I think Ichiwara would answer that question by saying something like: 'When a farmer finds a fox in his chickens, he does not retaliate by burning down the henhouse,'" said Magnus. "After all, as far as the Kilroys are aware, Kepler III holds some valuable experimental breeding stock."
"You're suggesting that as long as we stay planet-bound they won't attack?"
"That seems to be a possibility," Magnus said. "On the other hand, once Venturer Twelve takes to space, they may very well close in."
"In that case, the sooner we get off this planet the better," Bruce said.
"To face an unknown enemy—with God knows what weapons at his disposal?" Magnus said. "You're very eager for this confrontation, Commander."
"You've only seen the pictures," Bruce said, his voice trembling with a barely controlled rage. "I was there on Minos IV. Sometimes I wake up at nights even now, seeing them, smelling the stench of them and hearing the sound of their cries. I destroyed them, out of mercy, every last one of them, but when I did, I vowed to myself that if ever the chance came, I'd exact revenge on the race that created them."
Magnus sighed. "Very well, Commander. You may prepare for liftoff at sixteen hundred hours tomorrow evening. That will give me time to make the necessary preparations."
Bruce frowned. "Preparations?"
"The Keplerian people will have to be given some plausible reason for the ship's leaving at this stage. I shall tell President Kido that you are taking her out into space in order to carry out routine repairs and tests on the main drive units. That and the presence of myself should convince him that at least he and his people are not being deserted."
"You're going to stay here, on Kepler?"
"But of course—my place is here, until the conclusion of the independence investigation, at any rate," Magnus said calmly. "In any case, I'm afraid that my presence aboard Venturer in the event of a confrontation with the Kilroys would be highly undesirable, and a distraction to you in the efficient performance of your duty. As the senior Corps officer in the area, any such matter of alien contact is your responsibility according to protocol."
Bruce stared at the Explorations Divison officer. "Don't you even want to know my intended plans, in the event of contact?"
"No, Commander. You are, in your own words, 'the man on the spot,' and you must have a completely free hand."
Bruce found himself looking on Magnus with a new respect. There had been times in the past when he had found what he took to be the man's arrogant assumption of his own powers a considerable irritant. Now he was able to see that behavior from a different angle, to understand that a great deal of what he had mistaken for arrogance was in fact calm conviction, and rigid adherence to principles understood and respected.
"And the Keplerians are to be told nothing?" he said.
"There would be no useful purpose in alarming them at this stage," Magnus said. "As far as they are concerned, the independence investigation must appear to be going ahead as planned. And, of course, the work on the elimination of Johannsen's disease. Surgeon Lieutenant Maseba must continue with his research program, and be seen to do so. Such activity will maintain the confidence of the Keplerians in our intentions."
"Maseba!" Bruce stiffened. "You mean you expect me to leave my chief medical officer here on Kepler, while I take this ship into action against an unknown enemy?"
"It is essential that Maseba should remain," Magnus said. "He is already well-known to the Keplerians. As for the running of the medical section aboard ship, you have his deputy, De Witt, a very efficient young woman—and there is, of course, our young friend Huygens."
"Huygens!"grunted Bruce. "A blasted disgrace to the Corps."
"An unwise young man, no doubt, in many ways," Magnus said. "But a competent medic, I understand, who could prove useful in an emergency."
"Huygens stays in close arrest," snapped Bruce. "As far as I'm concerned, he is no longer capable of being entrusted with the duties of a medical officer."
Tom Brace's green eyes narrowed as he looked into the ebony features of Surgeon Lietutenant George Maseba. "What the hell is this—some kind of conspiracy? When did you join the Let's-be-kind-to-Piet-Huygens Society?"
"Nobody's being kind—this is just common sense," said Maseba.
