Collected Short Fiction, page 383
STRAINED hours dragged by. The Astrarch’s fleet decelerated, to circle and bombard the mother world, after the battle was done. The Earth ships came out at full normal acceleration.
“They must stop,” the Astrarch said. “That is our advantage. If they go by us at any great velocity, we’ll have the planet bombed into submission before they can return. They must turn back—and then we’ll pick them off.”
Puzzlingly, however, the Earth fleet kept up acceleration, and a slow apprehension grew in the heart of Brek Veronar. There was but one explanation. The Earth men were staking the life of their planet on one brief encounter.
As if certain of victory!
The hour of battle neared. Tight achronic beams relayed telephoned orders from the Astrarch’s chart-room, and the fleet deployed into battle formation—into the shape of an immense shallow bowl, so that every possible gun could be trained upon the enemy.
The hour—and the instant!
Startling in the huge dim space that housed the autosight, crackling out above the whirring of the achron-integrator, the speaker that was the great brain’s voice counted off the minutes.
“Minus four—”
The autosight was set, the pickups tuned, the director relays tested, a thousand details checked. Behind the control table, Brek Veronar tried to relax. His part was done.
A space battle was a conflict of machines. Human beings were too puny, too slow, even to comprehend the play of the titanic forces they had set loose. Brek tried to remember that he was the autosight’s inventor; he fought an oppression of helpless dread.
“Minus three—”
Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers—for the autosight removed the need of telescopic eyes, and enabled ships to fight from deep smoke screens.
“Minus two—”
The two fleets came together at a relative velocity of twelve hundred thousand miles an hour. Maximum useful range of twenty-inch guns, even with the autosight, was only twenty thousand miles in free space.
Which meant, Brek realized, that the battle could last just two minutes. In that brief time lay the destinies of Astrarchy and Earth—and Tomy Grimm’s and Elora’s and his own.
“Minus one—”
The sodium screens made little puffs and trails of silver in the great black cube. The six Earth ships were visible behind them, through the magic of the achronic field pickups, now spaced in a close ring, ready for action.
Brek Veronar looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist—a gift from the Astrarch. Listening to the rising hum of the achron-integrators, he caught his breath, tensed instinctively.
“Zero!”
The Warrior Queen began quivering to her great guns, a salvo of four firing every half-second. Brek breathed again, watching the chronometer. That was all he had to do. And in two minutes—
The vessel shuddered, and the lights went out. Sirens wailed, and air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. And abruptly the cube of the stereo screen was dark. The achron-integrators clattered and stopped.
The guns ceased to thud.
“Power!” Brek gasped into a telephone. “Give me power! Emergency! The autosight has stopped and—”
But the telephone was dead.
There were no more bits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent. After an eternal lime, feeble emergency lights came on. Brek looked again at his chronometer, and knew that the battle was ended.
But who the victor?
He tried to hope that the battle had been won before some last chance broadside crippled the flagship—until the Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.
“Crushed,” he muttered. “You failed me, Veronar.”
“What are the losses?” whispered Brek.
“Everything.” The shaken ruler dropped wearily at the control table. “Your achronic beams are dead. Five ships remain able to report defeat by radio. Two of them hope to make repairs.
“The Queen is disabled. Reaction batteries shot away, and main power plant dead. Repair is hopeless. And our present orbit will carry us far too close to the Sun. None of our ships able to undertake rescue. We’ll be baked alive.” His perfumed dark head sank hopelessly. “In those two minutes, the Astrarchy was destroyed.” His hollow, smoldering eyes lifted resentfully to Brek. “Just two minutes!” He crushed a soft white fist against the table. “If time could be recaptured—”
“How were we beaten?” demanded Brek. “I can’t understand!”
“Marksmanship,” said the tired Astrarch. “Tony Grimm has something better than your autosight. He shot us to pieces before we could find the range.” His face was a pale mask of bitterness. “If my agents had employed him, twenty years ago, instead of you—” He bit blood from his lip. “But the past cannot be changed.”
