[Jan Darzek 05] - The Whirligig of Time

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  "Precisely." Kernopplix clucked his approval. "This is a very proper arrangement. There should be no direct contact between the government and my humble self. We agreed on that. Very well. If you will kindly wait a moment, I have been provided with sealed instructions for every contingency."

  He darted from the room with startling speed, all thirteen limbs functioning as legs. A few minutes later he returned with ~ piece of woven parchment 'like the material the masfiln's letters had been indited on. It was folded and sealed.

  "You see the label," he said, waving it under Darzek's nose. " 'Outright refusal of demands.' Does that cover the situation? I have various instructions concerning counterproposals or requests for delay, but none of them would seem to apply. You're saying the world's finance council will provide no solvency and therefore you offer nothing. And that amounts to outright refusal, doesn't it?"

  "Quite correct," Darzek assured him.

  "Then this is the proper instruction." Kernopplix's voice again gave Darzek the impression he was being beamed at. The spidery appendages broke the seal and unfolded the message.

  "Well," Kernopplix said when he'd finished reading. "There's nothing further for me to do. Nor you, I suppose." He sounded bitterly disappointed. "There's no message to relay. We'll simply have to wait."

  He handed the parchment to Darzek. It said, "A demonstration will be arranged. Make no further effort in the matter of obtaining the government's cooperation. Wait until the government comes to you."

  "So." Kernopplix effected a sweeping gesture with several of his limbs. "I am to wait. When you are ready to come to me, I'll be here."

  Darzek performed the ceremonious gesture of farewell. "When or if - the government changes its mind, or when - or if - the finance council makes the solvency available, I'll know where to find you."

  He took his leave and returned to the Trans-Star office, where he found Wolndur waiting with Melris Angoz. He told them what had happened and Melris frowned apprehensively.

  "A demonstration? Of what?"

  "The only kind of demonstration that would achieve the desired result would be to tum something into a sun," Darzek said. "One of your moons, perhaps."

  "Wouldn't that make Vezpro rather uncomfortably warm?"

  "No doubt. But not as warm as if Vezpro were turned into a sun." "We must do something!" Wolndur exclaimed.

  "You might make a thorough check of your moons," Darzek suggested.

  "I must talk with the mas," Wolndur said and hurried away.

  Melris was studying Darzek thoughtfully. "Gul Darr, would it be possible to get solvency from the Council of Supreme for an emergency such as this one?"

  "It's possible to ask," Darzek said. He controlled unlimited solvency himself, as First Councilor, but he did not know whether the term "unlimited" extended to infinity - and a billion billion solvency units sounded like infinity to him: He easily could have provided enough solvency to buy and outfit the spaceship and thus stall Kernopplix for a term or two. Perhaps he should have.

  But as long as the blackmailer had promised a demonstration, Darzek thought he might as well wait and see what it was. A demonstration didn't sound threatening.

  "Will you ask?" Melris persisted.

  "I'll send Supreme a full report at once, but I doubt that anything will happen. Supreme is like your finance council. It doesn't believe there's any danger because it doesn't comprehend what the danger could be."

  "I thought Supreme comprehended everything," she said.

  "Tsk. And you a computer expert. Supreme is like any other computer, only it's enormously bigger and more complicated. It knows only what it's been told, and no one has told it how to turn a world into a sun."

  "But if there's a demonstration?"

  "Like your finance council, Supreme needs to be shown. A demonstration might show it."

  12

  UrsNollf arrived, went immediately to Zarst, and was not seen again for twelve days. He returned dazzled by the Zarstan research. "A most strange organization," he told Darzek. "One part of it is an amazingly successful business - it designs products and consults on production problems for fabricators from several sectors. Another part of it is devoted to advanced research in the sciences. And of course all of its members are devotedly religious."

  "I know," Darzek said. "They worship science."

  "I would not say so, no. Science is only one of a number of studies. It is a means to the understanding of what they worship - the ultimate essence of the universe. Hence their queer costumes that look like some scientific puzzle involving the atomic structure."

