The planet was wreathed in clouds, storms, cyclones, as if intentionally dead and waiting-hiding behind an incessantly transmitted sign that requested some countersign. Observations made under the heading of archeology—to discover traces of a historical past, such as ruins of cities, or things corresponding to the cultural architecture of Earth, like temples, pyramids, ancient seats of government—yielded nothing definite. If war had destroyed these totally, or if human eyes were unable to discern them for their sheer alienness, the sole bridge cast across that alienness remained technological activity. So they looked for the devices—gigantic, surely—that had been used to hurl the ocean waters into space. The arrangement of such artillery could be calculated using criteria that were universally applicable, since determined by physics. Given the direction of the rotation of the ice ring, its circumequatorial path, it was possible to deduce the localization of the planetary water-throwers. But again the searchers were stymied: the installations must have been erected where dry land met ocean—in the very region over which now sped the frozen ring, whose constant friction against the rarefied atmosphere covered the critical places with storm and downpour. Thus even the attempt to recreate the methods employed by the engineers of Quinta a century ago to shoot the seas into the void met with failure.
The detailed photographs filled the archives of the ship but had no more value, really, than blotches on the page of a Rorschach test. The meaningless contours of the star-shaped structures on the continents suggested to the human eye as many terrestrial things as the shapes a man might see—but in fact only imagine—when confronted with copious spatterings of ink. DEUS's helplessness in the face of these thousands of pictures made them realize that within the machine, too—though it was supposed to be absolutely objective in the processing of information—lay the stubborn inheritance of anthropocentrism. Instead of learning something about an alien intelligence, Nakamura remarked, they had learned how close the bonds of mental kinship were between man and his computer. The nearness of the alien civilization—practically within arm's reach—became a separating distance that mocked their attempts to get to the heart of it. They struggled, with the growing feeling that a malicious trap had been laid for the expedition, as if Someone (but who?) wished to offer them a challenge full of hope, only to reveal—at the end of the road, at the destination—its impossibility. Those who were troubled by this thought kept it to themselves, so as not to infect their comrades with defeatism.
After seven hundred hours of this fruitless diplomatic emission, Steergard decided to send to Quinta the first lander, named Gabriel. The Ambassador announced the Gabriel's arrival forty-eight hours before takeoff, informing the Quintans that the probe was not equipped with any kind of weapon and would touch down on the large northern continent Heparia, a hundred miles from a certain star-shaped group of buildings, in a barren—hence uninhabited—area, as an unmanned emissary, with which the Heparians would be able to communicate in machine language. Although the planet did not respond to this announcement, either, they sent the Gabriel out of orbit, in the aposelenium. It was a two-stage rocket with a microcomputer that had, besides the standard programs of contact, the ability to revise and alter them to fit unforeseen circumstances. Polassar supplied the Gabriel with the best of the small terajoule engines that they had on board, so that it could cover the four hundred thousand kilometers to the planet in about twenty minutes, at a speed up to six hundred kilometers a second. It would slow down only above the ionosphere.
The physicists wanted to maintain contact with the emissary, shooting relay probes to race ahead of it, but the captain rejected the idea. He preferred to have the Gabriel act on its own, reporting information to them only after it made a soft landing, via a beam that the atmosphere of the Moon would focus on the Hermes. He felt that any earlier positioning of relays between the Moon, behind which the Hermes hid, and the planet might be noticed and increase the suspiciousness of the paranoid civilization. The unaccompanied flight of the Gabriel underscored the peacefulness of its mission.