Brek was staring at the huge, silent bulk of the autosight. “Perhaps”—he whispered—“it can be!” Trembling, the Astrarch rose to clutch his arm. “You spoke of that before,” gasped the agitated ruler. “Then I wouldn’t listen. But now—try anything you can, Veronar. To save us from roasting alive, at perihelion. Do you really think—” The Astrarch shook his pale head. “I’m the madman,” he whispered. “To speak of changing even two minutes of the past!” His hollow eyes clung to Brek. “Though you have done amazing things, Veronar.”
The Earthman continued to stare at his huge creation. “The autosight itself brought me one clue, before the battle,” he breathed slowly. “The detector fields caught a beam of Tony Grimm’s, and analyzed the frequencies. He’s using achronic radiation a whole octave higher than anything I’ve tried. That must be the way to the sensitivity and penetration I have hoped for.”
Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes. “You believe you can save us? How?!”
“If the high-frequency beam can search out the determiner factors,” Brek told him, “it might be possible to alter them, with a sufficiently powerful field. Remember that we deal with probabilities, not with absolutes. And that small factors can determine vast results.
“The pick-ups will have to be rebuilt. And we’ll have to have power. Power to project the tracer fields. And a river of power—if we can trace out a decisive factor and attempt to change it. But the power plants are dead.”
“Rebuild your pick-ups,” the Astrarch told him. “And you’ll have power—if I have to march every man aboard into the conversion furnaces, for fuel.”
Calm again, and confident, the short man surveyed the tall, gaunt Earthman with wondering eyes.
“You’re a strange individual, Veronar,” he said. “Fighting time and destiny to crush the planet of your birth! It isn’t strange that men call you the Renegade.”
Silent for a moment, Brek shook his haggard head. “I don’t want to be baked alive,” he said at last. “Give me power—and we’ll fight that battle again.”
THE WRECK dropped Sunward. A score of expert technicians toiled, under Brek’s expert direction, to reconstruct the achronic pick-ups. And a hundred men labored, beneath the ruthless eye of the Astrarch himself, to repair the damaged atomic converters.
They had crossed the orbit of Venus, when the autosight came back to humming life. The Astrarch was standing beside Brek, at the curved control table. The shadow of doubt had returned to his reddened, sleepless eyes. “Now,” he demanded, “what can you do about the battle?”
“Nothing, directly,” Brek admitted. “First we must search the past. We must find the factor that caused Tony Grimm to invent a better autosight than mine. With the high-frequency field—and the full power of the ship’s converters, if need be—we must reverse that factor. Then the battle should have a different outcome.”
The achron-integrators whirred, as Brek manipulated the controls, and the huge black cube began to flicker with the passage of ghostly images. Symbols of colored fire flashed and vanished within it.
“Well?” anxiously rasped the Astrarch.
“It works!” Brek assured him. “The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will isolate the smallest—and hence most easily altered—essential factor.”
The Astrarch gripped his shoulder. “There—in the cube—yourself!”
The ghostly shape of the Earthman flickered out, and came again. A hundred times, Brek Veronar glimpsed himself in the cube. Usually the scene was the great arsenal laboratory, at Astrophon. Always he was differently garbed, always younger.
Then the background shifted. Brek caught his breath as he recognized glimpses of barren, stony, ocher-colored hills, and low. yellow adobe buildings. He gasped to see a freckled, red-haired youth and a slim, tanned, dark-eyed girl.
“That’s on Mars!” he whispered. “At Toran. He’s Tony Grimm. And she’s Elora Ronee—the Martian girl we loved.”
The racing flicker abruptly stopped, upon one frozen tableau. A bench on the dusty campus, against a low adobe wall. Elora Ronee, with a pile of books propped on her knees to support pen and paper. Her dark eyes were staring away across the campus, and her sun-browned face looked tense and troubled.
