Gilpin's Space, page 23
Laure and 1 told Henry, and then set about our final inspections. We had planned an itinerary, and drilled the captains of the other two ships on it. The course for Laure’s World had been fed into each ship’s computer, not as a straight line, but tentatively in four stages. Laure had chosen three systems where we could rendezvous in normal space, and where we knew there were planets and their satellites on which to land. When the time came for us to pick up the Macartneys, Chris and Placek would take off ahead of us. Once they arrived at the first rendezvous point, they would shift into normal space, contact each other—and us, if we had made it. If we had not arrived, they were to land, compare notes, do what they could to help each other if necessary, and wait for us.
They were to wait only the equivalent of three Earth days. Then, if we still had not arrived, they were to give us up for lost and continue on.
It was not a pleasant prospect. Not even the bell at Lloyd’s would toll for us, and there would be no way for us to tell those we had left on Laure’s World what our fate had been—except that in our hearts we, Laure and I, knew with a terrible certainty that they would know.
Busy with all our last-minute preparations, every once in a while I’d find myself confronted by the undeniable craziness of the operation we were going to attempt. The idea of diving under a forty-five-foot sailing vessel, making certain she was properly positioned to ride in her cradle, surfacing, and then not just lashing her down like a whaler’s lifeboat but enveloping her in the wire cocoon that would enable her translation into Gilpin’s Space—well, as a once-practical naval officer, I found myself shuddering at the thought. Yet it could not be avoided. On Laure’s World, the ketch would be invaluable; so would whatever Alec had been able to load aboard. Even if we hadn’t had a commitment to him and to his family, we still would have had to try it.
We were to pick them up at between 11:00 and 12:00 p.m. GMT, which meant early morning in Taiwan; and the night before Henry entertained us all at a farewell supper at which, for the first time, the President of the Republic and Admiral Leong were present, to wish us well, to thank Laure for her gift, and to assure us that the Republic, at least, would continue to assert the complete freedom of Gilpin’s Space. A leave-taking on a long journey can be emotional enough; our leave-taking was of a different order. Everyone there, I know, was overawed by the vastness we were going to traverse, by its uncounted suns and worlds and beings, and by the knowledge that we were traveling, not just to a new and friendly world, but into an unknown forever. Few words were said. They had already been. Even Henry’s parting with Chris and his grandchildren was formal, almost muted. People shook hands more fervently than they ever had; they embraced people whom they had never embraced before. Even Franz didn’t promise to send anyone a postcard. Next morning, everything was business. We, on Owl, waited until Pussycat and Chris’ Young Unicorn had dissolved and disappeared. Then we too shifted into Gilpin’s Space. My last view of the dock that had sheltered us was Henry’s ghostly figure, standing there in its spectral ambience.
Presently, Owl was hovering motionless over the small harbor Alec had described to us.
From Gilpin’s Space, its every detail was, as always, eerily visible. Several fishing boats and a yacht or two were tied up to the single pier. Two or three similar vessels were anchored or tied to buoys. Some showed a riding light, but that was all, and I thanked our stars that no one was up partying. Alec’s ketch, Morveth, was anchored near the harbor’s mouth, scarcely moving in the slow, gentle sea-swell. Scattered cottages ashore showed no lights at all. Everything looked almost too favorable.
“Standing by?” I said to Latourette and Alwyss, and they nodded their readiness. So did Peter Dougall, who we’d found had some sea experience. It was going to be their job to place the two steel-cable tie-downs Henry had designed to hold the ketch as securely as cables hold enormous logs on lumber trucks, fasten them, tighten them down with turnbuckles, then spread the all-important cobweb from the mainmast head.
“Going down,” I said.
A moment later we were alongside Morveth. barely kissing the surface of the water—and instantly, almost without a ripple, we were in normal space. A summer stillness lay over the harbor, its cottages, its cliffs. The scene was starlit, with what remained of a pale moon. And suddenly, without warning or rhyme or reason, I felt intensely that eyes were watching us, unfriendly eyes.
Laure and I exchanged glances. “We’ll have to hurry!” she said grimly. “Geoff, I feel it, too.”
