Asimov’s Future History Volume 13

by Isaac Asimov

  It meant crowding; it meant a complete absence of privacy; and it meant that Artemisia would have to adjust herself to the fact that there were no women’s clothes aboard, no mirrors, no washing facilities.

  Well, she would have to get used to it. Biron felt that he had done enough for her, gone sufficiently out of his way. Why couldn’t she be pleasant about it and smile once in a while? She had a nice smile, and he had to admit that she wasn’t bad, except for her temper. But oh, that temper!

  Well, why waste his time thinking about her?

  The water situation was the worst. Tyrann was a desert planet, in the first place, where water was at a premium and men knew its value, so none was included on board ship for washing purposes. Soldiers could wash themselves and their personal effects once they had landed on a planet. During trips a little grime and sweat would not hurt them. Even for drinking purposes, water was barely sufficient for the longer trips. After all, water could be neither concentrated nor dehydrated, but had to be carried in bulk; and the problem was aggravated by the fact that the water content of the food concentrates was quite low.

  There were distilling devices to re-use water lost by the body, but Biron, when he realized their function, felt sick and arranged for the disposal of waste products without attempt at water recovery. Chemically, it was a sensible procedure, but one has to be educated into that sort of thing.

  The second take-off was, comparatively, a: model of smoothness, and Biron spent time playing with the controls afterward. The control board resembled only in the dimmest fashion those of the ships he had handled on Earth. It had been compressed and compacted frightfully. As Biron puzzled out the action of a contact or the purpose of a dial, he wrote out minute directions on paper and pasted them appropriately on the board.

  Gillbret entered the pilot room.

  Biron looked over his shoulder. “Artemisia’s in the cabin, I suppose?”

  “There isn’t anyplace else she could be and stay inside the ship.”

  Biron said, “When you see her, tell her I’ll make up a bunk here in the pilot room. I’d advise you to do the same, and let her have the cabin to herself.” He muttered the addition, “Now there’s one childish girl.”

  “You have your moments, too, Biron,” said Gillbret. “You’ll have to remember the sort of life she’s used to.”

  “All right. I do remember it, and so what? What sort of life do you think I’m used to? I wasn’t born in the mine fields of some asteroidal belt, you know. I was born on the biggest Ranch of Nephelos. But if you’re caught in a situation, you’ve got to make the best of it. Damn it, I can’t stretch the hull of the ship. It will hold just so much food and water, and I can’t do anything about the fact that there isn’t any shower bath. She picks on me as if I personally manufactured this ship.” It was a relief to shout at Gillbret. It was a relief to shout at anybody.

  But the door opened again, and Artemisia stood there. She said, freezingly, “I would refrain, Mr. Farrill, from shouting, if I were you. You can be distinctly heard all over the ship.”

  “That,” said Biron, “does not bother me. And if the ship bothers you, just remember that if your father hadn’t tried to kill me off and marry you off, neither one of us would be here.” c

  “Don’t talk about my father.”

  “I’ll talk about anyone I please.”

  Gillbret put his hands over his ears. “Please!”

  It brought the argument to a momentary halt. Gillbret said, “Shall we discuss the matter of our destination now? It’s obvious at this point that the sooner we’re somewhere else and out of this ship, the more comfortable we’ll be.”

  “I agree with you there, Oil,” said Biron. “Just let’s go somewhere where I don’t have to listen to her clacking. Talk about women on space ships!”

  Artemisia ignored him and addressed Gillbret exclusively. “Why don’t we get out of the Nebular area altogether?”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Biron at once, “but I’ve got to get my Ranch back and do a little something about my father’s murder. I’ll stay in the Kingdoms.”

  “I did not mean,” said Artemisia, “that we were to leave forever; only till the worst of the search was over. I don’t see what you intend doing about your Ranch, anyway. You can’t get it back unless the Tyrannian Empire is broken to pieces, and I don’t see you doing that.”

