Captive of the Centaurianess

by Poul Anderson

  "Yes," Urushkidan snickered, "I habe had a digestibe pouch full of you Jobians talking about te glories of war and destiny and te will of te Race and historical necessity and suchlike tings. Perhaps in future you will wish to employ more logical rigor."

  The flight was short to Camp Muellenhoff. It lay out on the surface, a cluster of pressure huts around a watchtower. There was no barbed wire; the Ganymedean environment gave ample security. If a spacesuited prisoner did slip away from a work detail, the sole question was whether a local monster would get him before his oxygen or his heat pack was exhausted.

  When the boat landed in the area, such a figure was urged toward her airlock by a couple of others. The political officer had radioed ahead the demand he was supposed to, quite convincingly. A voice did rattle out of her receiver: "Sir, I've been ordered to ask if you really want to bring this prisoner back to town. We've lately been alerted to watch out for a party of escaped desperadoes."

  "Yes," the secret policeman said between clenched teeth, "I want him back in town. Oh. how I want him back in town!"

  The captive stumbled into the cabin. Ice promptly formed over his armor. Dyann gave a command, the boat stood on her tail and screamed off toward parts unknown, the newly rescued person clattered against the after bulkhead and lay asprawl.

  Presently, when they were flying on an even keel, he opened his faceplate. Slightly battered, the countenance of Ray Tallantyre emerged. "Haa-ai, dear sveetheart!" Dyann cried. She reached for him, touched his suit, and withdraw her hand with a yelp. "How are you?" she asked, not very distinctly since she was sucking frostbitten fingers.

  "Well . . . I . . . well, not too bad." he answered out of his bewilderment. "A rough time but . . . mainly it was truth drugs . . . they told me I'd be shot as a, a precautionary measure—"

  "Poor, dear Ray! Poor little Earthlin! Lie easy. I vill soon take care of you."

  "Yeah, I'm afraid you will."

  "Te immediate question," Urushkidan said, "is, Tallantyre, can you pilot a behicle of tis type?"

  "Well, uh. yes, I suppose I can," Ray answered. "Looks like a modified Astrid-Luscombe. . . . Yes, I can."

  "Good. Ten we can drop tis creature here. I do not like and/or trust him. He smells of phenylalanine—Dyann! Do you mean we are not simply going to drop him?"

  "I made my promise," the woman said.

  They descended on a rocky plateau, gave the secret policeman a spacesuit, and dismissed him. He should be able to reach the camp, given reasonable luck. Nevertheless he bemoaned his maltreatment.

  "And now. vat next?" Dyann asked blithely.

  "Lord knows," Ray sighed. "I suppose we find us a place in the wilderness where we aren't likely to be spotted for a while, and take stock. Maybe, in some crazy fashion, we can contact the Union embassy. You and Urushkidan ought to rate diplomatic intervention, and I can ride on your cloaks. Maybe. First we find that hideyhole, and second we prepare to skedaddle if we spy a Jovian flyer."

  He strapped into the master seat and tickled the controls. The boat lifted readily, but after a moment began to shake, while ominous noises came through the engine-room radiation wall.

  "Could tat be te effects of carbon deposits in te tubes tat we were warned about?" wondered Urushkidan.

  Ray grimaced. "You mean you took off without proper warmup? Yes. I'm afraid it is." His fingers danced across the board. The response he got was erratic. "We'll have to land soon. Else we crash. It'll take a week before the radioactivity is low enough that we can go out and clean the jets."

  "And meanvile is a satellite-vide hunt after us." Dyann's clear brow wrinkled. "Is Ormun offended because I did not invite her alon? It does seem our luck is runnin low."

  "And," said Ray. "how!"

  IV

  He used the last sputter of ions to set down in a valley which appeared to be as wild and remote as one could hope for. However, when he got a look through a viewport, he wondered if he hadn't overdone it.

