It went by. Bors’s voice, relayed, said,
“Coup! You’re out of action. Right?”
The skipper of the ship just up from Kandar said grudgingly, “Hell, yes! We threw fifteen missiles at it, and missed with every one! This is magic! Can we all have this before the Mekinese get here?”
“I hope so,” said Bors’s voice. “We’re trying hard, anyhow. Will you report to ground?”
“Right,” said the speakers in the ship which had just fired fifteen missiles without a hit or interception. “Off.”
And then the compartment doors opened again and the normal sounds of a small fighting ship in space began again.
An hour later, aground, Bors said impatiently, “Half a dozen ships have checked out with me. I sent a single dummy-warhead missile at each one. They knew I was trying something new. They tried interceptors. Not one worked. Worse, my missiles drew the interceptors off-course so they lost their original aim on the Isis. Missiles set for variable acceleration not only can’t be intercepted but they draw interceptors off-course and are super-interceptors themselves. I fired one dummy warhead at each target-ship. I got six hits with six missiles. They fired an average of twelve missiles against each of mine. They got no intercepts or hits with seventy-two tries! This appears to me a very gratifying development for the situation we’re in.”
The bearded man who’d plumped for negotiation, earlier, now spoke indignantly in the War Council.
“Why wasn’t this revealed earlier? We could have made a demonstration and Mekin would have been wary of issuing an ultimatum! Why was this concealed until it was too late to use in negotiations with them?”
“It wasn’t available until today,” Bors answered. “It was tried, and it worked.”
An admiral said slowly, “As I understand it, this is a proposal of the—hm—Talents, Incorporated people.”
“No,” said Bors. “We got the idea but couldn’t do the math. Talents, Incorporated did the computations to make the missiles hit.”
“Why? Why let them do the math? There may be a counter to this device. Perhaps Talents, Incorporated, was sent to us to get us to adopt this freakish trick.”
“Talents, Incorporated,” said Bors, “enabled us to smash a submerged Mekinese cruiser. In giving us the necessary information, Talents, Incorporated kept the Mekinese from wiping out our space-fleet. Talents, Incorporated—Oh, the devil!”
The admiral gazed about him.
“This—device,” he said precisely, “is not a tried and standard weapon. On the other hand, the sally of our fleet is not war. Because of our civilian population we cannot make war on Mekin! The defiance of our fleet will be a gesture only—a splendid gesture, but no more. It should be a dignified gesture. It would be most inappropriate for our fleet to take to space, ostensibly to say that it prefers death to surrender, and for it then to unveil a new and eccentric device which would say that the fleet was foolish enough to hope that a gadget would save it from dying and Kandar from conquest. The fleet action should be fought with scorn of odds. It should end its existence in a manner worthy of its traditions!”
Bors exploded, “Damnit—”
King Humphrey held up his hand and said fretfully, “As I remember it, Admiral, you have been assigned to hold together the defense forces—those who either did not insist on going with the fleet, or for whom there was no room—who have to be surrendered. You talk of gestures. But the young men who will go out in the fleet are not going there to make gestures! They simply and furiously hate Mekin for what it is about to do. They are going out to kill as many Mekinese as they can before they, themselves, are killed. They would call your speech nonsense. And I would agree with them.”
Bors said respectfully, “Yes, Majesty. It may also be said that copies of the first Talents, Incorporated launching-data tables have already been distributed to the missile crews throughout the fleet. More are being distributed as fast as Logan calculates them. I don’t think you can keep our ships from trying the new missiles when the fighting starts!”
Indignantly, the bearded man said, “I protest! This is a War Council! If the council is to be lectured by strangers and if its orders won’t be obeyed, why hold it?”
“Why, indeed?” King Humphrey looked sternly about the council-table. Sternness did not become him, but dignity did. He said with dignity, “You who are to stay here have to think of dealing with a victorious Mekin. We who are to go have to think of making our defeat count. There is no point in further discussion. The fleet will take off immediately.”