The Hermes observed this flight reflected in the unfolded mirrors of the Ambassador, with a five-minute delay due to the translational distance. The perfectly chilled reflector of the Ambassador gave an excellent image. The Gabriel was carrying out maneuvers to make it impossible to locate the mother ship, and soon it appeared as a dark pin against the white-cloud face of the planet. Eight minutes later, the people at the screens stiffened. Instead of proceeding quickly to its designated landing site in Heparia, the Gabriel moved southward along a curve of increasing radius and prematurely cut its speed. They immediately saw the reason for its turn. In the belt above the equator, four black points made slowly for the Gabriel, two from the east and two from the west, along mathematically perfect trajectories of pursuit. The eastern chasers had already diminished the distance separating them from the Gabriel. The pursued craft changed shape, from a needle to a dot surrounded with blinding light: having cut its drive with a four-hundredfold overload, instead of descending to the planet it shot straight up. The four pursuing points also changed course. They began to converge. The Gabriel seemed motionless in the center of the trapezium whose corners were the chasers. The trapezium shrank before their eyes, indicating that the chasers, too, had shifted from orbital motion to hyperbolic and were coming together, bright with the heat of the increased drives.
Steergard was tempted to ask Rotmont, as a programmer, what the Gabriel would do next, because the blaze produced by the chasers was evidence of tremendous thrust. The group of five moved away from the planet, leaving in its wake a wide crater in the sea of white clouds. There was silence in the dim control room. Watching this unique scene, no one spoke. The four dots drew closer and closer to the Gabriel. At the edge of the field of vision, the Doppler telemeter and accelerometer spat out their little red numbers so rapidly that it was difficult to read the indicated speed. The Gabriel was at a disadvantage, because it had lost valuable time braking and turning around while the pursuit craft, flanking it, kept on accelerating. DEUS drew on the monitor the predicted intersection of the five trajectories. According to the telemetry and Doppler shift, the Gabriel would be caught in about twenty seconds. Twenty seconds was a lot, even for a man thinking a billion times slower than a computer—particularly in moments of extreme tension.
Steergard himself did not know whether or not he had made a mistake by not providing the probe with even a defensive armament. He was furious in his helplessness. The Gabriel lacked even a self-destruct charge. Noble intentions, too, ought to have their limits: this was all he had time to think.
The square of the hunters became as small as the dot over an "i." Although the prey and the predators were now a full planetary diameter away from the planet, the force of their drives sent tremors through the surface of the cirrus sea below. In the opening of that sea showed the ocean and the uneven coastline of Heparia. Remnants of cloud vanished in this window like wisps of cotton candy under heat.
The dark background of the ocean worsened the visibility. Only the continually racing, red-flickering numbers of the telemeter gave the Gabriel's position. Its pursuers closed in on it from four sides. They were alongside it. Then the window in the clouds bulged, as if the planet were expanding like a gigantic balloon; the gravimeters gave a sharp crack; the screens blackened for a moment—and the image returned. The funnel-shaped window in the white clouds was again small, distant, and completely empty. Steergard did not immediately grasp what had taken place. He looked at the telemeter: all that blinked were red zeros.
"He let 'em have it," said someone with grim satisfaction. Harrach, probably.
"What happened?" Tempe didn't understand.
Steergard knew now, but said nothing. The absolute conviction came upon him that, though they might renew their efforts, they would lose their ship sooner than force contact. For a moment he wondered—already far in his thoughts from this first encounter—whether or not to continue with the arranged program. He barel
y heard the excited voices in the control room. Rotmont was trying to explain what the Gabriel had done, though the reconnaissance plan did not foresee this. The Gabriel had crushed space and the pursuers with a sidereal implosion.
"But it didn't have a sidereal generator," Tempe protested, amazed.
"It didn't, but it could have made one. It had a teratron engine, after all. It diverted it, shorted it, directed the full power of the drive into itself, in one discharge. Cunning! They were playing poker, and the Gabriel changed the game to bridge. It led with a trump—because there's no suit higher than a gravitational collapse. That's how it avoided capture…"
"Wait a minute." Tempe was beginning to understand. "It had that in its program?"
"Of course not! It had a terawatt annihilative engine and complete autonomy. It went for broke. The thing's a machine, remember, not a man, so this wasn't suicide. The prime directive said that it could allow itself to be handled, but only after landing."
