For a few moments his fear was so intense that he could hardly see anything. Then he noticed that the stranger looked like an Arkonide-by and large. He was three heads taller than Panjel Dreeb and very broad-shouldered. The suit he wore was one familiar to Panjel Dreeb. Only one thing about the stranger was distressing, the colour of his skin was black.
"Don"t be afraid," said the black man in Arkonese. "I won"t do anything to you. Tell me where I am."
Panjel Dreeb began to stutter. Only after a few aborted attempts at speaking did he have his tongue in enough control to express himself coherently. He said that this was an Arkonide ship but that did not seem to interest the stranger, who interrupted him and said: "I know that already. I meant, where is the control room?"
Wheels began to turn in Panjel Dreeb"s small brain. Who was the black man? Why was he inquiring about the control room? Did he want to do something to the ship?
"Come on, tell me!" urged the stranger.
Panjel Dreeb stretched out his arm to point the way. "There," he said fearfully.
"Above or below?" demanded the black man.
Panjel Dreeb answered readily. He was in fear for his life. In a short time the black man knew the way to the control room precisely.
It won"t hurt anything, Panjel Dreeb thought. As soon as he leaves I"ll sound the alarm. They"ll get him right away.
"I thank you kindly, sir," said the black man. "You have been of immense help to me. Unfortunately, I"m going to have to hurt you a little bit, otherwise you might give me away. Don"t be frightened-nothing is going to happen to you. You"re just going to go to sleep for awhile."
Panjel Dreeb wanted to cry out but he did not have any opportunity. The black man suddenly had a small, glittering thing in his hand and pointed it at him. Panjel Dreeb felt a hard blow and a burning pain run through his body. Then it grew dark around him and he knew nothing more.
Feverish tension reigned in the control room of the Newborn. The boarding crew had not yet shown itself. The Arkonide ship shone quietly and threateningly, a tiny, dully illuminated point in the shimmering sea of stars.
Julian Tifflor"s plan had been put into action a few minutes before. It could only succeed if the Arkonides remained quiet. Sgt. Fryberg had examined the recording made by the comreceiver of the order from the Arkonide ship to heave to, and found that the energy used to transmit the message had been so weak and limited that 100,000 kilometres farther away it could not have been understood. That meant the blockade fleet did not know one of its vessels had captured a Terran cruiser.
Tifflor was hardly able to control his excitement. Again and again he looked from the shining point of the Arkonide ship to the red, cloud-like fleck that was the overlapping zone (which was, despite precise hytrans calculations, still two light-years away), and back to the Arkonide ship once more.
The Arkonides would need 10 minutes to get the boarding party underway. Would Ras Tschubai succeed in acting faster?
Ras Tschubai had no intention of making his way to the control room by foot. He knew the direction. After he had hidden the little Iriam-man away where he would not be so quickly found, Ras concentrated for a few seconds, trying to picture his goal in his mind, and sprang.
He landed exactly where he had wanted, although he had imagined it rather differently than the way in which he found it.
He materialized in the middle of the room and in the first second collided with something hard and sizeable. He fell back, opened his eyes and saw that he had run into an Arkonide battlerobot. The machine whirled around and aimed one of its weapon-arms at the intruder. Ras Tschubai tensed his muscles in expectation of something that did not happen. The weapon remained aimed at him but the robot had evidently been given no orders for shooting.
The control room swarmed with robots. Since one of their number was seeing to the intruder, the others did not concern themselves any longer with the incident and continued with their work. Besides Ras Tschubai there was only one other organic creature present: a tall, white-haired man who sat in a deep and comfortable chair. He looked as though none of the activity around him affected him.
He was unmistakably an Arkonide, probably the nominal commander of the ship. Ras Tschubai looked at him over the robot"s weapon-arm-but if the Arkonide had taken any note of his appearance at all, he was no longer interested in the phenomenon. His intelligent-looking face gave a bored, almost disgusted, impression.
