The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  But though ships in overdrive had to be considered as in motion, and though their speed had to be considered as beyond the astronomical, there were such incredible distances to be covered that time piled up. Aside from double stars, there were no suns yet discovered which were less than light-years apart. The time required for travel between inhabited planets was still comparable to the time needed for surface-travel between continents on a world. So the fleet of Mekin, journeying faster than the mind could imagine, nevertheless drove and drove and drove in the blackness and darkness and isolation of each ship’s overdrive field. They had so driven for days. They would continue to do so for days to come.

  When Captain Bors burned the documents in the Ministry for Diplomatic Affairs, the enemy fleet might have been said to be at one place. When a submerged space-cruiser, planning assassination, was itself blown to bits with no chance to strike back, the Mekinese fleet was approximately somewhere else. When a cabinet meeting disheartened King Humphrey, the fleet was much nearer to Kandar. But days of highly-tedious eventlessness were still ahead of the war-fleet.

  So Bors and Gwenlyn and Morgan got a ground-car and were driven to Kandar’s commercial spaceport. There they found the Sylva. It was far larger than the usual space-yachts. There were commercial space-craft which were no larger. But it was a workmanlike sort of ship, at that. It had two lifeboat blisters, and there were emergency rockets for landings where no landing-grids existed. The armored bands of overdrive-coil shielding were massive. The Sylva, in fact, looked more like a service ship than either a commercial vessel or a yacht. It was obviously unarmed, but it had the look of a craft that could go very nearly anywhere.

  “You’ll find the Talents a bit odd,” said Gwenlyn, as they drove up under the hull’s wide bulge. “When they meet new people they like to show off. Most of them were pretty well frustrated before Father found a use for them. But they’re quite pleasant people if you don’t treat them like freaks. They’re not, you know.”

  Bors had nothing to say. Until he was fifteen he’d lived on Tralee, which was then a quiet, pacific world, as Kandar had been. As the nephew of a monarch at least as resolutely constitutional as King Humphrey, he’d been raised in a very matter-of-fact fashion. The atmosphere had been that of a comfortable, realistic adjustment to facts. He was taught a great respect for certain facts without being made fanatically opposed to anything else. He’d been trained to require reasonable evidence without demanding that all proofs come out of test tubes and electronic apparatus. He was specifically taught that arithmetic cannot be proved by experimental evidence, but that sound experimental evidence agrees with arithmetic. So he was probably better qualified than most to deal with something like Talents, Incorporated. But it was not easy for him.

  The ground-car stopped. An exit-port in the space yacht opened and an extension-stair came down. The three of them mounted it. The inner lock-door opened and they entered the Sylva.

  An incredibly fat woman regarded Bors with warm and sentimental eyes. A man no older than Bors, but with prematurely gray hair, nodded at him. A man in a chair lifted a hand in highly dignified greeting. Everyone seemed to know who he was. There was a blonde woman who might be in her late thirties, a short, scowling man with several jewelled rings on his fingers, and a gangling, skinny adolescent. There were still others.

  Morgan addressed them with enthusiasm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I present Captain Bors! He’s come to arrange to use your talents in the gravest of all possible situations for his world!”

  There were nods. There were bows. The dignified man in the chair said confidently, “The ship was where I specified.”

  “Exactly!” said Morgan, beaming. “Exactly! A magnificent piece of work! Which is what I expected of you!”

  He made individual introductions all around. Bors did not begin to catch the names. This was so-and-so, said Morgan, “our Telepath.” Still another, “our ship-arrival Precognizer—he predicted the coming of the liner, you remember.” He came to the scowling man with rings. “Captain Bors, this is our Talent for Predicting Dirty Tricks. You’ve reason to thank him for disclosing that Mekinese cruiser underwater.”

  Bors followed the lead given him.

  “There are many of us,” he said, “with reason to thank you for a most satisfying operation. We smashed that cruiser!”

  The scowling man nodded portentously. The introductions went on. The skinny adolescent was “our Talent for Locating Individuals.” The enormously fat woman: “our Talent for Propaganda.”

