In minutes, space was swept clean of the glittering cloud.
“We’re safe,” Dal said. “Let’s get out of this cursed system.”
He spoke too soon. Yggdrasil’s straightening course was taking it past the Moon. It lay before them, huge and yellow through the grand observation blister that formed one wall, Through sulfurous wisps of clouds could be seen a landscape of round lakes, patches of sparse unhealthy vegetation, pocked scars softened by weather, oily seas dotted with ring islands that had once been craters.
And popping up through the murky atmosphere was a shower of orange sparks.
An alarm went off. Jun Davd picked up the interphone, said “I see them,” and hung up.
Bram was already busy at the computer touch board. Jun Davd leaned over his shoulder to see what he was entering, nodded approval, and started feeding in supplementary data from the tree’s sensors.
“What can they hope to accomplish?” Bram whispered when the answer appeared on the screen. “At best they’ve matched roughly for our present velocity. Those vehicles could be waiting for us in our projected flight path if we stopped accelerating in the next decihour. But we’re still boosting. They’ll only end up behind us, like the others, and get themselves vaporized in our drive exhaust.”
“Then they must expect us to stop accelerating,” Jun Davd said.
“Missiles,” exclaimed Alis Tonia Atli, then had to explain the specialized meaning of the word from her knowledge of twentieth-century earth history.
“No,” Jun Davd said. “We’d have seen them by now. At any rate, they wouldn’t do much better at catching us than those piloted craft. It has to be something faster.”
“A fusion exhaust,” said Dal. “Remember how reckless they were with it around the diskworld? They might not quail at using it this close to home. And they might not realize Yggdrasil’s combustible. If all they want to do is kill the probe and stop us, they. wouldn’t mind turning us into a ball of slag. We’d be another moon to settle on—bigger than most of those they use.”
“There’s nothing the size of their interstellar ship in orbit,” Jun Davd said. “I’m sure they launch them as soon as they make them. The largest objects I see in orbit are those bulky cylindrical structures attached to mirrors—” He stopped.
“Light,” Bram said. “Light would be fast enough.”
Jun Davd looked shaken. “I thought they had something to do with solar power. I can see that even now we don’t fully understand these creatures. They’ve mounted laser defenses against unwanted colonization by their brethren on Earth.”
Even as he spoke, the laser beams struck Yggdrasil. There was a flickering of images on the big screen as some of the antennae elements dispersed across Yggdrasil’s crown burned out, then the computer redistributed data to compensate. Bram saw the beams, hundreds of them, sending their threads of light through space in a complex skein that focused on Yggdrasil. The computer had assigned different colors to the threads to distinguish the types of lasers—violet, red, blue, green, magenta, and a deadly gray to represent x-rays.
One of the visitors went into hysterics, a little round man who was calmed by two women and given a glass of water.
Bram reached for the interphone before he remembered that he was no longer year-captain. He turned to Jun Davd. “Somebody should get Enyd to rotate the tree—distribute the heat absorption. Even though we’re boosting, another few percent of g wouldn’t—”
“We needn’t bother,” Jun Davd said. “We couldn’t get rotation started fast enough. Besides…”
He trailed off, looking thoughtful.
The tree continued to accelerate. One of the women with the hysterical man said soothingly, “See, we’re still going.”
“The sensitive part of the ramjet shaft’s in the umbrage of the leaves at this angle,” Jun Davd said. “And as for the leaves themselves, our sensors haven’t yet detected any fires.”
He was trying to suppress a smile. He gave up the effort and let his long face split in a big grin.
Bram took the call from Smeth when it came. He listened briefly, then hung up and addressed the expectant throng.
“Smeth wanted to warn us that we’re all a few pounds heavier—but I’m sure you’ve all noticed that already. The laser beams are giving us a small additional boost—enough to take a little of the load off the ramjet and turn more of its work into acceleration.”
