Collected Short Fiction, page 588
A rock rolled under my foot, on the brushy slope. I stumbled., and lost Eon. When I reached the ring of posts, he was inside. Something was smouldering on the black altar stone, and he was on his knees, scratching with a stick in the dust before it.
I stopped outside the posts, afraid.
Eon stood up, and stepped into the pentacle he had drawn. He was murmuring something I couldn’t quite hear. Smoke billowed up from the altar. It filled the circle of posts, and blew out into my eyes. The mound seemed to tremble under me, as if from an earthquake shock.
And the altar stone was gone.
Beyond the row of posts lay another, larger stone. Carol Wakeman was sitting on it, beneath a flowering tree. She wore a lei of flowers, and she was feeding flowers to a fearsome beast that she clearly didn’t fear.
“Carol!” Eon was shouting. “Can you hear me?”
She heard him. I saw her luminous smile, as she tossed the flowers to her monstrous pet and jumped up to meet him. Incredibly, across the unimaginable lightyears, I heard her joyous voice.
“Darling, darling—”
The smoke was in my eyes again. It swirled away, and left the blackened altar stone where it had been before. Carol and Eon were gone, with all their unknown world. I stood for a long time staring at the pentacle scratched in the dust, before I stumbled back down the mound, to begin trying to learn that two plus two can sometimes equal infinity.
THE END
Operation: Gravity
It has long been contended that one of the true impossibilities expressed in science-fiction is the concept of an anti-gravity device. In the 1890’s, the famous astronomer Garrett P. Serviss wrote a newspaper serial, entitled “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” in which he theorized that gravity was related to electricity and therefore could be short-circuited or neutralized. Einstein’s latest theory attempts to merge both forces into the same equation. Yet the truth is that at present we simply have no concept of the nature of gravity. If, as in this story, we should have the opportunity of studying gravity under special conditions, we may arrive at an understanding that will make science-fiction notions about gravitation a possibility.
HE CAME ABOARD at Jupiter Station. A withered little old man, with nearsighted eyes and untidy white hair. He looked innocent enough, with his absent-minded smile, but the moment he opened his mouth I knew he was the sort of civilian egg-brain who always wants to wreck the fine old traditions of the Guard.
“Barron?” He was squinting dimly at the captain’s insignia on my uniform, but he didn’t use my title. “Name’s Knedder. I want to look over your ship.”
I was about to inform him that the Starhawk was a fighting vessel and not a museum for planet-hopping tourists, when I saw the armchair Admiral coming through the airlock behind him. I bit my tongue and saluted.
“Relax, Captain.” The Admiral returned my salute with a disgracefully slack waggle of his arm, and nodded respectfully at the sloppy little civilian. “This is the Doctor Knedder.”
I hadn’t known there were any Dr. Knedders at all, but I shook his limp hand and started to give him my standard tour for unavoidable civilians. No ship had a braver record than the Starhawk. Most people are impressed with the row of gold service awards on the bulkhead inside the lock, but Knedder wasn’t interested.
“This one’s the Blue Nova,” I was saying. “We won it in the Martian War—”
“Wars don’t matter.” He shrugged at the whole splendid history of the ship. “Let’s see your drive.”
“Sorry, sir,” I told him. “But most of our machinery is still classified—”
“Never mind that, Captain,” the Admiral interrupted. “Dr. Knedder’s out here to work with the Guard on a secret research mission. Operation Baby Giant. He has been fully cleared. Our orders are to give him all the help he asks for.”
I didn’t want anything to do with such civilian nincompoops or their idiotic projects, but the Admiral teas an Admiral. I led the way to the ship’s elevator. When we got to the reactor room, Knedder began prying into our equipment and asking questions.
“And what’s your propellant mass, Captain?”
“Ammonia in the tanks,” I told him. “It comes out broken down into nitrogen and hydrogen ions—”
“Dr. Knedder knows all about that,” the Admiral cut in. “He designed our new ion accelerators.”
