by Jerry
“For God’s sake, can’t you talk yet?” Hardwick was in quite a state. It was hard to blame him. He had discovered where they were, where I had sent them—Glacis 17. And he feared they—we—would stay there forever. Or until I worked my miracle, for I had to have some way out in mind, unless I had simply committed a protracted suicide, Hardwick would reason. Correctly. And he would be most unpleasant unless I was forthcoming; but that was beside the point, as I fully intended to work that miracle. Perhaps if I could make an effort, I could tell him now. But why bother? Let him stew a bit longer. And anyway, it wasn’t good manners to threaten the Customs Service.
It had been, I realized, a frightening moment: the control room was quite indefensible, besides which, I was unarmed; and Hardwick could call on a thousand and more volunteers, if he wished.
My first thoughts had been to make for a shuttle, but a shuttle could be outpaced and destroyed. If be stayed, I could expect no better. My only chance was to create a situation where I would be needed. But how?
The ‘Collomosse’ was an old ship, almost certainly an extroop-carrier, bought cheap. She still worked on the old scoop and hop system, blasting into hypespace by using a vast amount of energy, instead of slipping into it gently on Wendelin drive. The hop principle was the one that had originally taken men to the stars. It had been judged to be practically impossible at first: how could so much energy be obtained? It was beyond the ability of the best fusion reactors to provide. The problem was only solved with the development of force field technology to a high state: a scoop technique, using a force field, was evolved for the tapping of the requisite energy from the only place where it was freely available—the interiors of suns.
The other problem, that of storing the energy so obtained, was easily solved: it was kept in a force store, as a bar of “pseudo-neutronium”. The other minor problems, mapping out the “area of available energy” in a star, etc., were easily solved: the method had been the only one used for centuries before Wendelin rendered it obsolescent. The one difficulty with the hop and scoop system—apart from the cost of it—had been that only enough energy could be stored to give a ship a sufficient impulse to go, at the most, just less than two parsecs—just about the average distance between stars this far from the Centre.
Just looking at the antique controls brought up memories—of the first pioneers, of the Glacis War, or rather, what I had learnt of them at school. And the second of those two memories, coupled with a glance at the display positional map, elated me: the only place in the universe where I would be safe was a mere hop away. I set the automatic hop controls and waited. There was just enough left in the double store; they hadn’t made a full hop since last scooping. The ship was just on the point of hopping when Hardwick returned.
I had almost taken him. I surprised him, didn’t give him a chance to use his gun, and was just following up a good blow to the face that had given his eyes a glazed look when the wrench of going into hypespace seemed to take me by the shoulders and shake me. Hardwick, the more experienced hop-ship traveller, took it in his stride: his eyes cleared, he stepped forward, and I felt the cold, hard muzzle of a neuroneut in my stomach; and thereafter, it had all been pain, succeeded mercifully by unconsciousness.
“You’re in a cleft stick, Hardwick.” The words were spaced out and clumsily formed, but they were intelligible, and Hardwick gave every sign of understanding them.
“What do you want?”
So he was willing to bargain; that was good; it was a seller’s market.
“You, the ship, everyone in it—in short, everything.”
“No.”
“Then let me go back to sleep.” I closed my eyes.
“No, no—we can talk about it.” Hardwick seemed to have got over his first fury, but probably it was still there, hidden beneath this show of conciliation.
“I can talk better on my feet.”
Hardwick looked down at me suspiciously for a long moment, then nodded. He even helped take off the life-support strapping and equipment, but he stepped well back as I levered myself painfully into a sitting position. I noticed that the grey, squat shape of the neuroneut had reappeared in Hardwick’s hand.
“I’ll use this, if you force me to.”
The threat proved pointless: I managed to get out of the life-support system only with the greatest difficulty, and then I could only walk slowly and painfully, as if on knives.
THE SUN of Glacis 17, flamed in the centre of the main visual display board, vastly impressive; and how angrily did Hardwick stare at it! It was to be expected, of course. The energy of that sun, or rather a minute fraction of it, could solve all his problems and put his great ship back on its star hopping course. But it was forbidden him: if he tried to scoop, the ship’s stores would overload, and all that would be left of the ‘Collomosse’ would be a scurrying shower of photons, of various energies, spreading even further apart.
For this was the Glacis, or all that remained of it: the 17 Base kept up in honour of Commander Cornell, whose station it once had been, and who, in some Byzantine involvement with the Mlacchis, had engineered the beginning of their defeat, at the cost of his own life. How strange it was to think that the peaceable, backward Mlacchis had once vied with humanity for supremacy—and had nearly won! If it hadn’t been for the Glacis, they would have.
The Glacis operated individually by denying hop travel by means of a “crude-scoop”, which wasn’t a true scoop at all, but a force field method of creating a state of continual and vicious flux in the “area of available energy,” so that anyone really scooping got more than they bargained for, was overloaded—overloaded and destroyed. A hop ship, because of its limited storage capacity, needed to stop at every star and scoop and a Glacis system was a complete barrier. During the War, the Glacis had been a vast ovoid of such systems surrounding the human worlds, a screen behind which humanity had regrouped; and from which, after Wendelin’s discovery, had burst forth to conquer. But all that was a long, long time ago.
