in0 (22 page)

It had been twenty hours since the
Whale
shook itself free of its parking orbit and began the long climb out of the New Eden system. Another twenty hours would see them en route to Sol (or a plasma cloud slowly expanding across a million cubic kilometers of space).

Dan was taking advantage of the hours under acceleration to continue exploring his command. He noted the various alien devices attached to the bulkheads. Some were obviously functional, while others appeared to be decorative. One in particular caught his eye. In front of him was a hexagonal frame inside which was a picture that might well have been an abstract painting. Then again, he decided, it might be either a landscape or portrait, but one painted in pigments to which the human eye was not sensitive. The painting was typical of the alien craft’s furnishings and fixtures - a strange mixture of the familiar and the odd.

If it were indeed a piece of artwork, it had at least performed one of the functions of art. It had triggered more questions than it answered. He liked to think that humanity would find kindred spirits among a race that painted pictures. In truth, of course, he had no way of knowing. The artist might have been engaged in a mating ritual, or relaying a message, or possibly just wanted to break up the dull grayness of the bulkhead. Perhaps the picture was a signal to the others aboard that this particular section belonged to the beetle things.

Dan used the water bottle to soak the sponge again. From what he had seen of the beetle corpses, they had not been handsome beings. Then again, he doubted they would have found humans attractive, either.

The next best thing to having a live alien to question was to know what they had stored in the ship’s computer. A team of specialists had been working for more than two weeks on understanding the alien ship’s brain. The team was finally making some progress. They could not read the information they had extracted from the alien computer, of course, but they could do an analysis on how the information had been stored inside the memory banks of the machine.

Curiously, nearly sixty percent of the data bank’s memory had proven to be empty, with the unused portion divided among several large gaps. The pattern suggested that there had once been information stored in these sections, but that it had been erased. Whether the hypothetical erasures had been the result of battle damage or of normal computer operation, the specialists had, as yet, been unable to say.

#

“All Hands! Stand by for superlight velocity in ten minutes. Secure for jump and report status. T

minus ten minutes and counting!
”

“Ten minute warning complete, Captain.”

“Very well, Ensign,” Dan Landon replied. “Engineer, how are your generators?”

“Fusion is nominal, Captain,” Laura Dresser responded. “Stardrive is on-line and functional. Standing by for jump order.”

Again, they were suspended from their webs in the control room as all through the ship other vacuum suited figures hurried to secure their equipment for jump. Landon let his gaze sweep the readouts in front of him that showed his ship ready for stardrive. He wondered which of them were lying to him.

“Grimes, get me
Magellan
.”

After a moment, the ensign reported. “Commander Heinrich on the line, sir.”

“Scott, are you ready to jump?”

“Ready, Captain. We’ll wait five minutes after you go superlight to observe, then we will follow you.”

“Right. See you back home in six days.”

“Yes, sir. We will be looking for you. Good luck!”

“Luck to you as well,
Magellan
. Landon out.”

The voyage to Sol would take six days and would be made in utter isolation. So far, no one had ever invented a method for detecting a ship traveling faster than light and it was doubtful that anyone ever would. Once the
Ruptured Whale
departed New Eden, she would be totally on her own, wrapped in a private dark universe.
Magellan
would stick around for five minutes to make sure that the
Whale
did not fall out of superlight the same instant she went in - or to monitor the debris cloud if the ship exploded.

However, once either ship transitioned successfully to superlight, there would be no contact.

The great danger, of course, was if their drive broke down en route. The distance between the stars is too vast for the human mind to comprehend, let alone for humanity’s small fleet of starships to search. If the
Whale
fell out of superlight, they would starve to death or suffocate long before anyone could possibly find them.

“Final check. Have all stations report status.”

“All stations! Report status.”

The reports began flowing into the control room. Dan Landon listened carefully as each station reported that they were secured and ready for superlight. He noted that their voices carried overtones of repressed excitement, but no more tension than was to be expected. He smiled. They were a good crew.

If anyone survived the next few minutes, they had a damned good chance of making it home.

