Cochrane found his breath and his voice as he screamed with the agony of the broken ribs where Thorsen had kicked him.
Thorsen flung him back into the wooden chair like old garbage. The rigid chair legs squealed against the floor as the chair slid into one of the mercenaries. The butt of a rifle pushed Cochrane forward again.
Thorsen squatted down in front of the scientist so Cochrane wouldn’t have to look up again. Cochrane doubted he could. He shook with spasms of wordless torment. His nose, his head, his ribs. Thorsen handed him a white cloth from another pocket.
“What you must always remember, Mr. Cochrane, is that people such as you exist only because people such as I allow it. You and your kind are a luxury in this world. The food you consume could be given to my soldiers. The ideas you spread can disrupt the public order. And the public, my public, will not stand for that.”
Cochrane took the cloth, and even that simple movement shot pain across his back. He tried to use the cloth to wipe the blood from his nose, but he couldn’t bear the pressure of the fabric anywhere on his face.
He opened his mouth, gasping as he felt cold air strike a broken tooth.
“You’re nothing more than a thug,” he said with extreme difficulty.
Thorsen looked amused. “Mr. Cochrane, really. I was discussing physics. You attacked me.” He stood up again.
Dimly, through his pain, Cochrane heard footsteps behind him. Sir John and his granddaughter were pushed roughly into the office. Cochrane was thankful to see that neither of them looked the way he felt. They hadn’t been harmed. Yet.
“See here,” Sir John exclaimed in shock as he saw Cochrane. “There is no call for this.” He rapped his cane on the floor for emphasis. “This man was only a passenger. I instructed my driver to leave the checkpoint in order to get to Heathrow on—”
“Please, Mr. Burke,” Thorsen said in a tone of supreme aggravation. The old astronomer’s royal honors would not be acknowledged by the Optimum. “We’re not playing games any longer. I know this passenger is Zefram Cochrane. I know you are part of some ill-considered, futile resistance organization. And I know your driver is your granddaughter. My time is short so, please, let’s not waste it”
Sir John smoothed down his wispy, flyaway hair. Monica stood ramrod straight at his side, her dark chauffeur’s uniform giving her the look of a soldier as well.
“To get to the point,” Thorsen said, “I have asked Mr. Cochrane for information which he does not wish to provide. Therefore, I am hoping that one of you might persuade him to change his mind.” He stood too close to Monica. “Ms. Burke? Is there anything you’d care to say to Mr. Cochrane which could convince him of the, shall we say, precariousness of his position?”
Monica spit on Thorsen’s gleaming black boots, never breaking contact with his eyes. Cochrane admired her defiance and her aim. It was good to know there were still humans on Earth who could and would fight oppressors.
Thorsen didn’t move. “Very good, Ms. Burke. But hardly wise.” And then his fist shot out and caught Sir John in the stomach, making the old man grunt and stumble backward into a mercenary. The mercenary jabbed him in the back with the barrel of his fistgun, knocking him jarringly to his knees, making his cane fly from his grip to clatter on the floor. Even before Sir John had come to a rest, Thorsen’s hand had caught Monica Burke by the throat as she attempted to strike him.
“Do you know what my soldiers do to people like you?” Thorsen asked her silkily, his voice barely betraying the tension in the muscles of his arm. Then he released her and she dropped to her knees by her grandfather, who wheezed to catch his breath.
Cochrane had had enough. He struggled to his feet. The pain in his side was unbearable but he knew what he had to do.
Thorsen watched him, seemingly puzzled. “What drives you people? You’re supposed to be scientists. You’re supposed to be smart. Can’t you see the inevitable?”
“If I had accepted the inevitable,” Cochrane said thickly, “we’d still be traveling slower than light.” He reached out his hand. “A pen, something.”
Thorsen looked intrigued. He slipped Cochrane a pen from a side pocket on his jumpsuit. “You’re not going to try to kill me with that, are you, Mr. Cochrane?”
Cochrane shuffled to the desk. There was an old paper calendar on the writing surface, showing a month at a time. It hadn’t been changed for more than thirty years. With uncertain movements, he ripped off the top sheet and turned it over. Dust flew. “Here,” he said weakly. “Look.”
