VII
The outside viewscreen, which had been vacantly gray for overthree thousand hours, was now a vertiginous swirl of color, theindescribable color of a collapsing hyperspatial field. No twoobservers ever saw it alike, and no imagination could vision theactuality. Trask found that he was holding his breath. So, henoticed, was Otto Harkaman, beside him. It was something, evidently,that nobody got used to. Even Guatt Kirbey, the astrogator, wassitting with his pipe clenched in his mouth, staring at the screen.
Then, in an instant, the stars, which had literally not been therebefore, filled the screen with a blaze of splendor against the blackvelvet backdrop of normal space. Dead in the center, brighter thanall the rest, Ertado's Star, the sun of Tanith, burned yellowly.The light from it was ten hours old.
"Pretty good, Guatt," Harkaman said, picking up his cup.
"Good, Gehenna; it was perfect," somebody else said.
Kirbey was relighting his pipe. "Oh, I suppose it'll have to do," hegrudged, around the stem. He had gray hair and an untidy mustache,and nothing was ever quite good enough to satisfy him. "I could havemade it a little closer. Need three microjumps, now, and I'll haveto cut the last one pretty fine. Now don't bother me." He beganpunching buttons for data and fiddling with setscrews and verniers.
For a moment, in the screen, Trask could see the face of AndrayDunnan. He blinked it away and reached for his cigarettes, and putone in his mouth wrong-end-to. When he reversed it and snapped hislighter, he saw that his hand was trembling. Otto Harkaman must haveseen that, too.
"Take it easy, Lucas," he whispered. "Keep your optimism undercontrol. We only think he might be here."
"I'm sure he is. He has to be."
No; that was the way Dunnan, himself, thought. Let's be sane about this.
"We have to assume he is. If we do, and he isn't it's adisappointment. If we don't, and he is, it's a disaster."
Others, it seemed, thought the same way. The battle-stations boardwas a solid blaze of red light for full combat readiness.
"All right," Kirbey said. "Jumping."
Then he twisted the red handle to the right and shoved it inviciously. Again the screen boiled with colored turbulence; againdark and mighty forces stalked through the ship like demons in asorcerer's tower. The screen turned featureless gray as the pickupsstared blindly into some dimensionless noplace. Then it convulsedwith color again, and this time Ertado's Star, still in the center,was a coin-sized disk, with the little sparks of its seven planetsscattered around it. Tanith was the third--the inhabitable planet ofa G-class system usually was. It had a single moon, barely visiblein the telescopic screen, five hundred miles in diameter and fiftythousand off-planet.
"You know," Kirbey said, as though he was afraid to admit it, "thatwasn't too bad. I think we can make it in one more microjump."
Some time, Trask supposed, he'd be able to use the expression"micro-" about a distance of fifty-five million miles, too.
"What do you think about it?" Harkaman asked him, as deferentiallyas though seeking expert guidance instead of examining hisapprentice. "Where should Guatt put us?"
"As close as possible, of course." That would be a light-second atthe least; if the _Nemesis_ came out of hyperspace any closer toanything the size of Tanith, the collapsing field itself wouldkick her back. "We have to assume Dunnan's been there at leastnine hundred hours. By that time, he could have put in adetection-station, and maybe missile-launchers, on the moon. The_Enterprise_ carries four pinnaces, the same as the _Nemesis_; inhis place, I'd have at least two of them on off-planet patrol. Solet's accept it that we'll be detected as soon as we come out ofthe last jump, and come out with the moon directly between us andthe planet. If it's occupied, we can knock it off on the way in."
"A lot of captains would try to come out with the moon masked offby the planet," Harkaman said.
"Would you?"
The big man shook his tousled head. "No. If they have launchers onthe moon, they could launch at us in a curve around the planet, bydata relayed from the other side, and we'd be at a disadvantagereplying. Just go straight in. You hearing this, Guatt?"
"Yeah. It makes sense. Sort of. Now, stop pestering me. Sharll,look here a minute."
The normal-space astrogator conferred with him; Alvyn Karffard, theexecutive officer, joined them. Finally Kirbey pulled out the bigred handle, twisted it, and said, "All right, jumping." He shovedit in. "I suppose I cut it too fine; now we'll get kicked back halfa million miles."
The screen convulsed again; when it cleared the third planet wasdirectly in the center; its small moon, looking almost as large, wasa little above and to the right, sunlit on one side and planetlit onthe other. Kirbey locked the red handle, gathered up his tobacco andlighter and things from the ledge, and pulled down the cover of theinstrument-console, locking it.
"All yours, Sharll," he told Renner.
"Eight hours to atmosphere," Renner said. "That's if we don't haveto waste a lot of time shooting up Junior, there."
Vann Larch was looking at the moon in the six hundred power screen.
"I don't see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles; oneplanetbuster, or four or five thermonuclears," he said.
* * * * *
It wasn't right, Trask thought indignantly. Minutes ago, Tanith hadbeen six and a half billion miles away. Seconds ago, fifty-odd million.And now, a quarter of a million, and looking close enough to touchin the screen, it would take them eight hours to reach it. Why, onhyperdrive you could go forty-eight trillion miles in that time.