“Where’s the station?” I asked.
Hardwick operated the controls with casual skill, and the scene changed, first to a dismal looking planet, then to a dull continent, a plain, and finally the base, still hung with desiccated camouflage nets, and looking no more dangerous than an abandoned homestead on Freemantle.
“There’s our salvation,” I said.
“You’re hoping to relay a message using its tachyon beam projector?”
“Of course.”
“Then we’re trapped!”
“Not at all,” I said. “We can’t relay it from here, you’re quite right: it only sends messages covering its own efficiency and the state of the stars in its vicinity. So we simply send a shuttle down. We don’t try to tamper with the “crude-scoop” equipment—it’s sure to be booby trapped—but we can alter the hyperadio to send a message to Customs H.Q.”
I noticed that the strain formerly evident on Hardwick’s face was now vastly more pronounced: the skin looked grey, and the pupils of the eyes seemed to be suspended on red nets.
“Watch!” Hardwick said.
The scene on the visual display board changed from the Base to inside the ship itself. He was using the memory.
There were four of them, the rest of the ship’s officers. They were only wearing short duration suits, and I could recognize them through the sunshaded face-plates. They were making for one of the shuttle tunnels.
“When?”
“About twelve hours ago.” Hardwick was still at the controls, editing and abridging the recording with almost professional skill.
The shuttle could be seen in space now, moving against a background of stars, heading for the Base planet, where there was hope—not of contacting anyone, least of all Customs Service, but of destroying the “crude-scoop” capacity of the last of the Glacis Bases. They would be able to take their precious human cargo on to Borton’s world, there to labour in the tall red towns, between the mountains of iron ore.
They were about as far from the Base planet now as it was from its primary, and the first sign of failure became apparent; when they were half that distance from their destination, it was made manifest, in their destruction.
It had been too short, that minute of recognition and memory I had had when I discovered I was in a hop ship, and had sought to put it in the one safe place. I’d recalled that Glacis 17 had been a manned base, under Cornell, whom it honoured by its existence. But Cornell had died early in the War; later, most of the manned bases had been replaced. In that moment of panic, I’d assumed that the Base preserved would be like that Cornell had known; but instead, it was just the automatic one left at the War’s end.
I should have guessed that. And I knew well enough how an automatic Base worked. I remembered reading a long and overly reverential biography wherein was given a detailed description of how Long’s frigate, after the main War, had penetrated a Glacis-type base against a twelve pack. It was a celebrated episode. Using all the tricks at his command, Long had accelerated and decelerated, put out almost all his store of missiles, even to one that ballooned into the shape of the mother ship and so drew off attacking missiles, until the pack had been reduced to a disoriented three, easily disposed of with light homers. Packbrains—the composites formed from the radio interconnection of the brains of the individual missiles—had not been used in battle since, as Long had demonstrated how, by picking them off one by one and subjecting the composite to successive loss-traumas, their value could be negated.
But the shuttle had had no defense. And the packbrain had willingly suffered the single loss-trauma while the other eleven victory rolled about the glittering plasma with more than machine-like gusto.
That answered many questions I hadn’t even bothered to frame: why Hardwick alone had dealt with me, why he hefted the neuroneut so lovingly. Unless I came up with a way out very quickly, I would be killed. We would all die, sooner or later, marooned here—but the later the better!
“That was unfortunate,” I said tritely, and seeing the expression on Hardwick’s face, added hurriedly, “they could all have been saved.”
“How?” Hardwick spat the word out greedily.
“Well, for one thing,” I temporized, “we could send out a radio message. It would take time, but with the life-support systems available, we’ve plenty of that.”
“We’d not be heard. Who listens for distress signals sent out from one system to another? No one with any sense: the signal would be too weak to make sense of.”
I considered arguing the point, and decided against it: Hardwick was only too obviously right.
“There has to be a way out!”
“Does there?” Hardwick looked at me with cold hatred. “The Glacis was designed to provide no way through, and it was successful. It was never breached. And the ‘Collomosse’ is just an ordinary hop-ship: we couldn’t afford to modernize it. So we’re like rats in a trap. I ought to kill you for that, but why should I put you out of your misery?” He paused, then tossed the neuroneut to me. I caught it clumsily.
“I’m surrendering to you, Customs man,” Hardwick went on, with heavy-handed irony. “As the only surviving member of the ‘Collomosse’s’ crew, I’ll make a full confession. I’ll even accept your executive punishment.” He laughed, raucously, and then stalked out of the control room, leaving me holding the foolish weapon, uselessly.
THERE WAS AMPLE CAUSE for despair, but I didn’t long consider it. The Customs was a proud Service, and it didn’t recruit those who easily gave in to despair. Or so I told myself. But realism was another matter, and I was soon aware that I wasn’t going to find a flaw in the Glacis, even in its last fragment. A whole race had searched for a century and never succeeded. But there had to be a way out!—some modifications or modernization in either the ship or the Base that would allow us to hop on or contact Customs H.Q.
I started with the ship.