Thorsen moved around the desk to see what Cochrane would do. Cochrane squeezed the pen and its ready light came on. He tapped it twice for a broad nib and the tip of it changed shape. Then he drew a star shape. He had given this presentation a thousand times to his students and he no longer even had to think about it. The standard asymmetric energy-curve comparison diagram told the whole story to anyone who would bother to look at it and understand. It was the fundamental basis of all he had done to create faster-than-light physics; as important, he believed, as pi or e.
“This is it,” he began, tapping the pen on the topmost tip of the star for emphasis. “Right here. The Holy Grail. The speed of light. The absolute fastest, ultimate speed anything can move in this universe.”
“Very pretty,” Thorsen said dryly.
“You know what happens when you try to reach the speed of light?”
“Enlighten me, Mr. Cochrane.”
“Einstein happens. Plain, old-fashioned, hundred-and-fifty-year-old relativistic effects. Like time dilation. I know you’ve heard of time dilation. The faster you go, the more your subjective time flow decreases. And at the same time, your mass increases. It’s a straightforward ratio: the faster you go, the more massive you become, and therefore the more energy you need to continue to increase your speed.” With some difficulty, he brought the pen to the paper again. “So look what happens.” He drew an energy expenditure curve over the star.
With the pen tip, he moved again up the curve’s left-hand side for emphasis. “See? The closer you get to light-speed, the more your mass and energy requirement increases, until at the very speed of light”—he tapped the curve’s topmost point, above the star that represented absolute speed—“your mass becomes infinite so you need infinite energy. Now, once you get past light-speed …” Cochrane’s voice gained in strength as he continued. “… over here to the right, sure, the Clarke corollary shows that power consumption will drop off dramatically. But you can’t get past light-speed without getting to light-speed first. And that’s up here, Thorsen. Off the scale. Beyond the infinite. Can’t be reached. Can’t. Be. Done.”
“Yet you do it, Mr. Cochrane.”
“Exactly,” Cochrane agreed, hoping Thorsen would listen to him, that somewhere in the soldier’s military training he had had some introduction to basic physics. “Because I do not exceed the speed of light in normal space-time. I change the rules. I distort the continuum to change a small volume of it into something else where the restrictions of normal space-time no longer apply. And look what happens.”
He brought pen to paper again and sketched a rough approximation of the asymmetric peristaltic field-manipulation function, this time below the star representing the speed of light, where it belonged, where it made all things possible.
“Look at it, Thorsen. This is the literal, bottom-line energy expenditure for my superimpellor. It’s well below infinity, easily obtainable from a basic matter-antimatter reaction. But look how it’s offset—separated—from the standard energy expenditure of normal space-time.” He tapped the pen to the top of the bottom curve, where it reached its peak to the right of light-speed. “Don’t you see? Because the field is asymmetric, because it doesn’t reach peak power until after it’s outside normal space-time, you can never have a warp reaction cause a destructive release of energy that’s anywhere near as great as matter-antimatter annihilation. As soon as you get into that range, you’re going faster than light in a different contin
uum. There can be no interaction. It cannot function as a bomb. Period.”
Cochrane threw down the pen. “It’s a law of nature, Thorsen. No matter how big you build it, no matter how powerful you make it, the only thing a warp bomb could ever possibly do is to destroy itself. And a few grams of antimatter will do the same, far more cheaply, far more efficiently.”
Thorsen took the pen, switched it off, then slipped it back into his side pocket, all the while looking at the diagram Cochrane had drawn. He lifted the sheet of paper. He folded it in half, in half again, and again, so it made a small booklet in his hand. Then he stared at Cochrane and crushed that booklet into a ball, dropping it back to the desk.
“Corporal. Take the old man outside and kill him.”
“No!” Cochrane gasped. He saw two mercenaries grab Sir John by his coat and haul him to his feet. Monica tore desperately at one of the zombies, ripping away his inhaler hose. But the mercenary swung his fistgun up into her face and sent her slight form crashing to the wall, then the floor.
“You can’t do this!” Cochrane said. Forgetting his own injuries, he grabbed Thorsen’s arm, and was grabbed fiercely in return.