  Bors was confused. He had to steel himself not to decide flatly that all this was nonsense. Morgan and Gwenlyn took him away from what appeared like a sort of social hall for these externally commonplace persons.

  They arrived at a smaller compartment. It was a much more personal sort of place. Morgan waved his hand.

  “Gwenlyn and I live here,” he observed. “Our cabins are yonder and you might call this our family room. Gwenlyn finds the undiluted society of Talents a bit wearing. Of course, handling them is my profession, though I have some plans for retirement. We’ll see our Mathematics Talent in a minute or two. He knows it’s expected that he’ll be the most useful of all our Talents at the moment. He will make an entrance.”

  Gwenlyn sat down. She regarded Bors with amusement.

  “I think the Captain’s halfway unconvinced again, Father.”

  “I’m not unconvinced,” said Bors grimly. “I’m desperate. It’s not easy either to ignore what’s happened or to believe that it will continue. And I—well—if the Mekinese fleet does arrive, I don’t want to miss going with our fleet to meet it.”

  “You won’t miss anything, Captain,” said Morgan happily. “Have a cigar. Gwenlyn, do you think I should—”

  “Let me,” said Gwenlyn. “I know how the Captain feels. I’m an outsider, too. I haven’t any talent—fortunately! Sit down, Captain.”

  Bors seated himself. Morgan offered a cigar. He seemed too impatient and much too pleased to be able to sit down himself. Bors lighted the cigar; at the first puff he removed it and looked at it respectfully. Such cigars were not easy to come by.

  “I think,” said Gwenlyn amiably, “that Father himself has a talent, which makes him not too easy to get along with. But it has had some good results. I hope it will have more here. The whole business is unbelievable, though, unless you think of some very special facts.”

  Bors nodded. He puffed again and waited.

  “He told you some of it,” said Gwenlyn. “About the ship arrival Talent and the dowser. There’ve always been such people with gifts that nobody’s ever understood, but that are real. Only they’ve always been considered freaks. They feel that they’re remarkable—and they are—and they want people to recognize this. But they’ve never had a function in society. They’ve been denied all function. Take the Mathematical Talent! He can do any sort of mathematics in his head. Any sort! He used to hire out to work computers, and he always got discharged because he did the computations in his head instead of using the machines. He was always right, and he was proud of his ability. He wanted to use it! But nobody’d let him. He was a miserable misfit until Father found him and hired him.”

  Bors nodded again, but his forehead wrinkled.

  “Talents, Incorporated is merely an organization, created by my father, to make use of people who can do things ordinarily impossible, and probably unexplainable, but which exist nevertheless. There are more talents than Father has gathered, of course. But what good are their gifts to them? No good at all! They’re considered freaks. So Father gathered them together as he found them. First, of course, he needed capital. So he used them to make money. Then he began to do useful things with them, since nobody else did. Now he’s brought them here to help.”

  Bors said painfully, “They don’t all have the same gift.”

  “No,” agreed Gwenlyn.

  “And there are limits to their talents?”

  “Naturally!”

  Mo
rgan broke in, amused. “Gwenlyn insists that I have the talent of finding and using talents.”

  “A mild talent, Father,” said Gwenlyn. “Not enough to make you revolting. But—”

  A door opened. A tweedy man with a small mustache stood in the doorway.

  “I believe I’m wanted?” he said offhandedly.

  Morgan introduced him. His name was Logan. He was the lightning calculator, the mathematical talent of Talents, Incorporated. Bors shook his hand. The tweedy man sat down. He drew out a pipe and began to fill it with conscious exactitude. He looked remarkably like a professor of mathematics who modestly pretended to be just another commuter. He dressed the part: slightly untidy hair; bulldog pipe; casual, expensive sports shoes.

  “I understand,” he said negligently, “that you want some calculations made.”

  “I’m told I do,” said Bors, harassedly. “But I don’t know what they are.”

  “Then how can I make them?” asked Logan with lifted eyebrows.