In the huge dim room aboard the wrecked warship, a gong throbbed softly. A red arrow flamed in the cube, pointing down at the note on the girl’s knee. Cryptic symbols flashed above it. And Brek realized that the humming of the achron-integrators had stopped.
“What’s this?” rasped the anxious Astrarch. “A schoolgirl writing a note—what has she to do with a space battle?”
Brek scanned the fiery symbols. “She was deciding the battle—that lay twenty years ago!” His voice rang with elation. “You see, she had a date to go dancing in Toran with Tony Grimm that night. But her father was giving a special lecture on the new theories of achronic force. Tony broke the date, to attend the lecture.”
As Brek watched the motionless image in the cube, his voice turned a little husky. “Elora was angry—that was before she knew Tony very well. I had asked her for a date. And, at the moment you see, she has just written a note, to say that she would go dancing with me.”
Brek gulped. “But she is undecided, you see. Because she loves Tony. A very little would make her tear up the note to me, and write another to Tony, to say that she would go to the lecture with him.”
The Astrarch stared cadaverously. “But how could that decide the battle?”
“In the past that we have lived,” Brek told him, “Elora sent the note to me. I went dancing with her, and missed the lecture. Tony attended it—and got the germ idea that finally caused his autosight to be better than mine.
“But, if she had written to Tony instead, he would have offered, out of contrition, to cut the lecture—so the analyzers indicate. I should have attended the lecture in Tony’s place, and my autosight would have been superior in the end.”
The Astrarch’s waxen head nodded slowly. “But—can you really change the past?”
Brek paused for a moment, solemnly. “We have all the power of the ship’s converters,” he said at last. “We have the high-frequency achronic field, as a lever through which to apply it. Surely, with the millions of kilowatts to spend, we can stimulate a few cells in a schoolgirl’s brain. We shall see.”
His long, pale fingers moved swiftly over the control keys. At last, deliberately, he touched a green button. The converters whispered again through the silent ship. The achron-integrators whirred again. Beyond, giant transformers began to whine.
And that still tableau came to sudden life.
Elora Ronee tore up the note that began, “Dear Bill—” Brek and the Astrarch leaned forward, as her trembling fingers swiftly wrote: “Dear Tony—I’m so sorry that I was angry. May I come with you to father’s lecture? Tonight—”
The image faded.
“MINUS four—”
The metallic rasp of the speaker brought Brek Veronar to himself with a start. Could he have been dozing—with contact just four minutes away? He shook himself. He had a queer, unpleasant feeling—as if he had forgotten a nightmare dream in which the battle was fought and lost.
He rubbed his eyes, scanned the control board. The autosight was set, the pick-ups were tuned, the director relays tested. His part was done. He tried to relax the puzzling tension in him.
“Minus three—”
Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers. Staring into the black cube of the screen, Brek found once more the six tiny black motes of Tony Grimm’s ships. He couldn’t help an uneasy shake of his head.
Was Tony mad? Why didn’t he veer aside, delay the contact? Scattered in space, his ships could harry the Astrarchy’s commerce, and interrupt bombardment of the Earth. But, in a head-on battle, they were doomed.
Brek listened to the quiet hum of the achron-integrators. Under these conditions, the new autosight gave an accuracy of fire of forty percent. Even if Tony’s gunnery was perfect, the odds were still two to one against him.
“Minus two—”
Two minutes! Brek looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist. For a moment he had an odd feeling that the design was unfamiliar. Strange, when he had worn it for twenty years.
The dial blurred a little. He remembered the day that Tony and Elora gave it to him—the day he left the university to come to Astrophon. It was too nice a gift. Neither of them had much money.
He wondered if Tony had ever guessed his love for Elora. Probably it was better that she had always declined his attentions. No shadow of jealousy had ever come over their friendship.