  “You never mind what I intend doing. It’s my business.”

  “Might I make a suggestion?” asked Gillbret mildly.

  He took silence for consent, and went on, “Then suppose I tell you where we ought to go, and exactly what we ought to do to help break the Empire to pieces, just as Arta said.”

  “Oh? How do you propose doing that?” said Biron.

  Gillbret smiled. “My dear boy, you’re taking a very amusing attitude. Don’t you trust me? You look at me as though you think that any enterprise I might be interested in was bound to be a foolish one. I got you out of the Palace.”

  “I know that. I’m perfectly willing to listen to you.”

  “Do so, then. I’ve been waiting for over twenty years for my chance to get away from them. If I had been a private citizen, I could have done it long since; but through the curse of birth, I’ve been in the public eye. And yet. if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was born a Hinriad, I would not have attended the coronation of the present Khan of Tyrann, and in that case I would never have stumbled on the secret which will someday destroy that same Khan.”

  “Go on,” said Biron.

  “The trip from Rhodia to Tyrann was by Tyrannian warship, of course, as was the trip back. A ship like this, I might say, but rather larger. The trip there was uneventful. The stay on Tyrann had its points of amusements, but, for our purposes now, was likewise uneventful. On the trip back, however, a meteor hit us.”

  “What?”

  Gillbret held up a hand. “I know quite well it’s an unlikely accident. The incidence of meteors in space–especially in interstellar space–is low enough to make the chances of collision with a ship completely insignificant, but it does happen, as you know. And it did happen in this case. Of course any meteor that does hit, even when it is the size of a pinhead, as most of them are, can penetrate the hull of any but the most heavily armored ship.”

  “I know,” said Biron. “It’s a question of their momentum, which is a product of their mass and velocity. The velocity more than makes up for their lack of mass.” He recited it glumly, like a school lesson, and caught himself watching Artemisia furtively.

  She had seated herself to listen to Gillbret, and she was so close to him that they were almost touching. It occurred to Biron that her profile was beautiful as she sat there, even if her hair was becoming a little bedraggled. She wasn’t wearing her little jacket, and the fluffy whiteness of her blouse was still smooth and unwrinkled after forty-eight hours. He wondered how she managed that.

  The trip, he decided, could be quite wonderful if she would only learn to behave herself. The trouble was that no one had ever controlled her properly, that was all. Certainly not her father. She’d become too used to having her own way. If she’d been born a commoner, she would be a very lovely creature.

  He was just beginning to slip into a tiny daydream in which he controlled her properly and brought her to a state of proper appreciation of himself, when she turned her head and met his eye calmly. Biron looked away and fastened his attention instantly on Gillbret. He had missed a few sentences.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea why the ship’s screen had failed. It was just one of those things to which no one will ever know the answer, but it had failed. Anyway, the meteor struck amidships. It was pebble-sized and piercing the hull slowed it just sufficiently so that it couldn’t blaze its way out again through the other side. If it had done that, there would have been little harm to it, since the hull could have been temporarily patched in no time.

  “As it was, however, it plunged into the control room, ricocheted off t
he far wall and slammed back and forth till it came to a halt. It couldn’t have taken more than a fraction of a minute to come to a halt, but at an original velocity of a hundred miles a minute, it must have crisscrossed the room a hundred times. Both crewmen were cut to pieces, and I escaped only because I was in the cabin at the time.

  “I heard the thin clang of the meteor when it originally penetrated the hull, then the click-clack of its bouncing, and the terrifying short screams of the two crewmen. When I jumped into the control room, there was only the blood everywhere and the torn flesh. The things that happened next I remember only vaguely, although for years I lived it over step by step in my nightmares.

  “The cold sound of escaping air led me to the meteor hole. I slapped a disk of metal over it and air pressure made a decent seal of it. I found the little battered space pebble on the floor. It was warm to the touch, but I hit it with a spanner and split it in two. The exposed interior frosted over instantly. It was still at the temperature of space.

