Fiasco (27 page)

The physicists wanted to maintain contact with the emissary, shooting relay probes to race ahead of it, but the captain rejected the idea. He preferred to have the
Gabriel
act on its own, reporting information to them only after it made a soft landing, via a beam that the atmosphere of the Moon would focus on the
Hermes.
He felt that any earlier positioning of relays between the Moon, behind which the
Hermes
hid, and the planet might be noticed and increase the suspiciousness of the paranoid civilization. The unaccompanied flight of the
Gabriel
underscored the peacefulness of its mission.

The
Hermes
observed this flight reflected in the unfolded mirrors of the Ambassador, with a five-minute delay due to the translational distance. The perfectly chilled reflector of the Ambassador gave an excellent image. The
Gabriel
was carrying out maneuvers to make it impossible to locate the mother ship, and soon it appeared as a dark pin against the white-cloud face of the planet. Eight minutes later, the people at the screens stiffened. Instead of proceeding quickly to its designated landing site in Heparia, the
Gabriel
moved southward along a curve of increasing radius and prematurely cut its speed. They immediately saw the reason for its turn. In the belt above the equator, four black points made slowly for the
Gabriel,
two from the east and two from the west, along mathematically perfect trajectories of pursuit. The eastern chasers had already diminished the distance separating them from the
Gabriel.
The pursued craft changed shape, from a needle to a dot surrounded with blinding light: having cut its drive with a four-hundredfold overload, instead of descending to the planet it shot straight up. The four pursuing points also changed course. They began to converge. The
Gabriel
seemed motionless in the center of the trapezium whose corners were the chasers. The trapezium shrank before their eyes, indicating that the chasers, too, had shifted from orbital motion to hyperbolic and were coming together, bright with the heat of the increased drives.

Steergard was tempted to ask Rotmont, as a programmer, what the
Gabriel
would do next, because the blaze produced by the chasers was evidence of tremendous thrust. The group of five moved away from the planet, leaving in its wake a wide crater in the sea of white clouds. There was silence in the dim control room. Watching this unique scene, no one spoke. The four dots drew closer and closer to the
Gabriel.
At the edge of the field of vision, the Doppler telemeter and accelerometer spat out their little red numbers so rapidly that it was difficult to read the indicated speed. The
Gabriel
was at a disadvantage, because it had lost valuable time braking and turning around while the pursuit craft, flanking it, kept on accelerating. DEUS drew on the monitor the predicted intersection of the five trajectories. According to the telemetry and Doppler shift, the
Gabriel
would be caught in about twenty seconds. Twenty seconds was a lot, even for a man thinking a billion times slower than a computer—particularly in moments of extreme tension.

Steergard himself did not know whether or not he had made a mistake by not providing the probe with even a defensive armament. He was furious in his helplessness. The
Gabriel
lacked even a self-destruct charge. Noble intentions, too, ought to have their limits: this was all he had time to think.

The square of the hunters became as small as the dot over an "i." Although the prey and the predators were now a full planetary diameter away from the planet, the force of their drives sent tremors through the surface of the cirrus sea below. In the opening of that sea showed the ocean and the uneven coastline of Heparia. Remnants of cloud vanished in this window like wisps of cotton candy under heat.

The dark background of the ocean worsened the visibility. Only the continually racing, red-flickering numbers of the telemeter gave the
Gabriel's
position. Its pursuers closed in on it from four sides. They were alongside it. Then the window in the clouds bulged, as if the planet were expanding like a gigantic balloon; the gravimeters gave a sharp crack; the screens blackened for a moment—and the image returned. The funnel-shaped window in the white clouds was again small, distant, and completely empty. Steergard did not immediately grasp what had taken place. He looked at the telemeter: all that blinked were red zeros.

"He let 'em have it," said someone with grim satisfaction. Harrach, probably.

"What happened?" Tempe didn't understand.