“Very wasteful way to use atomic energy for flight through space.” Knedder shook his fluffy head regretfully, and asked another impertinent question. “Captain, what’s your top payload?”
“Depends entirely on the mission, sir.”
“Of course.” He nodded patiently, and stopped to scratch something on a pad before his blue, shortsighted eyes came back to me. “Suppose your mission is to carry forty tons of equipment and three technicians to a point in space fifteen billion miles out from the sun?”
“A crazy question.” I saw the Admiral’s face, and tried to moderate my tone. “What I mean, sir, the Starhawk wasn’t designed for interstellar flight—”
“No ion ship is good enough for that.” Knedder didn’t seem offended, but he was persistent. “But I understood that you could carry us fifteen billion miles out. Right?”
“That’s about the limit of our cruising range.” I tried to be polite about it. “With no extra passengers and no extra load.”
“Can’t trim another ounce off our impedimenta.” Knedder stood tugging at the leathery lobe of his outsized ear, with a dreamy look on his dried-up face. “But how many tons of weapons do you carry?”
“That’s restricted—”
The Admiral cleared his throat. “Please answer, Captain.”
“Twelve point four mass-tons of mounted armament.” I tried hard to swallow my natural indignation. “Eighteen-point-seven tons of ammunition and missiles in all categories.”
“Only thirty-one tons.” In a worried way, Knedder combed his knobby fingers back through his straggling mop of hair, without improving its appearance. “Something else will have to go.” He clapped his hands together. “How about your radar range finders?”
“Four point two mass-tons in the electronic detection gear.” I couldn’t help flinching. “Three-point-seven tons in the cybernetic fire control.”
“One more to go.” He scowled and scribbled on his pad, humming through his nose in a way that annoyed me. “Let’s have a look in your ammunition room.”
I saw what was coming, but there was nothing I could do about it but follow Knedder meekly through the ship and hold the end of a steel tape while he measured bulkheads and deck space. Finally he looked up at me, with a preoccupied nod.
“Okay, Barron,” he said. “Your ship will have to do.”
“Do?” I forgot to be polite. “For what?”
“You ought to feel honored, Captain,” the Admiral put in hastily. “Dr. Knedder is choosing the Starhawk for a mission that is certain to become a milestone in space history. We can tell you now that you are going out beyond the orbit of Pluto, to search for an undiscovered planet. We plan to name it Cerberus.”
I came very near exploding. The Guard was formed to protect and assist space commerce, not to chase down imaginary planets.
“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed,” I told Knedder, when I could trust myself to speak. “A dozen expeditions have gone out to look for trans-Plutonian planets since I’ve been in the Guard. Most of them never came back. The few that did hadn’t found a thing.”
“But I know what we’re looking for.” Knedder was impervious to common sense. “I know the approximate mass and position of Cerberus, calculated from the way it affects the orbits of Pluto and Neptune.”
“Hasn’t that been tried before?”
“The planet’s heavier and farther away than anybody else has ever suspected,” Knedder said. “More massive than Jupiter. It has a highly eccentric orbit, inclined almost ninety degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. For a thousand years at a time, it’s too far off to have any measurable effect on the nearer planets. Now it’s back near perihelion.”
WE WERE STANDING near the starboard turret, and Knedder turned to the Admiral with a restless gesture at the missile launchers and the long space rifles mounted there.
“No time to waste,” he said. “Rip out that junk.”
“Junk?” Something choked me. I might have hit him, old and harmless as he looked, but the Admiral caught my arm.
“Very well, sir,” he told Knedder. “We’ll have demolition crews on the job in an hour.”
“Good,” Knedder said. “My equipment’s ready at the dock.”
I felt relieved when I saw him pocket his tape and turn to go; I’d had just about all I could take from him.
“And thank you, Barron.” He beamed at me stupidly. “We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, and I want you to know that I’m happy to be in the hands of such a competent officer.”
If he had actually been in my hands, I could have twisted his scrawny neck without a qualm. As things stood, I could only inquire just what he meant to do with his forty tons of cargo.