  “Naturally,” said Morgan, “you’ll find out the kind of calculations he needs, that he can’t get anywhere else. That’ll be the kind he needs from you.”

  “Hm,” said Logan. He blew a smoke-ring, thoughtfully. “Where do you use calculations in space-travel?”

  “Everywhere,” said Bors. “But we’ve computers for it. And they’re quite adequate.”

  Logan shrugged. “Then what do you need me for?”

  “You tell me!” said Bors, nettled. “Certainly we don’t need calculations for space-travel. We’ve no long journey in mind. We’re simply going to go out and do some fighting when the Mekinese fleet gets here.”

  Logan blew another smoke-ring.

  “What calculations do you use in space-fighting?”

  “Courses and distances,” said Bors. He could see no sense in this, but he went on. “Allowing for acceleration and deceleration in setting our missiles on targets. Allowing for the motion of the targets. Again we have computers for this. In practice they’re too good! If we send a missile at a Mekinese ship, they set a computer on it, and it computes a course for a counter-missile which explodes and destroys our missile when it’s within a certain distance of it.”

  “Then your missile doesn’t hit,” said Logan.

  “All too often, it doesn’t,” admitted Bors.

  “Then their missiles don’t hit either.”

  “If they send a hundred missiles at us, they’re cancelled out if we send a hundred to destroy them. Unfortunately, if they send more than we can counter, we get wiped out.”

  Bors found his throat going dry. This, of course, was what he’d desperately been denying to himself. It was the fundamental reason for a total lack of hope. The history of warfare is the history of rivalry between attack and defense. In the matter of missiles in space, there was a stalemate. One missile fired in attack could always be destroyed by another fired in defense. It was an arithmetic balance. But it meant that three ships could always destroy two, and four ships three. In the space-fight ahead, there would be at least ten Mekinese ships to every one from Kandar. The sally of Kandar’s fleet would not be a rush into battle, but an advance into annihilation. “What we need,” said Bors desperately, “is a means to compute courses for our missiles so they’ll hit, and that the enemy can’t counter-compute—so that his missiles can’t compute how to change course in order to cancel ours out.”

  He was astonished as the words left his mouth. This was what was needed, of course. But then he realized that it couldn’t be done.

  Logan blew a smoke-ring.

  “Mechanical computers,” he said, “have limits. They’re designed to calculate a trajectory with constant acceleration or no acceleration. But that’s all.”

  Bors frowned. “What else could there be?”

  “Changing acceleration,” said Logan condescendingly. “A mechanical computer can’t compute that. But I can.”

  Bors continued to frown. One part of his mind assured him that the statement that mechanical computers could not calculate trajectories of missiles with changing acceleration was incorrect. But the rest of his mind tried to imagine such a trajectory. He couldn’t. In practice, men do not have to handle the results of variable acceleration as cumulative effects.

  “I think,” said Bors carefully, “that if you can do that—”

  Logan blew a smoke-ring more perfect than any that had gone before.

  “I’ll calculate some tables,” he said modestly. “You can use them on your computer-results. Then if you arrange your missiles to change their acceleration as they go, the Mekinese missiles can’t intercept them.”

  He waved his hand with the grand air of someone assuring a grammar-grade pupil that multiplication tables were quite reliable and could be used with confidence. But his eyes fixed themselves on Bors’s face. As the Captain realized the implications of his statement, the eyes of the Mathematical Talent of Talents, Incorporated shone with gratified vanity.

  “We’ll go out in a couple of tin cans,” said Bors fiercely, “and try this out with dummy warheads!”

  Gwenlyn said quickly, “Marvelous! Marvelous, Logan!”

  “It’s nothing,” said Logan modestly.

  But it was a very great deal. Bors, impatient to try it out, nevertheless realized that Logan hadn’t made the suggestion out of a brilliant perception of a solution to a problem in ballistics, but because he thought in terms of mathematical processes. He didn’t think of a new missile operation, but a new kind of computation. And he reveled in the fact that he had showed off his brilliance.