“All stations report ready to jump, Captain,” Grimes reported to him.

“Engineer, begin your final pre-jump check of the stardrive.”

“Stardrive is nominal, Captain.”

“Very well. Stand by. Two minute warning.”

“All hands. Two minutes to superlight. Stand by.
”

Landon watched the digits of his suit chronometer click down toward
00:01:00
. At the one-minute mark, he ordered Laura Dresser to place the stardrive in automatic mode. A computer-generated voice began to echo softly in his earphones, counting down the seconds. As it always did, the countdown sent shivers up his spine. His eyes scanned the readouts continuously now, his gauntletted hand poised over the kill button. Then came the surge of adrenaline as the final seconds ticked off...

“Five ... four ... three ... two ... one...”

Dan Landon took a deep breath and held it as the mechanical voice finished.

“Zero. Energize!”

Dr. Bendagar, Professor Rheinhardt, the project’s chief exobiologist, Lisa Arden, and Mark Rykand all sat in the transient lounge aboard Equatorial Station and watched the Earth periodically appear in the viewport in front of them. They were en route to the Tangier Conference, traveling incognito. All wore tourist-type clothes, which is to say, they dressed normally.

“Feels good to get a solid deck underfoot again, doesn’t it?” Rheinhardt asked. The biologist made no secret of his dislike for microgravity. He had lost twenty pounds since the project’s inception and was looking forward to meals that had never seen the inside of an autokitchen. If he could only arrange to see his wife while he was aground, things would be perfect.

“I don’t know,” Lisa responded. “I kind of like floating through life.” There was one definite benefit to microgravity in her opinion. This was the first time in weeks that she had to wear her bra.

Raoul Bendagar sighed, “I agree with Ben. Man was not intended to swim everywhere he goes. Besides, it will be good to breathe fresh air again.”

The others looked at where he lay sprawled in a pneumatic couch. It had been the better part of a year since the scientist had breathed anything but ship’s atmosphere. He had missed his opportunity to set foot on New Eden and since the starship’s return to Sol, had not left PoleStar.

Lisa was also looking forward to breathing molecules not tainted by the numerous smells that accumulated in a closed environment. There was one smell in particular that she would not miss. She had long since gotten sufficiently used to Sar-Say’s body odor that she no longer made any conscious note of it. Still, it was good to breathe air not clouded by
Eau de Taff
. She suspected Sar-Say felt the same about her body odor.

Official invitations to the Tangier Conference had gone out the week before. Most of the attendees were from the universities and think tanks that had been let in on some part of the secret. A dozen scientists aboard PoleStar had also been directed to attend. As a precaution against accident, and to make them less conspicuous, they were traveling to the conference by three different routes. Mark Rykand had had to pull strings in order to get himself assigned to Lisa Arden’s group.

Sar-Say, of course, had not been invited. Not only was there no way to get him to the conference without people noticing, the biologists still weren’t positive that the risk of infection was zero. There had been long technical arguments about whether the caution involved was protecting humanity from Sar-Say, or vice versa.

Whichever it was, everyone returning to Earth from PoleStar had been given a very thorough physical examination. One who had shown signs of an incipient runny nose had been refused permission to leave the station. Whatever disease he had contracted would have to run its course before he could again enter Earth’s biosphere.

“Here comes our ship,” Lisa said, pointing overhead to where a dart shaped craft highlighted by flashing attitude jets was growing slowly larger against the backdrop of the spinning Earth. As they watched, the Earth again slid out of sight on the right of the port, to be replaced by the black of space. The ship was noticeably larger the next time the Earth was in view. “Perhaps we should get to the loading lock.”

“Plenty of time,” Mark said. “They have to dock and offload before we can go aboard. Besides, docking is the best part.”

Just then, a functionary in the uniform of the Equatorial Station staff entered the lounge and scanned its occupants. He carried a small hand screen clipped to his belt and halted as he spotted the party from PoleStar. He threaded his way among the pneumatic furniture that dotted the lounge until he stood in front of Bendagar.”