Bruce rose jerkily from behind the desk and strode about the office as he talked. "Common sense, is it? A deserter, in close arrest, awaiting court martial, we let him out of his cell with a gentle slap on the wrist, and put him back down on the very planet where he deserted in the first place—where, I might add, his partner-in-crime is still at large. Jesus H. Christ, George! What kind of stupid move is that? He'll be off like a bloody rabbit as soon as he sets foot on the ground. Apart from that—look at the disciplinary aspect. What will the rest of the crew think?"
'They'll think what you tell them to," Maseba said, doggedly. "Huygens will be released into my custody, as senior medical officer. Til accept full responsibility for him."
"Well that's just dandy!" snapped Bruce. "So what do I do when he decides to go over the wall again— put you on a charge, too?"
"He's not going any place, but into a laboratory, where hell be working harder than he ever has in his life," said Maseba. "We're both agreed that Leela De Witt must stay aboard Vee Twelve when you lift off It would be suicidal to take the ship into action without at least one competent medical officer aboard. That means that I shall be left here on Kepler with half a dozen orderlies and a handful of colonial-trained hick doctors to tackle a medical emergency situation involving a population of a million people. Whatever you may think of him personally and as a Corps officer, I need Huygens. After passing his finals he worked for two whole years in virology research back in Lake Cities, before joining the Corps. In my present situation, his knowledge could be invaluable."
"How do you know he would be prepared to cooperate?"
"De Witt has talked to him several times since his return. She's of the opinion that immersion in such work would have considerable therapeutic value for him, from the psyche point of view."
Bruce looked at his chief medical officer long and hard. "All right, George. We'll do it your way. Just keep the bastard out of my sight, that's ail."'
"Will do, Commander," Maseba said, with a grin. He turned to leave.
"Oh, and George..." Bruce said. "Commander?"
"Tell De Witt to let me have that psyche recommendation of hers in writing, will you? Just for the record."
If there was ever a color for sorrow, it was not blue, as the African peoples claimed; it was gray. Mia Mizuno knew it, felt it throughout her whole being. Physically, she was an attractive and healthy young woman who had accomplished the task of giving birth with complete satisfaction. Spiritually, she was in a condition not far removed from death. Not an hour passed but she reviewed with non-understanding sadness this incredible thing which had happened to her. For a fortnight she had been in a trancelike state from which, even now, she was only emerging with reluctance. That bright, gay, passionate Mia no longer existed, and to Jiro Osuragi it seemed possible that never again would her mind be unclouded.
Doctor Osuragi and his sister, who was matron of the little clinic, had been kindness personified. They made her a guest in their apartment, spoke gently to her, looked after her in every possible way. When, momentarily, she had come out of her sorrow to express the wish that she should get some work, Osuragi had got on at once to a friend who was personnel manager of the local Akai electronics factory, to see what might be done for her; but almost directly after, he had to cancel a provisional appointment, because
Mia was not fit to take up the threads of a life which was without Piet Huygens.
Without Piet . . . without Piet . . . that was the problem.
Osuragi and his sister could help little in giving reasons for Piet's departure.
Now she sat in her plain but dainty little room, ' with folded hands and aching mind, and wondered. Piet had left her; he had meant nothing when h
e said he loved her; at most, he was trying to reshape his past into a shape which was less haunting to his constricted inner self.
Her eye caught a newspaper . . . "The Magnificent Work of the Medical Staff of Venturer Twelve. . . Oh, yes. Venturer Twelve. Crewwoman—no, Leading Crewwoman Mizuno. The girl they would leave behind them. She looked at the television set, then back at the paper. Channel eight, formerly reserved for ancient ritual and culture programs, reports three times a day on the work of the medical unit whose efforts mean life and death for us all....
She switched on the set, and pressed a button for channel eight. A serious-faced commentator filled the screen. "Using special drugs, the key men of this important enterprise are able to cut down their sleep to six hours per day out of the twenty-eight; for the rest of the time, except for short meal breaks, they work as the spearhead of our own doctors. Now, we bring you a very short interview with one of these selfless scientists. Be proud to meet Lieutenant Piet Huygens."