Latourette threw the personnel lock open, extruded the gangplank so that its end rested on Morveth aft of her low midships deckhouse. At once, Alec and his family were topside, bags, bundles, and a cat-carrier in their hands.
“Get ’em all in, Alec,” I told him, “fast as possible. We’ll get busy with the tie-downs.”
My anxiety was intensifying, becoming irrationally acute. Latourette and Alwyss jumped the three-foot gap between the ships, and I followed them. Peter Dougall came after us with the cobweb folded like a parachute. “Can you climb the mainmast?” I shouted at him.
“He won’t need to!” Alec shouted back. “We’ve a halyard ready!”
“Good man.”
He joined Dougall and the other two.
“First the tie-downs,” Alwyss said. “The web can wait till she’s out of the water.”
I turned, leaving them on Morveth’s deck, made sure all the Macartneys were safe inside, told Jamie to close the lock and suck the gangplank back, then joined Laure in the control tower. When the lights said yes, I let Owl submerge. The dark water enfolded us, and I turned on our underwater lights. Morveth’s graceful lines now were fully visible, and I saw, approvingly, that she was completely clean. I moved Owl ahead very carefully, brought the two ships into line, threw Owl’s engine into reverse, and very, very slowly backed her until I judged that Morveth’s bowsprit would come within a foot or two of our rear observation ports. Then, still very slowly, I began to surface. 1 felt Morveth touch her cradle, settle into it. I surfaced as quickly as I could.
Laure and I looked at each other. Everything was going beautifully.
And still everything was wrong.
“I’ll give the boys a hand,” I said. “The quicker we get this done the better.”
I went out through the lock onto the wet deck, and Laure followed me. So did young Jamie, and Norman, the oldest of Alec’s kids.
The world was silent, almost as silent as the still sea. Water dripped gently from Morveth’s hull. Somewhere ashore a small dog yapped petulantly twice, and once again. Dougall and Latourette were swinging down onto Owl’s deck. Alwyss was getting ready to pass them the tie-downs. I walked aft to where Alec had thrown over a Jacob’s ladder, and I climbed it, the kids right with me. Morveth’s standing rigging was of steel, and Alex was hoisting the packaged cobweb to the mainmast head; all we’d have to do when it was in place and the tiedowns secured was pull four ripcords, two amidships, one fore, one aft, make everything fast, and we’d be set.
From the direction of the pier, I heard—or thought I heard—the sound of oarlocks; and I tried to tell myself that probably some ancient fisherman ashore was getting curious. My anxiety was still upon me.
“Give us a hand with these lines!” Alec barked at the two boys. I took the one he handed me, and hurried aft, Jamie and Norman carrying theirs to port and starboard. “When I yell,” I told them, “we’ll all pull together. Then we’ll get back onto Owl’s deck and finish up.”
I had called over my shoulder as I ran past Morveth’s deckhouse—so intent on what we were doing that my mind simply didn’t register the soft, familiar, enormous sound that so suddenly broke the stillness. It didn’t really register until I heard Laure’s gasp and Alec’s horrified, “Good God, what’s that?”
Then I knew what the sound had been. It was the sound made by a Gilpin ship when, shifting into normal space, she settled on the water. I was not surprised. Somehow, I had known.
I stared out past Morveth’s stem, past Owl’s. Lying there, scarcely a hundred feet away, athwartships to us, was a vessel six or seven times as long as ours, and her winged control tower and the deck-domes that concealed her weaponry told me immediately exactly what she was—a Russian Tarantella-class sub, long since mothballed and now reactivated and converted. Any one of her weapons, obsolete though submarine warfare might be, could have destroyed us instantly. Of that there was no doubt. And there was no doubt that they had trapped us at our most helpless, when we couldn’t possibly shift into Gilpin’s Space or even reach our laser—which would have been suicide anyway.
She lay there, black and long and deadly, and we could hear her control tower lock opening. The moon’s faint light showed us the Cyrillic characters on her tower, and over them, newly painted, U.N.S.D.F. Suddenly two searchlights blazed, fore and aft, flooding Morveth and Owl with brilliance and sharp shadows, and a third bright light turned on to illuminate the tower and the deck surrounding it. We could see that they’d broken out the UN flag. We could also see two men standing on the tower—and one of them, unmistakably, was Whalen Borg.