“Dr. Raoul Bendagar?”

The chief scientist looked up and nodded.

“I have a message for you from your office. Will you accept it?”

“Certainly.” He took the small reader from the messenger and pressed his thumb against the screen. A terse few paragraphs of glowing letters flowed up the face.

“What is it?” Lisa asked.

Bendagar looked up, his face a mask. When he spoke, it was in a hushed tone that barely carried to his audience. “It’s from Pavel. He wanted to pass on the news that
Magellan
has just been spotted out beyond Jupiter.”

“Just
Magellan
?

Bendagar’s wizened features broke into a broad smile. “No. Pavel reports that she has another ship with her!”

#

“Hello, Luna Approach Control,” Dan Landon said into his communicator. “This is Survey Auxiliary
Flying Cloud
, inbound for landing at Lomonnosow Station.”

“Hello,
Flying Cloud
. We have you on our scopes. You are cleared for final approach. Be advised that you have a plasma research satellite crossing your orbit from the northeast twenty seconds behind you.

Please maintain your flight profile.”

“Thank you, Approach. We will do so. Standing by on guard frequency.
Flying Cloud
, out!”

Dan Landon lay back in his improvised acceleration couch aboard the
Ruptured Whale
and watched his instruments. Around him, other members of the command staff were doing the same. Because the arrangement of their couches at the center of the cylindrical control room made it difficult to see one another, Dan had had a mirror installed in the overhead. The view reminded him of the overhead camera shots of dance troops or possibly of the mirrored ceilings above beds in certain specialty hotels.

They had left the New Eden system six days earlier. The tension of whether or not the jury-rigged stardrive would work had peaked at the moment of jump. Nor had the tension really subsided until they had finally dropped sublight on the outskirts of the Solar System. Dan had found the constant tension of waiting for disaster nerve wracking.

He tried to relax by continuing his explorations of the
Whale
. Nothing he found altered his opinion that Broan technology was no more advanced than human. Indeed, a number of artifacts had seemed crudely made. The shipyard that had built the
Whale
seemed not to have been overly concerned with esthetics.

Good enough had been good enough.

The
Whale
dropped sublight precisely according to flight plan. Landon was surprised to discover that
Magellan
’s breakout point was only a million kilometers distant from his own. Considering that both ships had just crossed 100 light-years of void, to arrive so close to one another was either extremely lucky or phenomenal piloting. Dan knew enough about the factors involved to discount the latter possibility. The truth was that sometimes you just got lucky.

He wasted no time transmitting his mission log to
Magellan
, which had then sent it on to Earth via secure laser. His orders arrived by return laser almost as fast as speed-of-light delay allowed.
Magellan
was ordered back to PoleStar to deliver their records to the project scientists. The
Ruptured Whale
was ordered to the old Space Navy base at Lomonnosow Crater on Luna Farside, where the alien ship could be hidden from the curious. To preserve the fiction, they had taken the name of a cargo vessel.

“How is the reactor holding up, Engineer?”

“Fine, Captain,” Laura Dresser replied. “Normal space drive is far less taxing on the power system than stardrive.”

Despite her tendency to respond to command inquiries with long, extraneous explanations, Dan Landon had to admit that Laura Dresser had the makings of a fine ship’s engineer.

“Comm officer,” he said as the radar altimeter began to register their height above the pockmarked lunar surface. “All departments to report landing status.”

Each of the
Ruptured Whale
’s crew acknowledged their readiness in turn.

“Altitude is 100 kilometers and closing, Captain,” the spacer who operated the sensor board reported.

“I see it, Benton. Stand by for acceleration warning, Comm Officer. Stand by for power, Engineer.”

He was greeted by a series of acknowledgments. A large crater with lights strung out across its floor was growing below them. At 50 kilometers, he washed all extraneous thoughts from his mind and concentrated on his flying. There had not been time to rig an auto landing system on the
Whale
. Besides, the cylindrical shape made the ship’s mass distribution sufficiently different that he would not have risked it anyway.