“Our special equipment is designed for special methods of search,” he said. “Others, as you know, have investigated every visible object bigger than Phobos, within twenty billion miles of the sun. It follows that the vast mass of Cerberus must be in some way invisible.”
“Invisible?” I stared at him. “If it’s larger than Jupiter—”
“My theory—” Knedder checked himself, looking mysterious.
“Dr. Knedder’s theory is classified top secret,” the Admiral put in quickly. “You are to be informed only about those details that appear to be essential to the efficient performance of your duties.”
I escorted them off the ship, and went back to take a farewell look at the guns and missiles I loved, before the wreckers came.
They carried out the ammunition, hoisted out the missiles, dismantled the launchers, ripped out the rifles, knocked out the bulkheads, cut out the gun decks, tore out all the radar and cybernetic gear that had been the keen eyes and the cold nerves and the fighting brain of a living ship. Saws whined and hammers crashed and cutting torches hissed until my own guts felt sick.
Knedder’s two assistants came aboard with his secret equipment. Dr. Jefferson was a tall, trembling, dark-skinned skeleton. He looked too feeble to survive the ten-month round trip. I advised Knedder to send him back to an Earthside rest home, and find a younger helper.
“Brain’s still good,” Knedder was irritatingly patient and stubbornly sure of himself. “Astrophysicist. Traced Cerberus across astronomical plates exposed a hundred years ago. Brilliant job. I want him with us.”
I resigned myself to Dr. Jefferson, and asked how an invisible planet could have been photographed.
“Wasn’t,” Knedder murmured gently. “Gravity field bends light rays. Displaces images of stars beyond it. Slight effect, but enough for Jefferson. Brainy. Can’t do without him.”
Dr. Ming, the other assistant, was a plump Eurasian girl with thick-lensed glasses that seemed to magnify her sad black eyes. She was attractive: my crewmen whistled when they saw her come aboard. I called Knedder aside, and told him as courteously as possible that I couldn’t allow a woman passenger on the Starhawk.
“Guess Ming is a woman.” He nodded absently, as if that fact had never occurred to him before and didn’t matter now. “Also the greatest mathematician alive. Better than all your cybernetic brains. Absolutely essential to the project.”
I went to the Admiral. He made an unkind joke about my age, and advised me to make the best of her. That left me no choice, and I must admit that she was no trouble.
As a matter of fact, I seldom saw her. The special equipment for Operation Baby Giant came aboard packed in heavy crates or thickly wrapped in opaque plastics, and Knedder posted keep out signs outside all the compartments where he was setting it up. He and his people stayed inside, and kept all the doors secured with new combination locks.
That fed me up. When I found myself locked out of half my own ship, I decided to ask for reassignment. With thirty years in the Guard, I thought I knew how inside thrust is applied, but I received a heartbreaking shock.
“Request for reassignment unfavorably considered,” Luna station messaged me through channels, after a strange delay. “Impossible to replace you with officer of adequate experience. You will continue with Knedder mission.”
A second message informed me that Operation Baby Giant had been re-evaluated to crash repeat crash priority. How an insignificant little civilian could swing so much thrust was something I didn’t understand, but I saw that Knedder had me trapped aboard my own ship, like a galley slave.
His secret gear, when it was all weighed aboard, came to forty-two-point-nine mass-tons. Every item was essential, he insisted, and the Admiral backed him up. I had to leave half my regular crew behind and cut our supplies to the bone to get the lift and load sheets into any reasonable kind of balance.
The ship was still heavy when we finally nosed out of the station. One-point-six tons of overload—all of it Knedder’s mysterious gear. I could feel it, in the sluggish way the Starhawk answered to her jets.
One-point-six tons of trouble.
Not that it was obvious to anybody else, on the outbound trip. We dropped around Jupiter, picking up acceleration, and slipped smoothly enough into our plotted orbit for Knedder’s insane destination. Even with only our skeleton crew to work the ship, she never faltered or grumbled.
