The World at the End of Time (32 page)

Five was not very intelligent, but it was smart enough to be assured that these things represented no danger at all.

Well, then, what did they represent?

When Five reported them to its master, Wan-To’s response was not very helpful. Wan-To didn’t tell it what to do about them. Wan-To left the matter discretionary.

So Five did what it was best equipped to do. It studied the things.

From the point of view of little Luo Fah, the first in the landing party whom Five chose to examine, that process was terrifying, agonizing, and fatal. Luo had hardly stepped out of the lander, mask pumping oxygen into her faceplate, pistol at the ready, when she was snatched brutally into the air and—well—disassembled. The clothes, the gun, and the air mask were the first to go, as Five methodically dismantled its curious little specimen to see what it was all about. There was stark fear and a lot of pain as things were wrenched off her with little concern for what they did to her clutching fingers and resisting limbs. The next part was far worse, but fortunately for Luo she didn’t feel it. She was dead by the time the interior of her body was opened up for study.

The other two in the team were luckier—for a while.

One specimen had been enough for Five to deduce, roughly, how these things worked. They had a chemical basis, it perceived. They required an influx of gases (it didn’t call the process “breathing,” but it understood the necessity from the distress Luo had exhibited when it took her mask away). So it determined simply to observe the others for a while.

Five was cautious, of course. When it detected electromagnetic radiation, definitely patterned in nonnatural ways, coming from something inside the lander it could not permit that—who knew what the purpose of it was? So it destroyed the lander’s radio transmitter with one quick, controlled bolt. That was bad luck for the man who happened to be the one transmitting, because the blast burned his face quite horribly. But it wasn’t quite as bad for Jake Lundy, because Five then perceived that it had to be more careful with these things.

Five did not exactly have emotions. What Five had was orders. They were the commandments written in stone. They could not be violated . . . but what a pity that they hadn’t included instructions for dealing with these solid-matter creatures and their artifacts.

Five also had a good deal of resourcefulness. What it didn’t know it was quite capable of trying to learn. It was always possible, it reasoned, that at some time Wan-To would call again and would want to be fully informed about these unexpected visitors.

So it permitted those two to live. They were fascinating to watch. Five was fascinated to observe, as the burn victim’s wounds slowly began to heal, that they seemed to have some sort of built-in repair systems, like Five itself. (But then why hadn’t the two earlier ones managed to put themselves back together?) As Five learned more and more about their needs it even provided them with the kinds of air they seemed to want—the kinds, at least, that they kept inside their vehicle. When it deduced they also needed water—by observing how carefully they measured it out to each other in captivity—it made them some water. When it discovered they needed “food”—which took quite a while longer, and the two survivors were cadaverous by the time Five got to that point—that was harder, but Five had of course long since investigated the chemistry of the things the specimens had eaten, and of the excrement they insisted on carrying outside and burying. It was no impossible task for Five to create a range of organic materials to offer them; and some, in fact, they did seem to be willing to “eat.”

Unfortunately for Jake and his one surviving companion, that was pretty late in the game.

Five saw that things were going badly for its specimens. They were moving slower and more feebly. Sometimes they hardly moved at all for long periods. They spent a lot of time making sound vibrations to each other, but those slowed and became less frequent with time, too, as did their peculiar habit of, one at a time, making those same sound vibrations to a kind of metallic instrument. (Naturally Five investigated the instrument, but it seemed to do nothing more than make magnetic analogues of those vibrations on a spool of metal ribbon, so it returned the thing to them only slightly damaged.)

Five wondered why they didn’t copy themselves, so as to have new, young beings of their sort to carry on for them. It thought that would be nice. That would provide a permanent stock of such playthings; Five could investigate them in detail, over a long period of time, offering them all kinds of challenges and rewards to see what they would do.

Disappointingly, the time came when the second of them stopped moving entirely, and as the body began to bloat Five reluctantly conceded that its specimens had died. And they hadn’t ever copied themselves!

Five could not understand at all. It had never occurred to the doppel that they were both male.

A little while later—oh, a few hundred years—when the specimens were long dissolved into uninteresting dust, Five got another surprise.

When the doppel had not heard from Wan-To for all that time, because the relativistic shift had decoupled its Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, it began to wonder if it should not try some other kind of communication. Or, more important, whether Wan-To was trying to call it, say, by means of tachyons.

So it began listening more intently on the tachyon frequencies, then even on the unlikely electromagnetic ones. It heard nothing—nothing, at least, from any stellar source anywhere, except for the endless hiss of hydrogen and the chatter of carbon monoxide and the mutterings from all the other excited molecules in the stellar photospheres and gas clouds—nothing that was
artificial.

Until it realized that there was, in fact, a quite definitely artifactual signal beginning to come in now and then on the radio frequencies. It closely resembled the one that had caused it to destroy the lander’s radio—and it came from Five’s own solar system.

In fact, it came from a
planet.
That was astonishing to Five. A human being would not have been more surprised if a tree had spoken to him.

Of course, the doppel had no idea what messages were being conveyed by these bizarre signals, but once it had located their source it took a closer look in the optical frequencies, and what it saw gave it a start.

The hulk of the ship it had blasted was beginning to move under its own power again. It was being hijacked!

In that moment of discovery, Five came very close to again unleashing the forces that had destroyed Ark in the first place. If it had been a human, its fingers would have been on the button. Since Five was only a matter doppel it had no fingers; but the generators which produced the X-ray laser began to glow and build up to full power.

But they didn’t fire.

