Actually, where the limits of Lancelot lay he did not know. He did not have them yet in sight, let alone within his grasp.
Tupelov turned. "Colonel Marcus?"
The metal box said on radio: "I was going all out, or very nearly."
"Are you good for another run? Or-"
"Yeah, let"s get on with it. I"ll let you know if I can"t."
"All right, pursuit again this run. This time Michel will be the target."
"What the h.e.l.l good is that? How"m I supposed to catch him? I can"t."
Ten seconds of cool silence. "Very well, Colonel, Michel pursues again. All right with you, Michel?"
"All right."
"You take some defensive action, Marcus. Gently."
"Yes sir." Michel heard the voice-sound alter as Frank went off radio again. "Hear that, kid? When you catch me, we"ll spar. You try to knock me right into the ground. I"ll slap back at you."
"I hear."
"Come at me hard. He says gently, but if all this horsing around is going to prove anything, we"ve got to start being a little serious about it. We may get jarred, but neither of us is going to be really hurt, we"re too well shielded inside these things."
Inside? What things? It took Michel a moment to remember.
Back to the starting marks. This time Frank, evidently drawing on some reserve of strength, got off even faster than before. Michel flew on his own timer"s dot, and overtaking Frank took him no longer than in the previous trial. But at the last moment before interception, Frank"s blurred shape changed course more sharply than Michel had yet seen-and then, just as Michel"s grasping fields were closing, changed again.
For the first time since his first takeoff Michel was not in complete control of what his Lancelot was doing. In a spinning turn, he clawed for a grip on the great metal ovoid, and felt only the other Lancelot"s contending forces, trying to get away. In the next moment Frank surprised him, managing to knock the grip of one of Michel"s forcefield arms away.
Spinning in a paralysis caused more by the surprise than the acceleration, caught for the first time off balance, Michel for a moment could think of nothing but to tighten the grip of his other hand, as hard as possible.
Dimly he sensed how both of their hydrogen lamps drew power, escalating forces with their stubborn masters" wills.
. . . not going to be beaten here by any little . . .
. . . all right if you want to play REALLY ROUGH . . .
Around the spinning pair of them the lunar mountains whirled. Down into the regolith their buffered bodies blurred, hurling slow waves of gravel, scythes of sand. Michel felt not a bit of fear; he was far too absorbed in other things, a hundred of them, mostly new, new doorways opening everywhere, new wonders thronging to discovery.
With one portion of his/Lancelot"s mind he slowed down time by speeding up his own reactions, till now he could have plucked a millisecond out precisely from the endless spikefence of the marching past. Still, Frank"s forcefield paw, the one that had slapped down the drone, had taken its enormous shape and was swinging at Michel almost before Michel could realize it. The man had drawn upon some hidden reserve of speed, his almost magical mental agility. This, thought Michel, is what has set him apart from other humans at ship controls, what has kept him alive in s.p.a.ce against berserker after berserker. This something extra, at the last moment, at the end . . .
And before Michel"s thought had been concluded, the sparring match was over.
" . . . Marcus . . ."
" . . . get some . . ."
" . . . out there . . ."
" . . . a.s.sistance . . ."
" . . . boy back here . . ."
" . . . one"s down . . ."
Receding in a bounding flight across the rolling lunar surface, Frank"s Lancelot flapped forcefields like ruined wings with the ferocious velocity of its spin. Skipping a small crater, glancing upward from a hillock, trailing disconnected alpha waves of thought, it spun toward the distant launching pad where white-garbed toys were scattering. Slow lunar gravity finally brought Frank crashing down again, amid a fresh spray of fine material from the surface. And now it dragged his tattered gauze-webs to a halt.
The watching winner, drifting a meter above the ground, poised still at the place where the fight had ended. Though he could not yet understand the ending of the fight, he could still feel it, in the thin muscles of his right shoulder.
Wondering, he began to drift a little higher. He did not fly to Frank; he could tell from the alpha waves of a stunned but living brain that Frank was still alive, inside that small, crumpled complex of force and metal upon which machines and human beings were now converging from all directions of the plain. But there would be little or nothing that he, Michel, could do in the way of giving help.
In the distance circled the sun-touched hills, looking more golden now than silver. Michel rose just a little higher still.
"Michel." There was a new strain in Tupelov"s radio voice, and also a new fear starting. "Michel, come down."
He didn"t much like Tupelov, despite the man"s good manners; right from the start he hadn"t liked him.
