Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (24 page)

5

When the wine went round the captain’s table after dinner, One Eye accepted his glass but could not drink. He felt sick with suspense, and with the sickness went a loathing for Welded; not only did he disapprove of poisoning, as a devious method of killing, but he understood clearly that the little bottle held more than enough to spare for him, too, should Welded feel like disposing of all his opposition at once.

You had no such qualms. You took your glass when it was filled, toasted, as you did every night, the success of the expedition, and drained down the wine.

“This wine tastes flat,” you said. “We will stock up with better vintages on Yinnisfar!”

Everyone around the table laughed with you, except for One Eye; the muscles of his face contorted. He could not even force himself to look at Welded.

“What did you make of the thirty-mile-long object we sighted earlier?” Prim asked you, taking his wine at a more sedate pace.

“It was a Yinnisfar ship,” you said easily. “But don’t worry about it. Evolution will take care of it, just as evolution took care of the prehistoric monsters that once roved Owlenj and other planets.”

The captain spread his hands.

“For a practical man, that seems a strangely unpractical remark,” he said. “Evolution is one thing, superships quite another.”

“Only if you forget that evolution is nature’s scientific method, and starships, not being organic creatures, are a part of man’s evolution. And man himself is but a part of nature’s scientific method.”

“I trust you don’t imagine, at this late date in time, that man is not the end product of evolution?” he asked you. “We are constantly being told that the Galaxy is too old for anything but final extinction.”

“I imagine nothing,” you told him pleasantly. “But remember — what triumphs ultimately is something too vast for comprehension — yours or mine.”

You stood up, and the others followed suit. Soon the dining room was empty except for two very puzzled conspirators.

For just over four weeks, the Owlenj fleet had been vacuum-borne. Now the craft were deep within the star-clotted heart of the Galaxy. Suns which carried as an incidental burden hundreds of millions of years of the histories and myths of man burned on all sides like funeral torches. The graveyard air was reinforced by silence over all wave bands, the chatter of alarmed planets had died away to nothing.

“They’re waiting for us!” One Eye exclaimed, not for the first time. He lived on the bridge of the flagship now, staring for hours at a time at the seemingly motionless spectacle of the universe.

Much to the captain’s unstated disapproval, the bridge had also become Welded’s living quarters. He spent most of the time lying on his bed with a fuser under his pillow, and never looked out of the ports.

You came frequently to the bridge, but seldom spoke to the two. You were detached; it might have been all a dream. Yet, for all that, you were at times noticeably impatient, speaking abruptly, sometimes clicking your fingers in suppressed irritation, almost as if you wished to wake from the tedium of your sleep.

Only Fleet Commander Prim remained completely unchanged. The routine of command stayed him. He seemed to have absorbed all the confidence One Eye and Welded had lost.

“We shall ground on Yinnisfar in six days,” he said to you. “Is it possible they intend to offer us no resistance?”

“It is possible to think up excellent reasons for their nonresistance,” you said. “Owlenj has been isolated from the Federation for generations and has little knowledge of current intellectual attitudes within the Region. They may all be pacifists, eager to prove their faith. Or, at the other end of the scale, their military hierarchy, without war to thin its ranks, may already have collapsed under our unexpected pressure. Its all speculation — ”

At that second, the parasond exploded. An icy clatter rang along the floor as ruptured metal and glass showered out of the panel, while gusts of acrid smoke settled like mesh over the bridge. A babble of voices broke out.

“Get the communications chief,” Prim barked, but the chief was already on the job, calling over the intercom for a stretcher party and the electronics crew.

Welded was inspecting the damage, fanning away smoke, which still siphoned out of a red-hot crater in the panels. His spine arched as tensely as a prestressed girder.

“Look!” called One Eye. The hysterical edge to his voice was so compelling that even in this moment of crisis every eye present swivelled to where his finger pointed. Out, out they stared into the hard pageant of night beyond the ports. Their eyes had to probe and focus before they saw.

Flies. Flies, rising in a cloud from a dark stream on whose surface sunlight glittered, so that between dark and light the insects were almost lost to view. But the stream was space itself and the glitter a spangle of suns, and the flies spread across them — a cloud of ships. The ancient forces of Yinnisfar were rising to the attack.

6

“You can’t count them!” One Eye said, glaring aghast at the swarm of ships. “There must be thousands.
They
blew out the instrument panel; it was a sort of warning. By Pla and To, they’ll blow us into eternity at any moment!”

Turning on a heel, he crossed the promenade and confronted you.

“You brought us into this!” he shouted. “What are you going to do to get us away? How do we save ourselves?”

“Leave that to the captain and be silent,” you said. You moved away before he touched you and stood by the captain.

The short wave was unimpaired, and he spoke rapidly to the squadron leaders of his fleet. On a live schematic above his head, the results of those orders immediately became apparent. The Owlenjan fleet was deploying into its individual squadrons, spreading into a fan parsecs wide. They moved toward the curtain of flies like an opening hand. At maximum speed they moved, straight for the enemy navies.

“They’re too ready for us,” Prim said to you out of the corner of his dry mouth. “There aren’t enough of us to be effective. It’s nothing but suicide.”

“What else do you suggest?” you asked him.

“If every ship made for a planet, orbited it, held it under threat of demolition — No, they’d pick us off one by one...” He shook his head. “This is the only possible way,” he said quietly, again turning all his attention to the manoeuvre.

Further talk was impossible. The waiting ships and the handful of charging starcraft slid together. The gulf between them suddenly became trellised with blue flame — electric, blinding. Square links of force opened and shut like champing mouths. Whatever its power source, the drain must have been phenomenal, consuming the basic energies of space itself.

