Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (23 page)

The keepers prostrated themselves before the throne and were recognized by the Emperor. Biladze bit back a curse. The damn microphone wasn't picking up their conversation! How would he know what Pasa or his son wanted if he couldn't hear what was going on? All he was getting were music and laughter—plus a couple of indecent conversations close by the mike. This was the type of bungle that made the position of Chief Yacht Pilot a short-lived one, no matter how careful a man was.

One of his crew fiddled with the screen controls, but nothing could really be done at this end. They would see and hear only what the Lord Chamberlain was kind enough to let them see and hear. Biladze leaned toward the screen and tried to pick out from the general party noises the conversation passing between Boblanson and the Prince.

The two keepers were still prostrate at Pasa's feet. They had not been given permission to rise. Boblanson remained standing, though his posture was cringing and timid. Servants insinuated themselves through the larger crowd to distribute drinks and candies to the Imperial party.

The Emperor and his son seemed totally unaware of this bustle of cringing figures about them. It was strange to see two men set so far above the common herd. And it all brought back a very old memory. It had been the summer of his last year at Tiflis, when he had found both Klasa and the freedom of the Navy. Many times during that summer, he and Klasa had flown into the Kavkaz to spend the afternoon alone in the alpine meadows. There they could speak their own minds, however timidly, without fear of being overheard. (Or so they thought. In later years, Biladze realized how terribly mistaken they had been. It was blind luck they were not discovered.) On those secret picnics, Klasa told him things that were never intended to go beyond her classes. The architecture students were taught the old forms and the meaning of the inscriptions to be found upon them. So Klasa was one of the few people in all the Empire with any knowledge of history and archaic languages, however indirect and fragmentary. It was dangerous knowledge, yet in many ways fascinating: In the days of the Republic, Klasa asserted, the word "Emperor" had meant something like "Primary secretary," that is, an elected official—just as on some isolated Navy posts, the men elect a secretary to handle unit funds. It was an amazing evolution—to go from elected equal to near godling. Biladze often wondered what other meanings and truths had been twisted by time and by the kind of men he was watching on the holoscreen.

"—Father. I think it could be exactly what my creature says." The audio came loud and abrupt as the picture turned to center on the Prince and his father. Apparently Rostov had realized his mistake. The Chamberlain had almost as much to lose as Biladze if the Emperor's wishes were not instantly gratified.

Biladze breathed a sigh of relief as he picked up the thread of the conversation. Sasa's high-pitched voice was animated: "Didn't I tell you this would be a worthwhile outing, Father? Here we've already run across something entirely new, perhaps from beyond the Solar System. It will be the greatest find in my collection. Oh, Father, we must pick it up." His voice rose fractionally.

Pasa grimaced, and said something about Sasa's "worthless hobbies." Then he gave in—as he almost always did—to the wishes of his son. "Oh very well, pick the damned thing up. I only hope it's half as interesting as your creature here," he waved a gem-filthy arm at Boblanson, "says it is."

The non-Citizen shivered within his blue uniform, and his voice became a supplicating whine. "Oh, dear Great Majesty, this trembling animal promises you with all his heart that the artifact is perfectly fit to all the greatness of your Empire."

Even before Boblanson got the tongue-twisting promise out of his mouth, Biladze had turned from the holo and was talking to his men. "Okay. Close with the object." As one of the crew tapped the control board, Biladze turned to Kolja and continued. "We'll pick it up with the thirdbay waldoes. Once we get it inside, I want to check the thing over. I remember reading somewhere that the Ancients used reaction jets for attitude control and thrust—they never did catch on to inertial drive. There just might be some propellant left in the object's tanks after all these years. I don't want that thing blowing up in anybody's face."

"Right," said Kolja, turning to his own board.

Biladze kept an ear on the talk coming from the main deck—just in case somebody up there changed his mind. But the conversation had retreated from the specifics of this discovery to a general discussion of the boy's satellite collection. Boblanson's blue figure was still standing before the throne, and every now and then the little man interjected something in support of Sasa's descriptions.

Vanja pushed himself off the wall to inspect the approach program his crewman had written. The yacht was equipped with the new drive and could easily attain objective accelerations of a thousand gravities. But their target was only a couple hundred kilometers away and a more delicate approach was in order: Biladze pressed the PROGRAM INITIATE, and the ship's display showed that they were moving toward the artifact at a leisurely two gravities. It should take nearly two hundred seconds to arrive, but that was probably within Sasa's span of attention.

One hundred twenty seconds to contact. For the first time since he had called Boblanson into the control cabin ten minutes earlier, Biladze had a moment to ponder the object for himself. The cone was an artifact; it was much too regular to be anything else. Yet he doubted that it was of extraterrestrial origin, no matter what Boblanson thought. Its orbit had the same period and eccentricity as Earth's, and right now it wasn't much over seven million kilometers from Earth-Luna. Orbits like that just aren't stable over long periods of time. Eventually such an object must be captured by Earth-Luna or be perturbed into an eccentric orbit.

The cone couldn't be much older than man's exploration of space. Biladze wondered briefly how much could be learned by tracing the orbit back through some kind of dynamical analysis. Probably not much.