When Ras Tschubai realized that for at least the time being the robot was not going to do anything to him, his reason began to function again. He wondered what purpose such a group of mechanical beings crowding the control room could serve, since the control room was really the realm of the central positronicon that steered the ship.
He soon found out. He noticed a few unscrewed deckplates and saw two robots disappear into a large wiring shaft. Then he knew what had happened. Considering his own situation, it was ridiculous, something in the Arkonide ship was not working. The robots were occupied with repairing it.
With the robots" activity in full swing, the room was filled with noise. He had to shout to make himself understood to the Arkonide. "Could you tell your robot to leave me alone?" Ras demanded in Arkonese.
No one besides the old Arkonide took notice of his question. The hypothetical captain slowly turned his head and looked boredly at Ras. "As far as I can see, it doesn"t seem to be bothering you any," he said. Ras understood more of the reply from reading his lips than from actually hearing it. The Arkonide had made no effort to raise his voice above the room"s noise level.
"I mean, can"t you send him away?" Ras yelled.
"No, I can"t, my boy," came the reply. "I don"t know why but the robots obey someone other than me."
Ras gave up. The Arkonide was out of the game entirely. Ras had to depend entirely on himself if he wanted to win. That would be difficult. The robot with the raised weapon-arm did not take its optical lenses away from him. Ras Tschubai knew that there was no possibility of diverting its attention or, for that matter, of overpowering it.
Nevertheless, Ras Tschubai had no intention of giving up his mission. He knew how much depended from his success. Quite simply, he had to succeed.
He looked around and suddenly realized how he could start. The idea he had was not any too rich with chances of success but it was enough for Ras Tschubai that it offered a chance at all.
There was nothing to be accomplished here. He had hoped-or rather, it had been Col. Tifflor"s idea to find the control room empty, and had that been the case he could have disconnected the central robot and turned the ship"s guidance system over to manual control. Then he would have sent the ship into a transition so far beyond the outermost limits of the galaxy that it could neither call for help nor ever return. A ship"s energy supply was limited, if it squandered it all on a single transition, the ship emerged in a place from which it could never again move under its own power. That had been Tifflor"s plan. It was impossible to carry out. If Ras Tschubai made a single step towards the manual controls, the robot would blast him down on the spot at once.
There was only one possibility left. Ras Tschubai closed his eyes. He did not know if that would rouse the robot"s suspicions. He waited tensely for a few moments, and when nothing happened, Ras Tschubai began to concentrate. He was familiar with ships of this type of construction. He knew where the engine room was.
Sgt. Fryberg leaped up. "A message, sir!"
Tifflor whirled around. "Coded?"
"No, sir. Normal. Plainly readable." He handed Tifflor the diagram page he had taken out of the receiver.
The connected writing mechanism had printed a series of Arkonide letters on the sheet. Fryberg did not understand Arkonese, but he knew that the writing mechanism would not have been activated at all if the message had been coded.
"Positronicon damaged," Tifflor read. "Main circuit broken down. Request technical a.s.sistance."
Tifflor gave a start. Was this Ras Tschubai"s doing? If yes, then why hadn"t he done what he was supposed to do? Why was the Arkonide ship still standing in the same place?
And more-why had a robotship used Arkonese for making its plight known to other robotships? Robots usually communicated with one another using short impulse signals. What was the point of the detailed message in a human language?
"Have you picked up anything else, Fryberg?" he asked the sergeant.
"Yes sir. Also a series of short impulses."
With probably an identical meaning, Tifflor concluded in his thoughts. They had sent their message twice, once for robot antennae and the second time for Arkonide ears. What Arkonide played such an important role that he had to be informed of the ships" every move?
He dropped that line of thought. He could find an answer to the question only after some reflection and he did not have the time for it. Besides, it was unimportant. The important thing was, what was Ras Tschubai doing over there on the Arkonide ship? Would he be successful?
