The Mote in God's Eye (21 page)

Blaine nodded. His own screens had shown the Motie ship nine minutes before; Chief Shattuck’s crew wasn’t about to let civilians keep a better watch than the Navy.

“It will reach us in about eighty-one hours,” Buckman said. “It’s accelerating at point eight seven gees, which is the surface gravity of Mote Prime by some odd coincidence. It’s spitting neutrinos. In general it behaves like the first ship, except that it’s far more massive. I’ll let you know if we get anything else.”

“Fine. Keep an eye on it, Doctor.” Blaine nodded and Whitbread cut the circuit. The Captain turned to his exec. “Let’s compare what we know with Buckman’s file, Number One.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cargill toyed with the computer controls for a few minutes. “Captain?”

“Yes?”

“Look at the starting time. That alien ship got under way in not much more than an hour after we broke out.”

Blaine whistled to himself. “Are you sure? That gives ten minutes to detect us, another ten for us to dee them, and forty minutes to get ready and launch. Jack, what kind of ship launches in forty minutes?”

Cargill frowned. “None I ever heard of. The Navy
could
do it, keep a ship with a full crew on ready alert...”

“Precisely. I think that’s a warship coming at us, Number One. You’d better tell the Admiral, then Horvath. Whitbread, get me Buckman.”

“Yes?” The astrophysicist looked harried.

“Doctor, I need everything your people can get about that Motie ship. Now. And would you give some thought to their rather strange acceleration?”

Buckman studied the numbers Blaine sent down to his screen. “This seems straightforward enough. They launched from Mote Prime or a closely orbiting moon forty minutes after we arrived. What’s the problem?”

“If they launched that fast, it’s almost certainly a warship. We’d like to believe otherwise.”

Buckman was annoyed. “Believe what you like, but you’ll ruin the math, Captain. Either they launched in forty minutes, or . . . well, you could start the Motie vehicle something over two million kilometers this side of Mote Prime; that would give them more time. . . but I don’t believe it.”

“No more do I. I want you to satisfy yourself about this, Dr. Buckman. What could we assume that would give them more time to launch?”

“Let me see... I’m not used to thinking in terms of rocketry, you know. Gravitational accelerations are more my field, if you’ll pardon the pun. Hmmm.” Buckman’s eyes went curiously blank. For a moment he looked like an idiot. “You’d have to assume a period of coasting. And a much higher acceleration in the launching mechanism. Much higher.”

“How long to coast?”

“Several hours for every hour you want to give them make up their minds. Captain, I don’t understand your problem. Why can’t they have launched a scientific survey ship in forty minutes? Why assume a warship? After all,
MacArthur
is both, and it took you an unreasonably long time to launch. I was ready days early.”

Blaine turned him off. I’ll break his scrawny neck, he told himself. They’ll court-martial me, but I’ll claim justifiable homicide. I’ll subpoena everyone who knew him. They’re
bound
to let me off. He touched keys. “Number One, what have you got?”

“They launched that ship in forty minutes.”

“Which makes it a warship.”

“So the Admiral thinks, sir. Dr. Horvath wasn’t convinced.”

“Neither am I, but we’ll want to be ready for them. And we’ll want to know more about Moties than Horvath’s people are learning from our passenger. Number One, I want you to take the cutter and get over to that asteroid the Motie came from. There’s no sign of activity there, it should be safe enough—and I want to know just what the Motie was
doing
there. It might give us a clue.”

Horace Bury watched the foot-high Moties playing behind the wire screen. “Do they bite?” he asked.

“They haven’t yet,” Horvath answered. “Not even when the biotechs took blood samples.” Bury puzzled him. Science Minister Horvath considered himself a good judge of people—once he’d left science and gone into politics he’d had to learn fast—but he couldn’t fathom Bury’s thought processes. The Trader’s easy smile was only a public face; behind it, remote and emotionless, he watched the Moties like God judging a dubious creation.

Bury was thinking, My but they’re ugly. What a shame. They’d be useless as house pets, unless— He checked himself and stepped forward to reach through a gap in the netting large enough for an arm but not a Motie.

“Behind the ear,” Horvath suggested.

“Thank you.” Bury wondered if one would come to investigate his hand. The thin one came, and Bury scratched her behind the ear, carefully, for the ear looked fragile and delicate. But she seemed to enjoy it.