A few of the people looked puzzled. Bram drew a breath and said, “Yggdrasil thrives on light. Up to and including x-rays—the Nar found space trees happily in orbit around x-ray stars.”
He added his own grin to Jun Davd’s. “When Yggdrasil felt things getting a little too hot, it turned its leaves reflective side out, in the lightsail mode. The dragonflies will take a while to realize it, but they’re helping to speed us out of their system.”
An hour later, they watched the second fleet of dragonfly ships fall into the consuming flame of the drive beam. Long before then, the lasers had been switched off.
As Yggdrasil sped past the orbit of the planet that had been called Pluto, Jun Davd sought Bram out during an intermission at one of Edard’s concerts. It was a Tenday later, and life in the tree was returning to normal. “The next time we meet them,” Jun Davd said, “they may be more advanced.”
“Then we’ll have to go far enough to be sure we won’t meet them,” Bram said.
Jun Davd did not reply directly. “Trist is looking for volunteers to help repair the antenna system,” he said.
“What’s the hurry? We don’t have a Message to broadcast anymore.”
“No. But we’d better start listening.”
Seven years of listening had taken their toll on Trist. He had the same ready smile, the same willingness to banter. But his ice-blue eyes had acquired something of the haunted look that Bram remembered from the years when Trist had monitored the spread of Nar civilization through the Whirlpool galaxy—until the wave of radiation from the exploding core had put a stop to the radio emissions forever.
Trist had monitored the Nar emissions for fifty thousand years. He had listened to the spread of dragonfly civilization for only fifty-odd years—about seven years in terms of tree time. But his eyes had aged at the same rate as the outside universe, Bram thought.
Trist looked up from his console as Bram entered the control booth. The Message Center had been stripped of its library over the centuries, as the archivists had gradually integrated its contents with the growing central databank. But its equipment—the leaning stacks of power and control elements that made long avenues down the cylindrical cavity—had been left intact and placed at the service of the astronomy department.
“They’ve reached Aldebaran now,” he said before Bram could speak.
“Red giant,” Bram said, searching his memory. “With a companion.”
“It’s a white dwarf now,” Trist said. “The dragonflies have settled both components. They’re not very fussy. Outer planets of the dwarf would be pretty cold but that wouldn’t bother the kind of creatures who settled Pluto. Any inner planets, if they survived the red giant phase and resolidified, wouldn’t be much more habitable. Airless slagballs.”
“How far?” Bram asked.
“About sixty light-years from Sol. It was one of the stars that stayed in the same neighborhood.”
A crawling sensation went down Bram’s spine. “Their technology’s improving. They’re spreading outward at about half the speed of light.”
Trist nodded. “Since we first met them at Delta Pavonis, the sphere of space they occupy has grown to a diameter of nearly one hundred twenty light-years. At this rate, it will take them only two hundred thousand years to overrun the entire galaxy.”
“Jun Davd said that we could flee to the opposite ends of the Milky Way and find them waiting for us.”
“If they learn how to attain relativistic speeds any time in the next few centuries, yes.” Trist was gloomy. “And if they don’t, they could come calling
fairly soon, anyway.”
“The nearest large galaxy is two million light years away. Andromeda, former man called it.” Bram swallowed hard as he remembered the first breathtaking sight he’d had of the Milky Way’s sister galaxy, centuries ago, as a child at the observatory with Voth. “At one g, we could be there in thirty years, our time.”
“Two million years, dragonfly time,” Trist said. “Plenty of time for them to invent relativistic ramjets. And improve on them.”
“Yes,” Bram said. “And intergalactic beacons that broadcast their genetic code. They’re already in possession of the prototype.”
“We’re using frozen Nar technology for the most part,” Trist said. “We won’t have a better intergalactic machine till we’ve settled down somewhere, expanded our population, developed an industrial-based society—”
“While the dragonflies have had two million years to develop theirs.”