He rose from his seat. The bearded man protested, “But the Mekinese aren’t here yet! They won’t arrive until day after tomorrow!”
“You’re using Talents, Incorporated information,” objected Bors. “And it is wise for the fleet to move off-planet at once! You are reasonable men. Too reasonable! Nothing can destroy a nation so quickly as for it to fall into the hands of practical, hard-headed, reasonable men who act upon the best scientific data and the opinions of the best experts! That happened on Tralee, and my uncle and myself are exiles and Tralee is subjugated in consequence. But I am beginning to have hope for Kandar!”
He followed King Humphrey out of the council-room. Fleet admirals brought up the rear. The stodgy, dumpy figure of the king tramped onward. It became obvious that he was bound for the ground-cars that waited to take him and those who would follow him to the launching area of the fleet.
A lean, gray, vice-admiral fell into step beside Bors.
“You don’t think things are hopeless, Captain?” he asked curiously. “I don’t see the shred of a chance for us. But my whole life’s been in the fleet. Under Mekin I’d be drafted to work in a factory or serve as an under-officer on a guard-ship, one or the other! I’d rather end in a good fight. How can you have hope?”
Bors said grimly, “I’m not sure that I have. But I can’t believe that nations can be saved by reasonable, practical men. They aren’t made by them! I’ve no hope except that acting foolishly may be wisdom. Sometimes it is.”
“Ha!” The vice-admiral grinned wryly. “But fortunes are made by businessmen, and only history by heroes. No sensible man is ever a hero. But, like you, I don’t like practical men.”
They went out-of-doors. The king climbed sturdily into a ground-car. It hummed away. There was a sort of ordered confusion, and then other ground-cars began to stream away from the palace.
Morgan appeared and waved to Bors. He hesitated, and Morgan pointed to an unofficial vehicle. Inside, Gwenlyn was smiling cheerfully at Bors. He found himself returning the smile, and allowed himself to be guided to her. The ground-car rolled swiftly after the others.
“I’ve a little more Talents, Incorporated information,” said Morgan. “It’s written down for you to read when you get to wherever you’re going. It’s rather important. Please be sure to read it fairly soon, it may affect the fight.”
“I’m headed for the fleet,” said Bors. “Take me there, will you? I wanted to say something before I left, anyhow.”
Morgan waved his hand.
“I can guess,” he said blandly. “Deepest gratitude and all that, but the rush of events blocked any way to arrange a suitable recompense for what Talents, Incorporated has done.”
Bors blinked. “That’s the substance of what I meant to say,” he admitted.
“We’ll take it up later,” Morgan told him. “We’ll get in touch with you after the battle.”
“I doubt it,” said Bors. “I’m not likely to be around.”
Gwenlyn laughed a little.
“What’s so amusing?” asked Bors. “I don’t mean to strike an attitude, but I do hate everything Mekin stands for, and I’ve a chance to throw a brick at it. The price may be high but throwing the brick is necessary!”
“We,” said Gwenlyn, “have Talents, Incorporated information, some of which is in that letter Father gave you. Our Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks has been busy. You’ll see. But we’ve other information, too.�
��
Bors frowned at her. He put the letter away.
“More information—and you’ll see me after the fight. You’re not telling me you know the future?”
Morgan waved a cigar.
“Of course not! That’s nonsense! If one knew the future, one could change it, and then it wouldn’t be what one knew! You haven’t had any prophecies from me! Prophecy’s absurd! All we’ve told you is about events whose probability approaches unity.”
“But—”
“What Father means,” Gwenlyn told him, “is that you can’t be told beforehand about anything you can prevent, because if you can prevent it you can make your knowledge false. So it isn’t knowledge. What we want to say, though, is that we aren’t through.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going to retire,” said Morgan blandly. “But I want to do something first that I can gloat over later.”
“He wants,” added Gwenlyn, “to repose in the satisfaction of his vanity.” She laughed again at her father’s expression.
