Fiasco (31 page)

Yes, relief, because retreat now no longer entered into play.

His sight returned after about twenty seconds, though the gravimeter still pointed to the red.

The
Hermes
had not suffered a direct hit—that was impossible. Whatever had rammed it, DEUS, always on watch, parried the attack. But the attack had been carried out so cunningly and quietly that DEUS, with no time to choose a moderate shield, resorted to the ultimate.

A gravitational wall could not be breached by anything in
this
Universe except a singularity—so it saved the
Hermes.
But the power of so violent a riposte had to produce recoil. Like a cannon slapped back by the reaction upon firing, the entire ship, at the epicenter of the sidereal discharge, shook, though it received only a small fraction of the released energy. Steergard, not even attempting to rise because his body was still as if under a press, saw, eyes bulging, how the large indicator arrow fell, quivering, millimeter by millimeter, from the red section of the round dial. His muscles, strained to the utmost, now began to obey. The gravimeter dropped to the black 2. But the sirens kept howling in a monotone on all the decks.

Pushing down with both arms, he got out of the chair with difficulty. When he stood, he had to support himself with his hands on the edge of the desk—the way a stooped monkey walked, he thought (a curious thought, at this moment). Among the tapes and maps thrown to the floor he saw his father's coin, which continued to show tails or retreat.

He smiled, because that decision had now been trumped by a higher card. The gravimeter's white dial stood at 1 and was slowly dropping. He had to get to the control room, to see how his people were. But at the door he turned suddenly, went back, picked up the coin, and returned it to the closet. No one should learn about his moment of weakness. It was not weakness as far as game theory was concerned, because in the absence of minimax solutions there was no decision better than one purely random. He could therefore justify his action, at least to himself, but he did not care to. Halfway down the tunnel-corridor, weightlessness returned. He pushed the elevator button. The problem had been solved. Though he was not in favor of battle, he knew his people, and knew that not one of them, except for the Vatican delegate, would agree to running away.

It was impossible to learn the methods employed in the attack; whatever they had been, all trace of them was gone from the continuum. The printout from DEUS's memory showed the physicists what they had suspected. With omnidirectional sensors sweeping space around the
Hermes
to the outer perimeter of defense, radar echoes could be detected off particles a millimeter across within a radius of a hundred thousand miles. The blow was not radiant energy—that would have left a spectral line. The sudden appearance of about fifty objects with fuzzy edges around the
Hermes,
in a swarm converging rapidly on the ship, and all synchronized in motion, seemed inconceivable at first. They materialized at a very small distance, from one to two miles. The physicists, forced to speculate, pondered ways to penetrate the sensor shield undetected. They came up with three.

Clouds of particles, each particle no larger than a bacterium, could coalesce to form multiton masses, which would imply no little skill in the production of self-fusing elements directed at a target in wide dispersion. It would be something like a cloud of microcrystals coming together—with a necessary delay, inside the perimeter—in an avalanche reaction.

The individual particles, not merely condensing but interacting to form missiles, would have to possess a highly subtle structure. Nine seconds before the blow, the ship's magnetometers registered a jump in the magnetic field around the sides. It peaked at a billion gauss, then after several nanoseconds fell almost to zero. And yet beforehand there had been no electromagnetic activity whatever. The physicists were unable to propose a mechanism for the creation of a field of such strength, whose sources, with no prior appearance, could escape the notice of the sensors. Dipoles, theoretically, might penetrate the shield if a cloud of them neutralized itself through the mutual orientation of trillions of molecules.

Such a reconstruction of the attack assumed a technology never before conceived and therefore never tested experimentally on Earth.

