Timemaster

by Robert L. Forward

  "We're on a red intruder alert. We're also to give that message to every ship on that list. I've done up to Jupiter."

  He left for his break and she took his place at the console. "Let's see now," she murmured, looking at the list. "He said he did up to Jupiter, so I guess the next one I call is the Monitor ..."

  LATER that day, Oscar was back at his home in the Princeton Enclave, nursing his aching hand and seething with anger.

  I'm sure that power-hungry no-good has some devious plan up his sleeve. The only way to stop him is to kill him! But how ...

  He was sure that Randy and that supercilious trust officer would have left instructions with the Reinhold security force not to let Oscar visit any of their installations, especially the space stations that controlled access to Randy's spacecraft, warpgates, and the timelink-control room. Then he remembered that his pharmaceutical company was in the process of negotiating a lease for a Reinhold space freighter. It would probably take some time for Alan's warning to filter down to every engineer and salesperson in the Reinhold Company. But, if Oscar acted quickly ...

  "What was the name of that Reinhold salesgirl?" he muttered to himself as he raised his cuff-comp to check through his appointment calendar for the previous month. Shortly he had her on the telephone.

  "Good evening, Miss Jabbar," he said, flashing her his "dazzle 'em" smile. "I happen to be coming up to the Barkham Pharmaceuticals Space Station early tomorrow morning, and I was wondering if you would happen to have a freighter similar to the one we are going to lease. I would like to take a look at it."

  Oscar smiled evilly as he broke the connection. She hadn't yet been alerted and he had an appointment! He quickly punched in another telephone number. It was the secret line to the Animal Avenger Army, the illicit terrorist arm of the Animal Rescue Front. After the answering machine had made its noncommittal reply, he punched in a secret access code. After a single ring, a gruff voice growled, "Hello?"

  "This is Oscar," he said. "I need three men tomorrow morning. Armed."

  THE NEXT morning, Marcie Jabbar floated into the small control deck of the Reinhold freighter Jupiter. The ship was still under construction as it floated near the Reinhold Space Station in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Hans van Ewijck was belted into the pilot's seat and was manipulating the complex keyboard of a robogang controller while he watched the results on the videoscreen in front of him. His team of robotic roustabouts were loading a complex tangle of machinery into the hold under the control of his fingers.

  "The shuttle with Oscar Barkham from the Barkham Pharmaceutical Corporation will be here shortly," said Marcie. "Is there any part of the ship that's too dangerous to take him into?"

  "My robogang should be through loading the Miranda 'lectromagnetic launcher shortly," said Hans. "As soon as they're done, I'll seal and pressurize the cargo hold so you can show our prospective customer around. Is it a sale or a lease?"

  "Long-term lease," replied Marcie. "He wants to set up a supercryo pharmaceutical research station in the shadow cone of Pluto, then later explore Charon for exotic ices."

  "Then this ship is a good model of what they'll get," said Hans. He touched some control icons on the pilot's display and the cargo doors closed. "Make sure you show him the Miranda launcher in the hold. A similar model would do for Charon."

  "How long before we could deliver?" asked Marcie.

  "Since it would be similar to this ship, I would estimate one year," said Hans. "But for an exact date, you'd have to ask Hiroshi Tanaka." He motioned upwards with his finger. "He and his robogang are outside working on the installation of the secondary magnetic shield."

  Marcie's cuff-comp buzzed under her sleeve. She read the message on the screen and headed for the outside airlock. As she waited for the computers of the two ships to complete the attachment of a passageway between the two airlocks, she took a quick look at herself in the black porthole window. She fluffed out a flat spot in her Afro with her fingers and straightened up the Harvard MBA 'ring on the right side of her broad brown nose. There was a hissing and a click, and the lock cycled.

  "Welcome!" she said as she greeted the contingent from Barkham Pharmaceuticals. She frowned a little as three bodyguard types pushed their way through the passageway between the ships and spread out to look around. It would be expected that a billionaire would need bodyguards—but in space? They were followed by a tall, handsome blond man whom Marcie instantly recognized as the most eligible bachelor in the world. Oscar gave her one of his famous disarming smiles and Marcie's heart skipped a beat. When she saw the cast on his right hand, a motherly feeling flowed over her.