“Seriously, Captain, we wanted to give you the letter and to ask you not to be surprised if we turn up somewhere. There’s a Talent,” she added, “a young boy who can find people. He doesn’t know how he does it, but.… We’ll find you!”
The ground-car turned in at the fleet’s take-off ground. The normal interstellar traffic of a planet, of course, was handled by a spaceport, with ships brought down to ground and lifted out to space again by the force-fields generated in a giant landing-grid. But a war-fleet could not depend solely on ground installations. The fighting ships of Kandar were allowed to use the planet’s spaceport only for special reasons. Emergency rocket take-offs and landings were necessary training for war conditions anyhow. So the take-off ground was pitted and scarred with burnt-over circles, where no living thing grew and where very often the clay beneath the humus top-layer was vitrified by rocket-flames.
A guard at the gate brought the ground-car to a halt.
“War alert,” said Bors. “Only known officers and men admitted here. It’s not worth arguing about.”
He got out of the car and shook hands.
“I still regret,” he told Morgan, “that we’ve had no chance to do something in return for the information you’ve given us.” To Gwenlyn he said obscurely, “I’m glad I didn’t know you sooner.”
He turned and walked briskly into the fenced-off area. Behind him, Morgan looked inquisitively at his daughter.
“What was that he just said?”
“He’s glad he didn’t know me sooner,” said Gwenlyn. She looked smugly pleased. “Considering everything, it was a very nice thing to say. I like him even if he doesn’t smile.”
Morgan did not seem enlightened. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“That’s because you are my father,” said Gwenlyn. She stirred restlessly. She was no longer smiling. “I hope Talents, Incorporated information isn’t wrong this time! Remember, we heard on Norden that the dictator of Mekin consults fortune-tellers!”
“Ah!” said her father. “But they’re only fortune-tellers!”
“One could be a Talent,” said Gwenlyn worriedly, “maybe without even knowing it.”
There came a far-distant, roaring sound. Something silvery and glistening rose swiftly toward the sky. It dwindled to a speck. There were more roarings. Three more silvery, glistening objects flung themselves heavenward, leaving massive trails of seemingly solid smoke behind them. Then there were bellowings. Larger ships rose up. As the din of their rising began to diminish, there were louder, booming uproars and other silvery objects seemed to fling themselves toward the sky.
Then thunder rolled, and huge shapes plunged in their turn toward the heavens. The space-fleet of Kandar left its native world. It departed in the formation used for space maneuvering, much like the tactical disposition of a column of marching soldiers in doubtful territory. There was a “point” in advance of all the rest, to be the first to detect or be fired on by an enemy. Then flankers reached straight out, and to the right and left, and then an advance-guard, and then the main force with a rear-guard behind it.
The take-off area became invisible under a monstrous, roiling mountain of smoke, from which threads of vapor reached to emptiness. It became impossible to hear oneself talk; it was unlikely that one could have heard a shot, as the heavy ships took off. But presently there were only lesser clamors and then mere roarings after them, and the last of the rocket-boomings died away. The smoke remained, rolling very slowly aside. Then there were unexpected detonations. As the rocket-fume mist dissolved, the detonations were explained. Every building in the fleet’s home area, the sunken fuel-tanks, the giant rolling gantries—every bit of ground equipment for the servicing of the fleet was methodically and carefully being blown to bits. The fleet was not expected back.
The ships rose above the atmosphere, and rose still higher, and the planet Kandar became a gigantic ball which filled an enormous part of the firmament. Then there were cracklings of communicators, and orders flittered through emptiness in scrambled and re-scrambled broadcasts of gibberish which came out as lucid commands in the control-rooms of the ships. Then, first, the point, then the advanced flankers, and then the main fleet, line by line and rank by rank—every ship drove on outward under top-speed solar-system drive.
The last of the four chartered space-liners, come to take refugees away before the Mekinese arrived, saw the disappearance of the ships in the rear of the fleet’s formation. The liner was lowered to the ground by the landing-grid. It reported what it had seen. Those who were entitled to depart on it crowded aboard. With the fleet gone, panic began.