“You’re the only one who can change my mind, Mr. Cochrane.”
In Thorsen’s implacable grip, Cochrane craned to look at Sir John.
“It’s all right, young fellow,” the astronomer said, and Cochrane was amazed by the aura of calm around him. “It seems that every once in a while, history requires that the monsters win.” The old man glared undefeated at Thorsen. “So that when they are utterly defeated, future generations may count their blessings.”
“No, Thorsen,” Cochrane said urgently. “Maybe there’s some other way I can—”
“Don’t,” Monica implored him.
Cochrane acted as if he ignored her. There was no way he could explain to her his motives. He was willing to promise anything just to buy time. “But the warp bomb is still impossible.”
Thorsen shrugged. “Then none of you is worth anything and you’ve lived seventeen years too long.” He nodded at the mercenaries holding Sir John. “Record that one’s death, then take the body to Sandringham and feed it to my dogs. Record that, too. For his naïve friends in the resistance.”
“What about ’er?” one of the zombies asked, unconscious of the small trickle of drool that ran from his mouth. He nodded at Monica. She was on her feet, barely, blood dripping from a ragged gash on her cheek.
“What about her, Mr. Cochrane?” Thorsen asked.
“Do nothing for him,” Monica warned. “Nothing.”
Cochrane’s gaze met her dark eyes. Saw the passion there. The thrilling intensity of her determination to stop Thorsen. Cochrane realized that saving Monica Burke by capitulation would be no favor to her or to those like her. Every lesson Micah Brack had taught him about history came back to him now. The genie was out of the bottle. No matter what Thorsen and the others like him did to Earth, humanity would survive.
Cochrane faced Thorsen squarely. “You’ve got it wrong again, Thorsen. People like you exist because of people like me. Because we’re smarter than you, more aware than you’ll ever be, so in your jealousy, you try to destroy everything we stand for—rationality, humanity, common decency and respect.”
Thorsen’s face tightened.
“You’re everything that’s base in humanity,” Cochrane continued. “Drawing up strict, senseless rules for the sole reason of putting you at the top and excluding anyone you say doesn’t belong or fit in, for no other reason than just because you say so.” He turned to the mercenaries holding Sir John. “What’s your leader going to do when he’s killed all of us? He can only survive if there’s someone he can crush. When we’re gone, are you his next enemy?”
One of the zombies burped loudly. Both laughed, the sound ugly, disturbed.
“Finished?” Thorsen asked, then he addressed the mercenaries. “Transport the girl to Highgate for interrogation.” He looked back at Cochrane. “There are specialists there, Mr. Cochrane. Some of them even used to be doctors of a sort. Now they’re interface experts. Have you ever seen what happens to human nervous tissue after the insertion of Josephson probes into the brain?” He stroked the bridge of his nose with a thin finger. “Well, you will.”
Thorsen snapped his fingers at his mercenaries. “Make the old fool suffer. I’ll want close-ups for the uploads.”
They started to pull Sir John to the door.
“You dare call yourself a soldier?!” the astronomer called out.
“I am the soldier,” Thorsen corrected.
“Then at least give me the dignity of walking to my fate under my own power, sir.”
Thorsen sighed. He looked around, saw Sir John’s cane, reached down and brought it to the old man.
“Let him walk to his fate,” Thorsen told the mercenaries. He looked down at Sir John. “I’ll put your head on this when they’re finished with you.” He slapped the cane into Sir John’s hands.
Sir John shook himself loose from the mercenaries, tapped his cane on the floor as if to see if it still worked, smoothed his coat, then nodded his head at Cochrane. “Accept my apologies, sir. On behalf of the planet.” He looked over at his granddaughter. “Monica,” he said, “you were always the light of my life.”
“I understand,” Monica said. And that was all. Cochrane found the whole subdued exchange excruciatingly British, though there had almost been something to the way Sir John had said “light” that made Cochrane wonder if the astronomer had been passing on a hidden message.
Then Sir John turned his back on Thorsen and the office and walked ahead of the mercenaries, out the door. The mercenaries plodded after him, indifferent to their destination.