“Minus one—”
“This wouldn’t do! Half angrily, Brek jerked his eyes back to the screen. Still, however, in the silvery sodium clouds, he saw the faces of Tony and Elora. Still he couldn’t forget the oddly unfamiliar pressure of the chronometer on his wrist—it was like the soft touch of Elora’s fingers, when she had fastened it there.
Suddenly the black flecks in the screen were not targets any more. Brek caught a long gasping breath. After all, he was an Earthman. After twenty years in the Astrarch’s generous pay, this timepiece was still his most precious possession.
His gray eyes narrowed grimly. Without the autosight, the Astrarch’s fleet would be utterly blind in the sodium clouds. Given any sort of achronic range finder, Tony Grimm could wipe it out.
Brek’s gaunt body trembled. Death, he knew, would be the sure penalty. In the battle or afterward—it didn’t matter. He knew that he would accept it without regret.
“Zero!”
The achron-integrators were whirring busily, and the Warrior Queen quivered to the first salvo of her guns. Then Brek’s clenched fists came down on the carefully set keyboard. The autosight stopped humming. The guns ceased to fire.
Brek picked up the Astrarch’s telephone. “I’ve stopped the autosight.” His voice was quiet and low. “It is quite impossible to set it again in two minutes.”
The telephone clicked and was dead.
THE VESSEL shuddered and the lights went out. Sirens wailed. Air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. Presently, there were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent.
The tiny racing tick of the chronometer was the only sound.
After an eternal time, feeble emergency lights came on. The Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.
A group of spacemen followed him. Their stricken, angry faces made an odd contrast with their gay uniforms. Before I heir vengeful hatred, Brek felt cold and ill. But the Astrarch stopped their ominous advance.
“The Earthman has doomed himself as well,” the shaken ruler told them. “There’s not much more that you can do. And certainly no haste about it.”
He left them muttering at the door and came slowly to Brek.
“Crushed,” he whispered. “You destroyed me, Veronar.” A trembling hand wiped at the pale waxen mask of his face. “Everything is lost. The Queen disabled. None of our ships able to undertake rescue. We ll be baked alive.”
His hollow eyes stared dully at Brek. “In those two minutes, you destroyed the Astrarchy.” His voice seemed merely tired, strangely without bitterness. “Just two minutes,” he murmured wearily. “If time could be recaptured—”
“Yes,” Brek said, “I stopped the autosight.” He lifted his gaunt shoulders defiantly, and met the menacing stares of the spacemen. “And they can do nothing about it?”
“Can you?” Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes.
“Once you told me, Veronar, that the past could be changed. Then I wouldn’t listen. But now—try anything you can. You might be able to save yourself from the unpleasantness that my men are planning.”
Looking at the muttering men, Brek shook his head. “I was mistaken,” he said deliberately. “I failed to take account of the two-way nature of time. But the future, I see now, is as real as the past. Aside from the direction of entropy change and the flow of consciousness, future and past cannot be distinguished.
“The future determines the past, as much as the past does the future. It is possible to trace out the determiner factors, and even, with sufficient power, to cause a local deflection of the geodesics. But world lines are fixed in the future, as rigidly as in the past. However the factors are rearranged, the end result will always be the same.”
The Astrarch’s waxen face was ruthless. “Then, Veronar, you are doomed.”
Slowly, Brek smiled. “Don’t call me Veronar,” he said softly. “I remembered, just in time, that I am William Webster, Earthman. You can kill me in any way you please. But the defeat of the Astrarchy and the new freedom of Earth are fixed in time—forever.”
Mistress of Machine-Age Madness
Like blood-drenched gravestones were those Subterrane signposts to Satan’s underground empire, and Weston Craig would transcend the brain-spanning scope of the mad scientist’s deadly disrupter disk to salvage Ann Tancred’s stark loveliness from the fiend’s lusting devices, and secure for the world of tomorrow modern science’s greatest invention!