Steergard knew now, but said nothing. The absolute conviction came upon him that, though they might renew their efforts, they would lose their ship sooner than force contact. For a moment he wondered—already far in his thoughts from this first encounter—whether or not to continue with the arranged program. He barely heard the excited voices in the control room. Rotmont was trying to explain what the
Gabriel
had done, though the reconnaissance plan did not foresee this. The
Gabriel
had crushed space and the pursuers with a sidereal implosion.

"But it didn't have a sidereal generator," Tempe protested, amazed.

"It didn't, but it could have made one. It had a teratron engine, after all. It diverted it, shorted it, directed the full power of the drive into itself, in one discharge. Cunning! They were playing poker, and the
Gabriel
changed the game to bridge. It led with a trump—because there's no suit higher than a gravitational collapse. That's how it avoided capture…"

"Wait a minute." Tempe was beginning to understand. "It had
that
in its program?"

"Of course not! It had a terawatt annihilative engine and complete autonomy. It went for broke. The thing's a machine, remember, not a man, so this wasn't suicide. The prime directive said that it could allow itself to be handled, but only
after
landing."

"But, then, couldn't they have pulled the teratron out after the
Gabriel
landed?" Gerbert asked, puzzled.

"How? The whole first stage, including the teratron, was supposed to melt upon penetration of the atmosphere. With immersion of the stator, the internal pressure would blow apart the poles, and everything, the engine room included, would end up a cloud of dust. And without the least bit of radioactivity. It was only the upper, forward module that was supposed to land and make pleasant conversation with the masters of the house…"

"Oh, yes," Harrach growled, indignant. "It was assumed that their rockets wouldn't be able to build up such acceleration! The
Gabriel
would fly through the satellite rubbish heap like a rifle bullet through a swarm of bees, and politely set down."

"Why didn't it melt its engine when they went after it?" asked the doctor.

"Why doesn't a chicken fly?"

Rotmont was giving vent to his irritation.

"What could it melt the teratron
with
? The energy for burning the drive module was to be drawn from outside—from atmospheric friction. That's how the thing was designed. You didn't know? But let's return to the crux of the game. Either the
Gabriel
would escape, which was not very likely, or they would seize it in space, pull it down into orbit, and disassemble it. If they smothered its drive, and it waited until then to short the engine, there would have been an explosion, but a toroid having poles might survive. The
Gabriel
couldn't allow that, so it came up with the idea of a black hole with a double event horizon, sucked the hunters into itself, imploding, and when the inner sphere collapsed the outer went free, because on that scale quantum effects equal gravitational. Space curved—which is why we saw Quinta as if through a magnifying glass."

"And this truly wasn't programmed? The possibility was never even considered?" Arago said, silent until now.

"No! It wasn't! Fortunately, the machine had more upstairs than we do!" Rotmont was angered by the questions. "It was to be as defenseless as a newborn babe! The
Gabriel's
teratron was not intended for the hyperthermic production of collapsars by short-circuiting, but the Quintans could have deduced that from the construction itself. Obviously they could have, if the
Gabriel
hit on the idea in a couple of seconds."

"By itself?"

The monk's question made Rotmont lose all patience.

"By itself! How many times do I have to say that? It had, after all, a luminal computer with a quarter the power of DEUS! In five years, Father, you wouldn't think your way through half the number of bits that it could in one microsecond. It examined itself, ascertained that it could reverse the field of the teratron and that shorting the poles would produce a mononuclear sidereal generator. The generator would burst, of course, immediately, but at the same time as the collapse…"

"That was to be expected," observed Nakamura.

"If you take a walk with a walking stick and a mad dog comes at you, it's to be expected that you'll hit him over the head," replied Rotmont. "It's incredible that we could have been so naïve! But all's well that ends well. They showed their hospitality, and the
Gabriel
knew how to return the compliment. Of course, it could have been equipped with a conventional self-destruct charge, but our leader chose not to do that…"

"And what took place, is that any better?" asked Arago.

"And was I supposed to install a moped engine in it? It needed power, so it got power. And the fact that a teratron resembles, in its design, a sidereal generator is not my fault but the consequence of physics. Jokichi?"