  To business, Marcie, to business ... she told herself as she got her emotions under control and started her spiel.

  AFTER Marcie had taken Oscar around the whole ship, his bodyguards trailing behind, she returned to the control deck. Oscar had asked many more questions than the usual company CEO. Nearly all were intelligent, penetrating questions, as if he were going to pilot the ship himself.

  "The ship has a standard negmatter drive with the new feature of an artificial warpgate," said Marcie. "Unlike the Silverhairs, the artificial warpgate needs no tending."

  "You still need to torture the poor animals to make them give you the negative matter for the artificial warpgates," blurted Oscar, his face hardening into a scowl.

  "The Silverhairs are plants, sir," replied Marcie firmly, parroting the Reinhold Astroengineering Company line. "As so judged by the patent courts. Obtaining negmatter balls from the Silverhairs is no more harmful to them than picking apples from an apple tree."

  She turned to point to the pilot's console. "To cut operational costs, the whole ship is designed to be run by one person from this room. This is the pilot console for normal one-gee operation, while next to it is the five-gee acceleration waterbed for reaching cruise speed. Over there is the thirty-gee immersion tank for emergencies." She paused and looked at Oscar. "Do you have any more questions?"

  "Yes," said Oscar. "Is the immersion tank in working order?"

  Marcie turned to look at Hans.

  "This is a standard control deck," answered Hans. "It comes from the robofactory with everything installed and operational." He frowned. "But why do you ask? This isn't the ship you're going to get. This ship is going to be used on the Uranus run."

  "Not anymore," said Oscar, his eyes suddenly turning dangerous. He pulled his left hand from his pocket, and the tips of ten triangular ceramic bullets pointed at Hans from ten triangular holes in the rectangular end of a ceramic disposa-pistol. The bodyguards also drew their box-shaped guns and soon a very frightened Marcie and Hans were facing forty ceramic bullets.

  "Stay still and don't say a word, and you won't be hurt," commanded Oscar. "And stick out your cuff-comps." Two of the bodyguards moved forward, removed their cuff-comps, and turned them off.

  FLOATING securely in his construction pod, Hiroshi Tanaka saw the shuttle from Barkham Pharmaceuticals leave. He was a little puzzled, however, for its course seemed to be taking it directly to Earth rather than back to the Barkham Geostation. Urgent-sounding beeps suddenly drew his attention back to his robogang control screen. Emergency circles were flashing around every robot working on the spaceship.

  "The ship is moving!" he gasped. He jabbed a communication button.

  "Hans! What the devil is going on!" There was no answer. The ship was now moving even faster. With an experienced flicker of his fingers over the controller keyboard, Hiroshi sent his crew of construction robots into an emergency escape pattern. A few seconds after that, the Jupiter was gone, leaving behind an expanding cloud of tumbling robots and two inflated rescue bags with their emergency beacons beeping distress calls into space.

  OSCAR kept the ship at five gees for as long as he could stand it. After about five hours he pulled down on the joyball and lowered the acceleration to one gee. Exhausted from the strain, he climbed off the acceleration couch and collapsed into the pilot's chair to check the s
creen. He had traveled a tenth of an AU and was moving at nearly a thousand kilometers a second.

  "Fast enough to prevent any immediate pursuit," he panted. "But I've got to go faster if I'm going to catch up to him." He brought up the instructions for the use of the immersion tank. It sounded dreadfully uncomfortable, but he would have to do it.

  The default persona for Jupiter had been an icon that looked like the Roman god. Oscar found it inhibiting and turned it off in favor of a mechanical voice.

  "The flight plan you have proposed exceeds safety standards," warned the voice. "Full radiation shielding has not been installed in this ship. Velocities in excess of point-nine cee will produce radiation doses exceeding minimums."

  "Damn!" said Oscar. "I should have waited a few more days." His face grew grim and determined. "But there's no helping it now. I'm going to stop that goddamn bastard if it's the last thing I do." He scrubbed down, struggled into the tank suit, adjusted the helmet, and lowered himself into the immersion tank.