But all the time those tons of overload were eating up more tons of precious reaction-mass. The shape of trouble was plain enough to me, on every chart and meter. Fifteen billion miles was going to be a long way home.
KNEDDER SPENT most of the long voyage out locked up in his own compartments. That was probably just as well, because even his dreamy-eyed smile had begun to get on my nerves. He was always too amiable and too deeply absorbed in his own scientific fairylands. His patient good humor became unendurable.
We emptied the main tanks, braking toward his destination point. Sweating over the charts, I calculated that we could limp back to Jupiter on the emergencies before our supplies ran out, with just about enough ammonia left over to make a baby sneeze.
I knew Knedder was searching with all that secret gear, but I kept my own eyes open. We were still three million miles from his destination point when I picked up an object there. Even though it seemed to be just a small asteroid, I was considerably surprised to find anything at all. I called Knedder on the intercom, and he came to the control room.
“That’s Cerberus, all right.” He nodded calmly at the tiny blip glowing in the ’scope. “We first observed it a week ago.”
“That’s no planet!” I told him. “It can’t be ten miles in diameter.”
“About eight miles,” he said. “But Ming has just recomputed its mass, from the gravitational displacement of stellar images that Jefferson has been measuring. It’s a little more massive than all the other planets combined.”
“Huh?” I stared at him. “What’s that heavy?”
“Nuclear fluid,” he said. “Collapsed atoms, stripped of orbital electrons. Stuff with a trillion times the density of ordinary matter. Final state of matter, in dead stars. Properly speaking, that’s what Cerberus is. Dwarf star. Black cinder of a burned-out sun. No native member of our solar family. Orbit indicates a fairly recent capture.”
I leaned to study the faint greenish speck in the ’scope, trying to imagine a planet larger than Jupiter squeezed into something smaller than Phobos. That was hard to do. I had never felt that any such notions had much to do with the efficient operation of the Starhawk, but alarm caught me now.
“If all that’s true—” I tried to swallow a sudden tremor in my voice. “If that thing’s really so massive, hadn’t we better keep away?”
“On the contrary—” Knedder’s dreamy eyes squinted at me till I shivered. “Cerberus has provided us with a natural gravitic laboratory, equipped with a field millions of times more intense than we can hope to reach anywhere else. Operation Baby Giant was organized and equipped to make use of it. I want you to take us within four hundred miles, at our first approach.”
For an instant I was stunned beyond protest. We were in free fall, and some involuntary movement sent me into the air. I caught at a guide rail, and finally steadied myself enough to make a rough mental calculation.
“Four hundred miles!” I hung staring at Knedder, trying to think I had misunderstood him. “That close in, the field intensity must be something like forty thousand gravities!”
“Fifty thousand.” He was grinning like a kid with an unexpected Christmas gift. “Scientific instruments have never been carried into such a field before.”
“How do you think we could pull away, against fifty thousand gravities?” I glared at him. “Even if we weren’t squashed flat!”
“We’ll still be in free fall,” he answered. “So we won’t feel any force at all. And it won’t be necessary to pull away with the jets. If you take us around on a parabolic orbit, with the perihelion at four hundred miles, our own momentum will lift us out again.”
“Theoretically it might,” I had to agree. “But I don’t care to gamble my ship on it. I’ll take you around at five thousand miles. That’s risky enough.” I’d thought I was still in command, and I knew we were some four months and thirteen billion miles beyond the present limits of radio communication, so that Knedder couldn’t go over my head to any papershuffling admiral. But he had one more bitter surprise for me. Apologetically, he handed me a sealed envelope.
“Sorry, Barron,” he said. “But your headquarters gave me this, for use if necessary.”
The official envelope was addressed to me, from Luna Station. The letter inside informed me that Dr. Knedder had been commissioned a temporary officer of the Guard, with the rank of admiral. The top brass was certain that I would co-operate faithfully toward every aim of Operation Baby Giant. That was a sickening kick, but I managed to come to attention.
