by Ian Wallace
“You are certain that they are not fuel tanks?”
“Very close to certain. On the mantas, the drive ducts were located in the wings, and so were the fuel tanks. Now if you will examine these diagrams of the wings—and each wing spreads more than nine kilometers from body-axis to tip— you will instantly see that the same arrangement is many times magnified in this ship.”
“Good, Hel. Then we are to assume that this flagship extrudes from those body-tanks some plasma that bonds with the net around the sun, yet hangs on to the ship; so that when the ship moves, she tows the sun. Is that it, do you think?”
“Sounds oversimplified, don’t you think?”
“I think.”
Bill put in: “Maybe whatever is in those tanks acts like a tow rope on a power winch which is the ship. The plasmic stuff is extruded, it bonds to the sun-net; it is then retracted while the ship is in power drive outward from the sun to act as an anchor. By this method the ship tugs at the sun, and when the sun begins to move, God help us, the ship moves ahead of it and delivers another tug. Eventually the sun’s massive momentum will get the sun traveling by itself, with all our planets trailing along; and perhaps eventually the ship’s problem will be to keep from being run over by what it is pulling. Is that any better, Helen?”
“I think so.”
Sven exploded: “What the hell kind of invisible soup would be able to reach out and drag at the sun while keeping its tail anchored to the ship?”
“Glad you said soup,” Bill responded. “Helen said plasma, and I’m remembering that the gaseous atmosphere on Dhorn and in this ship is pretty soupy. Probably they are experts on semi-fluid gases ionized and otherwise. For now, let’s just call it a tractor plasma.”
Sven objected: “But why all this capacity to store it?”
I suggested: “Maybe it’s ions don’t like each other.”
‘Then why would they hang together for traction?”
“Dear Sven, I don’t have a theory, and this isn’t when to ask all those questions even of ourselves, because I don’t think we are going to get anywhere if we try to attack that tractor plasma directly. Our only hope is to mess with the wiring.”
“Have your instruments located the wiring?”
“No, and they probably won’t, because there may not be any wiring. They may be using standing electromagnetic channels instead. But the point is, we are beginning to locate the prime points of contact; and at those points, economical sabotage might be attempted.”
Sven then said a thing which, as it developed, was the last straw for Bill’s nervous system. “Have you reflected that we five may not survive that?”
“Yes,” I told him promptly, “and I don’t give a damn, and I don’t think Wel or Collins does, when our planet is at stake. Do you give a damn, Sven?”
“I do give a damn, but it isn’t that big a damn.”
“Bill?”
We had turned to our astronomer—and found him huddled in his chair, shivering, hands claw-clutching, eyes glazed. I went to him and shook him, calling his name; no response. ‘Til get Collins,” said Sven, departing in a hurry for Wel's cubicle. He was back in a moment with both of them, Sven and Collins far ahead, Wel limping in the rear. Collins went over Bill in detail; then Collins did a queer thing, laying the right side of his cranium against the left side of Bill’s. After a few seconds, Bill calmed and relaxed, and Collins gravely straightened.
“Doctor Haley,” he said, “is a highly coarctated personality who has been under great strain, which he has tried to suppress. Was anything said that would shock him profoundly?”
Pale, I reported: “We were discussing the possibility that we might not survive—”
“That did it,” Collins asserted. “Doctor Haley has been presented with a large number of phenomena that were entirely outside his concept of reality. Confrontation with these Dhomer giants probably almost did it; confrontation by ^ sane assertion of possible death finally did it. He is in psychophysical shock, mainly psychic. I have implanted a suggestion which will bring him around in time, it is all I can do; chemical stimuli are counterindicated. Will it trouble you seriously if I let him continue to doze in his chair here?”
I managed to say, “Of course not.” Sven shrugged.
“Good,” Collins approved. “This may continue a day or two. If there is no improvement by this evening, I’ll feed him intravenously. He should be in bed, but his bed is unfortunately tilted wrong; later, we can sack him on Doctor Carr’s floor, perhaps. Do excuse us, now, we are terribly busy—”
And Collins departed with Wel for Wel's cubicle, leaving us with the nearest thing to a corpse on our hands.