They’d make terrible pets, Bury thought, but they’d sell for thousands each. For a while. Before the novelty wore off. Best to hit every planet simultaneously. If they breed in captivity, and if we can keep them fed, and if I sell out before people stop buying— “Allah be—! She took my watch!”

“They love tools. You may have noticed that flashlight we gave them?”

“Never mind that, Horvath. How do I get my watch back? In Allah’s— How did the catch come unfastened?”

“Reach in and take it. Or let me.” Horvath tried. The enclosure was too big, and the Motie didn’t want to give up the watch. Horvath dithered. “I don’t want to disturb them too much.”

“Horvath, that watch is worth eight hundred crowns! It not only tells the time and the date, but—” Bury paused. “Come to that, it’s also shockproof. We advertise that a shock that will stop a Chronos will also kill the owner. She probably can’t hurt it much.”

The Motie was examining the wrist watch in a sober, studious manner. Bury wondered if others would find the manner captivating. No house pet behaved like that, even cats.

“You have cameras on them?”

“Of course,” said Horvath.

“My firm may want to buy this sequence. For advertising purposes.” That’s one thing, Bury thought. Now there was a Motie ship coming here, and Cargill taking the cutter somewhere. He’d never get anywhere pumping Cargill, but Buckman was going. There might be returns from the coffee the astrophysicist drank after all.

The thought saddened him obscurely.

The cutter was the largest of the vehicles in hanger deck. She was a lifting body, with a flat upper surface that fitted flat against one wall of hangar deck. She had her own access hatches, to join the cutter’s air locks to the habitable regions of
MacArthur
because hangar deck was usually in vacuum.

There was no Langston Field generator aboard the cutter, and no Alderson Drive. But her drive was efficient and powerful, and her fuel capacity was considerable even without strap-on tanks. The ablative shielding along her nose was good for one (1) reentry into a terrestrial atmosphere at up to 20 km/sec, or many reentries if things could be taken more slowly. She was designed for a crew of six, but would carry more. She could go from planet to planet, but not between stars. History had been made again and again by spacecraft smaller than
MacArthur
’s cutter.

There were half a dozen men bunking in her now. One had been kicked out to make room for Crawford when Crawford was kicked out of his own stateroom by a three armed alien.

Cargill smiled when he saw that. “I’ll take Crawford,” he decided. “Be a shame to move him again. Lafferty coxswain. Three Marines...” He bent over his crew list. “Staley as midshipman.” He’d welcome a chance to prove himself, and was steady enough under orders.

The cutter’s interior was clean and polished, but there was evidence of Sinclair’s oddball repairs along the port wall where
Defiant
’s lasers had flashed through the ablative shielding; even at the long distances from which the cutter engaged, the damage had been severe.

Cargill spread his things out in the only enclosed cabin space and reviewed his flight plan options. Over that distance they could go at three gees all the way. In practice, it might be one gee over and five back. Just because the rock didn’t have a fusion plant didn’t mean it was uninhabited.

Jack Cargill remembered the speed with which the Motie had rebuilt his big percolator. Without even knowing what coffee was supposed to taste like! Could they be
beyond
fusion? He left his gear and put on a pressure suit, a skintight woven garment that was just porous enough to allow sweat to pass; it was a self-regulating temperature control, and with the tightly woven fabric to assist, his own skin was able to stand up to space. The helmet attached to a seal at the collar. In combat heavy armor would go over the whole mess, but this was good enough for inspections.

From the outside there was no evidence of damage or repair. Part of the heat shield hung below the cutter’s nose like a great shovel blade, exposing the control room blister, windows, and the snout of the cutter’s main armament: a laser cannon.

In battle the cutter’s first duty was to make observations and reports. Sometimes she’d try to sneak in on a torpedo run on a blinded enemy warship. Against Motie ships with no Field, that cannon would be more than enough.

Cargill inspected the cutter’s weapons with more than usual thoroughness. Already he feared the Moties. In this he was almost alone; but he would not be so forever.

The second alien ship was larger than the first, but estimates of its mass had a high finagle factor, depending on the acceleration (known), fuel consumption (deduced from drive temperature), operating temperature (deduced from the radiation spectrum, whose peak was in the soft x-ray region) and efficiency (pure guesswork). When it was all folded together the mass seemed much too small: about right for a three-man ship.