  “I tied a cord to the wrist of each corpse and then tied each cord to a towing magnet. I dumped them through the air lock, heard the magnets clank against the hold, and knew that the hard-frozen bodies would follow the ship now wherever it went. You see, once we returned to Rhodia, I knew I would need the evidence of their bodies to show that it had been the meteor that had killed them and not I.

  “But how was I to return? I was quite helpless. There was no way I could run the ship, and there was nothing I dared try there in the depths of interstellar space. I didn’t even know how to use the sub-etheric communication system, so that I couldn’t SOS. I could only let the ship travel on its own course.”

  “But you couldn’t very well do that, could you?” Biron said. He wondered if Gillbret ‘were inventing this, either out of simple romantic imaginings or for some severely practical reason of his own. “What about the Jumps through hyperspace? You must have managed those, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “A Tyrannian ship,” said Gillbret, “once the controls are properly set, will make any number of Jumps quite automatically.”

  Biron stared his disbelief. Did Gillbret take him for a fool? “You’re making that up,” he said.

  “I am not. It’s one of the damned military advances which won their wars for them. They didn’t defeat fifty planetary systems, outnumbering Tyrann by hundreds of times in population and resources, just by playing mumblety-peg, you know. Sure they tackled us one at a time, and utilized our traitors very skillfully, but they had a definite military edge as well. Everyone knows that their tactics were superior to ours, and part of that was due to the automatic Jump. It meant a great increase in the maneuverability of their ships and made possible much more elaborate battle plans than any we could set up.

  “I’ll admit it’s one of their best-kept secrets, this technique of theirs. I never learned it until I was trapped alone on the Bloodsucker–the Tyranni have the most annoying custom of naming their ships unpleasantly, though I suppose it’s good psychology–and watched it happen. I watched it make the Jumps without a hand on the controls.”

  “And you mean to say that this ship can do that too?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Biron turned to the control board. There were still dozens of contacts he had not determined the slightest use for. Well, later!

  He turned to Gillbret again. “And the ship took you home?”

  “No, it didn’t. When that meteor wove its pattern through the control room, it didn’t leave the board untouched. It would have been most amazing if it had. Dials were smashed, the casing battered and dented. There was no way of telling how the previous set of the controls had been altered, but it must have been somehow, because it never took me back to Rhodia.

  “Eventually, of course, it began deceleration, and I knew the trip was theoretically over. I couldn’t tell where I was, but I managed to maneuver the visiplate so that I could tell there was a planet close enough to show a disk in the ship telescope. It was blind luck, because the disk was increasing in size. The ship was heading for the planet.

  “Oh, not directly. That would have been too impossible to hope for. If I had just drifted, the ship would have missed the planet by a million miles, at least, but at that distance I could use ordinary etheric radio. I knew how to do that. It was after this was allover that I began educating myself in electronics. I made up my mind that I would never be quite so helpless again. Being helpless is one of the things that isn’t altogether amusing.”

  Biron prompted, “So you used the radio.”

  Gillbret went on: “Exactly, and they came and got me;”

  “Who?”

  “The men of the planet. It was inhabited.”

  “Well, the luck piles up. What planet was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean they didn’t tell you?”

  “Amusing, isn’t it? They didn’t. But it was somewhere among the Nebular Kingdoms!”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because they knew the ship I was in was a Tyrannian vessel. They knew that by sight, and almost blasted it before I could convince them I was the only one on board alive.”

  Biron put his large hands on his knees and kneaded them. “Now hold on and pull back. I don’t get this. If they knew it was a Tyrannian vessel and intending blasting it, isn’t that the best proof that the world was not in the Nebular Kingdoms? that it was anywhere but there?”

