The degree of destruction inside the vault augured serious difficulty in determining what materials might be missing.
Everyone in the group pondered this problem for a while. Havot, entering into the spirit of things—asked: “What chance is there that all the files here were kept in duplicate somewhere else?”
Someone responded: “The Imatran society enjoys a reputation as good record keepers. I’d say it’s worth looking into.”
Information from someone who had dealt with the late local authorities confirmed that the general policy was to create duplicates.
Prinsep nodded. “Good. Let’s find them if they exist. Meanwhile I want some people and machines down here, working to restore this junk to its original condition, or at least identifying it as accurately as possible. Whatever items appear to be completely missing, we’ll hypothesize that perhaps the berserker took them, and see where that gets us.”
Within an hour it had been determined that a duplicate archive did exist on one of the Imatran system’s sunward planets. It would be possible to get any record—or a VR simulation of it—beamed to the planetoid in a few hours by radio, which was still the fastest dependable communication this close to a sun.
The commodore and his people were soon back on the flagship, while a hastily assembled team in the devastated archive began the task of reconstruction.
Within a few hours the first stage of their job had been completed.
According to the reconstruction, there was at least an eighty percent probability that the records taken by the berserker lander were those dealing with the famous raid of nearly three hundred years before.
“That’s the one where some oddball berserker, historians call it Dirac’s berserker now, grabbed the bioresearch station right out of orbit and carried it off.”
“I don’t remember that story, I grew up a long way from here. It carried off a what? A bioresearch station, you say?”
“Yes, a sizable spacegoing lab—actually it seems to have been kind of a pilot plant for a huge colonization project that never really got going. And then, if I remember correctly, within a matter of days after the attack, Premier Dirac, whose bride happened to get carried away with the station, was here in-system, putting together a small squadron of ships, making brave speeches and rushing off to get her back.”
“How romantic.”
“I guess. His whole squadron disappeared with all hands—that was the expedition where Colonel Marcus was lost.”
“Colonel who?”
“You’re not up on the history of the Berserker Wars, are you? Never mind, I’ll show you later.”
Duplicate Imatran records of the old raid, urgently requested, would soon be on their way from one of the sunward worlds by tight-beam transmission and should be available on the flagship in a few hours. Meanwhile, now that the investigators had some idea of what they were looking for, they could call up routine news reports from the days immediately following that attack; some were available in the flagship’s general information banks.
Easily discernible in these records was the course taken by Dirac’s berserker in its flight. The cylindrical research station, being towed behind the enemy by forcefields, was briefly but clearly visible.
“Now here we are a few days later. And there go Dirac’s three ships, following exactly the same course.”
“Yep. So what good does this information do us?”
“I don’t know. My first reaction is, that as berserker attacks go, that one seems to have been truly unique. A very different kind of oddity from ours. The raid three centuries ago inflicted very little surface damage on Imatra.”
Prinsep, working and giving orders in his unhurried, dogged way, kept everyone moving productively. Several times he repeated: “I want to know more about that bioresearch station.”
The official history was fairly easy to come by.
At dinner that evening in the Symmetry‘s wardroom, the discussion turned briefly to the general subject of colonization, on which opinions had not changed all that enormously in three hundred years.
“How long have we—Solarian humans—been trying to colonize the Galaxy, anyway?”
“I don’t know—a thousand years?”
Some problems had not changed that much, either. There still remained in Solarian societies the question of what to do with inconvenient zygotes and fetuses. It was true that Solarian planets now in general seemed to produce fewer of these problem items than in Premier Dirac’s day.
Continued discussion of the subject elicited from someone a mention of von Neumann probes.
“What were they?”
“It’s an ancient scheme, a theory, going way back, to when all the Earth-descended folk in the Galaxy were actually still on Earth.
“The theory outlines techniques by which a civilization of quite modest technology, starting on one planet, would supposedly be able to explore the entire Galaxy in a quite reasonable time—even without the benefit of superluminal drive. To make it work properly, though, you have to be able to design some very smart and capable machines. And to overcome some serious problems in the engineering and construction. But the real problem appears, of course, when you send out your unmanned probes. At that point you have to really turn them loose—say goodbye and let them go, to roam the Galaxy unsupervised. You must be willing to let them represent you, your whole species, in whatever encounters they may have. These devices have to be self-repairing and self-replicating, like berserkers; able to improve their own design, like berserkers again. And with industrial capabilities, for mining and smelting ore and so on, that can easily be employed as formidable weapons.”
More than one among the listeners shuddered faintly.
“Just send them out unsupervised?”
“That was the idea.”
“Have Solarians ever actually built anything like that?”
“I’d have to look it up.”
“Try. It shouldn’t take long.”