To someone used to shuttles and Customs cruisers that rarely had more to do than carry a few officers, some microminiature equipment and a not too extensive range of weaponry, the ‘Collomosse’ was a revelation. It had a vast amount of oversized instrumentation that for all its age seemed as accurate and more copious than its present counterparts.
I soon noticed that the ‘Collomosse’ had a two store system with independent scoops. This didn’t allow it to take double hops. The main problem of hopping was to push the enormous mass of “pseudo-neutronium”, even as it was being consumed, into hypespace; the actual mass of the ship itself was only barely significant. So doubling the store was in effect almost doubling the problem, and its solution in the ‘Collomosse’ made that ship only marginally more efficient.
There were plenty of other notable features in the ship: the complex of life-support systems, for example, would have cost a fantastic amount to duplicate at present day prices—but there was no need. The only need was illegal. I wondered vaguely how much the ship had cost the smugglers-probably little more than a shuttle, a fraction above its scrap value. But that was all beside the point. What I was looking for was some item of modernization which could possibly affect our situation. And what I found was—nothing! Hardwick had spoken the exact truth: they had done nothing but patch.
Next I started examining the Base, as best I could, with the ship’s telescopic system. There was little to learn there. Even if there were, how would I get there to work the miracle? I spent a day staring at it and thinking about it, and gave up, not because I’d made no progress, but because I had spent the day coming more and more to see there could be no progress.
It was only by a combination of boredom and accident that anything came of the day: I misdialed a telescope setting and lazily persevered. I then noticed the system’s solitary giant planet—a dull red super-Jovian nestling in the darkness. I had already looked up in the handbook each planet of the system, from the Base planet to the gas giant; all were abiotic. I’d passed quickly over the gas giant: it wasn’t even conceivably habitable. But in terms other than those of habitation . . . An idea began to form. Almost feverishly, I set the telescope system to computer record and analyze, while I began to work out the possibility in my mind. It came with surprising facility: the nearness of death had a marvellous way of concentrating the mind, I rediscovered.
Then I programmed the ship’s computer by voice for the critical series of calculations. The results made the enterprise seem very far from certain. There were too many unknown factors; the biggest of all, the uncertainty about the exact nature of the Base’s own programme, and there the computer couldn’t help at all. It all came down to human judgment.
I judged.
“YOU’VE GONE OFF the rails,” Hardwick said when I finally managed to shock him out of the torpor he had fallen into.
“Nevertheless,” I answered him coldly, “I intend to scoop, and I’ll need your help.”
“Why should I participate in my own murder?” Hardwick retorted. “I don’t particularly want to make it suicide.” He paused. “I won’t try and stop you, of course.”
“That would take an effort.”
Anger flared in Hardwick’s eyes for a moment, then died.
“Why should I argue? If you want me to help, I will. I don’t believe it can succeed, but what’s there to lose?”
Hardwick being the only one of us with any real experience of operating a scoop, I let him have the ticklish operation of inserting the extensible finger of force fields into the sun of Glacis 17, while I put the other scoop into the centre of the Jovian-type gas giant, but with the function reversed. The atmosphere in the control room was unexpectedly calm. If there were to be any mistakes, we would never know of them anyway, so why sweat? Ironically, Hardwick, having just emerged from despair and the least convinced of the two of us in that philosophy, did his job the more expertly. The explosive energy was shortly being received and turned to “pseudo-neutronium” in one store, and as quickly as it formed, was transferred and reconverted to energy in th
e other store, and distributed about the centre of the system’s huge gas giant.
After about an hour, I signalled to Hardwick to stop the traffic.
“It was about time. The temperature of the ship’s structure about the stores is pretty high,” Hardwick agreed.
I nodded. “All we can do now is wait.”
“Or get a drink. There are some bottles aboard.”
“You really want to?”
“Not really, but it would take the mind off things. Even if we succeed, the best I can hope for is some years in one of your prisons, and if we don’t. He shook his head. “I think the sober mood I’m in is too strong to be affected by alcohol.”
I made no reply. It was quite true. Hardwick could expect to languish in gaol for about five years, while the passengers could expect suspended sentences and enforced repatriation. It was, without doubt, a harsh-seeming law, and one probably not destined to survive too long—it was a pity Hardwick would have to suffer its rigours. I felt guilty over the fate of the other four of the crew, though in law and morality, the fault wasn’t wholly mine. But if it hadn’t been for my actions and bad judgment, they would still be alive. But there was still the probability that the idea wouldn’t work out, and that would solve all our problems, finally.
THE IDEA had been quite simple. Recognizing all the limitations, I had decided taking the ship physically out of the system was impossible. So the only alternative was contacting Customs H.Q. via hypespace. And only the Base had a tachyon beam projector, which they would use exclusively for keeping H.Q. informed on the state of the stars in its vicinity. So the solution was to create a situation interesting enough for H.Q. to send someone to come and investigate. Destroying the Base itself would suffice, but unfortunately that was force field protected, and that left the possibility of altering the central star. But that star was Sol-sized, and no activity of the ‘Collomosse’ could conceivably effect any visible change in it. The only hope, then, was to begin anew—to create, however temporarily, a sun of our own.