MacRoscope (46 page)

“This is probably about the best our luck has to offer,” Afra said. “We could renovate Joseph and row across, as it were. A few years in melt—”

“We’d have to reconstitute every year, for safety,” Ivo reminded her. “The melt’s shelf-life isn’t guaranteed indefinitely.”

“I am not a gambling man,” Harold said, “but I’d rather gamble. That is, try some more passes. I don’t want to approach the destroyer in the melted state. I want my wits about me, not my protoplasm.”

They gambled — and lost. Six more passes failed to bring them within five light-years of the target. That parsec had been their best, and they couldn’t even find that track again. Jumpspace was too complex a puzzle.

“Schön says—”

“Shut
up
!” This time it was Afra, and her vehemence gave him another warm feeling. He remembered the word LOVE in the balloting, and dared to wonder. His love for her had changed its nature but never its certainty; he knew her well, now, and understood her liabilities as well as her assets, and loved them all. It was a love without illusion; he expected nothing of her, and drew his pleasure solely from being near her. Or so he told himself.

But — had she written the word? Harold would not have done it, and Beatryx should not have thought of it. Still—

“I think,” said Harold, “we had better give up on this one. There are several others in the galaxy, and for our purpose any one of them should do for a beginning. Perhaps our channel runs closer to another destroyer.”

That much they had verified, coming down into the Milky Way: there were a number of destroyers. Their devastating signals had intercepted the human party at about eighteen thousand light-years, wherever they moved within or near the galaxy. Once they had had two destroyers in “sight” simultaneously, and had verified the similarity of the signals by superimposing one on the other.

They gambled again, going for a new target. Once more their luck changed. Their second pass at the second destroyer brought them to just within one light-day.

At last they learned why it had been so difficult to obtain normal macroscopic information about any destroyer. Here virtually all macronic impulses were overridden by the artificial signal; or perhaps they were preempted for its purpose. Only one flux emanated from this area of space, and hardly anything coherent entered it. Apart from the destroyer signal itself, it was blackout. The macroscope, for the first time, was out of commission.

Except for the traveler signal. That, oddly, came through as strongly as ever. This was one more evidence of the superiority of the extragalactic technology: the traveler could not be jammed or blocked or diverted.

“Damn lucky, too,” Harold said. “Think of the trouble we’d have getting
out
of here, otherwise.”

Afra busied herself with the telescopes while the others set about demothballing Joseph. The ship had been buried within Triton, which in turn was buried in Neptune, and extricating it and themselves whole was no offhand matter. Fortunately — though Harold denied that chance had been involved in such an engineering decision — they had also mothballed the heavy equipment. Harold had constructed it on macroscopic plans, and what could be done could be undone enough for storage. Anything not deposited well within the Triton drillhole had been melted down during the Neptune approach, of course.

“I have photographed the destroyer complex,” Afra reported at lunch. “Can’t actually
see
anything with these inefficient optical instruments, but as I make it the center unit is almost two miles in diameter and spherical. Definitely artificial. Metallic surface. Since we can’t use the macroscope on it, we’ll have to go inside ourselves.”

“We seem to be getting blasé about galactic technology,” Harold said. “Now we complain about imperfect detail vision at a distance of one light-day! Still, why
not
go inside, then?”

“Because they might tweak our tailfeathers with a contraterrene missile, that’s why not,” she said. “So I suggest we make a dry run first.” She appeared uncommonly cheerful, as though, perversely, a weight had lifted from her mind.

“How?” Harold asked her. “Joseph is all we have.”

“Catapult, stupid,” she said, smiling. “We have a spot gravity nullifier, remember? And plenty of material.”

Harold knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. He, too, seemed uncharacteristically lighthearted. “Of course! We can shape a mock ship and launch it toward the destroyer—”

“Let’s begin with the satellites,” she said. “I think they’re the battleships.”

“Satellites?”

“I told you. The destroyer is ringed with hundred-foot spheres — six of them, about five light-minutes out, north-south-east-west-up-down.”