Morgan had to spend lavishly to get copies of the news reports that the liner had brought along as a matter of course. He took them back to the Sylva, where a frowning man with rings on his fingers read them with dark suspicion. Presently, triumphantly, he dictated predictions of dirty tricks from indications in the news.
Morgan returned to what he’d called the family room of the yacht. He relaxed. Gwenlyn tried to read. She did not succeed. She was excessively nervous.
Bors was not. The fleet re-formed itself well out from Kandar. It made for a rendezvous over a pole of the gas-giant planet which was the fourth planet from Kandar’s sun. It was almost, but not quite in line with that yellow star toward the base, from which the Mekinese flotilla would come. The fleet went into a polar orbit around that gigantic planet, which was useless to mankind because its atmosphere was partly gaseous ammonia and partly methane.
The cosmos paid no attention. An unstable sol-type star in Cygnus collapsed abruptly and a number of otherwise promising planets became unfit for human exploitation. In Andromeda, a super-nova flared. The light of its explosion would not reach Kandar for very many thousands of years. The largest comet in the galaxy reached perihelion, and practically outshone the sun it circled. Nobody saw it, because nobody lived there. On a dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable above-water cosmos it had discovered. Suns flamed and spouted flares. Small dark stars became an infinitesimal fraction of a degree colder. There was a magnetic storm in the photosphere of a sun which was not supposed to have such things.
The war-fleet of Kandar, in very fine formation, flowed in its polar orbit around the fourth planet out from Kandar’s sun. In carefully scrambled and re-scrambled communications, certain ships were authorized to modify the settings of Mark 13 missiles in this exact fashion, to remove their warheads, and to diverge in pairs from the fleet proper. They were to familiarize themselves with the results of making the acceleration of such missiles variable during flight. They would use the supplied data-tables to compute firing constants for given ranges and relative speeds. They would, of course, return to formation to permit other ships the same practice with the new method of missile handling.
Bors read the letter from Talents, Incorporated. It gave an exact time for the breakout of the Mekinese fl
eet. The rest consisted mostly of specific warnings from the Talents, Incorporated Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks. It listed certain things to be looked for among the ships of the fleet. The information was like the news of an enemy ship aground on Kandar; it was self-evidently plausible once one thought of it. Mekin was ruled and its military practices governed by men with the instincts of conspirators, using other men with the psychopathological impulses which make for spies. They thought of devices neither statesmen nor fighting men would have invented. But a paranoid Talent could think of them, and know that they were true.
As a result of the warnings, the flagship was found to have been somehow equipped, by Mekin, with a tiny, special microwave transmitter which used a frequency not usual on Kandar. It was, in effect, a radio beacon on which enemy missiles could home. Also, the lead ship of a cruiser-squadron had been mysteriously geared to reveal its exact position, course and speed while in space. There were other concealed devices. Some would make the controls of predetermined ships useless when beams of specific frequency and form were trained upon them.
Once the basic idea was discovered, it was possible to make sure that all such enemy-supplied equipment was out of operation. The fleet was still in no promising situation, with a ten-to-one disadvantage. But it could not have put up even the beginning of a fight, had these spy-installed devices remained undiscovered.
Bors said carefully, by scrambled and re-scrambled communicator, “Majesty, I’m beginning to be less than despairing. If they expect our ships either to have been destroyed aground, or to be made helpless the instant combat begins, we may give them a shock. We hoped to smash them ship for ship. Finding out their tricks in advance may give us that! And if our missiles work as they’ve promised, we may get two for one!”
King Humphrey’s voice was dogged. “I will settle for anything but surrender! From an honorable enemy I would take severe terms rather than see my spacemen die. But I would do nobody any good by yielding to Mekin!”
Bors clicked off. He looked at a clock. The prediction from Talents, Incorporated was that the Mekinese fleet would break out of overdrive at 11.19 hours astronomical time.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 216