Wel said to Collins, “My feeling is that our start was not bad. What do you think?”
“I was getting through to him all right, Prospero. Also I was receiving excellently from you, and I think perhaps Princess Hréda was saying to Dhurk in his mind very nearly what you were having me have her say. Yes, the start was good, but it was only a start. So far he has not replied verbally; that will be a real test, you will have 'to improvise answers for me on the spot.”
“Only a start, yes. He will not act upon a dream. I do not see him as being superstitious.”
“He is, however, emotional. I could give him some affirmative suggestion to reinforce the dream-suggestion by Hréda.”
“The time for it would be during NREM Stage Three. But I gather from you, Ariel, that he is staying pretty much in REM tonight.”
“That could be altered. Do you suppose, Prospero, that first—another touch of Hréda, just for reinforcement, prior to implanting the suggestion?”
“Let’s not overdo Hréda.”
“The Horn, then—to reinforce Hréda with authority?”
“That might work backwards, Collins; I am seeing Dhurk as a strong man who is easily irritated by the Horn’s authority. No, I had a different and perhaps surprising thought—”
Dhurk sat in his command seat on the flagship bridge; beside him, no surprise to Dhurk, sat Hedrik, the Director of Dhom’s Interscientific Institute. Hedrik was saying: “—positively I am finding your execution marvelous. But do you mind if I slip in a bit of criticism?”
“By all means do so, Hedrik.” (That was Dhurk’s first voluntary response in dreaming; the situation was delicate, because voluntary responses tend to awaken the responders.)
“It only occurs to me, Dhurk, that so far you have missed an unparalleled opportunity. Here are these five little intelligent creatures from a planet in this ladiolis; you have them—and you are not studying either them or their technology.”
“I suppose you are right, Hedrik, but I really have no time for that now. I have this critical task of getting their star into motion, and the hazards are such that I must—”
As Dhurk launched into the second sentence, the image of Hedrik began to blur. It was altogether gone by the time Dhurk said “I must—” His voice trailed off, and he awoke on his bunk in his cabin. Having snickered a bit at himself, he drifted back into sleep.
This time it was NREM sleep. Deep into it, Dhurk was aware of a thought without imagery, a definite conclusion which on awakening he remembered as having been approximately this: Hréda made sense, and Hedrik was right, and the dreamings must have been hunches of my own.
“It is implanted, Prospero, and he will remember it when he awakens.”
“It does not guarantee that he will act upon it.”
“Nobody said that it was going to be. easy. What if he does not let me out?”
“Collins, next time they have us open up, I think you should contrive to get out.”
“You mean—rush them?”
“Worst of all possible mistakes. Can you think of a more subtle way to do it?”
“Well, yes—”
“The key interfaces have got to be here and here and here,” I told Sven, pointing to places on the diagram, “and the analogy with the manta-robots is very close.” Still we were in the salon, bending
over diagrams on the dinner table, trying to ignore the Bill-zombie catatonic near us.
“See,” I continued, “in this cross section of the ship segment between the wings, this horizontal transverse line is the main deck where crew action is centralized; and here, all round the deck, is the power pack of batteries which spark the ship’s engines and activate also the tractor plasma. I’m sure that if we should trouble to retrace the, circuits, we would find provision for continually recharging the batteries. And here, associated with the batteries, is a remote-control transmission system which takes the place of wires.
“Now look at this topograph of the right wing. This mighty compartment has got to be a thrust-fuel tank with capacity around a billion cubic meters; these four smaller compartments are the thrust-engines; and out here beyond the engines is another fuel compartment with capacity around half a billion cubic meters. Presumably their fuel is a high concentrate, if all they need can be stored in a billion and a half cubic meters per wing—since the left wing is laid out as a mirror image of the right one. Here are feed lines from the fuel compartments to the engines; and this bulge in each feed line has got to be a pump. Now look at these bulges on each engine and on each pump: they are the receptors for off and on impulses from the computerized controls.