  "You seem to have enjoyed yourself," Darzek said. "Did you find out anything?"

  "I learned more than you'd care to hear me describe, but as concerns the Nifron D problem - I can assure you, positively, that the experimental research on Zarst has nothing to do with turning worlds into suns. For all their discoveries, the Zarstans are Scientifically incapable of that. My personal opinion is that they also would be incapable of it ethically and morally and religiously. Such a thing would deface the universe and be contrary to their most profound beliefs."

  "If you say so," Darzek said. "I'll go right on being suspicious of ~ them, because it's my job to be suspicious of everyone. You don't know, for example, how many secret laboratories they failed to show you. And you don't know about Qwasrolk."

  "Who - or what - is Qwasrolk?"

  "Never mind. The Mas of Science and Technology has set up a secret committee to study the problem of turning a planet into a sun. Let's go see him. I'd like to have you sit in on the committee's meetings and let me know how competent it is."

  They went to see Forlan, who was delighted to meet one of the galaxy's leading astrophysicists. He offered the government's hospitality and his own to UrsNollf during his visit and immediately invited the committee members to meet him.

  Darzek left UrsNollf in Naz Forlan's obviously capable hands and returned to the Trans-Star office. There he settled himself in his private quarters and spent some time in trying to figure out what, if anything, he had accomplished since his arrival on Vezpro.

  Miss Schlupe returned and dropped wearily into her rocking chair.

  "Well, I've done it," she said. "Wolndur has his moon search organized, and I've got fifty of my people scattered through the search parties. Though it beats me why you want them there - they're unskilled and uneducated and wouldn't know a nuclear bomb from a sewage disposal unit."

  "That's irrelevant," Darzek said. "What I really want to know is whether a thorough search is made."

  Miss Schlupe said bluntly, ”I think the whole project is a dratted waste of time and effort."

  "You're probably right. UrsNollf says turning any but Vezpro's smallest moon into a sun would make the planet uninhabitable, and even the smallest moon would make the world too hot for comfort, so I rather doubt that a moon would be used. A population or a government wouldn't be disposed to pay ransom to save a world that's too uncomfortable to live on."

  "Even if a moon is used, they won't find anything," Miss Schlupe said. "The entire population of Vezpro wouldn't be large enough to search all the moons properly, and we don't know whether we're looking for something the size of a power plant or a match box, or whether it'd be on the surface or buried ten kilometers deep. So I say it's a silly waste of time. Why bother?"

  "Because we're too stupid to think of anything better to do. If the blackmailer is laughing hilariously at us, so much the better. Later on, it may make him underestimate us when he shouldn't. So we'll search the moons."

  "Can't that committee of nuclear experts tell us what to look for?"

  Miss Schlupe asked.

  "How expert is an expert? UrsNollf has never encountered such a problem, and neither has anyone else on Forlan's committee. Forlan is a metallurgist; he knows a little about nuclear science, but with a problem of this complexity he can only do what I do: ask an expert and hope that he gets a right ans
wer. Wolndur is a very bright youngster and no doubt competent at assembling facts, provided that the facts aren't hidden too deeply. I have the feeling that everyone concerned is as likely to hatch an egg as come up with a solution, and they're all concentrating so hard on the scientific puzzle that they haven't grasped the fact that this is a two-part proposition: figuring out a way to turn a world into a sun doesn't necessarily show us how to keep someone else from doing it. The one real expert I've met is our computer tee."

  "Melris Angoz?"

  "Right. I'm sorry she's not on Primores. She'd put a strain on all of Supreme's unused think tanks. She's run checks on some highly imaginative ideas."

  "But she hasn't found anything."

  "She found Qwasrolk. The fact that we already knew about him doesn't distract from her achievement. If there's anything else to find with a computer, she'll do it."