  Around the boat was a stretch of seamed and pitied stone, sloping up on every side toward fang-cragged hills. The glow of Jupiter shimmered, weirdly colored, off a distant glacier and a closer pool of liquid methane. The latter had begun boiling; its vapors obscured the tiny sun and streamed ragged across a stand of gaunt, glassy plants. Quite a wind must be blowing out there, though too tenuous for him to hear through the hull. At this time of day, when the hemisphere had warmed, the air—which still didn't amount to much more than a contaminated vacuum— consisted mostly of carbon dioxide, with some methane, ammonia. and nitrogen: not especially breathable. Even Urushkidan couldn't survive those conditions without proper gear. This craft's heating and atmosphere regeneration plants had better be in good working order.

  An animal passed across the view in kangaroo-like bounds. While small, it gave him another reason not to want to go outdoors. Ganymedean biochemistry depended on heat-absorbent materials; the thermal radiation of a spacesuited human attracted animals, and carnivores were apt to try eating their way directly to the source.

  Kay turned to his companions. "Well," he sighed, "what shall we do now?"

  Dyann's eyes lit up. "Hunt monsters?" she suggested.

  "Bah!" Urushkidan writhed his way toward the laboratory compartment, where there was a desk. "You do what you like except not to disturb me. I habe an interesting aspect of unified field teory to debelop."

  "Look," said Ray. "we've got to take action. If we sit here passive, waiting for the time when we can clean those tubes, we're too bloody likely to be found."

  "What do you imagine we can effect?"

  "Oh. I don't know. Camouflage, maybe? Damnation, I have to do something!"

  "I don't, apart from my matematics. Leabe me out of any idiotic schemes you may hatch."

  "But if they catch us. we'll be killed!"

  "I won't be," said Urushkidan smugly. "I am too baluable."

  "You're a, uh, an accessory of ours."

  "True. I did get carried away in te excitement. My hope was to aboid habing to waste my genius toiling for a mere engineering project. Tat hope has apparently been disappointed. Well, ten, te logical ting for me to do when te Jobians arribe is to go ahead and complete te dreary ting for tem, so tey will let me go home . . . wit proper payment for my serbices. I trust." The Martian paused. "As for you two. I will try to make it a condition tat your libes be spared. I am, after all, a noble person. I doubt you will eber be set free, but tink how many years you will habe, undistracted, to cultibate philosophical resignation."

  Dyann tugged at Ray's sleeve, "Come on," she urged. "Let's hunt monsters."

  "Waaah!" Goaded beyond endurance, the Earthman jumped on high—and, in Ganymedean gravity, cracked his pate on the overhead.

  "Oh, poor darlin!" Dyann exclaimed, and folded him in an embrace that would have done credit to a bear.

  "Let me go!" he raged. "Somebody here better think past the next minute!"

  "You really must work on serenity," Urushkidan advised him. "Consider tings from te aspect of eternity. You are only a lower animal. Your fate is of no importance."

  "You conceited octopus!"

  "Temper, temper." Urushkidan wagged a flexible finger at the man. "Let me remind you why you should heed me. If your reasoning powers are so weak tat you cannot demonstrate a priori tat Martians are always right—by definition—ten remember te facts. Martians are beautiful. Martians habe a benerable cibilization. Eben physically, we are superior; I can libe under Eart conditions, but I dare you to try staying alibe under Mars conditions. I double-dog dare you."

  "Martians," gritted Ray, "didn't come to Earth. Earthmen came to Mars."

  "Of course. We had no reason to bisit you, but you had ebery reason to make pilgrimages to us, hoping tat a little beauty and wisdom would rub off on you. Enough. I am going aft to carry on my research and do not want to be disturbed, except tat when you get te galley going, you may bring me a bite to eat. I can ingest your kind of food, you know. I cannot, howeber, positibely cannot abide t
e taste of asparagus or truffles. Do not prepare me any dish wit asparagus or truffles." Urushkidan started off along the deck.

  "You know, Ray," said Dyann, "I have been thinking, and you are right. Now is not the time to hunt monsters. Let's make love."

  "Oh, God!" the human groaned. "If I could get away from you two lunatics, you'd see me exceed the speed of light doing it."

  He stiffened where he stood.

  "Yes?" asked Dyann.

  "Lord, Lord, Lord," he whispered. "That's the answer."

  "Yes, tat's right, talk no louder tan tat while I am tinking," Urushkidan said from the after door.