"But, then, couldn't they have pulled the teratron out after the Gabriel landed?" Gerbert asked, puzzled.
"How? The whole first stage, including the teratron, was supposed to melt upon penetration of the atmosphere. With immersion of the stator, the internal pressure would blow apart the poles, and everything, the engine room included, would end up a cloud of dust. And without the least bit of radioactivity. It was only the upper, forward module that was supposed to land and make pleasant conversation with the masters of the house…"
"Oh, yes," Harrach growled, indignant. "It was assumed that their rockets wouldn't be able to build up such acceleration! The Gabriel would fly through the satellite rubbish heap like a rifle bullet through a swarm of bees, and politely set down."
"Why didn't it melt its engine when they went after it?" asked the doctor.
"Why doesn't a chicken fly?"
Rotmont was giving vent to his irritation.
"What could it melt the teratron with? The energy for burning the drive module was to be drawn from outside—from atmospheric friction. That's how the thing was designed. You didn't know? But let's return to the crux of the game. Either the Gabriel would escape, which was not very likely, or they would seize it in space, pull it down into orbit, and disassemble it. If they smothered its drive, and it waited until then to short the engine, there would have been an explosion, but a toroid having poles might survive. The Gabriel couldn't allow that, so it came up with the idea of a black hole with a double event horizon, sucked the hunters into itself, imploding, and when the inner sphere collapsed the outer went free, because on that scale quantum effects equal gravitational. Space curved—which is why we saw Quinta as if through a magnifying glass."
"And this truly wasn't programmed? The possibility was never even considered?" Arago said, silent until now.
"No! It wasn't! Fortunately, the machine had more upstairs than we do!" Rotmont was angered by the questions. "It was to be as defenseless as a newborn babe! The Gabriel's teratron was not intended for the hyperthermic production of collapsars by short-circuiting, but the Quintans could have deduced that from the construction itself. Obviously they could have, if the Gabriel hit on the idea in a couple of seconds."
"By itself?"
The monk's question made Rotmont lose all patience.
"By itself! How many times do I have to say that? It had, after all, a luminal computer with a quarter the power of DEUS! In five years, Father, you wouldn't think your way through half the number of bits that it could in one microsecond. It examined itself, ascertained that it could reverse the field of the teratron and that shorting the poles would produce a mononuclear sidereal generator. The generator would burst, of course, immediately, but at the same time as the collapse…"
"That was to be expected," observed Nakamura.
"If you take a walk with a walking stick and a mad dog comes at you, it's to be expected that you'll hit him over the head," replied Rotmont. "It's incredible that we could have been so naïve! But all's well that ends well. They showed their hospitality, and the Gabriel knew how to return the compliment. Of course, it could have been equipped with a conventional self-destruct charge, but our leader chose not to do that…"
"And what took place, is that any better?" asked Arago.
"And was I supposed to install a moped engine in it? It needed power, so it got power. And the fact that a teratron resembles, in its design, a sidereal generator is not my fault but the consequence of physics. Jokichi?"
"He's right," said Nakamura, appealed to.
"In any case, they have no sidereal technology or gravistics, I'll stake my life on that," Rotmont went on.
"How do you know?"
"Because they would have used it. That whole Moloch buried on the Moon, for example, is a horse and buggy from the point of view of sidereal engineering. Why tunnel down to magma and the asthenosphere if you can transform gravitation to produce macroquantum effects? Their physics took a different road—I would say a more roundabout road, which led them away from the trump suit. Thank God! We want contact, after all, not combat."
"But won't they consider what just happened combat?"
"They might. They very well might!"
"Gentlemen, do you think you can locate any pieces of the craft that the Gabriel sent flying?" Steergard asked the physicists.
"Not likely—unless the collapse was highly asymmetrical. I'll ask DEUS. I doubt that the grav monitors were able to record it precisely. DEUS?"