Then she saw him; his face was thinner, he looked tired out, but he was her Piet—and he had gone back to fight this ... what was it? A disease which threatened Kepler III. ... It didn't matter. There was her Piet. She knew where he was. She must go to him. She must go to him. There would be reasons why he had left her. Piet still loved her, she knew, she knew!
He was her man. She would find him, come what may.
Lieutenant Wiltrud Anna Hoffman, the sleek lines of the scout ship looming behind her, stood on Rokoa field and looked up into the night sky of Kepler III. Out there, somewhere, Venturer Twelve was hunting for the unseen enemy; out there, history was being made, the first face-to-face encounter of mankind and alien ... an encounter feared and yet in some curious way looked forward to . . . one which would give meaning to all the training, the armament of such ships as Vee Twelve. And she ... ? Her training, her life . . . devoted to the Corps and its aims ... a good officier, with ability and determination . . . she was not even to be a spectator to this confrontation. . . . Her job was to wait here, on Rokoa field, to wait for an indefinite period, and eventually to provide transport for Maseba and Magnus back to Vee Twelve.
A warm breeze blowing across the field tangled her short-cut blonde hair, and she moved her hand up irritably to brush it back from her forehead. Behind her, through the open airlock, she could hear the subdued murmur of a radio in the crew quarters. Tuned to a local Kepler station, it was playing the kind of weird, archaic chamber-jazz favored by the Keplerians. There were two crewmen, besides herself and P.O. Patel, with the scout ship—and so she, as an officer, was to all intents, alone. Alone and bored. Her eyes moved restlessly, looking beyond the perimeter of the field, towards the lights of the suburb of Shamari. There at least, people were living, there was excitement, human contact of some kind. ... A Corps officer might find interesting ways of diverting herself, of relieving a boredom that threatened to. .. . But then, there were other aspects to be considered—the appearance of a Corps officer in Shamari at this time would certainly be remarked upon; on the other hand...
The idea that struck her contained all the elements necessary to combat her ennui, carrying as it did, simultaneously, the appeal of both the known and the unknown—and at the same time an element of safety from the Corps disciplinary point of view. Moving with new determination, she walked back up the ramp to the control cabin of the ship. P.O. Patel, brown and stockily built, was seated by the sub-etheric. He moved to his feet as she altered.
"Fm taking one of the ground cars over to the Medical Inspection Center," she said.
Patel's Eastern bumpkin face showed no change of expression. ''Yes, ma'am. If anything comes through from Vee Twelve?"
She patted the side pocket of her tunic. "You can get me anytime you like—I have my personal communicator.
"Ma'am." Patel nodded. "When will you be back?"
"I'm not sure. It may be morning," she said. "Carry on, P.O." Without waiting for his answer, she turned and headed back down the ramp towards the ground carpark.
The Combat Information Display of Venturer Twelve gave a God's-eye view, and Tom Bruce, seated in his command position at the console of the Combat Control Computer, was God, looking down on the enormous tank-screen which presented a three-dimensional picture of space up to a range of half a light year. Translating the information from the ship's myriad exterior sensors, radar, video camera, gravity and radiation field detectors, CID showed Venturer Twelve at the center of a display which took in the entirety of the Kepler
sun system, with Kepler III a blue-green ball flanked by its satellites just off to the left. Beyond that lay the two barren rocky spheres of the inner planets; and farther away still, the Kepler sun itself, its blue-white brilliance damped down by the display to a more tolerable intensity.
Godlike too, was the tremendous destructive power represented by the controls beneath Bruce's fingertips, which were capable of releasing the massive armament of this, United Earth's largest and most advanced ship, armament capable of reducing a medium-size planet to a boiling mass of radioactive matter within a few minutes. Mankind had been preparing for this moment for over a century, and now, at last, here in this remote corner of the universe, fifteen parsecs from Earth, possibility was becoming reality. And Bruce was the man on the spot—Bruce, with his extension the Combat Control Computer, which could think faster, calculate with greater accuracy than any living creature, and was thus capable of making the necessary decisions in the four-dimensional chess game that was war in space.