Trist spoke with a sort of controlled terror. “Long before then, they’ll have swallowed the entire Milky Way. Trillions of them around every G-type and K-type star. Billions, maybe, around less hospitable stars … And … two hundred billion stars! Two hundred billion separate dragonfly civilizations, all of them competing to be the first for the next leap outward.”
“Jun Davd was right,” Bram said. “All they have to do is to learn to crowd the speed of light by one decimal place better than we can.”
He turned to listen for a moment to the speakers, which were pouring out a torrent of dragonfly clicks and snaps from whatever lumps of rock were in orbit around Aldebaran and its companion. When he spoke again, it was half to himself.
“There’s no place we can go in the entire universe where we’d be safe from them. No place at all.”
Both of them listened to the clicks for a while. Then Trist spoke. “You’d better call a ship’s meeting.”
“I’m not year-captain.”
Trist showed rare exasperation. “Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, by the time we get Smeth to do it and wait for him to sort out all the ifs, buts, and maybes, the dragonfly sphere will be another fifty light-years across!”
“I’ll post a notice in the datanet,” Bram said.
“I say we go back!” the man on the holo stage bleated. “Go back and sterilize all their worlds with our engine exhaust! All of them, down to the smallest asteroid! That’s the only way we’ll ever be safe?
He was a narrow-faced man with an incongruously thick and muscular neck sticking up out of protective coveralls, and his voice was shrill with fear.
“Who is he?” Bram whispered to Trist in the seat next to him.
“Name’s Perc. He’s one of Smeth’s technicians. Fusion specialist, I think. Big talker—always trying to organize the black gang, whatever that means. He’s always at loggerheads with Smeth.”
“The way to do it,” Perc blathered on, “is to start back far enough to build up a tremendous gamma factor. Build up enough relativistic mass so that we devastate them by gravitational effects, too, just to make sure. But the main thing about going in at relativistic speeds is that we can flash by in fractions of a second, before they have time to react. They might not even realize we were there, in fact. To them it would just seem as if the surface of their planets just sizzled and went up in flame.”
“Ferocious, isn’t he?” Bram said.
“He’s just frightened,” Mim said. “We all are.”
“He’s one of the post-Milky Way generation,” Nen said, leaning across Trist. “Have you noticed how all of the really bloodcurdling comments tonight came from the new people?”
Mim nodded agreement. “It’s hard for those of us who were raised among the Nar to think of a life form—any life form—as being a threat.”
“We’re learning,” Bram said grimly.
“Oh, my dear, yes,” Mim said, reaching blindly for Bram’s hand. She seemed on the verge of bursting into tears; she might have been remembering the long vigil when Bram had failed to return to the tree with the evacuees. But it took her only a moment to recover her usual spunk. “That was another time, another universe.”
Perc’s outside holo image was waving its mammoth arms around. “Just one quick pass over each planet,” Perc said earnestly and reasonably. “We needn’t go into a polar orbit that would cover the entire surface—and we couldn’t, anyway, with the kinetic energy of relativistic speeds. Our exhaust would boil away the crust—melt a channel of slag from pole to pole. Split the planet like a rotten fruit. Turn the oceans to steam and strip away the atmosphere. Nothing could survive—not anywhere. And think of Yggdrasil’s mass at seventy—or seven hundred—gamma. We’d rip them apart! I move that we start back at once. Burn them out. Descend on them like an avenging angel. Bring them their time of fire.”
The holo lurched off the stage, and the little man who had cast it seated himself again. Smeth thanked Perc for his views as if it hurt his teeth, then gaveled down the uproar that started.
“Jun Davd, I think you wanted to make a comment, he said.
Jun Davd’s holo rose, courteous and grave, and looked down at the audience. “There’s no doubt that we could wipe out planets if we had a mind to do so,” he said. “But I’m afraid that for us to exterminate the entire dragonfly race is a mathematical impossibility. You can’t make U-turns in space, and by the time we backed up far enough for a second run—decelerated and built up gamma again—years would have passed. We’d have to do that for every single planetary body … divided, perhaps, by a factor of three or four for those we could align, of course. In Sol system, there are thirty-five inhabited bodies of fair size, plus an unknown number of asteroids, cometary nuclei, and possibly space habitats. We could not be sure of … sterilizing … them all. And if we could, there still would be numbers of dragonfly vehicles in transit within the system, ready to settle on some of the cooling cinders after we passed.”