"Locating them," said the computer, "is not possible. The blast from the opening of the outer Kerr envelope dispersed the fragments away from the sun."
"And in the vicinity?"
"An indeterminacy of a parsec was created."
"You're not serious?" said Polassar. Nakamura was also amazed.
"I am not sure that Dr. Rotmont is right," said DEUS. "Possibly I am biased, as one more closely related to the Gabriel than is Dr. Rotmont. In addition, I did limit its autonomy, according to the instructions that I received."
"Enough of that 'related' business." The captain did not care for machine humor. "Tell what you know."
"My guess is that the Gabriel intended only to disappear—by turning itself into a singularity. It knew that neither we nor they would be harmed in this way, because the probability of meeting a singularity is, practically speaking, zero. It has a diameter of 10-50 of a proton. Two flies, one flying from Paris, the other from New York, would be more likely to collide."
"Whom are you defending, Rotmont or yourself?"
"I defend no one. Though not a man, I speak as a man, to men. The Hermes and the Eurydice originate in Greece. Let this sound, then, as if uttered at the walls of Troy: if the crew suspects those who programmed and sent forth the Gabriel, I give my Olympian word that the collapse-escape was not entered in any memory bank. The Gabriel possessed the decisional maximum, a nanosecond heuristics with branches to 1032, the cardinal number of the combinatorial set. To what use it put that capability I do not know, but I do know the amount of time it had to reach a decision: from three to four seconds. Too little, that, to determine the Holenbach interval. Thus the choice it faced was: all or nothing. If it did not close off space with a collapse, it would explode like a hundred-megaton thermonuclear bomb—because the power liberated by the short would have been such an explosion. In view of that, the Gabriel went to the other extreme, which ensured an implosion down to a singularity, and incidentally pulled the Quintans' missiles into the Kerr envelope."
DEUS fell silent. Steergard looked around at his men.
"All right. I'll accept that. The Gabriel surrendered its soul to the Lord. As to whether it checkmated Quinta in the process, we'll find out. We remain where we are. Who's on duty?"
"I am," said Tempe.
"Good. The rest of you, to bed. If anything happens, wake me."
"DEUS is always on duty," offered the computer.
Alone in the control room with the lights on dim, the pilot circled like a swimmer in invisible water, past dead an
d empty screens, and rose to the ceiling. Struck by an unexpected thought, he kicked off from the ceiling and flew to the central videoscope.
"DEUS?" he said in a low voice.
"Yes."
"Show me again the final stage of the chase. Slowed down five times."
"Optically?"
"Optically with an infrared overlay, but the image shouldn't be too blurred."
"The degree of blurring is a matter of taste," replied DEUS as the screen lit up. Along the frame flashed the numbers of the telemeter. They did not rush at lightning speed as before, but changed in small jumps.
"Cross hairs on the image."
"Very well."
The picture, intersected stereometrically, whitened with clouds. Suddenly it shook, as if seen through rushing water. The lines of the grid began to bend. The distance between the needle of the Gabriel and the pursuers decreased. At slow motion, everything took place as in a drop of water under a microscope, when comma bacilli swim toward a black speck in suspension.
"Differential Doppler telemetry!" he said.
"Space is losing its euclidean structure," replied DEUS, but switched on the differentiator. Though the squares of the grid trembled and bent, distance could still be roughly estimated. The commas were a few hundred meters from the Gabriel. Then a large expanse of the planet beneath the five clustered black points swelled in a violent magnification, only to return instantly to its normal appearance. But the black dots had all vanished. In the place where they had been there was a slight stirring, as of air. It gave a terrible blaze of red, like a gush of shining blood, which formed a scarlet bubble that turned brown, dimmed, and went out. The far clouds, dispersed thousands of miles by the shock, lazily rotated above the surface of the ocean, which was darker than the continental coast to the east. The window, with its swirling edges, still gaped wide and round, but was empty.
"Gravimeters!" called the pilot.
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