Right now the only difference between its orbit and Earth's was the inclination: about three degrees. That might mean it had been launched from Earth at barely more than escape velocity, along a departure asymptote pointing due north. Now what conceivable use could there be for such a trajectory?

Ninety seconds to contact. The image of the slowly tumbling cone was much sharper now. Besides the faint scoring along its hull, he could see that the dull white surface was glazed. It really did look as if it had passed through a planet's atmosphere. He had seen such effects only once or twice before, since with any inertial drive it was a simple matter to decelerate before entering an atmosphere. But Biladze could imagine that the Ancients, having to depend on rockets for propulsion, might have used aerodynamic braking to save fuel. Perhaps this was a returning space probe that had entered Earth's atmosphere at too shallow an angle and skipped back into space, lost forever to the Ancients' primitive technology. But that still didn't explain its narrow, pointed shape. A good aerodynamic brake would be a blunt body. This thing looked as if it had been designed expressly to minimize drag.

Sixty seconds to contact. He could see now that the black hole at its base was actually the pinched nozzle of a reaction jet—added proof that this was an Earth-launched probe from before the Final Conflict. Biladze glanced at the holoscreen above the printer. The Emperor and his son seemed really taken with what they were seeing on the screen set before the throne. Behind them stood Boblanson, his poor nearsighted eyes squinting at the screen. The man seemed even stranger than before. His jaws were clenched and a periodic tic cut across his face. Biladze looked back at the main screen; the little man knew more than he had revealed about that mysterious cone. If he had not been beneath their notice, the Safety Committee would have long since noticed this, too.

Thirty seconds. What was Boblanson's secret? Biladze tried to connect the centuries-deep hatred he had seen in Boblanson with what they knew about the tumbling white cone: It had been launched around the time of the Final Conflict on a trajectory that might have pointed northwards. But the object hadn't been intended as a space probe since it had evidently acquired most of its speed while still within Earth's atmosphere. No sensible vehicle would move so fast within the atmosphere. . . .
unless it was a weapon.

The thought brought a sudden numbness to the pit of Biladze's stomach. The Final Conflict had been fought with rocket bombs fired back and forth over the North Pole. One possible defense against such weapons would be high acceleration antimissile missiles. If one such missed its target, it might very well escape Earth-Luna—to orbit the sun, forever armed, forever waiting. Then why hadn't his instruments detected a null bomb within it? The question almost made him reject his whole theory, until he remembered that quite powerful explosions could be produced with nuclear fission and fusion. Only physicists knew such quaint facts, since null bombs were much easier to construct once you had the trick of them. But had the Ancients known that trick?

Biladze casually folded his arms, kept his position by hooking one foot through a wall strap. Somewhere inside himself a voice was screaming:
Abort the approach, abort the approach!
Yet if he were right and if the bomb in that cone were still operable, then the Emperor and the three highest tiers of the nobility would be wiped from the face of the universe.

It was an opportunity no man or group of men had had since the Final Conflict.

But it's not worth dying for!
screamed the tiny, frightened voice.

Biladze looked into the holoscreen at the hedonistic drones whose only talent lay in managing the security apparatus that had suppressed men and men's ideas for so long. With the Emperor and the top people in the Safety Committee gone, political power would fall to the technicians—ordinary Citizens from Tiflis, Luna City, Eastguard. Biladze had no illusions: ordinary people have their own share of villains. There would be strife, perhaps even civil war. But in the end, men would be free to go to the stars, from where no earthly tyranny could ever recall them.

Behind the Emperor and the nobles, Boblanson cringed no more. A look of triumph and hatred had come into his face, and Biladze remembered that he had said this would be a gift fit for the Empire.

And so your people will be revenged after all these centuries,
thought Biladze. As vengeance it was certainly appropriate, but that had nothing to do with why he, Vanja Biladze, floated motionless in the control cabin and made no effort to slow their approach on the tumbling cone. He was scared as hell. Mere vengeance was not worth this price. Perhaps the future would be.

They were within a couple thousand meters of the object now. It filled the screen, as if it whirled just beyond the yacht's hull. Biladze's instruments registered some mild radioactivity in the object's direction.

Good-bye, Klasa.

Seven million kilometers from Earth, a new star was born. In an astronomical sense, it was a very small star, but to itself and what lay nearby it was an expanding, plasmatic hell of fission-fusion products, neutrons and gamma rays.

Like many another, my first encounter with Stephen Vincent Benet was "The Devil and Daniel Webster"; which delightful story directed me to an early Pocket Book of his short stories (alas, my copy was read until it fell apart, and the book is out of print). "Paul's Case," "The Last of the Legions," "Old Doc Carter and the Pearly Gates"; a flood of stories, all different all readable; all heady stuff indeed to one not yet in high school.

I found his poetry only in libraries, and again it's mostly out of print. Benet, like many poets who wrote during the turmoil between the world wars, could see great storms ahead; and though he was basically an optimist, he had nightmares.

Like this one.

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside, Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model T or even an early Napier,
They'd have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow,
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World!"
He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc, and a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there'd never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace) like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
"Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created. And, in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully till Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet and gunpowder and they had to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skulls, the handsome folk, the excellent scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucius, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander—
Just to take half a dozen—
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"