There was no need to answer him right away. Frank was probably going to be all right, but now there would be no more testing for a while-maybe three days, Michel guessed. And before he took off the suit there was a thing or two he was impatient to get a look at.
Kid, you all right?This was Frank, half-conscious now, sub-vocalizing.Kid, this is a tougher thing than any of us realized.
"I understand, Frank." He didn"t bother, this time, to turn his radio off before he spoke. "Anyway I"m starting to."
"Michel, come down."
Come at me harder this time . . . I won"t hurt you . . .The mumbled words cut off abruptly. Some of the medics and their robots had reached Frank already, a.s.sessed his condition, opened his dented ovoid, were administering medication that knocked him out completely.
Michel rose higher. Beyond the hills where sunlight had a grip would lie the rim of the full Earth.
"Michel!" Tupelov was in a swift agony of alarm. "Get down here! The defenses will pick you up; you"re entering the danger zone . . ."
He knew all that. Without difficulty he could feel the vast electronic nerve-nets just beyond the near horizon, on all sides. The defense machines could not locate him yet, not really, but they were twitching with his presence. Ignorant G.o.ds, idiotic genius genii of metal and force.
He had to give them words to say to him:Are you fast, little one in the gauze suit? Are you powerful?
Will you play against berserkers, as we do? We dare you to a trial. Dare dare dare dare- Not ready for that, not yet, Michel turned away from the Earth, sank ten centimeters lower. As he turned his back on Earth the forcefields shielding his eyes went gold-opaque. In a moment his mind had cleared them enough to let him see Earth"s risen G.o.d. There were great slow undulations of corona, and on the disc itself the flares and ulcerous sunspots. The solar wind came sleeting in his face, infinitesimally faint but he could see it if he tried.
Great things out there, that someone-like me-can somehow, sometime, begin to know. On even terms, maybe? Or do I only think that because of still-enormous ignorance?
"Michel?" The voice was still afraid, but now it was starting to be calculating as well.
No need to make Tupelov sweat so dangerously. Michel did not have to hurry, to do what must be done. More learning, first. More exploration of what was possible. And then?
"I"m coming," said Michel. In quiet obedience he coasted down to land.
FIVE.
Lombok found Elly Temesvar in an enormous and ancient city of old Earth, where the air was rich, untamed, with live-Earth smells, very different from those of all the other worlds Lombok had visited, very fitting, he thought, to the human senses. Temesvar"s address was in a part of the city so old that it seemed half monument and maybe one-fourth archaeological site. The remainder in private hands included the great structure identified to Lombok as the Temple of the Final Savior. Its walls were granite block, aged steel reinforcements here and there showing through their fabric. Their style was some branch of Gothic. Just inside the doorway by which Lombok entered, a bright electroplaque informed the visitor of the different theories regarding the time and the purpose of the original construction-the place had been a temple of some kind, it seemed certain, from the very start.
An old-looking man with empty eyes, garbed in a gray sack, approached after Lombok had stood for an uncertain minute inside the arched dimness of the entry. When Lombok gave him the name of the woman he was looking for, he shuffled away again; Lombok continued waiting, looking mostly at the electroplaque.
A couple of minutes later, a blonde young woman of st.u.r.dy frame, veiled from the eyes down in well-fitting gray, emerged from behind a dull shimmer of modern field-drapes.
"You have a question for me?" Her voice was businesslike. It didn"t seem to surprise her at all that a stranger should have a question.
"If you are Elly Temesvar, I have a question or two.Aboutyou, actually."
Above the veil, gray eyes appraised him levelly. "No reason why I shouldn"t answer questions. Come along, we can talk in here."
He followed her past great columns, framing far interior s.p.a.ces lost in dimness. Light from the gray Earth day outside entered through clerestory windows far above. Somewhere around a corner, a mixed chorus chanted drearily in a language Lombok did not recognize. He had been able to find out very little about this place as yet, and hadn"t wanted to delay his visit until he could learn more. It was not on the secret Security list of possible goodlife front organizations-which of course proved nothing either way.
Elly led him across an enormous nave, whose immensity dwarfed small groups of gray-robes standing here and there in what looked like contemplation. At the far end of the nave rose what appeared to be a huge altar badly in need of repair. What with more pillars, and the pervading dimness, Lombok got no very clear look in that direction. Presently he was led into an out-of-the-way corner surrounded by still more columns, containing ancient stonework decorations and the first chairs Lombok had seen since entering the Temple. All the chairs looked old; some of them had once been real furniture, and some were cheap.