  "Qwasrolk," Miss Schlupe muttered. She had been trying to find the radiation victim herself, now that he was known to be on Vezpro - or to have been on Vezpro - but without a whisper of success. There was no clue as to how he got there or where he went. "I suppose there's nothing for us to do but sit around waiting for the demonstration," she said. "I wonder if it'll be announced in advance, admission by invitation only, special bleachers for high-ranking guests. It wouldn't do to have the thing happen when no one's around to admire it."

  "A demonstration like this one doesn't require an audience," Darzek told her. "It makes a lasting impression. While we're waiting for it, we ought to do a little detecting. Have you tracked down everything that can be learned about those missing nuclear scientists?"

  "I don't know. We keep trying."

  Later, Darzek sat alone in the living room gloomily reviewing what he knew. He still had no answers - only questions. What had happened to Nifron D? The missing nuclear engineers and scientists Miss Schlupe kept identifying might be involved in the scheme, but none of them seemed to have the qualifications to originate it. If the threat to Vezpro were genuine, the criminal they were looking for had a knowledge of nuclear physics that transcended that of the galaxy's leading experts. And if it were a hoax, Kernopplix's employer still was a very shrewd crook. In a society where neither crime nor criminals were supposed to exist, Darzek was confronted with a monstrous noncrime engineered by a master noncriminal.

  He heard a rush of footsteps and thought that Miss Schlupe was returning, perhaps with a bargain she'd picked up in the "mushrooms" she was so fond of, but it was UrsNollf who burst in on him.

  "We've done it!" he exclaimed.

  It took a moment for Darzek to focus his thoughts. "You mean the committee has found out how -"

  "It has, and we're arranging a demonstration." Darzek winced.

  "Would you like to watch?"

  "Of course," Darzek said, and added, "So it seems that the impossible is no longer impossible."

  "So we're about to prove!"

  "When will the demonstration take place?" Darzek asked. It amused him that UrsNollf, whose first reaction to the committee's work had been to proclaim it preposterous, now described its success in terms of "we."

  "The advance party just left. We'll follow tomorrow."

  It was a single sun Darzek had never heard of, with a scattering of ash-heap planets: a slum of a solar system, until this moment of no value to anyone. Now one of those planets was about to be touched into incandescence by a magic wand Darzek refused to try to understand. He politely ignored the drawings spread out on a table in a special observation compartment of the command ship.

  The scientists of Naz Forlan's committee were gloating over them, as was UrsNollf. The Mas of Science and Technology was studying them gravely and asking an occasional question. Darzek was much more interested in a three-dimensional photograph of the triggering device. It was actual size, and it stood in the center of the compartment and reached from floor to ceiling. It suggested that the operation of converting a world into a sun was not an inconspicuous one; but Darzek, familiar with the normal processes of technology by which complicated gadgets became progressively smaller, had no doubt that many of the indescribable innards of this monster could be miniaturized.

  Even in its present form it would require an excessively thorough search to locate it on a doomed world if its creator took any pains to conceal it. On one of Vezpro's moons, for example, in a cavern or fault with the opening sealed over, it could be found only by pealing off the moon's surface. No wonder Wolndur's search had been futile!

  But perhaps, now that the scientists knew what those innards consisted of, they could create detection devices. He fervently hoped so.

  He said as much to Forlan, who had left the drawings and joined him to study the photographic model.

  Forlan gestured his agreement. "Once one miracle has been achieved, one is justified in expecting more."

  "Do you understand the thing?" Darzek asked.

  "Frankly, no. I understand the principle, of course. And I understand what they have done, up to a point. But beyond that point we enter a realm of pure nuclear theory that even experts negotiate more by instinct than by reason. There I'm completely lost. I can only congratulate them on their brilliance."

  "And - since you can't understand what they've done - hope that they are right?"

  "No," Forlan said bluntly. "I hope that they are wrong. I hope that the thing is impossible. Then we can stop worrying. If their test succeeds, then we have to go on worrying, and we must also start worrying, as you suggest, about detection devices and how to make use of them. I would much prefer that the making of suns be left to the universe's natural processes."