“You did
not
, girl, tell me. You implied that you could not obtain such detail with optics. This complicates the problem.”

“I
did
tell you. Where were you when I said ‘destroyer
complex
’?”

“Who was it who said ‘There is no faith stronger than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own infallibility’?”

“Cabell said it. But he also implied that a bad-tempered woman needs an even-tempered man.” Both smiled.

Ivo went on eating, but Beatryx’s excellent cooking had become tasteless. Afra and Groton!

No — he was jumping to an unfounded suspicion. A ludicrous one! Their open banter merely reflected the increasing intimacy of the little group. It was almost the way the project had been, when he and Brad and all the others had batted inanities back and forth while pursuing deeper studies. Afra and Groton had had to work closely together ever since Triton — particularly when Ivo himself had skipped off to Tyre and left them stranded in deep space. And there had developed a kind of father-daughter relation between them since the trial. Afra had lost her own father somehow, so—

Groton and his waldoes and machines performed their miracles of construction again, and in due course Neptune had a planetary cannon. The bore was thirty-five feet across and two miles long, bottomed by the field-distortion mechanism. Slender tubes opened to the atmospheric surface of the planet in a circle many miles across, and fed into the nether sections of the bore. Great baffles stood ready to redirect the force of the gases that would converge the moment the generators opened the tunnel to space.

They gathered in the control room to watch the launching. Neptune was rotating, relative to the destroyer complex, and the action had to be properly timed. Afra had done the calculations, querying Ivo only for verification. She had made it plain, in similarly subtle ways, that the relation between them had changed. She was not dependent on him for such work.

Groton manipulated his controls, that seemed to be almost as intricate as those of the macroscope maintenance, and on the screen the monster dummy-ship was lifted into place. This was a breech-loading cannon with a clip of four; further expenditures on dummies had been deemed a waste of time.

Groton fired. The gravity-diffusion field came on, taking a moment to develop full intensity. It was generated by a different unit than theirs of the residential area, since it was essential that they continue to be shielded from the full gravity and pressure of the planet. Then gas hurtled through the pipes and smashed into the base of the projectile, itself abruptly weightless. The control chamber shuddered.

Above, atmosphere imploded into the column of null, meeting the baffles there and forming into an instant hurricane with an eye that was a geyser of methane snow. All the pressure of Neptune’s atmosphere drove that bullet forward: one million pounds per square inch, initial.

Out from ammonia and water, both vaporized by the friction; through hydrogen and beyond the mighty atmosphere: a thousand miles beyond the apparent surface of the planet the motor cut in. The rocket accelerated at a rate that would have terminated any fleshly occupants and shattered unprotected equipment. It was a temporary motor, designed for power and not duration, and it consumed itself as it functioned; and it got the ship up to a velocity that would bring it to the destroyer in days instead of months.

“Certainly looks like a ship from here,” Afra said with admiration. “Are you sure you didn’t put Joseph in that lock by mistake?”

“Drone ship, on my honor. It only weighs a tenth as much as Joseph, and that galactic formula would asphyxiate our type of life as soon as it ignited, not to mention the fact that it burns its own guts. You can do a lot with chemical drive if you don’t have to sit on top of it.”

The watch began. Each person tracked the drone for four hours, ready to sound the alarm when anything happened. A light-day was a very small distance compared to those they had become accustomed to, but even galactically sponsored chemical drive was very weak. The rocket achieved its top velocity and coasted, an empty shell. Their vigil lasted a fortnight.

The drone passed the nearest satellite and angled toward the destroyer itself. Nothing happened. It came within a light-minute of the main sphere and curved around it as though bent by a tremendous gravitational force, but did not stop. It passed another satellite on the way out.

“Either they’re dead or playing possum,” Groton said. “Do we try another?”

Another two weeks of eventless waiting, Ivo thought, but certainly the wisest course.

“I’m satisfied,” Afra said. “Obviously there are no functioning automatic defenses. I’m sorry we wasted this much time. Let’s move in ourselves.”