Maranne's voice: "Missile proceeding, on course. Transmission normal. . . Approaching speed .25 light and holding...."
The Centaur Fifteen missile was shown on CID as a small dot, creeping along the green dotted line that was its predicted trajectory. A loudspeaker over Bruce's head relayed the continuous beep-beep transmitted by the small sub-etheric transmitter installed by Maranne's section in the heart of the missile.
Bruce, conscious of the smell of his own sweat, shifted slightly in his well-padded seat, and wondered, how long? How long before the missile made contact with the invisible barrier of radiation that had prevented Venturer's sub-etheric message from getting through to Earth? How long, and how far behind the barrier was the ship or ships, which had erected that barrier—the ships controlled by the unseen, long-awaited enemy, the creatures whose tracks had bred the Kilroy legend, whose handiwork he had seen there on the raped planet of Minos IV, and here on Kepler where they had altered the very seed of man? Wherever they were, those ships were still too far away to show up on any of Venturer's detectors. Waiting there . . . for what?
"Fifteen million kilometers out, still on course." Maranne's voice again.
Beside him he could sense, at the periphery of his vision, the presence of Helen Lindstrom. She too would be watching the display, knowing what this moment meant to him, to all of mankind.
Beep-beep-beep-beep . . . regular, metronomic, the measured pulse of the Centaur missile's transmitter.
All over Venturer Twelve men stood at battle stations, watching screens, armament prepared, awaiting orders...
. Beep-beep-bee...
Bruce sat, straining his ears for the next in the sequence, and there was a deadly quiet throughout the ship's tactical nerve center as everyone else did the same.
Transmission from the missile had ceased.
And yet, looking down into the CID tank-screen, the red dot of the Centaurus Fifteen still showed, climbing steadily up the ladder of green dots. It remained for almost a full minute, then flared briefly into incandescence and was gone.
Bruce knew that in reality the missile had died at the moment its transmission had ceased, and that the red dot in the CID had been a ghost, caused by the lagging snail-pace of radar and light waves as compared with sub-etheric. Galvanizing into action, he began to feed instructions into the battle computer. Instantaneously, under the direct control of the computer, the intensity of the ship's huge Grenbach drives began to increase, thrusting her forward with moun
ting acceleration, following the trajectory of the missile, plunging towards the unknown....
Piet Huygens lay naked on his* bed in the Medical Inspection Center, waiting for a sleep that refused to come. Despite air-conditioning, the air of the small room was hot and thick. Throughout the day there had been no time for external thought—he had been immersed in work, jvork of the kind he understood, for which he had been trained; cultures, tissue samples, the moving, tiny worlds of virus and bacteria viewed through a microscope. But now, once again, there was time to think, and he was haunted by the shadows of his guilt, and thoughts of Mia, so many miles away.
Perhaps it would have been best to have told them where she was, so that she could be brought back, but to do that would have been somehow compounding his first betrayal of her. He wanted Mia—but not as a prisoner. He wondered what she had been doing since his flight from Nisuno. Was she still there in Osuragi's small clinic? Had she decided to try to make some kind of life for herself among those people? Perhaps hoping vainly that he would one day return to her? Or had she cut herself off from him with a barrier of hate and resentment for his desertion of her? Was it possible that her love could have turned to hate?
Outside the building he heard the purring of a ground car engine approaching, then stopping. Someone else, who like himself was unable to sleep? No, no one else could carry such a burden of guilt
He wondered briefly if he should go back to the laboratory and continue his work—there at least there would be something to occupy his mind, to banish the shadows. He dismissed the idea almost as soon as it was formed. He was tired, beyond that point where he could work efficiently, and tomorrow there would be more and more for him to do. Tomorrow Doctor Osawa, Sato's assistant, would be joining him, and they would begin the task of correlating their results. Osawa had been working on the problem for some time, and there was just a chance that her information might be valuable. If he was to be fresh and alert for that meeting, he must have sleep, now. . . .
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