“Return aft, now, to this lateral of the tank series for the tractor plasma. At the bottom of each tank is a bulge; and there is a second bulge at the top of the anterior tank. Remember that there are valved pipe connections between tanks, here and here and so on. The top bulge on the anterior tank is the interface with the master computer complex to operate the tractor plasma; these bulges along the tank bottoms are coordinator systems. Suppose that the top bulge on the anterior tank receives an impulse to fire; that tank is full, so the impulse is passed along from tank to tank by the bottom bulges until an empty tank is found, whereupon the tank just in front of the empty takes over the discharge. We can’t tell about actual fullness or emptiness from these diagrams, but the point of coordination holds.
“And it is most interesting to notice that there are swim-tubes to all the interface bulges, both in the wings and in the body.
“Now, here is a cross section of nearly the nose of the ship, just behind the bridge. The ship is much narrower here, the cross section has a far smaller perimeter. Here is the transverse line of the bridge-deck: you can see how narrow it is, no more than forty meters wide at this point, wider farther astern. And the diameter of the ship’s body at this point is only about one kilometer, arching shallow beneath the deck and high over it and diversely around it.
“If you examine closely the arch around the bridge-deck, particularly in the great space above it, you will see that it is nearly filled with a system of bulges quite differently shaped from the storage batteries farther aft. These are the computer plexus—for internal ship control, for ship guidance, for activation of thrust, and for activation of the tractor substance.
“See, Sven? We know what to do already. The remaining questions are, how to do it, and which to do first. ’Scuse the prolonged lecture. Over.”
Sven reflected aloud: “As you said—even knowing the possibilities, our priority of sabotage is a tough question. Consider consequences. If we go for either the tractor plasma or the engine drive, probably it will only cause delay; they can repair our damage while they skewer us. We could do a kamikaze by using Hoolihan to blow the fuel tanks, one or both, except that we don’t know what the fuel is—it may not even be flammable in any way that we understand. Besides which, Hel, our first move will probably be our last.”
“I think you’re saying, it has to be either the power pack or the computer plexus.”
“Probably not even the power pack, Hel; probably they carry spare batteries. I’m becoming quite certain that we need to do a sharp sure thrust at the computer plexus.”
“And scramble it totally?”
“Like eggs. No good to merely clear the program; Dhurk or one of his officers or even -one of his robots probably knows how to reprogram it, maybe even how to replace the memory. You don’t travel two million light-years from home into primitive country without being at least mentally self-contained. Which gives me the idea that maybe the simplest way would be to waste the officers—”
“NO!” I yelled the order. Then, calming myself but still short of breath: “Apart from the idea’s being horrible, it’s a bad idea. To be safe, you’d also have to waste all the robots.” “Feeling no compunction about wasting robots, I have to agree that the idea is impractical.”
‘The computer complex, then—once we figure how to get at it. Sven, must we use Hoolihan to wreck it?”
“What’s your thought?”
“Hoolihan is curtains for us, too. Some lesser method might wreck the computers while allowing us to escape in Mazda”
“That was likewise my thought. The idea that I am entertaining, Helen, will either scare you or make you laugh.”
“A laugh I need; a scare I got.”
‘Take another look at these diagrams. There are swim-tubes leading from bridge-deck level to the computer plexus. Three of them—hitting three points around the plexus, with probably local feeder tubes. Do you notice the tube diameters?”
“Uniformly, six meters. Too narrow for those dragons to stand up in there, but they probably swim it. The robots are a bit shorter than the men, have you noticed?”
“Yes, but—does that six-meter tube diameter suggest anything about a weapon that we might bring in—a weapon capable of blasting the computer plexus clear out of space without totally blowing the ship? Give it some thought, now: free association—”
I tried to let my mind roam free. Then something snapped into place, and I began gazing at the inner shell of Mazda. I murmured: “Sven—you wouldn’t!”