As his guide sat down, she simultaneously unveiled her face, saving her visitor the trouble of trying to frame a polite request along that line. Her appearance matched the photos Lombok had studied. "So, what are your questions, Mr.-?"
"Lombok. I"m from the Defense Department."
He had credentials ready, but Temesvar waved them away. "I believe you. Anyway, it doesn"t matter."
Oh? Lombok wondered silently. Even if I were to ask you something about highly cla.s.sified material? Of course whatever secrets the woman had known when on active duty would now be greatly out of date.
Or most of them would.
Aloud he said, "I"m doing a psychological study on certain retired veterans. You filled out a census form last year, remember? We"re just spot-checking some randomly chosen respondents."
"Randomly." For some reason, that amused her, or almost did. "If anything happens at random, it"ll fall on me."
He almost looked up at her sharply, hearing that. Randomness related to certain official secrets she did know, secrets still kept in hiding on the Moon.
He was consulting a convincing-looking list. "Your resignation, let me see, was perfectly voluntary, wasn"t it? No pressure put on you of any kind, for any reason?"
"There was a little pressure to change my mind, stay with the service, as I recall. I was really pretty good."
"Yes. You were." He paused. "Looking back at it now, what would you say was the real reason you resigned?"
"The same reason I gave then. I had begun to understand that what I was doing in the service did not matter."
Lombok gave her a chance to elaborate on that. When nothing came, he started making notes, painstakingly: "Did . . . not . . . matter."
"Aren"t you recording this? Most people do."
Most people? How many interviewers had she had, and who were they? "If you don"t mind-"
"Not in the least."
Lombok pretended to turn on a tiny recorder that had been running all along. "Now. Could you amplify that a little, about your career in the s.p.a.ce Force not mattering?"
"It just didn"t. Military things don"t, nor does exploring s.p.a.ce. After my last mission I began to understand that. Not all at once, but gradually."
"The defense of the life of the galaxy against berserkers doesn"t matter?"
"I knew you were going to put it that way. In the long run-no, it doesn"t. Oh, we"re not goodlife here in the Temple. If there were berserkers attacking Earth at this moment, I"d fight them, I suppose. Yes, I"m sure I would, a human reaction to protect the people that I"d see around me, and, I suppose, myself.
Even though I knew that ultimately it wouldn"t matter."
Lombok was trying to understand. "You just couldn"t see that any more reconnaissance missions were worthwhile."
She was pleased, a little, that he was making an effort to grasp what she meant. "Something like that,"
she said.
"Want to tell me about that last mission of yours?"
She shifted position, crossing her legs athletically under the gray robing. "If you have the time to listen."
"All the time in the world." Lombok gestured genially. "Where you went, what you saw and did. How you got on with Colonel Marcus."
"Colonel, now, is he? Somehow I pictured him as having more rank than that by this time. Or being dead." It was said quite remotely, but without malice.
Lombok said, "I"m sure you"ve told the story of that last mission of yours before now."
"Yes, it"s been recorded before, too. You could have looked it up. Probably you did. I admit I"m a little curious. Why do you come and ask me to tell it again, eleven years later?"
He didn"t know whether or not to try and keep up the fiction of the random survey. "It was a unique experience. Wasn"t it? I"d just like to hear it from you live, if you don"t mind."
"Mind? No." But intelligent Elly was re-evaluating him. She dug out smokers, offered one which Lombok refused, puffed her own into life. "Who do you work for, at Defense?"
"Tupelov."
She digested that for a moment, then gestured that it did not matter. "All right. Well, the big thing about that last mission of course was that we ran into something near the Core that we had never heard of, seen, or imagined before. It had been sighted at least once before, and photographed. But there are so many weird filings in CORESEC they didn"t even try to brief us on them all. Anyway. When we got back to CORESEC headquarters with-what we brought-people started calling the thing that we had found the Taj, after the Taj Mahal here on Earth. Something large and grand, with an aura of mystery about it.
That became its official code name. What you call it now I don"t know."
"What did you think of the Taj? At first sight?"
Her eyes, which had begun to drift away from him, came back.
"At first of course it was just a place to go. A hope. You have to realize that our ship had been under attack almost continuously for almost twenty standard hours, by a berserker much more powerful than we were. No one but Frank Marcus could have . . . anyway, by the time the Taj came into sight I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. I realize that now. They did hospitalize me briefly as soon as we got back to CORESEC headquarters, as you must know."
He knew. He signaled sympathetic, full attention.