The second possibility was a highly speculative method of using the quantum effects of space. According to this idea, no material particles had been smuggled past the defensive barrier, nor were there any in the whole spherical region surrounding it. Physical space contained a host of virtual particles that could materialize upon a shock-wave infusion of energy from without. This approach would require the ship to be surrounded, beyond the radius of the shield, by generators of the hardest band of ultraroentgen gamma rays, as well as a centripetal discharge that, in the shape of a spherical wave contracting at the speed of light, would produce—exactly upon its intersection with the defense—a tunnel effect: quanta of energy, emerging near the ship, would give rise to a sufficient quantity of hadrons in space for them to hurtle upon the
Hermes
from every direction. A possible method, but one demanding the most sophisticated instruments, precision positioning in space, as well as perfect camouflaging of orbiters. It seemed highly unlikely.

The third way involved the use of negative energy outside the perimeter of defense, but this called for mastery of sidereal engineering—and sidereal engineering in its macroquantum form, with the preliminary siphoning of power from the Sun, because the power stations able to produce the necessary energy on the planet would betray their activity to the
Hermes
by the residual thermal buildup in the surrounding terrain.

DEUS, taken completely unawares, seized its gravitational last resort. Calling on the full power of both main engines, it girdled the ship with gravity toroids. Inside these toroids, as in the center of intersecting automobile tires, sat the
Hermes,
and the missiles directed at it fell into Schwarzschild-curved space. Since any material object falling into such space lost all physical properties except electrical charge, angular momentum, and mass, becoming a formless part of the gravitational grave, no trace was left behind of the methods used in the attack.

The toroids, serving as impenetrable armor, existed no more than twenty seconds, at a cost to the ship of 10
²¹
joules. The
Hermes
did not share the fate of the
Gabriel,
did not annihilate itself in self-defense from the toroidal configuration of surging isogravs. But because they could not be focused sharply at the emitter, the ship absorbed about one-one-hundred-thousandth of the energy released. A few twenty-thousandths would have crushed the ship as a hammer crushes the shell of an empty, blown egg.

The men came out of the emergency in one piece. With the exception of Steergard and Kirsting, all had been asleep or were at least buckled in their bunks like Tempe. The ship was not fitted for battle. Polassar suggested—whatever might happen—that they move to the perihelion, to replenish the power lost in repulsing the attack. Along the way, the
Hermes
passed through a cloud of rarefied gas. At first the gas was taken for a prominence dispelled in the solar wind, but the sensors reported that innumerable molecules had attached themselves to the armor and were corroding it catalytically. Specimens taken revealed the specificity of their action, much like that of the viroids already known. Steergard therefore did what in his conversation with the apostolic delegate he had called "coming out in the open." The
Hermes
swept the treacherous cloud with a series of thermal blasts, then destroyed the erosion viruses that adhered to the sides, by a simple expedient: with the refrigerating units on at full capacity, it turned like a roast on a spit as it passed through the top of a solar prominence that was mere light-seconds above the photosphere. Then the ship reduced speed to assume a stationary orbit, turned its stern toward Zeta, and opened its energy receptors. A portion of the tanked energy went to maintain the refrigeration; the rest was sucked up by the sidereals.

At this point, the crew split into three groups.

Harrach, Polassar, and Rotmont believed that the incident with the cloud represented a second attack by the Quintans.

Kirsting and El Salam thought that it was not a blow directed at them intentionally but was, in a way, accidental—that the
Hermes
had entered a mined territory, mined long before their arrival.

Nakamura occupied a middle position: the cloud was not a trap—a trap set either for the
Hermes
or for the Quintan orbiters—but was, rather, a "garbage dump" of microweapons employed in warfare above the planet and which had drifted, in the Sun's gravitational tide, to this perihelion, contrary to the intentions of the warring parties.

Arago said nothing.

DEUS was occupied with programming possible strategies for defensive, offensive, and conciliatory actions. It gave no preference: the data for the optimization of any of these lines were too meager.

Gerbert considered that the thing to do was forget about contact and shows of strength, but he felt unqualified to participate in the debate, which grew more and more heated.

Tempe, summoned by the captain when they had replaced the power lost, said that he was no SETI expert and did not command the ship.