  Breathe deeply, he reminded himself as his helmet filled with oxygen-bearing fluid.

  The next five weeks passed in increasing misery. Oscar limited his one-gee rest breaks to thirty minutes every eight hours. That gave him just enough time to cough his lungs out, cram some tasteless pap down into his shriveled stomach, see if he could make his constipated bowels move, then climb back into the tank again for another eight hours of drowning at thirty-gee acceleration.

  Even his underwater sleep periods were miserable. He had a recurring dream where he was marching to his destruction like a tiny tin robot toy, while towering above him was a gigantic, laughing Randy, controlling his every motion with a remotecontrol box. The only difference in the dreams was the method by which he was destroyed.

  "THE RADIATION dose on the pilot deck has now reached a rem a day," warned the ship's computer.

  Oscar looked at the virtual screen projected in his helmet. The head of the velocity arrow had the figure "0.995c" in it. It would have to do. He still had a year of travel to go even at that speed. But at a rem a day, he probably wouldn't survive the trip. Six hundred rems killed most people, and even a few hundred rems made a person awfully sick. He pushed down on the virtual joyball and brought the acceleration down to a comfortable one gee. Weakly, he got out of the tank, took off his helmet and suit, and coughed his lungs dry. After a long, hot shower, he came back to talk to the ship's computer.

  "Where's the safest place on the ship?" he asked.

  "There is a 'storm cellar' in the center of the water storage tank on the hydroponics deck," said the mechanical voice. A map appeared on the screen, showing him how to find it.

  Oscar crawled through the doubly twisted tunnel that led to the cramped, cylindrical room. There was a toilet, three bunks, a pneumatic tube connecting to the robokitchen, and a stripped-down pilot's console that allowed the ship to be operated from inside. There was no acceleration couch, so the acceleration was limited to what the pilot could stand. The radiation dose inside the storm cellar was a tenth of what it was in the rest of the ship. Oscar decided to stay.

  Normally, life in a storm cellar was boring. But Oscar had plenty to keep him busy. On one of his brief excursions he brought back the robogang controller keyboard that the technician had been using when he had boarded the ship. He found an instruction program that taught him how to operate the controller, and within a week he had brought back to life the gang of robot roustabouts that had been left abandoned in the cargo hold when he had stolen the ship.

  "First things first," said Oscar, now very pleased with himself. "What color paint do we have on board?" he asked the ship's computer.

  "There is a good supply of all-purpose white base paint with additives to produce any color," said the mechanical voice.

  Oscar had one of the ship's crablike mechanical robots mix up some paint while he got used to operating an android roustabout through a virtual suit and helmet. He put the ship into free-fall, and used the android to take a trip out to the front of the ship. There, he painted out the name Jupiter and replaced it with the name Animal Avenger. Next to the name he painted the logo of the Animal Rescue Front—a large-toothed dog biting a bloody human hand. Oscar was a little disappointed in the result. His version of the dog didn't look anywhere near as ferocious as the ones he remembered.

  While he was outside, Oscar took the opportunity to use the android's eyes to take a good look at the kilometer-long mast sticking out of the end of the ship. He used the android to climb to the end where the secondary magnetic shield was normally installed. There was some debris there, generated during his abrupt departure. He used the android to clear away the debris and to document the exact status of the attachment brackets that were left.

  For a month the Animal Avenger stayed in free-fall while Oscar used the crew of android roustabouts to jury-rig a one-kilometer segment of the Miranda electromagnetic launcher to the long mast. Finally it was done. Oscar used the controller keyboard to bring the androids back into the cargo hold, then donned a virtual suit to get inside one of them.

  Using the android's built-in negmatter drive, he floated over to a rack and took out a massive cylinder, almost as long and as big around as the android's body. It was a bucket made of silvery supermagducting metal with a rounded point and a blunt tail. It was designed to hold ore as it was being accelerated by the launcher.