Ivo thought of objecting, then decided not to. She had spoken and it was so, impetuous or not. This project was hers, now.

They were space-borne again, and it was a strange sensation. Not since they put down on Schön, erstwhile moon of a moon, had they taken Joseph out of planetary control for any extended period. In the passing months the old reflexes had faded, if they had ever been really implanted, making free-fall unfamiliar, making them have to stop and think out their actions.

“I like it,” Afra said. “Neptune is home, of course, but this is vacation.”

Why was she so buoyant? Ivo wondered. They were near the termination of their grisly mission, in whatever guise that mission existed now, and he would have expected it to remind her forcefully of the fate of her supposed fiancé. Instead she acted as though she had found new love. She hardly seemed to care about the destroyer itself, though it was the instigator of all of this.

Groton clapped his hand on Afra’s shoulder, sending her skidding in the weightlessness. “Girl, if you don’t get on those computations before I reorganize our gear, I’ll have the cap’n hurl you into the brig!”

They had tied down their equipment and pushed out from Neptune slowly, without the benefit of full gravity nullification. This had been expensive in working fluid, but far safer for man and machine. Now the ship was scooping in more hydrogen and compressing it, at the fringe of the Neptune atmosphere, so that they would have full tanks for the main haul. They were ready to retool for straight space flight.

They had to melt, despite Groton’s earlier objection; there was no other way to cover such a distance. The cycle was routine, however, once their course had been set. They revived in good condition light-seconds from one of the satellites. It had seemed wiser to investigate the minion before the master.

Ivo had been lulled by the somewhat cavalier attitude affected by the others, but the sight of the alien sphere looming so close — telescopically — reminded him with a shock that this was to be their first physical contact with an artifact of extraterrestrial civilization. A malignant one.

It was monstrous as they approached, not so much in its hundred-foot diameter (Afra had done expert photographic work and analyzing, to pinpoint that size at a distance of a light-day, even allowing for the superior equipment sponsored by galactic technology) as in its suggestion of implacable power. The surface was pocked, as though it had been subject to spatial debris for many millions of years. Portions of it projected, reminiscent of cannon.

Afra took over the telescope to make detail photographs. Now, while her attention was wholly taken up, he could watch her. She was radiant; her hair was bound in a single braid that drifted over one shoulder and down her front, red against the white of her blouse. She had recovered the weight she had lost and was now in vibrant health. Her lips were parted, half-smiling in her concentration. Light from the equipment played over her high cheekbone and across her perfect chin, caressing her face with shadow.

Was it the single rose he smelled again?

“Moonstruck,” Brad had termed him, setting that emotional snare, and Afra was that moon. Ivo knew he would have loved her anyway, whatever her color, whatever her intelligence. It was perhaps her appearance more than her personality; he had disillusioned himself long ago about his romantic values and hers. Still, the love he felt encompassed all of her, the violent along with the beautiful. All, no matter what.

She jerked her head up, eyes widening in shock, showing that blue again. Ivo jumped guiltily, thinking she had caught him staring, but her exclamation banished such inconsequential alarm immediately.

“It’s tracking us!”

Groton and Beatryx seemed to materialize beside her.

“It’s live!” Afra said with the same shock. “It has a range-finder on us.”

“Since we’re a sitting duck, all we can do is quack,” Groton said, but he did not look as complacent as he sounded.

Beatryx ventured one of her rare technical comments: “Wouldn’t it have
done
something, if it meant to?”

Afra smiled, as she did so readily and prettily now. “You’re right,” Tryx. I’m getting hysterical after the fact. We’d be smithereened by now if we were going to be. We’re within fifty thousand miles, and you can bet that’s well within its sphere of control. So eradication just isn’t in our horoscope for today.”

The strange antenna continued to track as they came close. It was a bowl-shaped spiral of wire about two feet in diameter, with beads strung on the outermost spire. There was no other sign of life. Ivo felt the cold sweat on his palms and wiped it off, embarrassed by it and what it signified. Was he the only one to feel old-fashioned
fear?