Thorsen crossed his arms and faced Cochrane. “I’m thinking of making Centauri B II the first example of what happens to colonies who don’t contribute to Earth. What do you think, Mr. Cochrane? Superimpellors with antimatter bombs? Are they any match for your warp bombs?”
“If you come out of a distortion field within half a parsec of my planet, you’ll have asteroid interceptors locked on to you two weeks before you get within a million kilometers,” Cochrane said fiercely. Every colony world had the same defense because no extrasolar system had been studied in enough detail for asteroid impacts to be predictable. The result was that superimpellors, which could not operate close to a sun, were not a viable military threat.
“Still,” Thorsen replied, “it might be worth a—”
A hideous shriek echoed down the corridor outside the office.
Cochrane felt sick.
“How surprising,” Thorsen said as he studied Monica’s reaction. “I thought he would be the stiff-upper-lip type. ‘So sorry to bleed on your carpet.’ That sort of—”
A second scream echoed. It was not made by the same person who first had cried out.
Cochrane felt electrified with hope. Thorsen reached for his net phone. Monica, for some reason Cochrane didn’t understand, immediately leaned over and ripped at the heel of her boot.
“This is Thorsen,” the colonel barked into his slender phone. “Get me—”
And then Sir John was in the doorway again, cheeks flushed, the few strands of hair he had standing straight out to the side, and he was aiming his cane at Thorsen as if it were a rifle.
“Put it down, Colonel,” Sir John commanded, only a bit out of breath.
“Get me Operations!” Thorsen shouted.
A spike of red light lanced out from the tip of Sir John’s cane and swept across Thorsen’s chest. The red fabric of his jumpsuit was unharmed but the interlinked triangles of the Optimum Movement he wore on his chest exploded in a spray of molten metal, his net phone burst into blue-white flames, and white smoke burst from the back of his hand as Cochrane heard the sizzle of burnt flesh.
Thorsen grunted in pain but made no other sound. He clutched his injured hand to his stomach. “You will never survive,” he panted. “You are unfit.”
Then Moni
ca was at him, the black plastic of her heel in her hand. She jammed it against Thorsen’s arm as he tried to avoid her and this time he did scream.
His swinging fist sent Monica back. He started for her, snarling something incomprehensible. Cochrane could hear a capacitor whine from Sir John’s cane. Whatever system powered its laser wasn’t ready to fire. Someone had to act.
“Thorsen!” Cochrane yelled in challenge.
Thorsen spun around, his arm still raised to strike Monica. His narrow face was twisted in animalistic fury.
Cochrane matched it.
The scientist charged the soldier, ignoring the pain of his own nose and ribs. He heard the alarming sound of grinding bones below his lungs, but he would not let Thorsen win. No matter what it took.
Cochrane slammed his head into Thorsen’s chest and howled in pain as the shock of impact tore through his own chest. Thorsen’s fist crashed down on his back but the counterblow was too late.
The two men flew back into a wall, shattering the glass over an old baseball photograph, then slid to the floor. Cochrane pushed himself off Thorsen, feeling shards of glass dig into his hand. Thorsen kicked at him, tried to get up, then shivered, arms stiff at his side. His heavy boots thumped at the floor for a moment, then were still.
Cochrane caught his breath, staring at Thorsen lying on the floor. The madman wasn’t unconscious. His pale blue eyes remained wide with hatred and still bored into him. Then Monica was at Cochrane’s side, holding out her hand. In the other, she still carried the heel of her boot.
“We have to hurry,” she told Cochrane as she helped him to his feet. She smiled at him as if he were an old friend, a trusted ally. Cochrane felt an unexpected warmth in his chest. He hoped it didn’t mean he was bleeding to death from internal injuries.
“What happened to him?” Cochrane asked. Thorsen still stared unblinking at him.
Monica held up her boot heel. Cochrane could see three silver needles arranged in it, stained by blood. “Selective neural inhibitor,” she explained. “Shuts down the section of the brain responsible for physical movement. Same process that keeps us motionless when we dream we’re moving.” She tugged on his arm and Cochrane winced. “Sorry, but there’re more zombies at his Rover. We have to leave.”
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