“Oh three oh four.” Garner looked out at the stars. “No Neptune. Why?”
“Just a sec.” Anderson fooled with the attitude jets. The ship swung around. Neptune was a blue-green ball, dim in the faint sunlight. Usually a world that close is awe-inspiring, if not blinding. This world only looked terribly cold. “There it is. What’ll I do with it?”
“Put us in a search orbit and start scanning with the radar. Can you set it to search for something as dense as dwarf star matter?”
“You mean, set it to search below the crust? Will do, Captain.”
“Anderson?”
“Uh huh?” He was already at work on the instrument panel.
“You will remember that we have a time limit?”
Anderson grinned at him. “I can put this thing in a forced orbit and finish the search in five hours. Okay?”
“Great.” Luke started punching for breakfast.
“There’s just one thing. We’ll be in free fall some of the time. Can you take it?”
“Sure.”
Anderson moved in. When he finished, the ship balanced nose down, one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a force of more or less one gee. The “more or less” came from Anderson’s constant readjustments.
“Now don’t worry,” Anderson told him. “I’m trying keep us out of the atmosphere, but if we do happen to land in the soup all I have to do is turn off the motor. The motor is all that’s holding us in this tight orbit. We’d fall straight up into outer space.”
“So that’s what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?”
“Well, on a map it would look like I’m following lines of longitude. I’ll turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we can keep changing our line of search. We can’t just let the planet turn under us. It would take almost sixteen hours.”
The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below—more or less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the ward horizon, which on the radar screen looked like stratified air. It was solid rock.
“Understand, this is just to find out if it’s there,” Anderson said an hour later. “If we see a blob, we’ll have pinned within five hundred miles. That’s all.”
“That’s all we need.”
At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He ached from shoulders to fingertips. “It’s not there,” he said wearily. “Now what?”
“Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed toward Nereid and turn off the drive.”
The bright stars that were two fusion-drive spacecraft were too close to the tiny Sun to be easily seen. Anderson couldn’t even find the Golden Circle. But Greenberg’s ship came steadily on, blue and brightening at the edge of the Sun’s golden corona. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour path to Nereid, Neptune’s outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg’s light grew brighter.
At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering. “Do we start shooting?” Anderson wanted to know.
“I think not. Let’s see where he’s going.”
They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.
“He’s not coming toward Nereid,” said Anderson. They were both whispering, for some reason.
“Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it’s in orbit. Could it be in orbit after that long?”
“Missile’s tracking,” Anderson whispered.
Greenberg was past Triton before he started to decelerate. “In orbit?” wondered Garner. “He must have nuts.”
Twenty minutes later Greenberg’s ship was a wiggling between the horns of Neptune’s cold blue crescent. They watched its slow crawl toward one of the horns. He was in a forced orbit, covering a search pattern of surface. “Now what?” Anderson asked.
“We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can’t understand it.”
“I swear it’s not on Neptune.”
“Uh, oh.” Garner pointed. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” A tiny spear of light was going by the lighted edge of the planet.
The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first time Kzanol regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the eighth planet when he had the chance, some two billion years ago. He asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about two and a half.
Kzanol stood at one of the small windows, his jaw just above the lower edge, his leathery lips drawn back in a snarl of worry. Not long now! One way or another. For the pilot was nudging the ship into a search orbit.
Someone was already there.
It was the half-asleep free slave he’d passed at the halfway point. He was almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.
The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.
And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which simply didn’t have the power?
He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets, wings, and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn’t think of a way back up.
Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present setting his radar would have shown Kzanol’s ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn’t.
“Why isn’t the other ship searching too?” Anderson wondered. “It’s just floating.”
“Ordinarily,” said Garner, thinking out loud, “I’d think they were in cahoots. There’s no need for them both to search. But how—? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he’s letting them do his job for him without their knowing it.”
“Wouldn’t the job get done quicker if they both searched?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if this alien isn’t the aristocrat’s aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he’s a master…But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?
“Look, son, why don’t you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in.”
One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.
Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small, cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los Angeles. Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle. He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.
He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner’s duty. There was a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments. For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the Arms. Smoky never forgave him.
One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn no
se out and keep driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.
He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.
Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner’s voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.
For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reason to be there.
Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser “cannon.” The war of the worlds was here at last!
Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn’t there!
He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.
A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton’s surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.
“So that’s it!” Anderson’s face glowed. “They thought it was on the surface and it wasn’t. Now they don’t know where it is!” He frowned in thought. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? The honeymooner’s aiming itself at Nereid, and we’re too close for comfort.”
“Right,” said Garner. “But first we turn the missile loose. The one that’s homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.”