  "The drive, the faster-than-light drive—" Ray broke into a war-dance around the cramped compartment, bounding from chairs to aisle and back. "We've got all kinds of scientific supplies and equipment, we've got the Solar System's top authority on the subject, I'm an engineer, everybody knows that the basic effects have been shown in the laboratory and a real drive is just a matter of development— We'll do it ourselves!"

  "Not so loud, I told you," Urushkidan grumbled. He passed by the door and slammed it behind him.

  "Dyann, Dyann," Ray warbled, "we're going home."

  Her eyes filled with tears. "Do you vant to leave me already?" she asked. "Do you not like me?"

  "No, no, no, I want to save our lives, our freedom, that's all. Come on, let's go aft and take inventory. I'll need you to move the heavy stuff around."

  Dyann shook her head. "No," she pouted. "If you don't care for me, vy should I help you?"

  "Judas priest," Ray groaned. "Look, I love you, I adore you, I worship at your feet. Now will you give me a hand?"

  Dyann brightened but insisted, "Prove it."

  Ray kissed her. She seized him and responded enthusiastically.

  "Yeow!" he screamed. "You're about to break my ribs! Leggo!" As she did: "Uh, we'll discuss this some other time, when we've less urgent business."

  "Love," said Dyann, "has gotten to be very urgent business for me. Come here."

  After a while Urushkidan opened the door. "If you two don't stop tose noises—" he began indignantly. His gaze went to the aisle. "Oh," he said. "Oh." He closed the door again.

  Later, an aroma of coffee drew him back to the forward cabin. A disheveled Ray Tallantyre was busy at the little food preparation unit while Dyann sat polishing her sword and humming to herself.

  "Well, hi," said the man with evident relief. "I guess we can get started. First, suppose I ask a few questions, to refresh and expand my knowledge of how this drive of yours works."

  "It is not a dribe and it does not work," Urushkidan replied. "What I habe created is a structure of pure matematics. Besides, it is beyond te full comprehension of anybody but myself. Gibe me some coffee."

  "You must have followed the experiments, though, and learned a good bit more along those lines from the Jovians who've been trying to build a usable device."

  "Oh, yes, no doubt I could design someting if I wanted to. I don't want to. My current interests are too cosmic." Urushkidan accepted a cup and slurped.

  "Look," Ray argued, "if the Jovians catch us, they'll force you to do it for them. And afterward they'll overrun Mars along with the other planets. Logistics will no longer be a problem for them, you see, nor will there be any defense against their missiles."

  "Tat would be unfortunate, I admit. Neberteless, it would be downright tragic if my present train of tought were interrupted, as it would be if I gabe your project my full attention, which I would habe to do if it were to habe any chance of success. Te Jobians can afford to employ me on a part-time basis. Let tem conquer te Solar System. In a tousand years tey will be a footnote in te history books. My accomplishments will be remembered while te uniberse endures."

  Dyann hefted her sword. "You will do vat he says," she growled.

  "You dare not harm me," Urushkidan gibed; "it would leabe you stranded for te Jobians to take rebenge upon."

  He finished his coffee. "Where is te tobacco?" he asked. "I habe used my own up."

  "Jovians don't smoke," Ray informed him with savage satisfaction. "They consider it a degenerate habit."

  "What?" The Martian's howl rattled the pot on the hotplate. "No tobacco aboard?"

  "None. And I daresay your supply back in Wotanopolis has been confiscated and destroyed. That puts the nearest cigar store somewhere in the Asteroid Belt."

  "Oh, no! How can I tink without my pipe? Te new cosmology ruined by tobacco shortage—" Urushkidan needed bare seconds to reach his decision. "Bery well. Tere is no help for it. If te nearest tobacco is millions of kilometers away, we must build te faster-tan-light engine at once.

  "Also," he added thoughtfully, "if te Jobians did conquer te Solar System, tey might well prohibit tobacco on ebery world. Yes, you habe conbinced me, yours is a bital cause."

  Ray made no attempt to use the Martian's equations in detail or to find elegant solutions of any. He merely wanted to compute the parameters of something that would work, and he proceeded with slashing approximations that brought screams of almost physical anguish from the other being.

  He did, however, recognize the basic nature of Urushkidan's achievement, a final correlation of general relativity and wave mechanics whose formulation had certain surprising consequences.