The damage to the positronicon incidentally explained what had been delaying the boarding party, although 20 minutes had gone by since the Newborn had been captured. If the main circuit had broken down, that meant they possibly might not be able to open any of their hatches.
Or was it a trick? Did they want to lure the Newborn into making an attempt to escape and then destroy it while it tried to get away? That was a plausible thought. A defect in the positronicon would put some, but by no means all, of the ship"s guns out of action. Perhaps they expected the crew of the Newborn to take that into consideration and make an attempt to escape.
Tifflor smiled mockingly. That kind of favour he would not do for them.
Ras Tschubai worked quickly, trying not to think of his inhibitions. When he had seen that the engine room was empty except for the collection of gigantic machinery installed there, he had thought for five minutes about whether he dared do what he had in mind. He had to reach back into his memory and recall that the fate of mankind was involved. He had to realize that the Robot Regent might well be able to learn the secret of the Earth"s galactic position from one of the Newborn"s crewmen. He imagined what it would look like if a fleet of 50,000 Arkonide ships attacked the Terran solar system and annihilated one planet after the other.
After that, he was determined to carry out his intentions.
For someone skilled in galactonautic technology, it was an easy task to turn the huge fusion reactors up to full power and block the most important outlets so that the reactors-to put it in graphic terms-filled themselves up with energy. Large as they were, a quarter of an hour would pa.s.s before they would be full and their controlled fusion process would be turned into an uncontrolled one. The enormous amount of energy would blow the Arkonide ship apart with the force of 100 hydrogen bombs.
The robot he had escaped from had probably sounded an alarm up in the control room. In all likelihood there was even now a search for him underway, trying to find out what damage he was in the process of wreaking.
But there was a defect in the positronicon. The robots would have to search every room separately, one after the other, and by the time they reached the control room... well, they would never get to it. The ship would have blown up by then. Now that the positronicon was no longer functioning, no one up in the control room would realize that the reactors were well on the way to choking on their own power.
Ras Tschubai took one last look at the connections he had altered. He seemed like an improbable dwarf at the feet of the gigantic machinery, and doubt whether he had acted rightly overcame him anew.
It was idle speculation. Ras Tschubai had no further effect on the fate of the Arkonide ship. Its destiny was fixed and Ras could only get away from it as quickly as possible.
He closed his eyes and concentrated for the spring. But instead of the Newborn appearing before his mind"s eye, he saw instead that little man he had met on one of the lower decks and who had shown him the way to the control room. Ras had promised that nothing would happen to him as he shot at him with a shockbeamer. The little man would never know that Ras Tschubai had had the best of intentions and that it was only the pressure of circ.u.mstances that prevented him from keeping his promise.
Ras drove the picture out of his mind. Ten of the 15 minutes had already ticked by. Since the time of the explosion could not be precisely calculated to the minute, it was becoming increasingly dangerous for him the longer he stayed aboard the Arkonide ship.
Finally the image of the Newborn succeeded in appearing in his brain. He stared at it, letting the picture grow until he almost believed he could see the control room through the hull.
Then he sprang.
Julian Tifflor paid no attention to what went on behind him. He sensed the developing disquiet and heard someone take two quick steps. But his eyes were trained on the vidscreen where the dully-shining point of the Arkonide ship could be seen. What formerly had been only a tiny spot in the depths of s.p.a.ce, distinguishable from the stars only by the odd way it shone, now suddenly ballooned in size, increased in brightness and became a radiant sun. A glaringly bright disc twice the size of the full moon seen from Earth suddenly stood in the darkness and Tifflor had to close his eyes against the glare.
No sound could be heard. A man accustomed to the roaring thunder of an explosion could not at first understand what had happened out in s.p.a.ce. A s.p.a.ceship had exploded. It had vanished in a bright, silent nuclear inferno, destroyed in a blaze of incredibly vast amounts of energy.
