The Mote in God's Eye (8 page)

At four gravities nobody walked; nobody lifted anything. The black box replacements in the hold stayed there while
MacArthur
ran on Sinclair’s makeshifts. Most of the crew worked from their cots, or from mobile chairs, or didn’t work at all.

In crew sections they played elaborate word games, or speculated on the coming encounter, or told stories. Half the screens on the ship showed the same thing: a disc like the sun, with Murcheson’s Eye behind it and the Coal Sack as background.

The telltales in Sally’s cabin showed oxygen consumption. Rod said words of potent and evil magic under his breath. He almost called her then, but postponed it. He called Bury instead.

Bury was in the gee bath: a film of highly elastic mylar over liquid. Only his face and hands showed above the curved surface. His face looked old—it almost showed his true age.

“Captain, you chose not to put me off on Brigit. Instead, you are taking a civilian into possible combat. Might I ask why?”

“Of course, Mr. Bury. I supposed it would be most inconvenient for you to be stranded on a ball of ice with no assured transportation. Perhaps I was mistaken.”

Bury smiled—or tried to. Every man aboard looked twice his age, with four times gravity pulling down on the skin of his face. Bury’s smile was like weight lifting. “No, Captain, you were not mistaken. I saw your orders in the wardroom. So. We are on our way to meet a nonhuman spacecraft.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“Perhaps they will have things to trade. Especially if they come from a nonterrestrial world. We can hope. Captain, would you keep me posted on what is happening?’

“I will probably not have the time,” Blaine said, choosing the most civil of several answers that occurred to him.

“Yes, of course, I didn’t mean personally. I only want access to information on our progress. At my age I dare not move from this rubber bathtub for the duration of our voyage. How long will we be under four gees?”

“One hundred and twenty-five hours. One twenty-four, now.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Bury vanished from the Screen.

Rod rubbed thoughtfully at the knot on his nose. Did Bury know his status aboard
MacArthur
? It couldn’t be important. He called Sally’s cabin.

She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week or smiled in years. Blaine said, “Hello, Sally. Sorry you came?”

“I told you I can take anything you can take,” Sally said calmly. She gripped the arms of her chair and stood up. She let go and spread her arms to show how capable she was.

“Be careful,” Blaine said, trying to keep his voice steady. “No sudden moves. Keep your knees straight. You can break your back just sitting down. Now stay erect, but reach behind you. Get both the chair arms in your hands before you try to bend at the waist—”

She didn’t believe it was dangerous, not until she started to sit down. Then the muscles in her arms knotted, panic flared in her eyes, and she sat much too abruptly, as if
MacArthur
’s gravity had
sucked
her down.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” she said. “Only my pride.”

“Then you stay in that chair, damn your eyes! Do you see me standing up? You do not. And you won’t!”

“All right.” She turned her head from side to side. She was obviously dizzy from the jolt.

“Did you get your servants off?”

“Yes. I had to trick them—they wouldn’t have gone without my baggage.” She laughed an old woman’s laugh. “I’m wearing everything I own until we get to New Caledonia.”

“Tricked them, did you? The way you tricked me. I should have had Kelley
put
you off.” Rod’s voice was bitter. He knew he looked twice his age, a cripple in a wheel chair. “All right, you’re aboard. I can’t put you off now.”

“But I may be able to help. I am an anthropologist.” She winced at the thought of trying to get up again. “Can I get you on the intercom?”

“You’ll get the middie of the watch. Tell him if you really need to talk to me. But, Sally—this is a warship. Those aliens may not be friendly. For God’s sake remember that; my watch officers haven’t time for scientific discussion in the middle of a battle!”

“I know that. You might give me credit for a little sense.” She tried to laugh. “Even if I don’t know better than to stand up at four gees.”

“Yeah. Now do me another favor. Get into your gee bath.”

“Do I have to take my clothes off to use it?”

Blaine couldn’t blush; there wasn’t enough blood flowing to his head. “It’s a good idea, especially if you’ve got buckles. Turn off the vision pickup on the phone.”

“Right.”

“And be careful. I could send one of the married ratings to help—”

  “No, thank you.”

“Then wait. We’ll have a few minutes of lower gee at intervals. Don’t get out of that chair alone in high gee!”