“I hate to do it. There’re two other people on the Golden Circle.” A moment passed. Lengthened. “I can’t move,” said Anderson. “It’s that third button under the blue light.”
But Luke couldn’t move either.
“Who’d have thought he could reach this far?” he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn’t help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.
To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.
Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.
Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years. But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what he asked. The Brain—which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the Power—had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space at .97 light. By now it would be beyond the curve of the universe.
He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage, automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol’s jaws closed and his head drooped between his massive shoulders.
All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time—and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.
Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.
“One…two…I can’t find Garner’s ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.”
“Funny he hasn’t called us. I hope nothing’s happened to him.”
“We’d have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.”
When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.
Kzanol’s pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper’s ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed-the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn’t want to risk their lives by letting them help the sleeper.
Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door swung open and a slave walked in.
A slave with a mind shield.
“Hi!” it said, incomprehensibly in English. “I guess we’ll need a translator.” And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it stopped and gestured—with Kzanol’s disintegrator.
A man of Leeman’s talent and education should never have been given such a boring job. Leeman knew it could never have happened in the Belt. Someday soon he would migrate to the Belt, where he would be appreciated.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Leeman was the foreman of the Lazy Eight III’s skeleton maintenance crew.
Leeman envied the crew of the other section, the drive section at Hamburg. Busybodies with good intentions were constantly ordering minor changes in the starship’s drive while they waited for politics to let them launch. The Lazy Eight III’s life system hadn’t been altered in two years.
Until today.
Now Leeman and his three subordinates watched a horde of technicians doing strange things to the number three “stateroom.” A complete balloon of fine wire mesh was being strung over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Heavy machinery was being welded to what would be the ship’s floor and was now the outer wall. Taps were let into the power system. Leeman and his men found themselves running errands through the ring-shaped corridor, bringing coffee and sandwiches and detail diagrams, tools and testing machinery and cigarettes. They had no idea what was going on. The newcomers were willing to answer questions, but the answers were gibberish. As:
“We’ll be able to triple the number of passengers!” said the man with a head like a speckled brown egg. He shook an ammeter for emphasis. “Triple!”
How?
The man waved his ammeter to include the room. “We’ll have them standing in here like rush-hour commuters in an elevator,” he confided. When Leeman accused him of levity he became mortally offended and refused to say another word.
By the end of the day Leeman felt like a flatworm in a four-dimensional maze.
Somehow he managed it so that the entire group went to dinner together, for mutual brain-picking. Things became clearer during dinner. Leeman’s ears went up when he heard the phrase “retarder field.”
Dinner turned into a party. It was almost two hundred before Leeman could make a phone call. The other man almost hung up. But Leeman knew the words to stop him.
The Lings’ first honeymoon had been spent at Reno, Nevada, thirty years ago. Since then Ling Wu had become rich in wholesale pharmaceuticals. Recen
tly the Fertility Board had granted the couple the rare privilege of having more than two children. And here they were.
Here, before the crystal wall of the main dance bubble, looking out and down at a ringed and banded world. They didn’t hear the music behind them. It was magic music, the sound of imagination, brought to life by the wild, desert loveliness before them. Soft curves of ice ran out to a horizon like the lip of a nearby cliff; and above the cliff hung a bauble, a decoration, an aesthetic wonder such as no habitable world has ever known.
Ask an amateur astronomer about Saturn. He won’t just tell you; he’ll drag out his telescope and show you. He’ll break your arm to show you.
Ling Dorothy, fourth generation San Franciscan, pushed the palms of her hands against the crystal wall as if half wanting them to go through. “Oh, I hope. I hope,” she said, “I hope it never comes for us!”
“What, Dot?” Ling Wu smiled up at her, for she was an inch taller than he was.
“The Golden Circle.”
“It’s five days late already. I love it here too, but I’d hate to think people died just to let us stay a little longer.”
“Haven’t you heard, Wu? Mrs. Willing was just telling me that somebody stole the Golden Circle right off the spaceport field!”
“Mrs. Willing is a romantic.”
“Givvv me ti’, givvv me ti’,” Charley mimicked. “First Larrry, then ’Arrnerr. Time is all we get. Do they want the stars all for themselves?”
“I think you underrate them,” said the older dolphin.
“Surely there’s room for both of us on any world.” Charley hadn’t been listening. “They practically didn’t know we were here until a short time ago. We could be useful, I know we could.”
“Why shouldn’t they have time? Do you know how much time they themselves needed?”
“What do you mean?”
“The first walker story about a trip to the moon is thousands of years old. They didn’t get there until a hundred and fifty years ago. Have a little patience,” said the one with the worn teeth and the scarred jaw.