Well, it took a man just as long to walk across a room today as ithad taken Pharaoh the First, or Homo Sap.
In the telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of anyTerra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seasand continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green,topped at the pole by an icecap. None of the surface features, noteven the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable,but Harkaman and Sharll Renner and Alvyn Karffard and the other oldhands seemed to recognize it. Karffard was talking by phone to PaulKoreff, the signals-and-detection officer, who could detect nothingfrom the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allenbelt from the planet.
Maybe they'd guessed wrong, at that. Maybe Dunnan hadn't gone toTanith at all.
Harkaman, who had the knack of putting himself to sleep at will,with some sixth or _n_-th sense posted as a sentry, leaned back inhis chair and closed his eyes. Trask wished he could, too. It wouldbe hours before anything happened, and until then he needed all therest he could get. He drank more coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes;he rose and prowled about the command room, looking at screens.Signals-and-detection was getting a lot of routine stuff--Van Allencount, micrometeor count, surface temperature, gravitation-fieldstrength, radar and scanner echoes. He went back to his chair andsat down, staring at the screen-image. The planet didn't seem to begetting any closer at all, and it ought to; they were approachingit at better than escape velocity. He sat and stared at it.
He woke with a start. The screen-image was much larger, now. Rivercourses and the shadow lines of mountains were clearly visible. Itmust be early autumn in the northern hemisphere; there was snow downto the sixtieth parallel and a belt of brown was pushing southagainst the green. Harkaman was sitting up, eating lunch. By theclock, it was four hours later.
"Have a good nap?" he asked. "We're picking up some stuff, now.Radio and screen signals. Not much, but some. The locals wouldn'thave learned enough for that in the five years since I was here.We didn't stay long enough, for one thing."
On decivilized planets that were visited by Space Vikings, thelocals picked up bits and scraps of technology very quickly. In thefour months of idleness and long conversations while they were inhyperspace he had heard many stories confirming that. But from thelevel to which Tanith had sunk, radio and screen communication infive years was a little too much of a jump.
"You didn't lose any men, did you?"
Th
at happened frequently--men who took up with local women, men whohad made themselves unpopular with their shipmates, men who justliked the planet and wanted to stay. They were always welcomed bythe locals for what they could do and teach.
"No, we weren't there long enough for that. Only three hundred andfifty hours. This we're getting is outside stuff; somebody's therebeside the locals."
Dunnan. He looked again at the battle-stations board; it was stilluniformly red-lighted. Everything was on full combat ready. Hesummoned a mess-robot, selected a couple of dishes, and beganto eat. After the first mouthful, he called to Alvyn Karffard:
"Is Paul getting anything new?" he asked.
Karffard checked. A little contragravity-field distortion effect.It was still too far to be sure. He went back to his lunch. He hadfinished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a redlight flashed and a voice from one of the speakers shouted.
"Detection! Detection from planet! Radar, and microray!"
Karffard began talking rapidly into a hand-phone; Harkaman unhookedone beside him and listened.
"Coming from a definite point, about twenty-fifth north parallel,"he said, aside. "Could be from a ship hiding against the planet.There's nothing at all on the moon."
* * * * *
They seemed to be approaching the planet more and more rapidly.Actually, they weren't, the ship was decelerating to get intoan orbit, but the decreasing distance created the illusion ofincreasing speed. The red lights flashed once more.
"_Ship detected!_ Just outside atmosphere, coming around the planetfrom the west."
"Is she the _Enterprise_?"
"Can't tell, yet," Karffard said, and then cried: "There she is,in the screen! That spark, about thirty degrees north, just offthe west side."
Aboard her, too, voices from speakers would be shouting, "Shipdetected!" and the battle station board would be blazing red.And Andray Dunnan, at the command-desk--
"She's calling us." That was Paul Koreff's voice, out of thesquawk-box on the desk. "Standard Sword-World impulse-code.Interrogative: What ship are you? Informative: her screencombination. Request: Please communicate."
"All right," Harkaman said. "Let's be polite and communicate.What's her screen-combination?"
Koreff's voice gave it, and Harkaman punched it out. Thecommunication screen in front of them lit at once; Trask shoved overhis chair beside Harkaman's, his hands tightening on the arms. Wouldit be Dunnan himself, and what would his face show when he saw whoconfronted him out of his own screen?
It took him an instant to realize that the other ship was not the_Enterprise_ at all. The _Enterprise_ was the _Nemesis'_ twin; hercommand room was identical with his own. This one was different inarrangements and fittings. The _Enterprise_ was a new ship; this onewas old, and had suffered for years at the hands of a slack captainand a slovenly crew.
And the man who sat facing him in the screen was not Andray Dunnan,or any man he had ever seen before. A dark-faced man, with an oldscar that ran down one cheek from a little below the eye; he hadcurly black hair, on his head and on a V of chest exposed by an openshirt. There was an ashtray in front of him, and a thin curl ofsmoke rose from a cigar in it, and coffee steamed in an ornate butbattered silver cup beside it. He was grinning gleefully.
"Well! Captain Harkaman, of the _Enterprise_, I believe! Welcometo Tanith. Who's the gentleman with you? He isn't the Duke ofWardshaven, is he?"
Space Viking Page 7
