before it was abruptly silenced.