  Darzek dryly agreed.

  Their ship was in orbit well beyond the system's scattering of planets. For all their brilliance, the scientists seemed doubtful as to the demarcation of safety in such an experiment. They had placed scanners on the doomed planet, on the orbiting satellites, on nearby planets, and on the ship's exterior, and the ship itself was carefully shielded. Now they drifted, and the scanners nearest the triggering device - which looked like a giant pear with a flat bottom - were transmitting the final preparations to viewing screens in Darzek's compartment.

  Since he could not understand what was taking place, he quickly tired of watching. He had another look at the drawings on the table - a massive jumble of lines and cryptic symbols - and then he found a comfortable chair for himself and watched the scientists.

  They were a typical cross section of the intelligent life forms of a galaxy - from UrsNollf and his misplaced head and bulging hump of a brain to the four-armed Forlan and the triple-armed and -legged Vezpronians to the multiple-limbed, massive headed, insectlike types that some said were the most brilliant of all. Most of them looked like something one might expect to see under a microscope, but Darzek had no doubt that Naz Forlan had assembled the most brilliant team of nuclear scientists available. If they couldn't do the job, no one could.

  And they said that they could do it.

  Eventually the final tinkering was completed; the scientists responsible for it left the doomed planet by transmitting to a waiting spaceship, which speedily placed itself at an orbital distance slightly beyond Darzek's ship. One small group of scientists was huddled over a bank of instruments, taking readings in several languages. Finally they turned questioningly to Forlan.

  "All systems are go," Darzek muttered.

  "Proceed whenever you're ready," Forlan said. He seated himself beside Darzek, and the two of them watched the cluster of viewing screens. The largest showed the triggering device from a distance of a kilometer or so, a lonely, white object starkly alien against a barren landscape. Darzek - and the doomed world - waited.

  Then Armageddon flashed, and at the same instant the screen went blank. Darzek turned to another screen, fed by a scanner on an orbiting satellite just above the holocaust. The glowing ball spread and seemed about to envelop the planet. Then it faded abruptly, lost in swirling smoke and debris.

&n
bsp; Darzek turned to Forlan, who was staring in fascination. The other scientists' attitudes had altered from triumph to dismay. They all continued to watch, but already it was apparent that the doomed planet was no longer doomed; and as the swirling cloud gradually thinned, the satellite scanner revealed what Darzek already had guessed. A small chunk of the planet had been converted to gasses, but all the experiment had accomplished was to blast a gigantic and probably super-radioactive hole in the world's ash-heap surface.

  UrsNollf looked crushed. He turned away from Darzek, unable to speak. Nearby, a multiple-segmented scientist muttered, "Something went wrong."

  Forlan said quietly, "I think, rather, that something was wrong to begin with." Then he smiled at Darzek. "This means that you can invite that unmentionable character Kernopplix to leave Vezpro on the next ship. If he doesn't, I'll ask our legal department to devise some kind of action against him. Will you call on him the moment we return?"

  "Certainly, if you want me to," Darzek said. "But there might be some way to handle this to our advantage. After all, Kernopplix is only an agent. It's his employer that we want."

  Forlan subsided and gestures wearily with all four arms. "Of course. It's his employer that we should seek punishment for. Kernopplix is only a messenger." He brightened. "I'll leave Kernopplix to you. My department can return to its normal routine, I can catch up on my work, and the masfiln can sleep soundly. He needs it."

  UrsNollf came over to the two of them and began stammering an involved explanation of what might have gone wrong. Forlan silenced him with a multiarmed gesture. "Never mind. You will of course want to land as soon as it can be done safely to investigate and perhaps perform tests. If you think it worthwhile, you can try again. Vezpro will continue to provide any necessary solvency. We want your answer to be definitive and final. Those who wish to continue to work on the project will transfer to the other ship. This one will return to Vezpro immediately."