"No one here now is an expert, as I think you may have noticed," replied Steergard. "Myself included. Even so, everyone has his thoughts on the subject. You, too. It's only your opinion I want, not advice."

"DEUS would have more to say," said the pilot, smiling.

"DEUS will present twenty tactics, or a hundred. And that's all that it will do. You know as much as our experts, including DEUS. The minimum risk lies in retreat."

"True enough." Tempe, sitting opposite the captain, continued to smile.

"What amuses you?" asked Steergard.

"Are you asking privately, Captain, or is that an order?"

"It's an order."

"The situation is sticky, for sure. But I've gotten to know you well enough to know what you definitely will
not
do. We are not turning tail."

"You're certain of that?"

"Absolutely."

"Why? Do you think that we were attacked once, or twice?"

"It doesn't matter. Either way, they don't want contact. I have no idea what else they have up their sleeve."

"Further attempts will be dangerous."

"Obviously."

"So?"

"Well, I seem to like danger. If I didn't, I'd have been under a gravestone on Earth for a couple of hundred years now, because I would have died in bed surrounded by a grieving family."

"In other words, you think that a show of strength is necessary."

"Yes and no. It's a last resort that cannot be avoided."

Held in place by a steel cube, a stack of printed pages lay on Steergard's desk, with a graph on the top page. The pilot recognized it. An hour before, he had received a copy from El Salam.

"Have you read that?" Tempe asked.

"No."

"No?" He was surprised.

"It's one more hypothesis from the physicists. I wanted to talk with you first."

"You should read it. A hypothesis, yes. But I found it convincing."

"You may go."

The paper, entitled "The Zeta System as Cosmic War Zone," was signed by Rotmont, Polassar, and El Salam.

A civilization that has not only destroyed its forms of wireless communication, such as radio and television, filling the whole ionosphere with white noise that drowns out any signal, but which in addition has invested the lion's share of its global production and energy in the building of weapons that occupy the space around it—such a civilization seems impossible, an absurdity. But one should keep in mind that this state was not consciously planned, not deliberately arrived at; rather, it arose gradually, through escalation. The starting situation, we believe, was when multifront war, waged on the surface of the planet, became tantamount to total annihilation. After this critical point was reached, the arms race was moved off the planet. None of the antagonists intended to transform the entire solar system into a battle zone of monstrous proportions, but proceeded in steps, countering the moves of the adversaries. By the time a confrontation was finally reached in outer space, nothing could any longer restrain the zone's growth, let alone nullify it to establish a lasting peace.

Computer simulation using game theory—nonzero functions of reward—shows that, in the case of such struggles, the lack of trust in the efficacy of concluded disarmament treaties imposes a limit on the possibility of agreement through negotiation. Agreement in the absence of trust in the enemy's "good faith"—classically termed
pacta sunt servanda
—requires the mutual inspection of armaments, which means making one's territory accessible to the enemy's experts.

But when the race to acquire greater and greater military capability enters the path of microminiaturization, inspection without trust becomes an impossibility. Armories, arsenals, and laboratories can then be hidden securely. Agreement cannot be reached thereafter, even on a
minimal
level of mutual trust (that he who refrains from microweapons research will
not
be assuming thereby a position of imminent defeat). Nor is it possible to dismantle arms already possessed, on the enemy's assurance that he will do likewise.

The question arises: why do we find a machine war-sphere around Quinta, and not the biomilitary methods once predicted on Earth?

Undoubtedly for the reason that the adversaries have already achieved—in the realm of biological weaponry, too—the power to wipe out the entire biosphere, just as previously that could be accomplished by an exchange of nuclear blows. Consequently, no one now will be the first to use either type of arms.

As for the cryptomilitary macro-alternative—i.e., bringing down pseudonatural elemental disasters upon the enemy through climate or seismic tampering—such things may have taken place, but could provide no strategic solution, because anyone who is himself able to act cryptomilitarily will recognize similar actions taken against him by the enemy.