Deathworld: The Complete Saga

by Harry Harrison

  He smiled angelically at their scowls of hatred, the sudden tensing of hard muscles, the whine of the power holsters as their guns slipped toward their hands, then slid back out of sight.

  “Let us get started,” Kerk said. “We are wasting time and every second counts. What do we do first?”

  “Go through the records, find out everything we can about a ship like this, then find a way in.”

  “I fail to see what throwing rocks at that ship can do,” Meta said. “We know already that it destroys them before they get close. It is a waste of time. And now you want to waste food as well, all those animal carcasses . . .”

  “Meta, sweet, shut up, I’m hinting. There is method to the apparent madness. The navy command ship is out there with radars beeping happily, keeping a record of every shot fired, how close the target was before it was hit, what weapon fired the shot and so forth. There are thirty spacers throwing spacial debris at the battleship in a steady stream. This is not the usual thing that happens to a mothballed vessel and it can only have interesting results. Now, in addition to the stonethrowing, we are going to launch these sides of beef at our target, each space-going load of steak to be wrapped with twenty kilos of armlite plastic. They are being launched on different trajectories with different speeds, and if any one of them gets through to the ship, we will know that a man in a plastic spacesuit made of the same material will get through as well. Now, if all that isn’t enough burden on the ship’s computer, a good-sized planetoid is on its way now in an orbit aimed right at our moth-balled friend out there. The computer will either have to blow it out of space, which will take a good deal of energy—if it is possible at all—or fire up the engines or something. Anything it does will give us information, and any information will give us a handle to grab the problem with.”

  “First side of beef on the way,” Kerk announced from the controls where he was stationed. “I cut some steaks off while we were loading them; have them for lunch. We have a freezerful now. Prime cuts only from every carcass, maybe a kilo each; won’t affect the experiment.”

  “You’re turning into a crook in your old age,” Jason said.

  “I learned everything I know from you. There goes the first one.” He pointed to a tiny blip of fire on the screen. “Flare powder on each, blows up when they hit. Another one. They’re getting closer than the rocks—but they’re not getting through.”

  Jason shrugged. “Back to the drawing boards. Let’s have the steaks and a bottle of wine. We have about two hours before the planetoid is due, and that is an event we want to watch.”

  The expected results were anticlimactic, to say the least. Millions of tons of solid rock put into collision orbit at great expense, as Admiral Djukich was fond of reminding them, soared majestically in from the black depths of space. The battleship’s radar pinged busily and, as soon as the computer had calculated the course, the main engines fired briefly so that the planetoid flashed by the ship’s stern and continued on into interstellar space.

  “Very dramatic,” Meta said in her coldest voice.

  “We gained information!” Jason was on the defensive. “We know the engines are still in good shape and can be activated at a moment’s notice.”

  “And of what possible use is that information?” Kerk asked.

  “Well, you never know; might come in handy . . .”

  “Communication control to Pyrrus One. Can you read me?”

  Jason was at the radio instantly, flicking it on. “This is Pyrrus One. What is your message?”

  “We have received a signal from the battleship on the 183.4 wavelength. Message is as follows. Nederuebla a’t navigacio centro. Kroniku ci tio Sangon . . .”

  “I cannot understand it,” Meta said.

  “It’s Esperanto, the old Empire language. The ship simply sent a change-of-course instruction to navigation control. And we know its name, the Indestructible.”

  “Is this important?”

  “Is it!” Jason yipped with joy as he set the new wavelength into the communication controls. “Once you get someone to talk to you, you have them half sold. Ask any salesman. Now, absolute silence, if you please, while I practice my best and most military Esperanto.” He drained his wine glass, cleared his throat and turned the radio on. “Hello, Indestructible, this is Fleet Headquarters. Explain unauthorized course change”

  “Course change authorized by instructions 590-L to avoid destruction.”

  “Your new course is a navigational hazard. Return to old course.”

  Silent seconds went by as they watched the screen-then the purple glow of a thrust drive illuminated the battleship’s bow.

  “You did it!” Meta said happily, giving Jason a loving squeeze that half crushed his rib cage. “It’s taking orders from you. Now tell it to let us in.”

  “I don’t think it is going to be that easy—so let me sneak up on the topic in a roundabout way.” He spoke Esperanto to the computer again. “Course change satisfactory. State reasons for recent heavy expenditure of energy.”

  “Meteor shower. All meteors on collision orbit were destroyed.”

  “It is reported that your secondary missile batteries were used. Is this report correct?”

  “It is correct.”

  “Your reserves of ammunition will be low. Resupply will be sent.”

  “Resupply not needed. Reserves above resupply level.”

  “Argumentative for a computer, isn’t it?” Jason said, his hand over the microphone. “But I shall pull rank and see if that works.

  “Headquarters overrides your resupply decision. Resupply vessel will arrive your cargo port in seventeen hours. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed. Resupply vessel must supply override mothball signal before entering two-hundred kilometer zone.”

  “Affirmative, signal will be sent. What is current signal?”

  There was no instant answer—and Jason raised crossed fingers as the silence went on for almost two seconds. “Negative. Information cannot be supplied.”