She didn’t even look tempted. One experience was enough.

“
Lermontov
’s calling again,” Whitbread announced.

“Forget it. Don’t acknowledge.”

“Aye aye, sir. Do not acknowledge.”

Rod could guess what the cruiser wanted.
Lermontov
wanted first crack at the intruder—but
MacArthur
’s sister ship wouldn’t even get close to the aliens before the approach to the sun was just too close. Better to intercept out where there was some room.

At least that’s what Rod told himself. He could trust Whitbread and the communications people;
Lermontov
’s signals wouldn’t be in the log.

Three and a half days. Two minutes of 1.5 gee every four hours to change the watch, grab forgotten articles, shift positions; then the warning horns sounded, the jolt meters swung over, and too much weight returned.

At first
MacArthur
’s bow had pointed sixty degrees askew of Cal. They had to line up with the intruder’s course. With that accomplished,
MacArthur
turned again. Her bow pointed at the brightest star in the heavens.

Cal began to grow. He also changed color, but minutely. No one would notice that blue shift with the naked eye. What the men did see in the screens was that the brightest star had become a disc and was growing hourly.

It didn’t grow brighter because the screens kept it constant; but the tiny sun disc grew ominously larger, and it lay directly ahead. Behind them was another disc of the same color, the white of an F8 star. It, too, grew hourly larger.
MacArthur
was sandwiched between two colliding suns.

On the second day Staley brought a new midshipman up to the bridge, both moving in traveling acceleration chairs. Except for a brief interview on Brigit, Rod hadn’t met him: Gavin Potter, a sixteen-year-old boy from New Scotland. Potter was tall for his age; he seemed to hunch in upon himself, as if afraid to be noticed.

Blaine thought Potter was merely being shown about the ship; a good idea, since if the intruder turned out hostile, the boy might have to move about
MacArthur
with total familiarity—possibly in darkness and variable gravity.

Staley obviously had more in mind. Blaine realized they were trying to get his attention. “Yes, Mr. Staley?”

“This is Midshipman Gavin Potter, sir,” Staley said. “He’s told me something I think you ought to hear.”

“All right, go ahead.” Any diversion from high gravity was welcome.

“There was a church in our street, sir. In a farm town on New Scotland.” Potter’s voice was soft and low, and he spoke carefully so that he blotted out all but a ghostly remnant of the brogue that made Sinclair’s speech so distinctive.

“A church,” Blaine said encouragingly. “Not an orthodox church, I take it—”

“No, sir. A Church of Him. There aren’t many members. A friend and I snuck inside once, for a joke.”

“Did you get caught?”

“I know I’m telling this badly, sir. The thing is— There was a big blowup of an old holo of Murcheson’s Eye against the Coal Sack. The Face of God, just like on postcards. Only, only it was different in this picture. The Eye was very much brighter than now, and it was blue green, not red. With a red dot at one edge.”

“It could have been a portrait,” Blaine suggested. He took out his pocket computer and scrawled “Church of Him” across its face, then punched for information. The box Linked with the ship’s library, and information began to roll across its face. “It says the Church of Him believes that the Coal Sack, with that one red eye showing, really is the Face of God. Couldn’t they have retouched it to make the eye more impressive?” Rod continued to sound interested; time enough to say something about wasting his time when the middies were through. If they were wasting time...

“But—” said Potter.

“Sir—” said Staley, leaning too far forward in his chair.

“One at a time. Mr. Staley?”

“I didn’t just ask Potter, sir. I checked with Commander Sinclair. He says his grandfather told him the Mote was once brighter than Murcheson’s Eye, and bright green. And the way Gavin’s describing that holo—well, sir, stars don’t radiate all one color. So—”

“All the more reason to think the holo was retouched. But it is funny, with that intruder coming straight out of the Mote...”

“Light,” Potter said firmly.

“Light sail!” Rod shouted in sudden realization. “Good thinking.” The whole bridge crew turned to look at the Captain. “Renner! Did you say the intruder is moving faster than it ought to be?”

“Yes, sir,” Renner answered from his station across the bridge. “If it was launched from a habitable world circling the Mote.”

“Could it have used a battery of laser cannon?”