Tifflor wiped his hand across his forehead and looked around. Two paces behind him stood Ras Tschubai. Those had been his steps Tifflor had previously heard. The African returned his glance guiltily, explaining: "I couldn"t do anything else, sir. The control room was filled with robots. They were repairing something. I couldn"t have moved my little finger without one of them noticing.
Tifflor nodded. "In a case like this," he said thoughtfully, "it"s not easy to say "You"ve done a good job", but nevertheless, you have. No doubt about that."
Ras Tschubai sighed in relief.
Blast it all anyway, thought Tifflor angrily, what"s wrong with me? The Arkonides blow up whole planets without losing any sleep about it and I"m worried by my conscience because one of their ships exploded?
He shook the thought away from him. Before it blew up, the Arkonide ship had called for technical a.s.sistance. The a.s.sistance could show up at any second now and it would doubtless be better for the Newborn if it were some distance away from the scene of the disaster.
The call for help would incidentally provide a plausible explanation to the approaching ships for the explosion of the s.p.a.cesphere. It had reported positronicon damage. In such a case, anything could happen, including the reactors going out of control. No suspicion needed to fall on the Newborn.
So the third stage of the plan had succeeded. The fourth and most difficult now lay before the Newborn. It had to penetrate the overlapping zone and play its part for the Druufs.
Tifflor set the ship into motion. He accelerated towards the vague red cloud and went into transition as soon as sufficient velocity had been attained. So far there had been no sign that a second Arkonide ship had spotted the Terran vessel.
If only things continue to go so well!
4/ VOLUNTARY CAPTIVITY.
By Arkonide standards Door-Trabzon was a remarkable man, even though he looked exactly like an Arkonide-or perhaps because of that. One would have expected that after taking command of the 20,000-unit search fleet he would have turned all his duties over to the robots and installed himself on a nice, comfortable couch to watch a stimulating program on the fictive projector.
Door-Trabzon took command but otherwise he did nothing that was expected of him. He was an Ekhonide. The Ekhonides were descendants of Arkonide emigrants and had the same language and physical appearance as their forefathers. And yet they were different from their cousins, the true Arkonides. The Arkonides, after millenniums of peace, prosperity and galactic power, had become a race of decadent, bored aristocrats without ambition. The Ekhonides, on the other hand, had retained their energy and competence. Door-Trabzon was a high officer in the Ekhonide fleet, which consisted of 300 units, and no better offer could have been made to him than command of an armada of 20,000 ships. Door-Trabzon had every intention of carrying out his a.s.signment, and then some. He arranged to be informed of everything that went on within the area of the search fleet and he wanted to make at least half of the necessary decisions. The other half had to be made by the central positronicons but that could not be avoided.
Since Door-Trabzon a.s.sumed office, the Arkonide ships no longer communicated only via short impulses over the hypercom but also transmitted each message in Arkonese at the same time so that Door-Trabzon could do something about it himself if he chose to.
Door-Trabzon"s flagship was a s.p.a.cesphere of the largest cla.s.s. When he had taken it over, it bore the impersonal name KK-17. Now it was called the WaKelan, named after the most famous general in Ekhonide history. Door-Trabzon was proud of the name and the ship that bore it, and kept his crew, which included half a battalion of robots, in constant activity.
He learned of the positronic breakdown that had immobilized a ship in the fleet about three light-years from the WaKelan. It was not a pleasant thought to him to take a ship from its post simply because of a breakdown, but after all, he had no other choice. He sent an armed transporter to replace it.
A few minutes later the transporter reported that the damaged ship was nowhere to be found. Instead there was a thin cloud of rapidly expanding plasma at the place where the ship should have been. The crew aboard the transporter a.n.a.lysed the plasma and found that with only a few slight variations its composition matched that of a s.p.a.ceship and crew. That meant the ship had blown up. Door-Trabzon cursed in Ekhonide but he did not get overly excited. He was commander of 20,000 ships and one less was no great loss. The crew of the exploded ship probably got what was coming to it: even with positronic damage, the reactors could be turned down and not allowed to run at full blast.