  In the ground-car on the way to the fleet, Bors said helplessly to Gwenlyn, “I’m not the right man to be the liaison with you people. But this might make us a pretty costly conquest for Mekin! With luck, we may trade them ship for ship! They won’t miss the ships they lose, but it’ll be a lot of satisfaction to us!”

  “You expect to be killed,” Gwenlyn said flatly.

  “My uncle,” explained Bors, “considers that he should have gotten killed when Mekin took over Tralee. It would have set a good example. Since we didn’t do it for Tralee, we’ll do it for Kandar. The king’s going along too. After all, that’s one of the things kings are for.”

  “To get killed?”

  “When necessary,” Bors told her. “Kandar shouldn’t surrender even though there will be at least ten Mekinese to one Kandarian.”

  She smiled at him, very oddly.

  “I suspect,” she said, “that not everybody on the fleet will be killed. I’m sure of it. In fact, as my father would say, that’s Talents, Incorporated information!”

  Bors frowned worriedly.

  The fleet of Mekin continued in overdrive, heading for Kandar. Each second it traversed a distance equal to the span of a solar system, out to its remotest planet. A heartbeat that would begin where a pulsing Cepheid, had it been possible to see, would have seemed at its greatest brilliance, and would end where the light from that same giant star seemed dimmed almost to extinction. Of course no such observation could be made from any ship in overdrive. Each one of the many, many ugly war-machines was sealed in its own cocoon of overdrive-stressed space. Even in the armed transports that carried officials and bureaucrats and experienced police organizers to set up a puppet government on Kandar, there was not the faintest hint of anything that happened outside the individual ship. But, what might be termed the position of the fleet, changed with remarkable swiftness. It traveled light-hours between breaths. Light-days between sentences. Light-months and light-years.…

  But it would not arrive on Kandar for a long while yet. Not for three whole days.

  Chapter 4

  The small fighting ship lifted swiftly from the surface of Kandar. As it rose, the sky turned dark and the sun’s brilliant disk, far too bright to be looked at with unshielded eyes, became a blazing furnace that could roast unshielded flesh. Stars appeared, shining myriads despite the sun, with every one vivid against a background of black. The planet’s surface became
a half-ball, of which a part lay in darkness.

  “Co-o-ntact!” said a voice through many speakers placed throughout the fighting ship’s hull.

  There was the rushing sound of compartment doors closing. Then a cushioned silence everywhere, save for the faint, standby scratching sounds that loudspeakers always emit.

  Screens lighted. A speck moved among the stars.

  “Prepare counter-missiles,” said the voice. “Proximity and track. Fire only as missiles appear.”

  The moving speck flamed and was again only a moving speck. It ejected something which hurtled toward the ship just up from Kandar.

  “Intercept one away!” said a confident voice.

  The last-launched missile fled toward the first moving speck, diminishing as it went. It swung suddenly, off course.

  “Fire two!” snapped somebody somewhere.

  Another object hurtled away toward the stars.

  “Fire three! Fire four!”

  Far away, something came plunging toward the ship. It did not travel in a straight line. It curved. It was not reasonable for a missile to travel in a curved line. The interceptor missiles had to detect it, swing to intercept, to accelerate furiously. The first interceptor missed. Worse, it had lost its target. It went wandering vaguely among the stars and was gone.

  The second missed. The voice in the speaker seemed to crack.

  “Fire all missiles! They’re turning too late! Pull ’em up ahead of the damned thing!”

  The deadly contrivances plunged away and further away into emptiness. The third interceptor missed. The fourth. Tiny specks moved gracefully on the radar screen. There was something coming toward the ship that had risen from Kandar. The tracer-trails of missiles appeared against the stars. They made very pretty parabolas. That was all. The thing that was coming left a tracer-trail too. It curved preposterously. The just-risen ship furiously flung missiles at it. It did not dodge. But none of the tracer-trails intersected its own. All of them passed to its rear.

  For the fraction of a second it was visible as an object instead of a speck. That object swelled.