And it did not. The ship’s general archive soon provided answers: Few people in recent centuries had thought it a good idea to send out von Neumann probes, either in slowship or c-plus form. Not in a galaxy known to be infested by true berserkers. Not when such devices necessarily contained in some form the Galactic coordinates at which the people who sent them could be found.
The archive even obligingly produced an example or two of worlds, branches of Solarian civilization, which in the very early years of the berserker encounter had implemented such a plan and had lived just long enough to regret it.
SEVENTEEN
Havot got a kick out of waiting for the Humanity Office people to revise their initial opinion of the commodore. Havot was ready to admit that he himself had been fooled at first. Almost everyone, on first meeting Ivan Prinsep, must get the impression that he was a decadent creampuff, who had been given command of this expedition as an exercise in politics—that much at least, Havot had heard, was true—who intended to conduct it as an exercise in fancy dining and other indulgence, meanwhile looking for some way to abandon the pursuit well before it became really dangerous. It hadn’t taken Havot himself long to become convinced that this first impression was mistaken; but he thought that Superintendent Gazin and his troops still had an awakening coming.
All components of the combat fleet that had descended to the planetoid’s surface were now lifting off again under pressure of the commodore’s relentless though unstressed orders. The desired information about the buried archive was on its way from one of the sunward worlds, and otherwise essential readiness had been achieved. The rising craft rendezvoused in low orbit with their fellows, and the entire fleet—eighteen ships, according to the last count Havot had heard—set out together.
Despite the efforts at rehabilitation Havot had witnessed on the planetoid’s surface, the task force was leaving behind it a deserted, practically uninhabitable body. The planetoid’s gravitational augmenters had been demolished. Its remaining atmosphere was once more
racked by horrendous winds, so in a matter of days probably only a dead surface would remain. This time, in contrast with the situation of three hundred years ago, all of the local leadership, the people with the greatest interest in revitalizing and rebuilding, had been wiped out. This time the military left only robots behind on Imatra, certain machines of little value in combat, but capable of working industriously with a minimum of human supervision to restore that planetoid’s hard-won habitability.
Officially, the restoration work had now been temporarily, perhaps indefinitely, postponed. In fact it might really have been completely abandoned. Two raids in three centuries, and we give up—in this case, anyway.
The duplicate archive material, transmitted in a tight beam from an inner planet in virtual reality format, arrived on the Symmetrybefore the task force had made much headway getting out of the system.
Other urgent information, this concerning Havot personally, came in at about the same time, specially coded for the Humanity Office. Agent Thanarat signed a receipt for the message and took it away for private decoding.
A few minutes later, she sought out Havot privately, and demanded: “I want you to explain something to me.”
From the change in her look, her manner, he suspected what had happened.
But he was innocently cheerful. “Gladly, if I can.”
“There’s a—” Becky started, temporarily lost the power of speech, and had to start again. Her voice was taut, withholding judgment. “Read this. I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.” And she thrust toward him a solid, secret, nonelectronic piece of paper, the kind of form often employed for very confidential messages and records.
Meanwhile, people who had been waiting for the data from the duplicate Imatran archive now hurried to the flagship’s VR chamber. Others were already in that spacious room, doing some preliminary studies.
The two senior Humanity investigators were on hand, waiting for the information as anxiously as anyone. The OH Superintendent, in making his decision to accompany the expedition, remained smugly confident that Prinsep was going to turn back, or proceed to some other safe system, before he actually caught up with any berserkers.
Meanwhile, some of the people milling about on the lower level of the ten-cube were arguing ancient history.
The old suspicion, going back nearly as far as the event itself, would not die, however illogical it might be: that Premier Dirac, feeling his base of power slipping, had somehow arranged the whole disastrous attack and kidnapping himself. Proponents of this theory claimed that the Premier had lived in hiding for a long time afterward, even that he was still alive somewhere, on some remote world. The corollary, of course, was that the supposed berserker he had been chasing had really been nothing of the kind, but rather a ship under the control of Dirac’s human allies. Or else, an even more sinister accusation, Dirac had made some kind of goodlife bargain with the real thing.
Those who gave credence to these theories were not swayed by the fact that no one had ever been able to generate a shred of evidence to support any of them. The most persistent suspicion, a common element in all the theories, was that in one way or another the berserker of three centuries ago had not been genuine. Some people, none of whom were considered tough-minded experts in the subject, still argued for that.
On the other hand, if Dirac’s berserker was accepted as genuine, then anyone who had arranged a deal with that machine undoubtedly qualified as goodlife. Any evidence that Dirac had tried to arrange such a deal might cast doubt on the legitimacy of all claims made by his modern heirs.
Havot meanwhile was now alone with Becky Thanarat in her small cabin—a mere cubicle, smaller than his own—and for the past few minutes he had been making an all-out effort to explain away the damning information which had just arrived.
“You do believe me, don’t you? Becky? Love?” The young man had no difficulty in sounding genuinely stricken.