"He's right," said Nakamura, appealed to.

"In any case, they have no sidereal technology or gravistics, I'll stake my life on that," Rotmont went on.

"How do you know?"

"Because they would have used it. That whole Moloch buried on the Moon, for example, is a horse and buggy from the point of view of sidereal engineering. Why tunnel down to magma and the asthenosphere if you can transform gravitation to produce macroquantum effects? Their physics took a different road—I would say a more roundabout road, which led them away from the trump suit. Thank God! We want contact, after all, not combat."

"But won't they consider what just happened combat?"

"They might. They very well might!"

"Gentlemen, do you think you can locate any pieces of the craft that the
Gabriel
sent flying?" Steergard asked the physicists.

"Not likely—unless the collapse was highly asymmetrical. I'll ask DEUS. I doubt that the grav monitors were able to record it precisely. DEUS?"

"Locating them," said the computer, "is not possible. The blast from the opening of the outer Kerr envelope dispersed the fragments away from the sun."

"And in the vicinity?"

"An indeterminacy of a parsec was created."

"You're not serious?" said Polassar. Nakamura was also amazed.

"I am not sure that Dr. Rotmont is right," said DEUS. "Possibly I am biased, as one more closely related to the
Gabriel
than is Dr. Rotmont. In addition, I did limit its autonomy, according to the instructions that I received."

"Enough of that 'related' business." The captain did not care for machine humor. "Tell what you know."

"My guess is that the
Gabriel
intended only to disappear—by turning itself into a singularity. It knew that neither we nor they would be harmed in this way, because the probability of meeting a singularity is, practically speaking, zero. It has a diameter of 10
^-50
of a proton. Two flies, one flying from Paris, the other from New York, would be more likely to collide."

"Whom are you defending, Rotmont or yourself?"

"I defend no one. Though not a man, I speak as a man, to men. The
Hermes
and the
Eurydice
originate in Greece. Let this sound, then, as if uttered at the walls of Troy: if the crew suspects those who programmed and sent forth the
Gabriel
, I give my Olympian word that the collapse-escape was not entered in any memory bank. The
Gabriel
possessed the decisional maximum, a nanosecond heuristics with branches to 10
³²
, the cardinal number of the combinatorial set. To what use it put that capability I do not know, but I do know the amount of time it had to reach a decision: from three to four seconds. Too little, that, to determine the Holenbach interval. Thus the choice it faced was: all or nothing. If it did not close off space with a collapse, it would explode like a hundred-megaton thermonuclear bomb—because the power liberated by the short would have been such an explosion. In view of that, the
Gabriel
went to the other extreme, which ensured an implosion down to a singularity, and incidentally pulled the Quintans' missiles into the Kerr envelope."

DEUS fell silent. Steergard looked around at his men.

"All right. I'll accept that. The
Gabriel
surrendered its soul to the Lord. As to whether it checkmated Quinta in the process, we'll find out. We remain where we are. Who's on duty?"

"I am," said Tempe.

"Good. The rest of you, to bed. If anything happens, wake me."

"DEUS is always on duty," offered the computer.

Alone in the control room with the lights on dim, the pilot circled like a swimmer in invisible water, past dead and empty screens, and rose to the ceiling. Struck by an unexpected thought, he kicked off from the ceiling and flew to the central videoscope.

"DEUS?" he said in a low voice.

"Yes."

"Show me again the final stage of the chase. Slowed down five times."

"Optically?"

"Optically with an infrared overlay, but the image shouldn't be too blurred."

"The degree of blurring is a matter of taste," replied DEUS as the screen lit up. Along the frame flashed the numbers of the telemeter. They did not rush at lightning speed as before, but changed in small jumps.

"Cross hairs on the image."

"Very well."

The picture, intersected stereometrically, whitened with clouds. Suddenly it shook, as if seen through rushing water. The lines of the grid began to bend. The distance between the needle of the
Gabriel
and the pursuers decreased. At slow motion, everything took place as in a drop of water under a microscope, when comma bacilli swim toward a black speck in suspension.