No, for Door-Trabzon there were much more important things than the loss of a single ship. He was on the track of a Terran ship. He did not precisely know why he had been given 20,000 ships to chase after one enemy ship but since the advantage was on his side it was all right with him. The Regent had a.s.sured him that although the fate of Arkon was not hanging in the balance, nevertheless a great deal was involved with capturing the Terran ship.
Door-Trabzon was convinced that the enemy would not elude him. The search fleet was not standing still. It moved constantly, crossing through every cubic kilometre of that sector of s.p.a.ce.
Let the Terran ship try to get through!
The transition had been completed. The dark red wall of the overlapping field stood huge and prominent on the Newborn"s vidscreens. A few thousand kilometres away, the mouth of the discharge funnel was open, pointing the way into the Druuf universe.
Tifflor was going this route for the first time. He had been used to regarding the matter as a problem of natural science and mathematics but now as he looked at the yawning funnel, he did not feel altogether comfortable. The glowing red, slowly pulsating mouth looked like the entrance to h.e.l.l.
At the moment the Newborn had yet another task. Its crew had to determine if a breakthrough to the other universe would be noticed by the Arkonides. To that end, the ship moved towards the funnel at a minimal speed and Sgt. Fryberg and his two men were busy listening in on empty s.p.a.ce for suspicious hypercom messages.
That was mainly a mathematical undertaking. The message density of that sector of s.p.a.ce was known to the Terran fleet. The number of hypercom conversations being conducted within the Arkonide fleet was almost constant. Shortly after the encounter with the damaged Arkonide ship, it was determined on board the Newborn that since the last recording made by Terran patrol ships, the message constant had risen by a factor of 1.333. It could have had nothing to do with the appearance of the Newborn, for the figure had not climbed to that level from a lower one after the Newborn had emerged from hypers.p.a.ce but had been that high from the start.
Nor had it changed now. That could only mean that the number of Arkonide ships had increased by a factor of 1.333. In turn, that was a most happy omen for it meant that the Robot Regent on Arkon had fallen for the Terran bluff and was making an extra effort to capture the ship of the "deserters".
In addition, Fryberg took a few random samples. He decoded some of the messages that had come in and found that they concerned matters of little importance, instructions transmitted from one ship to another, routine reports and even private problems.
Everything indicated that the Newborn had not been discovered. No one seemed to suspect that the explosion of the damaged ship had been the work of the Newborn.
Tifflor"s courage was renewed. Fate no longer seemed to be frowning on the Terrans.
He began to set the ship into full motion again when Sgt. Fryberg suddenly reported. "There"s something in our vicinity, sir," he said uncomfortably, his voice uncertain. "But I can"t quite make it out."
Tifflor"s attention perked up. "Let me see it," he ordered.
Sgt. Fryberg threw a switch. On Tifflor"s intercom-vidscreen appeared the image that showed on the radarscope and had startled Fryberg. At first Tifflor could see nothing more than the dull dark-green surface of the empty vidscreen.
"Up in the right, sir," explained Fryberg. "It"s a pale, washed-out spot."
Tifflor turned off the lights shining on his control console and made another attempt to find the foreign object. In the upper right-hand corner of the vidscreen he saw what Fryberg meant. It was not even a spot in the true sense of the word-it was a barely perceptible tinge, as though the vidscreen gla.s.s was slightly fogged over. "What does the rest of the equipment say?"
"Nothing, sir," answered Fryberg. "The matter detector hasn"t sensed it at all but that could be because the thing"s too far away. It doesn"t seem to be giving off any light and the area is free of fuel residue. Only the microwaves are picking it up."
Yes, thought Tifflor, it"s reflecting microwaves just about like a handful of soot reflects light.