The Mote in God's Eye (15 page)

“What?”

On Renner’s face was retrospective dread. “He should never have tried to pick up the probe. We’d lost too much time. We were about to ram a star. I wouldn’t have
believed
we could pick up the damned thing so fast...”

“Blaine did that himself?”

“No. He gave the job to Cargill. Who’s better at tight high-gravity maneuvers than anybody else aboard. That’s the point, Doctor. The Captain picked the best man for the job and got out of the way.”

“And you would have run for it?”

“Forthrightly and without embarrassment.”

“But he picked it up. Well.” Horvath seemed to taste something bad. “But he also fired on it. The first—”

“It shot first.”

“That was a meteor defense!”

“So what?”

Horvath clamped his lips.

“All right, Doctor, try this. Suppose you left your car on a hill with the brakes off and the wheels turned the wrong way, and suppose it rolled down the hill and killed four people. What’s your ethical position?”

“Terrible. Make your point, Renner.”

“The Moties are at least as intelligent as we are. Granted? OK. They built a meteor defense. They had an obligation to see to it that it did not fire on neutral space craft.”

Horvath sat there for what seemed a long time, while Kevin Renner thought about the limited capacity of the hot-water tanks in officers’ country. That bad-taste expression was natural to Horvath, Renner saw; the lines in his face fell into it naturally and readily. Finally the Science Minister said, “Thank you, Mr. Renner.”

“You’re welcome.” Renner stood.

An alarm sounded.

“Oh, Lord. That’s me.” Renner dashed for the bridge.

They were deep within the Eye: deep enough that the thin starstuff around them showed yellow. The Field indicators showed yellow too, but with a tinge of green.

All this Renner saw as he glanced around at half a dozen screens on the bridge. He looked at the plots on his own screens; and he did not see the battleship. “
Lenin
’s Jumped?”

“Right,” Midshipman Whitbread said. “We’re next, sir.” The red-haired middie’s grin seemed to meet at the back of his head.

Blaine sailed into the bridge without touching the companionway sides. “Take the con, Mr. Renner. The pilot ought to be at your station now.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Renner turned to Whitbread. “I relieve you.” His fingers danced across the input keys, then he hit a line of buttons even as the new data flowed onto his screen. Alarms went off in rapid succession: JUMP STATIONS, BATTLE STATIONS, HEAVY ACCELERATION WARNING.

MacArthur
prepared herself for the unknown.

She was the first to find the intruders.

She had been exploring a shapeless mass of stony asteroid that turned out to be mostly empty space. Some earlier culture had carved out rooms and nooks and tankages and storage chambers, then fused the detritus into more rooms and chambers, until the mass was a stone beehive. It had all happened very long ago, but that was of no interest to her.

In later ages meteoroids had made dozens of holes through the construct. Thick walls had been gradually thinned so that air might be chemically extracted from the stone. There was no air now. There was no metal anywhere. Dry mummies, and stone, stone, little else and nothing at all for an Engineer.

She left via a meteoroid puncture; for all the air locks had been fused shut by vacuum welding. A long time after that someone had removed their metal working parts.

After she was outside, she saw them, very far away, a tiny glimmer of golden light against the Coal Sack. It was worth a look. Anything was worth a look.

The Engineer returned to her ship.

Telescope and spectrometer failed her at first. There were two of the golden slivers, and some bulk inside each of them, but something was shutting out her view of the masses inside. Patiently the Engineer went to work on her instruments, redesigning, recalibrating, rebuilding, her hands working at blinding speed guided by a thousand Cycles of instincts.

There were force fields to be penetrated. Presently she had something that would do that. Not well, but she could see large objects.

She looked again.

Metal. Endless, endless metal.

She took off immediately. The call of treasure was not to be ignored. There was little of free will in an Engineer.

Blaine watched a flurry of activity through a red fog as he fought to regain control of his traitor body after return to normal space. An all-clear signal flashed from
Lenin
, and Rod breathed more easily. Nothing threatened, and he could enjoy the view.

It was the Eye he saw first. Murcheson’s Eye was a tremendous ruby, brighter than a hundred full moons, all alone on the black velvet of the Coal Sack.