“I would, but I see two problems that are major quite apart from the entailed noise. If we use our booster to maneuver Mazda through a tube, how do we turn her around to tail-blast the computer plexus? The other difficulty is independent: assuming that there are curves in the tube, with only half a meter clearance all around on straightaways, how do we manage the curves with a twenty-eight meter length of capsule-cum-booster?”
“Take your second problem first, Sven, and let’s tackle this bully idea. Look at the diagrams: the tubes leading to what I think is the computer plexus are uniformly straight upward diagonals until they near the top level, and then the curvature to level is* gradual. Wait, let me scale it. . . . Yeah, yeah, the ship with booster would clear that curve—scraping a little, maybe.”
“But how do we get into the tubes?”
“Mm?”
“The points of entry to the tubes did not show up in your scan, they must fall between a couple of fifty-meter samples. Assuming they are entered from crew deck, they may go horizontally hullward, then do a double curve forward and upward. End of Mazda idea, maybe.”
“We won’t know until we’ve scouted, will we?”
“True—”
“And I see a way to back our ship up the tube, if we can get her inside. Propel her backwards with the attitude jets— and use them also to keep her away from contact with the tube walls.”
“Bit of a caterpillar crawl, don’t you think, Hel?”
“But will it work, Sven?”
“Yes, if we can twist her in. I could kill myself. Hey—do you realize it’s after 1700, and we haven’t eaten a bite since that goddamned dinner for breakfast?”
“Do we dare eat now, Sven? In another few hours, they may be delivering breakfast for dinner. And after that, waking us up for lunch—”
“Hideous. Would you buy drinking and snacking?”
“Bought. How about Wel and Collins and—poor Bill, here?”
“As for Bill, I will pass a straight shot under his nose; if it doesn’t arouse him, let him trance on. As for the others, we’ll call them—but fgossakes hide those diagrams: if Wel won’t open up to us, I sure won’t open up to him.”
As with my ri
ght hand I assembled and stowed the diagrams while balancing my drink in my left, I was feeling a certain botherment about Sven. Clearly to me, he was under increasing strain: it just wasn’t like him to be mean about
Wel's furtiveness. I couldn’t really excuse Wel either, but Wel's behavior was at least consistent with the introversion that was ultimately his. Whereas Sven was big—but, because he commanded our mission, his counter-secretiveness was not.
Part Nine
PROSPERO’S PENTECOST
27
As predicted, the banging on our entry hatch came shortly after 1830. We activated the inner door, pushed the dirty din-ner-for-breakfast platter and utensils into the lock, closed the inner door; Sven banged back with a wrench, and buttoned the outer door: this time it worked. After a moment came another outer banging; Sven closed the outer door, activated exhaust pumps for the alien atmosphere, opened the inner; and we fetched the new food. Having brought it in and closed the inner door, just for fun Sven buttoned the outer: nothing. Release from Mazda was not for yet. But we had confirmed a thing about them: assuming that their ship’s clock followed their diurnal rhythm, their remote planet must rotate almost synchronously with Earth, as Collins had specified. The exact rotational deviations, one way or another, remained to be determined with the serving of more meals: if the timing should creep one way or another, that would establish the difference.
Again, their idea of a given meal (breakfast this time) was not all that bad to our taste. The platter was filled with a hot semi-mushy stuff well browned on top, having about the consistency of a southern American dish called spoonbread, and sure enough, the mighty utensils, which we would have had to wield with both hands, were spoons. When we dug in with our own tools, the taste suggested soy grits. Loaded with protein, assuredly; not bacon and eggs, but pretty good—and anyhow, we’d had no bacon or eggs since Earth. We did in fact eat most of it, and we drank most of the inevitable pseudo-coffee. I worked on somnolent Bill as though he were a food-resisting baby. I got him to swallow five small spoonfuls and to sip a bit of coffee through a straw; once more, then, he subsided into catatonia.