The Owlenjan ships found themselves on the defensive before evasion was more than a panicky thought. That chopping trellis flared before their ports, snapped, was gone, flared and snapped again, bathing every bridge in its eccentric luminance, dazzling, consuming. It was the last light thousands of eyes ever saw. The ships on which those blue jaws closed burned magnesium-bright; they burned, then sagged into limbo, leeched of life.

But the invaders were tearing through space at formidable speeds. Nor was the terrifying trellis properly in phase; whoever controlled it could not control its precise adjustment. Its scissor action was too slow — many ships hurtled through its interstices and into the ranks of the Yinnisfar fleet.

A glance at the schematic showed Prim he had only about forty ships left, raggedly out of formation.

“Superfusers — fire!” he roared.

No one in that immense melee of armour had ever been in a space battle before. The Galaxy in its tired old age had long since hung up its swords. Of all the astute minds following the rapid interplay of strategy, Prim’s was the quickest to seize advantage. The mighty ranks of Yinnisfar had placed too much reliance on their trellis device; they were temporarily numbed to find survivors on their side of it. Owlenj shook them out of their numbness.

Sunbursts of superfusers cascaded among them, leaping and feeding from ship to ship, coruscating with
cosmic
energy, while the attackers plunged through their devastated ranks and were away. The Yinnisfar vessels were also in rapid movement. In no time they had dispersed, safe from the fusion centre, where twenty score of their sister ships had perished.

“We’re through!” you said. “On to Yinnisfar itself. It will ransom our safety!”

The enemy fleet was not so easily outdistanced, however. Several units were already overtaking the invaders at staggering velocity. Among them was the thirty-mile-long craft they had sighted some days earlier.

“And there are three more like it!” Welder yelled from his position at the ports. “Look! How can anything travel that fast?”

Prim wrenched the flagship into a spin south. They altered course just in time; the overtakers launched a black mass like smoke directly ahead of their old position. The smoke was molecularized ceetee, capable of riddling the flagship like a moth in a carpet, leaving it mere gravel over the spaceways. In this manoeuvre, sight of the four giant vessels was lost. Then they spun into sight again, and with mind-wrenching turns formed the four points of an enormous square ahead of the flagship.

“No human could stand G’s like that. They are robot-controlled,” you said, gripped by the fascination of battle.

“And
they
put out the trellis screen!” Prim said. It was a flash of inspiration, shortly to be proved correct. He turned and barked orders at bombardment, telling them to hit the giants at any cost. By now the flagship was on its own, the rest of its company disintegrated or scattered far away.

The four giants were in position. Again the hellish blue pattern scissored across the flagship’s course. Prim had no time to swerve away — they racketed toward the dazzling pattern. At the last moment, bombardment fired a superfuser dead ahead.

Superfuser and trellis met.

The two insensate energies clawed each other like vast beasts of prey. Instead of spreading its usual explosion, the fusion climbed the writhing squares of trellis, gobbling as it mounted. At the centre it left a widening circle of nothingness, through which the flagship shot unharmed. It climbed to the trellis corners, barbed fire-devouring fire. It reached the four giant vessels.

Just for a moment they remained intact, each radiating a three-dimensional rainbow which flickered magically up and down the spectrum and was visible hundreds of light years away. Then that blinding beauty fused, the four rainbow orbs merged and became antilight. They sucked, guttered and went out — and a great gap in the nothingness of the universe appeared and spread. The ineluctable fabric of space itself was being devoured.

Several Yinnisfar ships were engulfed in this cataclysm. The flagship was spared no time to rejoice. The moment of its greatest triumph was also the moment of its destruction. A translucent globe from an enemy destroyer caught its dorsal vane.

Like an electronic monster, the globe spread tentacles of light and engulfed the flagship.

Prim swore furiously.

“Nothing responds any more,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides.

It was doubtful if anyone heard him. A continuous sizzle filled their ears while their body electricity jumped in protest at what was taking place. The scene was rendered in unforgettable hues of orange and black, as the light penetrated everything. Faces, clothes, floor, instruments, all were ravaged.

Then it was over, that moment of near madness. They were left in darkness, only pale starlight touching their faces. Prim staggered for the controls. He swept his hand wildly over banks of instruments. All were dead.

“We’re finished!” he announced. “Not a whisper of life anywhere. Even the air purifier is finished.”

He sank down, covering his face with his hands. For a while no one spoke; all were emotionally drained by the apocalyptic rigors of battle, the sag of defeat.

“They must be chivalrous on Yinnisfar,” you said at length. “They will have some residual code of battle. They will come and take us. We shall be honourably treated.”

Welded said harshly from a corner, “You still find room for cockiness! We ought to destroy you now.”

“Let’s kill him,” One Eye said, but made no move. They were all just lumps against the wall of starlight, lumps that spoke without relevance.

“I only feel relaxed,” you said. “The battle is over. We have lost honourably. Look at your captain here, half-dead with fatigue. He fought well, resourcefully. No blame lies with him that we lost the gamble. Now he can sit back without remorse — and we can do the same — knowing the future is not in our hands. Soon they will be here to collect us and give us an honourable trial on Yinnisfar.”

The others made you no answer.

7

The air was growing foul when the emissaries of Yinnisfar arrived, as you had predicted. They cut their way rapidly through the hull, rounded up all of the dazed men aboard and transferred them to their own ship. Full speed was then made toward Yinnisfar. The flagship was left to its own ruined devices.

You had been given a separate room with Prim, One Eye, and Welded. The latter two had been quite drained of all life by the magnitude of recent events. They sat together now like a pair of dummies, not speaking. Prim was in better shape, but reaction had hit him now, and he lay shaking on a couch. So you alone stood by the port and took in the spectacle as Yinnisfar approached.