  "A silver bullet to exorcise that chihuahua-sized werewolf," gloated Oscar. Tucking the silvery bucket under the android's arm, he took it outside, where he inserted the bucket into the end of the launcher and activated its supermagnets. The bucket snapped to the center of the breech and vibrated there, levitated by its strong magnetic fields.

  "Fire!" yelled Oscar inside his virtual helmet as he pressed a button on the console in front of him.

  The bucket was gone so rapidly that even the eyes of the android didn't see it leave.

  "It worked!" yelled Oscar with joy. Inside the virtual helmet he smiled maliciously as he brought the android back inside.

  "Now all I have to do is set up a feeding mechanism so I can shoot it rapid-fire ..."

  "I WOULD really feel better if you would pod home, Rose," said Randy at dinner. It was their engagement anniversary, and the table sparkled with candles, crystal goblets, and champagne. "Albert can see Oscar's ship on the radar and it's closing on us at close to the speed of light. I don't know how he's managing it. According to the message from Earth, the ship he took didn't have a complete shielding system. He must be getting a horrific radiation dose."

  "He can be a very determined man," said Rose.

  "ZED-crazy, is more like it," Randy said contemptuously. "He also doesn't seem to be slowing down any, so I don't know what he intends to do when he gets here. I've checked with Albert and he informs me that Jupiter's computer will refuse to ram Timemaster, since the collision will kill Oscar. Oscar could deactivate the computer and fly the ship himself, but if he does that, Albert is confident it can outdodge a mere human. Besides, Oscar may be mad enough to want to kill me, but he's not crazy enough to commit suicide while he's doing it."

  "I'm not worried," said Rose calmly. "I know you survived. I talked to the older you myself."

  "But we aren't sure what happened to you," said Randy.

  "Yes, we are," said Rose. "He said that I and the kids were just fine and doing well."

  "I still wish you would pod home," Randy persisted.

  "No!" said Rose defiantly.

  OSCAR, having had problems with objections from the ship's computer, had taken the computer out of the control loop and was now flying the Animal Avenger himself. He still used the computer for calculations, however.

  "What is the maximum acceleration of Randy's ship?" he asked.

  "My records show that Timemaster had a first-generation drive," responded the mechanical voice. "Maximum acceleration would have been five gees."

  "Good!" gloated Oscar. "If he started accelerating now, show me the volume containing all
the points he could reach by the time we get there."

  Shortly a picture appeared on the screen. In front of the icon of the distant ship, right at the intersection of its trajectory with that of Animal Avenger, there appeared a shaded volume labeled "Escape Sphere". Because of the high relativistic velocity of Randy's ship, the "sphere" was squashed into a flat ellipsoid.

  "Now," commanded Oscar, "calculate how many buckets I have to fire to make sure that at least one of them hits the bastard."

  Almost immediately a pattern of lines sprayed from the point showing Oscar's present position to pierce every portion of the flat ellipsoidal volume. "One hundred thirty-four," said the mechanical voice. "The number required slowly decreases as we get closer and there is less time for maneuvering." The voice sounded stern as it added something generated by its security monitor subroutine. "You are warned, however, that there is a high probability that the distant ship has human beings on board. Since the probability of the ship being hit by one of the ore buckets exceeds ninety-nine percent, there is a high probability of a human being suffering injury, and perhaps death. You are warned that you must not launch the buckets."

  "But you can't stop me, can you?" asked Oscar.

  "No," admitted the computer in its mechanical voice.

  "Good!" Oscar reached for the firing button jury-rigged to the rapid-fire mechanism of the electromagnetic launcher. Holding the button down with his left hand, he manipulated the joyball carefully with his right hand, rotating the nose of his ship until the line on the display indicating the orientation of the ship had passed over Randy's escape ellipsoid four times. Shortly thereafter, five hundred silver bullets streaked silently ahead through space in a deadly pattern of destruction.

  THE NEXT day Randy and Rose were up on the bridge of Timemaster, watching Oscar's approaching ship. As a precaution, they had donned tightsuits and helmets and were strapped side by side in the waterbed acceleration couch. The image of the approaching ship on the videoscreen in front of Randy was drastically blue-shifted and grew rapidly as it came straight toward them.