  “No, by the Galaxy.” Gillbret’s eyes were shining, and his voice climbed in enthusiasm. “It was in the Kingdoms. They took me to the surface, and what a world it was! There were men there from allover the Kingdoms. I could tell by the accents. And they had no fear of the Tyranni. The place was an arsenal. You couldn’t tell from space. It might have been a rundown farming world, but the life of the planet was underground. Somewhere in the Kingdoms, my boy, somewhere there is that planet still, and it is not afraid of the Tyranni, and it is going to destroy the Tyranni as it would have destroyed the ship I was on then, if the crewmen had been still alive.”

  Biron felt his heart bound. For a moment he wanted to believe.

  After all, maybe. Maybe!

  Eleven: And Maybe Not!

  AND THEN AGAIN, maybe not!

  Biron said, “How did you learn all this about its being an arsenal? How long did you stay? What did you see?”

  Gillbret grew impatient. “It wasn’t exactly what I saw at all. They didn’t conduct me on any tours, or anything like that.” He forced himself to relax. “Well, look, this is what happened. By the time they got me off the ship, I was in more or less of a bad state. I had been too frightened to eat much–it’s a terrible thing, being marooned in space–and I must have looked worse than I really was.

  “I identified myself, more or less, and they took me underground. With the ship, of course. I suppose they were more interested in the ship than in myself. It gave them a chance to study Tyrannian spatio-engineering. They took me to what must have been a hospital.”

  “But what did you see, Uncle?” asked Artemisia.

  Biron interrupted, “Hasn’t he ever told you this before?”

  Artemisia said, “No.”

  And Gillbret added, “I’ve never told anyone till now. I was taken to a hospital, as I said. I passed research laboratories in that hospital that must have been better than anything we have on Rhodia. On the way to the hospital I passed factories in which some sort of metalwork was going on. The ships that had captured me were certainly like none I’ve ever heard about.

  “It was all so apparent to me at the time that I have never questioned it in the years since. I think of it as my ‘rebellion world,’ and I know that someday swarms of ships will leave it to attack the Tyranni, and that the subject worlds will be called upon to rally round the rebel leaders. From year to year I’ve waited for it to happen. Each new year I’ve thought to myself: This may be the one. And, each time, I half hoped it wouldn’t be, because I was l
onging to get away first, to join them so that I might be part of the great attack. I didn’t want them to start without me.”

  He laughed shakily. “I suppose it would have amused most people to know what was going on in my mind. In my mind. Nobody thought much of me, you know.”

  Biron said, “All this happened over twenty years ago, and they haven’t attacked? There’s been no sign of them? No strange ships have been reported? No incidents? And you still think–”

  Gillbret fired at him, “Yes, I do. Twenty years isn’t too long to organize a rebellion against a planet that rules fifty systems. I was there just at the beginning of the rebellion. I know that too. Slowly, since then, they must have been honeycombing the planet with their underground preparations, developing newer ships and weapons, training more men, organizing the attack.

  “It’s only in the video thrillers that men spring to arms at a moment’s notice; that a new weapon is needed one day, invented the next, mass-produced the third, and used the fourth. These things take time, Biron, and the men of the rebellion world must know they will have to be completely ready before beginning. They won’t be able to strike twice.

  “And what do you call ‘incidents’? Tyrannian ships have disappeared and never been found. Space is big, you might say, and they might simply be lost, but what if they were captured by the rebels? There was the case of the Tireless two years back. It reported a strange object close enough to stimulate the massometer, and then was never heard from again. It could have been a meteor, I suppose, but was it?

  “The search lasted months. They never found it. I think the rebels have it. The Tireless was a new ship, an experimental model. It would be just what they would want.”

  Biron said, “Once having landed there, why didn’t you stay?”

  “Don’t you suppose I wanted to? I had no chance. I listened to them when they thought I was unconscious, and I learned a bit more then. They were just starting, out there, at that time. They couldn’t afford to be found out then. They knew I was Gillbret oth Hinriad. There was enough identification on the ship, even if I hadn’t told them myself, which I had. They knew that if I didn’t return to Rhodia there would be a full-scale search that would not readily come to a halt.