Five withheld the command. It couldn’t make up its mind what to do. If only Wan-To could be asked for instructions!

Fretfully Five ran over its instructions. There was nothing useful in them about solid-matter beings. All Five was ordered to do, really, was to snatch this group of stars out of its neighborhood and fly it away. It had done that. And it had no useful further instructions.

Five tried to do what its program had never intended it for; it tried to decide on its own if its instructions had some sort of built-in termination. The energies of the stars themselves kept pushing them faster and faster, by always lesser increments of velocity, right up against that limiting velocity of light itself.

Should Five allow them to go on accelerating forever? Trying to accelerate, at least—the rate of acceleration was always dropping now, asymptotically to be sure, but converging toward
c
itself.

If not, when should Five stop it? If it stopped, what should it do then?

Five had no answers to those questions. It would have to use its own discretion, perhaps—but if it guessed wrong, Wan-To might be angry.

Five was desperate, but not desperate enough to risk that. Not yet.

CHAPTER 18

Because the plan to revive
Mayflower’s
MHD-microwave generators had originated with the Great Transporters, it was a Great Transporter woman named Tortee who was in charge. When Viktor and Reesa reported to her room she was waiting for them. Not patiently.

Tortee turned out to be incongruously fat, and that was astonishing to Viktor. How could anyone get that much to eat in this mob of the underfed? She was lying back on a chaise longue, blankets wrapped over her plump legs, and she glared at them suspiciously. “Who are you? Where’s that silly little bitch with the tea?” she demanded. “Never mind. Where were we? Oh, yes,” she remembered, sounding spiteful, “what they want to do is to try to start up the orbiting power generator again. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Of course, Tortee,” Reesa said, causing Viktor to look at her sharply. Her tone had been admiring and deferential. Even soapy.

“Well, it’s a waste,” Tortee grumbled. “What they want us to do is take the little bit of fuel that’s left in
Ark
and transfer it to
Mayflower,
turn it into electricity, beam it down. It’s crazy.”

“I guess so,” Viktor said slowly. Following his wife’s lead, he was doing his best to be agreeable to the old woman—Reesa’s eyes were on him, to remind him. Still, the plan didn’t sound entirely crazy to him. It wasn’t that different from what he had helped do a few hundred years before. But Tortee was the boss of the project that had got him off the shit detail, and he didn’t want to argue with her—especially not here in her own room, with view screens and computer terminals all around her. Terminals meant
data.
He coveted that room—not least for its huge, wide bed.

“No, that’s really crazy,” Tortee was insisting. “Think! We’d have to rebuild the rectenna in the first place; they tore that down long ago for the metal—and what would we have to tear down now for metal to rebuild it? Then there’s the problem of transferring fuel from the engine accumulators in one ship to the generators in another. That’s a lot harder than what you did back in the old days, Viktor. Then you only had to move the whole reserve fuel storage unit, right? And that was dangerous enough, but this means taking the
drive
apart. I’ve studied the plans. A million things can go wrong—and everything’s a lot older now, so the chances of an accident are a lot worse.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Reesa put in, looking warningly at Viktor. “I’m surprised the containment didn’t give out already and blow the whole ship up.”

“And then even if it succeeded,” the old woman went on, “what would we have? Enough fuel for maybe ten years of power transmission, then we’re back where we started. Total waste!”

“Terrible
waste,” Reesa agreed.

“Oh, you don’t know,” Tortee said moodily. “You don’t have any
idea
how much this is costing us—we don’t have resources to spare here, you know! And meanwhile . . .“ She looked around conspiratorially. “And meanwhile there’s a perfectly good planet waiting out there for us, with plenty of warmth and water and air—”

Viktor cleared his throat. “You mean Nebo, I guess, is that right? But there’s also something on Nebo that shoots at us, Tortee.”

She glared at him dangerously. “Are you saying you don’t support my project?” Viktor was silent. “Answer me! I thought I could trust you—you were one of those who went there, centuries ago!”

“That was a matter of scientific investigation,” Viktor explained.

“Scientific investigation! You went there just because you were
curious?”

“What better reason could there be?”

“Because Nebo is
habitable
now!” Tortee cried. “At least, we think it may be—and this planet isn’t, not any more. Viktor!” She studied him suspiciously for a moment. “Do you want to be back on the shit detail?” she demanded suddenly.

“No, no, not at all!” Viktor said hastily. Reesa was giving him that look again, and he knew when to surrender. Still, he was beginning to suspect that the new assignment might not altogether be a blessing. He might find himself wishing he were back enjoying the comparatively relaxed conversation with the children in the mushroom cave, because he was beginning to be convinced that his new boss, Tortee, was a certifiable nut. “The only thing that’s worrying me,” he said, feeling his way, “is what are we going to do about the part of Nebo that shoots at us? Nebo’s not exactly
inviting
us to come down and start living there. It’s been pretty good at keeping us out.”

“Anything worth having,” Tortee said firmly, “is worth fighting for. I’ve thought all that out. We can patch
Ark
with what’s left of
Mayflower,
then all we have to do is put in some weapons.”

“But—” Viktor began, meaning to finish the sentence by stating the certain fact that neither he nor Reesa knew anything about installing weapons in a spaceship; he didn’t get the chance. Reesa was in ahead of him.

“Right, Tortee. That’s our first job,” she said quickly. “We’ll have to have help, of course; I expect there’s somebody who can assist in designing rockets that can be launched from orbit. And we’ll need to know what the targets are; you have survey tapes to show where the attacks came from, I guess?”