On the other side of the sky, the Mote was the brightest of a sea of stars. All systems looked this way at breakout: a lot of stars, and one distant sun. To starboard was a splinter of light,
Lenin
, her Langston Field radiating the overload picked up in the Eye.

Admiral Kutuzov made one final check and signaled Blaine again. Until something threatened, the scientists aboard
MacArthur
were in charge. Rod ordered coffee and waited for information.

At first there was maddeningly little that he hadn’t already known. The Mote was only thirty-five light years from New Scotland, and there had been a number of observations, some dating back to Jasper Murcheson himself. A G2 star, less energetic than Sol, cooler, smaller and a bit less massive. It showed almost no sunspot activity at the moment, and the astrophysicists found it dull.

Rod had known about the gas giant before they started. Early astronomers had deduced it from perturbations in the Mote’s orbit around the Eye. They knew the gas giant planet’s mass and they found it almost where they expected, seventy degrees around from them. Heavier than Jupiter, but smaller, much denser, with a degenerate matter core. While the scientists worked, the Navy men plotted courses to the gas giant, in case one or the other warship should need to refuel. Scooping up hydrogen by ramming through a gas giant’s atmosphere on a hyperbolic orbit was hard on ships and crew but a lot better than being stranded in an alien system.

“We’re searching out the Trojan points now, Captain,” Buckman told Rod two hours after breakout.

“Any sign of the Mote planet?”

“Not yet.” Buckman hung up.

Why was Buckman concerned with Trojan points? Sixty degrees ahead of the giant planet in its orbit, and sixty degrees behind, would be two points of stable equilibrium, called Trojan points after the Trojan asteroids that occupy similar points in Jupiter’s orbit. Over millions of years they ought to have collected dust clouds and clusters of asteroids. But why would Buckman bother with these?

Buckman called again when he found the Trojans. “They’re packed!” Buckman gloated. “Either this whole system is cluttered with asteroids from edge to edge or there’s a new principle at work. There’s more junk in Mote Beta’s Trojans than has ever been reported in another system. It’s a wonder they haven’t all collected to form a pair of moons—”

“Have you found the habitable planet yet?”

“Not yet,” said Buckman, and faded off the screen. That was three hours after breakout.

 He called back half an hour later. “Those Trojan point asteroids have
very
high albedos, Captain. They must be thick with dust. That might explain how so many of the larger particles were captured. The dust clouds slow them down, then polish them smooth
—
”

“Dr. Buckman! There is an inhabited world in this system and it is vital that we find it. These are the first intelligent aliens
—
”

“Dammit Captain, we’re looking! We’re looking!” Buckman glanced to one side, then withdrew. The screen was blank for a moment, showing only a badly focused shot of a technician in the background.

Blaine found himself confronting Science Minister Horvath, who said, “Please excuse the interruption, Captain. Do I understand you are not satisfied with our search methods?”

“Dr. Horvath, I have no wish to intrude on your prerogatives. But you’ve taken over all my instruments, and I keep hearing about asteroids. I wonder if we’re all looking for the same thing?”

Horvath’s reply was mild. “This is not a space battle, Captain.” He paused. “In a war operation, you would know your target. You would probably know the ephemeris of the planets in any system of interest
—
”

“Hell, survey teams find planets.”

“Ever been on one, Captain?”

“No.”

“Well, think about the problem we face. Until we located the gas giant and the Trojan asteroids we weren’t precise about the plane of the system. From the probe’s instruments we have deduced the temperature the Moties find comfortable, and from
that
we deduce how far from their sun their planet should be
—
and we still must search out a toroid a hundred and twenty million kilometers in radius. Do you follow me?”

Blaine nodded.

“We’re going to have to search that entire region. We know the planet isn’t hidden behind the sun because we’re above the plane of the system. But when we finish photographing the system we have to examine this enormous star field for the one dot of light we want.”

“Perhaps I was expecting too much.”

“Perhaps. We’re all waiting as fast as we can.” He smiled—a spasm that lifted his whole face for a split second—and vanished.