  “Prepare for memory check of override mothball signal. This is a radio signal only?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “This is a spoken sentence.”

  “Negative”

  “This is a coded signal.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Pour me a drink,” Jason said with the microphone off. “This playing twenty questions may take some time.” It did. But patient working around the subject supplied, bit by bit, the needed information. Jason turned off the radio and passed over the scribbled sheet. “This is something at least. The code signal is a ten-digit number. If we send the correct number, all the mothballing activity stops instantly and the ship is under our control.”

  “And the money is ours,” Meta said. “Can our computer be programmed to send a series of numbers until it hits on the right one?”

  “It can—and just the same thought crossed my mind. The Indestructible thinks that we are running a communications check and tells me that it can accept up to seven hundred signals a second for repeat and verification. Our computer will read the returned signal and send an affirmative answer to each one. But of course all the signals will be going through the discrimination circuits, and if the correct signal is sent, the mothball defenses will be turned off.”

  “That seems like an obvious trick that would not fool a five-year-old,” Kerk said.

  “Never underestimate the stupidity of a computer. You forget that it is a machine with zero imagination. Now, let me see if this will do us any good.” He punched keys rapidly, then muttered a curse and kicked the console. “No good. We will have to run nine to the tenth power numbers and, at seven hundred a second, it will take us about five months to do them all.” . “And we have just three weeks left.”

  “I can still read a calendar, thank you, Meta. But we’ll have to try in any case. Send alternate numbers from one up and counting from 9,999,999,999 back down. Then we’ll get the navy code department to give us all their signals
to send as well; one of them might fit. The odds are still about five to one against hitting the right combination, but that is better than no odds at all. And we’ll keep working to see what else we can think of.”

  The navy sent over a small man named Shrenkly who brought a large case of records. He was head of the code department, and a cipher and puzzle enthusiast as well. This was the greatest challenge of his long and undistinguished career, and he hurled himself into it. “Wonderful opportunity, wonderful. The ascending and descending series are going out steadily. In the meantime I am taping permutations and substitutions of signals which will—”

  “That’s fine, keep at it,” Jason said, smiling enthusiastically and patting the man on the back. “I’ll get a report from you later, but right now we have a meeting to attend. Kerk, Meta, time to go.”

  “What meeting?” Meta asked as he tried to get her through the door.

  “The meeting I just made up to get away from that bore,” he said when he finally got her into the corridor. “Let him do his job while we see if we can find another way in.”

  “I think what he has to say is very interesting.”

  “Fine. You talk to him—but not while I am around. Let us now spur our brains into action and see what we can come up with.”

  What they came up with was a number of ideas of varying quality and uniform record of failure. There was the miniature flying robot fiasco where smaller and smaller robots were sent and blasted out of existence, right down to the smallest, about the size of a small coin. Obsessed by miniaturization, they constructed a flying-eye apparatus no larger than the head of a pin that dragged a threadlike control wire after it that also supplied current for the infinitesimal ion drive. This sparked and sizzled its way to within fifteen kilometers of the Indestructible before the all-seeing sensors detected it and neatly blasted it out of existence with a single shot. There were other suggestions and brilliant plans, but none of them worked out in practice. The great ship floated serenely in space reading seven hundred numbers a second and, in its spare time, blowing into fine dust any object that came near it. Each attempt took time, and the days drifted by steadily. Jason was beginning to have a chronic headache and had difficulty sleeping. The problem seemed insoluble. He was feeding figures about destruction distances into the computer when Meta looked in on him. “I’ll be with Shrenkly if you need me,” she said. “Wonderful news.”

  “He taught me about frequency tables yesterday, and today he is going to start me on simple substitution ciphers.”

  “How thrilling.”

  “Well, it is—to me. I’ve never done anything like this before. And it has some value: we are sending signals and one of them could be the correct one. It certainly is accomplishing more than you are with all your flying rocks. With two days to go, too.”

  She stalked out and slammed the door, and Jason slumped with fatigue, aware that failure was hovering close. He was pouring himself a large glass of Old Fatigue Killer when Kerk came in. “Two days to go,” Kerk said.

  “Thanks. I didn’t know until you told me. I know that a Pyrran never gives up, but I am getting the sneaking suspicion that we are licked.”

  “We are not beaten yet. We can fight.”

  “A very Pyrran answer—but it won’t work this time. We just can’t barge in there in battle armor and shoot the place up.”

  “Why not? Small-arms fire would just bounce off us as well as the low-power rays. All we have to do is dodge the big stuff and bull through.”

  “That’s all! Do you have any idea how we are going to arrange that?”

  “No. But you will figure something out. But you better hurry.”

  “I know, two days. I suppose it’s easier to die than admit failure. We suit up, fly at the battleship behind a fleet of rocks that are blasted by the heavy stuff. Then we tell the enemy discrimination circuits that we are not armored spacesuits at all, but just a couple of jettisoned plastic beer barrels that they can shoot up with the small-caliber stuff. Which then bounces off us like hail and we land and get inside and get a billion credits and live happily ever after.”

  “That’s the sort of thing. I’ll go get the suits ready.”