A babble of voices broke out. Smeth pounded his gavel, and Jun Davd went on.
“And, of course, we’re not talking about only one system. There are approximately one thousand five hundred stars and multiple star systems within a sixty-five-light-year radius of Sol. Most of them, by the evidence of Trist’s radio survey, are inhabited. Even if we spent only five or ten objective years dealing with each, it would be millennia before we finished the task.”
He paused. The hall of the tree had gone silent.
“And by then, the dragonfly sphere of habitation would have grown to a diameter of at least fifteen thousand light-years.”
“Then you’re saying that we can’t keep up with their expansion?” shouted a man in the front row.
Smeth tried to gavel him out of order, but Jun Davd bent forward to reply. His holo loomed like a cloud over the first ten rows, but it was the man in front whom he addressed.
“We’d have to disinfect every star in the galaxy. And then we’d have to start all over again.”
There was a clamor of competing voices, and Smeth granted the stage to a woman who wanted to be assured that flight was not entirely hopeless. “Can’t we find just one little star they won’t want—where they’ll leave us alone? Somewhere between the galaxies where they wouldn’t find us?”
“Where’s Jao?” Bram whispered to Trist. “I don’t see him up there. I thought he had something he wanted to contribute to this.”
“The last I heard, he was still working on some calculations. He has a computer model he wants to stir some more figures into.”
“What good will that do?” Nen said angrily. “Words, numbers—what difference will any of it make?”
“It’s something he’s been cooking up with Jun Davd,” Trist said. “All I know is that they think it has some bearing on the present situation.”
On the platform, Smeth was trying to stem further discussion and bring the proceedings to some kind of conclusion. The company had been at this for hours now, everything had been said at least twice, and people were getting cranky and tired.
“The time’s
come for us to make a decision,” Smeth said harshly. “We have a problem that can’t be solved. But we’ve got to choose a course of action, nonetheless. Put quite simply, do we fight, run, or hide? Or pretend it isn’t so? I don’t believe I’ve heard any other suggestions tonight. So if anybody wants to start making motions, I’ll put them on the board and we can—”
The ushers were already starting to move down the aisles to get into position with their long-handled ballot boxes, when a burly figure dragging a bulky piece of electronic equipment shouldered his way past them.
“Hold it, Smeth!”
Smeth’s face showed annoyance. “The discussion just closed, Jao. There’s nothing more left to say. Take a seat with the others.”
Jun Davd leaned over to whisper something in Smeth’s ear. A slice of his face appeared in the holo projection, but the words weren’t audible.
“All right,” Smeth said. “Have your say. But try not to hold things up.”
Jao climbed to the stage with his gear and started plugging light fibers into the exposed holo panel while the projectionist hovered nearby. He said something to the projectionist, who nodded and took over the task while Jao strode to the lectern. A gigantic red-bearded face, disembodied, hovered over the auditorium; he hadn’t bothered with the niceties when he made his rough-and ready connections.
“When we dropped into the nucleus of the Milky Way from above the galactic plane about fifty of our years ago,” Jao began without preamble, “we saw a peculiar sight. It was a sort of arc of hot gas rising up out of the core at right angles to where you’d expect it to be for a galactic magnetic field.”
The audience stirred restively at what seemed to be an astronomy lecture coming when everybody was wound up with tension and ready to release it in the form of group action.
Jao appeared not to notice. The suspended face cocked a gigantic red eyebrow and went blithely on. “We postulated that something at the center of the galaxy was acting like a stupendous dynamo. The obvious candidate was a rotating black hole—the one we later used as a brake when we dived through the core.”
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