  Relativity deals with matter and energy, including potentials, which move at definite velocities that cannot exceed that of light. In contrast, wave mechanics treats the particle as a psi function which is only probably where it is. In the latter theory, point-to-point transitions are not speeds but shifts in the node of a complex wave. Urushkidan had abolished the contradiction by bringing in his own immensely generalized and refined concept of information as a condition of the plenum rather than as a physical quantity subject to physical limitations. It then turned out that the phase velocity of matter waves—which, unlike the group velocity, can move at any speed—could actually carry information, so that the most probable position of a particle went from region to region with no restrictions on the time derivatives.

  The trick was to establish such conditions in reality that the theoretical possibility was realized.

  "As I understand it," Ray had said, early on, "the proper configuration of quark interchanges will set up a field of space-strain. A spacecraft will react against the entire mass of the universe, won't even need rockets. In fact, we have here the key to a lot of other things as well, like gravity control. Right?"

  "Wrong," answered Urushkidan.

  "Well, we'll build it anyhow," Ray said.

  His ambition was not as crazy as it might seem—not quite. The theory was in existence and considerable laboratory work had been done. Despite his scorn for empirical science, Urushkidan's mind had stored away the data about these and was perfectly capable of seeing what direction research should take next. Moreover, he was in fact the sole person with a complete grasp of his concepts; no physicist had, as yet, comprehended every aspect of them. Given motivation, he flung the full power of his intellect against the problem of practical application. Ray Tallantyre was actually quite a good engineer where it came to producing hardware. That hardware was not really complex, either, any more than a transistor or a tunnel diode is complex; the subtlety lies in the physical principles employed. In the present case, what was required was, basically, power, which the spacecraft had, and circuits with certain resonances, which could be constructed out of available materials. The result would not be neat, but in a slapdash fashion it ought to work.

  Just the same, no R & D undertaking ever went smoothly, and this one labored under special difficulties. On a typical occasion—

  "We'll want our secondary generator over here, I think, attached to this bench," Ray said. "Tote it for me, will you, Dyann?"

  "All ve've done is vork, vork, vork," she sulked. "I vant to hunt monsters."

  "Bring it, you lummox!"

  Dyann glared but stooped above the massive machine and, between Ganymedean weight and Varannian muscles, staggered
across the deck with it. Meanwhile Ray was checking electrical properties on an oscilloscope. Urushkidan was solving a differential equation while grumbling about heat and humidity and fanning himself with his ears. Elsewhere lay strewn a chaos of parts and tools.

  "Damn!" the man exclaimed. "I hoped—but no, this piece of copper tube isn't right either. I need a resistance with so-and-so many ohms and such-and-such a capacitance, and nothing around seems to be modifiable for it."

  "Specify your values," Urushkidan said.

  Ray pawed through the litter around him, selected another object, and put it in his test circuit. "No, this won't do." He cast it across the room; it clanged against a bulkhead. "Look, if we can't find something, this project is stopped cold."

  Having put down the generator, Dyann went forward. She returned with the boat's one and only frying pan. "Vill this maybe be right?" she asked innocently.

  "Huh? Get out of my way!" Ray screamed.

  "Okay," she answered, offended. "I go hunt monsters."

  You know—passed through the man's head; and: What's to lose? He clipped the pan into the circuit. Its properties registered as nearly what he required. If I cut the handle off—Excited, he began to do that.

  "Are you mad?" protested Urushkidan.

  "Well, I don't like the idea of living off cold beans any better than you do," Ray retorted, "but consider the alternative." He rechecked the emasculated frying pan. "Ye-e-s, given a few adjustments elsewhere, this'll serve." Viciously: "Starward the course of human empire."

  "Martian empire," Urushkidan corrected, "unless we decide it is beneat our dignity."

  "It'll be Jovian empire if we don't escape. Okay, bulgebrain, what comes next?"

  "How should I know? I habe not finished here. How do you expect me to tink in tis foul, tick air, wit no tobacco?"

  Dyann clumped in from the forward cabin, attired in a spacesuit whose adjustability she strained to the limit. Its faceplate was still open. Her right hand clutched the rifle she had taken, her left her sword. "I saw monsters out there," she announced happily. "I am goin to hunt them."