“Sure, why not?” Renner wheeled over. “In fact, you could launch with a small battery, then add more cannon as the vehicle got farther and farther away. You get a terrific advantage that way. If one of the cannon breaks down you’ve got it right there in your system to repair it.”

“Like leaving your motor home,” Potter cried, “and you still able to use it.”

“Well, there are efficiency problems. Depending on how tight the beam can be held,” Renner answered. “Pity you couldn’t use it for braking, too. Have you any reason to believe—”

Rod left them telling the Sailing Master about the variations in the Mote. For himself, he didn’t particularly care. His problem was, what would the intruder do now?

It was twenty hours to rendezvous when Renner came to Blaine’s post and asked to use the Captain’s screens. The man apparently could not talk without a view screen connected to a computer. He would be mute with only his voice.

“Captain, look,” he said, and threw a plot of the local stellar region on the screen. “The intruder came from here. Whoever launched it fired a laser cannon, or a set of laser cannon—probably a whole mess of them on asteroids, with mirrors to focus them—for about forty-five years, so the intruder would have a beam to travel on. The beam and the intruder both came straight in from the Mote.”

“But there’d be records,” Blaine said. “Somebody would have seen that the Mote was putting out coherent light.”

Renner shrugged. “How good are New Scotland’s records?”

“Let’s just see.” It took only moments to learn that astronomical data from New Scotland were suspect, and no such records were carried in
MacArthur
’s library because of that. “Oh, well. Let’s assume you’re right.”

“But that’s the point: it’s not right, Captain,” Renner protested. “You see, it
is
possible to turn in interstellar space. What they should have done—”

The new path left the Mote at a slight angle to the first. “Again they coast most of the way. At this point”—where the intruder would have been well past New Cal—”we charge the ship up to ten million volts. The background magnetic field of the Galaxy gives the ship a half turn, and it’s coming toward the New Caledonia system
from behind
. Meanwhile, whoever is operating the beam has turned it off for a hundred and fifty years. Now he turns it on again. The probe uses the beam for braking.

“You sure that magnetic effect would work?”

“It’s high school physics! And the interstellar magnetic fields have been well mapped, Captain.”

“Well, then, why didn’t they use it?”

“I don’t
know
,” Renner cried in frustration. “Maybe they just didn’t think of it. Maybe they were afraid the lasers wouldn’t last. Maybe they didn’t trust whoever they left behind to run them. Captain, we just don’t know enough about them.”

“
I
know that, Renner. Why get in such a sweat about it? If our luck holds, we’ll just damn well ask them.”

A slow, reluctant smile broke across Renner’s face. “But that’s cheating.”

“Oh, go get some sleep.”

Rod woke to the sound of the speakers: “GRAVITY SHIFT IN TEN MINUTES. STAND BY FOR CHANGE TO ONE STANDARD GRAVITY IN TEN MINUTES.”

Blaine smiled
—
one gravity!
—
and felt the smile tighten. One hour to match velocities with the intruder. He activated his watch screens, to see a blaze of light fore and aft.
MacArthur
was sandwiched between two suns. Now Cal was as large as Sol seen from Venus, but brighter.

Cal was a hotter star. The intruder was a smaller disc, but brighter still. The sail was concave.

It was effort merely to use the intercom. “Sinclair.”

“Engineering, aye aye, Captain.”

Rod was pleased to see that Sinclair was in a hydraulic bed. “How’s the Field holding, Sandy?”

“Verra well, Captain. Temperature steady.”

“Thank you.” Rod was pleased. The Langston Field absorbed energy; that was its basic function. It absorbed even the kinetic energy of exploding gas or radiation particles, with an efficiency proportional to the cube of the incoming velocities. In battle, the hellish fury of hydrogen torpedoes, and the concentrated photon energies of lasers, would strike the Field and be dispersed, absorbed, contained. As the energy levels increased, the Field would begin to glow, its absolute black becoming red, orange, yellow, climbing up the spectrum toward the violet.

That was the basic problem of the Langston Field. The energy had to be radiated away; if the Field overloaded, it would release all the stored energy in a blinding white flash, radiating inward, as well as outward. It took ship’s power to prevent that—and that power was added to the Field’s stored energies as well. When the Field grew too hot, ships died. Quickly.