Six hours after breakout Horvath reported again. There was no sign of Buckman. “No, Captain, we haven’t found the inhabited planet. But Dr. Buckman’s time-wasting observations have identified a Motie civilization. In the Trojan points.”

“They’re inhabited?”

“Definitely. Both Trojan points are seething with microwave frequencies. We should have guessed from the high albedos of the larger bodies. Polished surfaces are a natural product of civilization—I’m afraid Dr. Buckman’s people think too much in terms of a dead universe.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Is any of that message traffic for us?”

“I don’t think so, Captain. But the nearest Trojan point is below us in this system’s plane—about three million kilometers away. I suggest we go there. From the apparent density of civilization in the Trojan points it may be that the inhabited planet is not the real nexus of Motie civilization. Perhaps it is like Earth. Or worse.”

Rod was shocked. He had found Earth herself shocking, not all that many years ago. New Annapolis was kept on Manhome so that Imperial officers would know just how vital was the great task of the Empire.

And if men had not had the Alderson Drive before Earth’s last battles, and the nearest star had been thirty-five light years away instead of four— “That’s a horrible thought.”

“I agree. It’s also only a guess, Captain. But in any event there is a viable civilization nearby, and I think we should go to it.”

“I—just a moment.” Chief Yeoman Lud Shattuck was at the bridge companionway gesturing frantically at Rod’s number-four screen.

“We used the message-sending locator scopes, Skipper,” Shattuck shouted across the bridge. “Look, sir.”

The screen showed black space with pinhole dots of stars and a blue-green point circled by an indicator lightring. As Rod watched, the point blinked, twice.

“We’ve found the inhabited planet,” Rod said with satisfaction. He couldn’t resist. “We beat you to it, Doctor.”

After all the waiting, it was as if everything broke at once.The light was first. There might have been an Earthlike world behind it; there probably was, for it was in the doughnut locus Horvath was searching. But the light hid whatever was behind it, and it wasn’t surprising that the communications people had found it first. Watching for signals was their job.

Cargill and Horvath’s team worked together to answer the pulses.
One, two, three, four
blinked the light, and Cargill used the forward batteries to send
five, six, seven
. Twenty minutes later the light sent
three one eight four eleven
, repeated, and the ship’s brain ground out:
Pi
, base twelve.
Cargill used the computer to find
e
to the same base and replied with that.

But the true message was,
We want to talk to you.
And
MacArthur
’s answer was,
Fine.
Elaborations would have to wait.

And the second development was already in.

“Fusion light,” said Sailing Master Renner. He bent close over his screen. His fingers played strange, silent music on his control board. “No Langston Field. Naturally. They’re just enclosing the hydrogen, fusing it and blasting it out. A plasma bottle. It’s not as hot as our drives, which means lower efficiency. Red shift, if I’m reading the impurities right . . . it must be aimed away from us.”

“You think it’s a ship coming to meet us?”

“Yessir. A small one. Give us a few minutes and I’ll tell you its acceleration. Meanwhile, we assume an acceleration of one gee...” Renner’s fingers had been tapping all the while “...and get a mass of thirty tons. Later we’ll readjust that.”

“Too big to be a missile,” Blaine said thoughtfully. “Should we meet him halfway, Mr. Renner?”

Renner frowned. “There’s a problem. He’s aiming at where we are now. We don’t know how much fuel he’s got, or how bright he is.”

“Let’s ask, anyway. Eyes! Get me Admiral Kutuzov.”

The Admiral was on his bridge. Blurs out of focus behind him showed activity aboard
Lenin
. “I’ve seen it, Captain,” Kutuzov said. “What do you want to do about it?”

“I want to go meet that ship. But in case it can’t change course or we can’t catch it, it will come here, sir.
Lenin
could wait for it.”

“And do what, Captain? My instructions are clear,
Lenin
is to have nothing to do with aliens.”

“But you could send out a boat, sir. A gig, which we’ll pick up with your men. Sir.”

“How many boats do you think I have, Blaine? Let me repeat my instructions.
Lenin
is here to protect secret of Alderson Drive and Langston Field. To accomplish task we will not only not communicate with aliens, we will not communicate with you when message might be intercepted.”