  “Before you do that, just consider one thing in this preposterous plan. How do we tell the discrimination circuitry . . .” Jason’s voice ran down in midsentence, and his eyes opened wide—then he clapped Kerk on the back. Heavily too, he was so excited, but the Pyrran seemed completely unaware of the blow. “That’s it, that’s how we do it!” Jason chortled, rushing to the computer console. Kerk waited patiently while Jason fed in figures and muttered over the tapes of information. The answer was not long in coming.

  “Here it is!” Jason held up a reel of tape. “The plan of attack—and it is going to work. It is just a matter of remembering that the computer on that battleship is just a big dumb adding machine that counts on its fingers, but very fast. It always performs in the same manner because it is programmed to do so. So here is what happens. Because of the main drive tubes the area with the least concentration of fire power is dead astern. Only one hundred and fourteen gun turrets can be trained that way. Their slew time varies—that is, the time it takes a turret to rotate one hundred and eighty degrees in azimuth. The small ones do it in less than a second; the main batteries need six seconds. This is one factor. Other factors are which targets get that kind of attention. Fastest-moving rocks get blasted first, even if they are farther away than a larger, slower-moving target. There are other factors like rate of fire, angle of depression of guns and so forth. Our computer has chomped everything up and come up with this!”

  “What does it reveal?”

  “That we can make it. We will be in the center of a disk of flying rocks that will be aimed at the rear of the Indestructible. There will be a lot of rocks, enough to keep all the guns busy that can bear on the spot. Our suits will be half the size of the smallest boulder. We will all be going at the same speed, in the same direction, so we should get the small-caliber stuff. Now, another cloud of rocks, real heavy stuff, will converge on the stern of the ship from a ninety-degree angle, but it will not hit the two-hundred-kilometer limit until after the guns start blasting at us. The computer will track it and as soon as our wave is blasted will slew the big guns to get rid of the heavy stuff. As soon as these fire, we accelerate toward the stern tubes. We will then become prime targets, but, before the big guns can slew back, we should be inside the tubes.”

  “It sounds possible. What is the time gap between the instant we reach the tubes and the earliest the guns can fire?”

  “We leave their cone of fire exactly six-tenths of a second before they can blast us.”

  “Plenty of time. Let us go.”

  Jason held up his hand. “Just one thing. I’m game if you are. We carry cutting equipment and weapons. Once inside the ship there should not be too many problems. But it is not a piece of cake by any means. The two of us go. But we don’t tell Meta—and she stays here.”

  “Three have a better chance than two to get through.”

  “And two have a better chance than one. I’m not going unless you agree.”

  “Agreed. Set the plan up.”

  Meta was busy with her new-found interest in codes and ciphers; it was a perfect time. The Earth navy ships were well trained in precision rock-throwing—as well as being completely bored by it. They let the computers do most of the work. While the preparations were being made, Kerk and Jason suited up in the combat suits: more tanks than suits, heavy with armor and slung about with weapons. Kerk attached the special equipment they would need while Jason short-circuited the airlock indicator so Meta, in the control room, would not know they had left the ship. Silently they slipped out.

  No matter how many times you do it, no matter how you prepare yourself mentally, the sensation of floating free in space is not an enjoyable one. It is easy to lose orientation, to have the sensation that all directions are up—or down—and Jason was more than slightly glad
of the accompanying bulk of the Pyrran.

  “Operation has begun.”

  The voice crackled in their earphones, then they were too busy to be concerned about anything else. The computer informed them that the wall of giant boulders was sweeping toward them—they could see nothing themselves—and gave them instructions to pull aside. Then the things were suddenly there, floating ponderously by, already shrinking into the distance as the jets fired on the space-suits. Again following instructions, they accelerated to the correct moving spot in space and fitted themselves into the gap in the center of the floating rock field. They had to juggle their jets until they had the same velocity as the boulders; then, power cut off, they floated free. “Do you remember the instructions?” Jason asked. “Perfectly.”

  “Well, let me run through them again for the sake of my morale, if you don’t mind.” The battleship was visible now far ahead, like a tiny splinter in space. “We do nothing at all to draw attention as we come in. There will be plenty of activity around us, but we don’t use power except in an extreme emergency. And we get hit by small-caliber fire—the best thing that can happen to us because it means the big stuff is firing at something else. Meanwhile the other attack of flying rocks will be coming in from our flank. We won’t see them—but our computer will. It is monitoring the battleship as well, and the instant the big guns fire on the second wave, it will send the signal go. Then we go. Full power on the rockets toward the main drive tube. When our suit radar says we are eleven hundred meters from the ship, we put on full reverse thrust because we will be inside the guns. See you at the bottom of the tube.”

  “What if the computer fires the tube to clear us out?”

  “I have been trying not to think about that. We can only hope that it is not programmed for such a complex action and that its logic circuits will not come up with the answer . . .”

  Space around them exploded with searing light. Their helmet visors darkened automatically, but the explosions could still be clearly seen, they were so intense. And silent. A rock the size of a small house burned and vaporized soundlessly not a hundred meters from Jason, and he cringed inside the suit. The silent destruction continued—but the silence was suddenly shattered by deafening explosions, and his suit vibrated with the impact.