At the moment she was once more having trouble speaking.
“I mean …” Havot did the best he could to generate a tone of amused contempt. “Murder, rape, knifings and torture … how many victims am I supposed to have destroyed? What did they say, again?” He reached politely for the paper; she handed it over. He waved it in distress. “Some really improbable total. You see, they rather overplayed their hand. Much more convincing if they’d simply said I was wanted for accidental manslaughter somewhere.”
“Explain it to me again.” She was sitting on her bunk, her hands white-knuckled clutching at the mattress, while he stood in the middle of the little private space. He almost had her; she was wavering. No, he really did have her, she was wavering so hard. She was begging to be convinced. “How there could be a mistake like this. You say these enemies of yours are—”
“It’s a local police department.” He named a real planet, very distant naturally. “Very corrupt. How I became their enemy is a long story, and it shows just how rotten and ugly the world can be. I’m sure they’ll be able to explain this message convincingly, when they’re eventually called to account for it, by saying it’s all some horrible computer error. That they innocently confused me with some real psychopath somewhere. Meanwhile they can hope I’ll be shackled, mistreated, or even killed … are there any other copies of this aboard, love?”
Becky slowly shook her head. Hope, her lover’s vindication, was winning the struggle in her mind. In another minute or two she might be able to start to smile.
“Think. Sure there aren’t? This would cause me no end of trouble if your boss got hold of it.”
“I’m sure.” Already a very attenuated, virtual-reality smile was struggling to be born. “We don’t want spare copies of any of our confidential communications floating around.”
“Good.” And he crumpled the paper softly in his fist.
Meanwhile, at the flagship’s ten-cube, a planning meeting was informally in session, being presided over by the commodore himself.
“I say we must concern ourselves with ancient history. What we must endeavor to determine now, my people, is just what today’s berserkers find so compelling about this record.” Prinsep tapped a pudgy finger on the case. “As we have seen, it delineates their own—or their predecessors’—attack upon the Imatran system three hundred years ago. Can we deduce why our current enemies should be so interested in history?”
“It may help, sir, if we take a closer look.”
“By all means.”
People who wanted to experience to the full the chamber’s powers and effects were required on entering to put on helmets equipped with sensory and control feedbacks. Some were starting to do that now, getting ready to scrutinize the new information as intensely as possible when it came in. A thousand cubic meters of interior space made the flagship’s VR chamber as large as a small house—few spaceships of only moderate size indulged in the luxury of having one. Such a generous volume allowed a party of a dozen or more to participate simultaneously in reasonable comfort—and this time there were almost that many.
Once inside, taking advantage of force supports and a few rubbery, polyphase matter projections from the walls—and of the partial nullification of artificial gravity inside the chamber’s walls—those experienced in this game showed others how they could leap and climb and “swim” about in almost perfect freedom and safety.
A display on one wall listed the titles of some of the software available. Posted almost invisibly was even a game list, including items called JUNGLE VINES, MASTS AND RIGGING, and CITY GIRDERS.
No time for games today. Someone already had a model of the Milky Way Galaxy up and running.
The idea had been to avoid wasting time, to keep from looking as if one were wasting time—and also to take a look at the Mavronari, in hopes of coming up with some clue as to why one berserker attack force after another had attacked the same planetoid and then fled into the same shelter, taking precisely the same direction.
The first scene evoked in GALACTIC MODEL showed
an overview of the whole Galaxy. The central, lens-shaped disk was some thirty kiloparsecs, or about one hundred thousand light-years, in diameter. The component spiral arms of this great wheel were surrounded by a much vaguer and dimmer englobement of individual stars, star clusters, clouds of gas and dust, and an assortment of other objects considerably less routine.
The brightest region in the display represented what was generally known to the Solarian military as CORESEC. This was the Galactic core, a star-crowded, roughly spherical volume perhaps a thousand light-years in diameter, holding at its unattainable center some of the unfathomable mysteries of creation.
There at the Galaxy’s very heart lay, among other things, that great enigma which for the last several centuries Solarian humanity had called the Taj, a name devised as a military code word but soon generally adopted as expressing the exotic and magnificent.
Only a few Earth-descended beings had ever reached even the outer strata of the Taj, and fewer still had ever managed to return. Notable among the very few had been the legendary Colonel Frank Marcus, missing for the last three hundred years upon another quest. Nor had any of that harrowed and honored handful been able to bring much information away with them from the Galactic heart—and what little news they had gathered there did not encourage further attempts at exploration.
In fact only about five percent of the Galaxy’s volume had ever been explored by Solarian ships, and much of that exploration had been nominal, a mere cataloguing of stars of beacon brightness, a mapping of the more substantial and readily visible nebulae and of the flow of subspace currents in the quasi-mathematical understrata of reality, that still-almost-unknown realm where c-plus travel could be brought within the range of possibility.
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