“But they aren’t men,” Renner pointed out. “Four Moties weigh as much as two men, but they don’t need as much room. We don’t know what they’re carrying for equipment, or armament, or shielding. Thin walls don’t seem to scare them, and that lets them build bigger cabins—”

“All right.” Rod cut him off. “If you don’t know, just say so.”

“I don’t know.”

“Thank you,” Rod said patiently. “Is there anything you
are
sure of?”

“Oddly enough, there is, sir. Acceleration. It’s been constant to three significant figures since we spotted the ship. Now that’s odd,” Renner said. “Normally you fool with the drive to keep it running at peak, you correct minor errors in course. . . and if you leave it alone, there’s still variation. To keep the acceleration that constant they must be constantly fiddling with it.”

Rod rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a signal. They’re telling us exactly where they’re going.”

“Yes, sir. Right here. They’re saying to wait for them.” Renner wore that strange, fierce grin. “Oh, we know something else, Captain. The ship’s cross-sectional profile has decreased since we sighted it. Probably they’ve ditched some fuel tanks.”

“How did you get that? Don’t you have to have the target transit the sun?”

“Usually, yes. Here it blocks the Coal Sack. There’s enough light bouncing off the Coal Sack to give us a good estimate of that ship’s cross-sectional area. Haven’t you noticed the colors in the Coal Sack, Captain?”

“No.” Blaine rubbed at his nose again. “Throwaway fuel tanks doesn’t make them sound like a warship, does it? But it’s no guarantee. All it really tells us is that they’re in a hurry.”

Staley and Buckman occupied the rear seats in the cutter’s triangular control cabin. As the cutter pulled away at one gee, Staley watched
MacArthur
’s Field close behind them. Against the black of the Coal Sack the battle cruiser seemed to go invisible. There was nothing to look at but the sky.

Half that sky was Coal Sack, starless except for a hot pink point several degrees in from the edge. It was as if the universe ended here. Like a wall, Horst thought.

“Look at it,” said Buckman, and Horst jumped. “There are people on New Scotland who call it the Face of God. Superstitious idiots!”

“Right,” said Horst. Superstitions were silly.

“From here it doesn’t look at all like a man, and it’s ten times as magnificent! I wish my sister’s husband could see it. He belongs to the Church of Him.”

Horst nodded in the semidarkness.

From any of the known human worlds, the Coal Sack was a black hole in the sky. One would expect it to be black here. But now that Horst’s eyes were adjusting, he saw traces of red glowing within the Coal Sack. Now the nebular material showed like layer after layer of gauzy curtains, or like blood spreading in water. The longer he looked, the deeper he could see into it. Eddies and whorls and flow patterns showed light years deep in the vacuum-thin dust and gas.

“Imagine,
me
stuck with a Himmist for a brother-in-law! I’ve tried to educate the fool,” Buckman said energetically, “but he just won’t listen.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sky. Dr. Buckman, is all that light coming from Murcheson’s Eye?”

“Doesn’t seem possible, does it? We’ve tried to find other sources, fluorescence, UV stars deep in the dust, like that. If there were masses in there we’d have found them with mass indicators. Staley, it’s not
that
unlikely. The Eye isn’t that far from the Coal Sack.”

“A couple of light years.”

“Well, what of it? Light travels farther than that, giver a free path!” Buckman’s teeth glowed in the faint multi-colored light of the control panel. “Murcheson lost a golden opportunity by not studying the Coal Sack when he had the chance. Of course he was on the wrong side of the Eye, and he probably didn’t venture very far from the breakout point . . . and it’s our luck, Staley! There’s never been an opportunity like this! A thick interstellar mass, and a red supergiant right at the edge for illumination! Look, look along my arm, Staley, to where the currents flow toward that eddy. Like a whirlpool, isn’t it? If your captain would stop twiddling his thumbs and give me access to the ship’s computer, I could prove that that eddy is a protostar in the process of condensation! Or that it isn’t.”

Buckman had a temporary rank higher than Staley’s, but he was a civilian. In any case, he shouldn’t be talking about the Captain that way. “We do use the computer for other things, Dr. Buckman.”