What does one think of when, abruptly, logic tells one all is lost? A few months before, I know I would have been filled with despair and black rage. Now I found myself completely cool, thinking first of my ship and of her people, thinking then of Janet and of Laure’s World, thinking of all these with a fathomless regret—and believing none of it. I was completely cool, in total control of my mind and my decisions.
I saw Borg lift a bullhorn to his mouth. “Cormac!” he bellowed. “And you, Laure Endicott. You are under arrest—you and everyone aboard your vessel. Tell all your people to line up on deck. We will board, transfer you to our ship, and take over yours.”
“Borg!” I shouted back. ’Take a look at our registration number and our silhouette. This is a Republic of China ship.” He laughed, and the man on the tower with him laughed as loudly. “We are familiar with false registrations, Mr. Cormac. Now you will do as the Admiral says!”
A boarding party was mustering just forward of the tower. “Christ!” muttered Alwyss. “Commander, let me just get to our laser turret for one minute. Look, I can wipe those bastards out as fast as they can come up topside.”
I grasped his arm, dug my fingers in. “Not a chance!” I whispered. “We’d all be dead—all, Owl, Morveth, Laure, the kids! You know what kind of stuff they’ve got aimed at us.
Alwyss’ arm went limp; he turned away. “Shit!” he said under his breath.
“Laure Endicott!” bellowed Borg. “And you, Geoffrey Cormac! Our warrants are from the United Nations and the United States, with the latter taking precedence. As soon as we come alongside and board, I shall personally take you into custody—”
I looked at him across the water as, slowly, his ship began to turn. His face was not quite as full as it once had been, and it was pale. His voice had lost a little, too, in force and volume. But all the old venom was still there, and more.
Then Laure’s voice rang out, icily clear. “Admiral Borg, Commander Cormac and I will surrender. We have no choice. But there is no reason why you should take our crew, or the people who, as you know, have taken passage with us.” Borg’s answering laugh was hot nice to hear. I saw him leave the tower for the deck—
And then it happened. It happened so fast that even after it was over I scarcely could believe what I had seen. Abeam of Owl, a third vessel had appeared, soundlessly. It did not speak to the Russian submarine. From a projection like a stubby bowsprit on its tower, a vague blue nimbus blossomed, took shape, flew forward growing as it flew. Another followed it scarcely a yard away. Another and another and another. Swelling, glowing, intensifying. I saw the first one strike directly on the tower, then almost simultaneously the rest. One hoarse, terrible cry came from the sub—and that was all. Otherwise, there had been no sound at all.
And where that four-hundred-foot ship of war had been, there now was nothing—nothing except the roiled surface of the sea.
I looked at the new arrival, and recognized her.
She was Cupid’s Arrow.
She came alongside. Her personnel lock opened. There, in the moonlight, stood Saul Gilpin, decked out in his squirrel-tail moustache and a Dutch barge-captain’s cap.
“Hello, Auntie Laurel” he called out. “Here I am—meus ex kachina.”
In the distance I heard the oarlocks again—frantically fast this time.
I stood there tongue-tied, trying to unwind, and I learned later that all the rest of us had reacted similarly—all except Laure.
“Why, hello Saul!” she called back to him. “What a nice surprise! But you should know that meus, in latin, means mine, not me.”
“Come, come!” he answered. “Ma chérie, surely you’d not niggle me out of such a lovely pun on a point of grammar? And anyhow, isn’t it good to know that there’s more than one way to throw a Gilpin ship right out of normal space?”
“Thank God there is!” Laure said. “Thank God!”
“You can thank me, too,” he replied modestly. The two vessels touched, and he jumped across to Owl, and then he was in Laure’s arms, and she was kissing him.
Then everybody was swarming over him.
“Saul,” I said when finally I could make myself heard, “what’s become of her, of that Rusky sub?”
Moments passed before he answered me, his voice subdued. “That was something I hoped I’d never have to do,” he said. “She’s in Gilpin’s Space, but it’s not her own. She’s going to have a time getting back.”
“And Borg?”
“He’s there, too. Or part of him, that is. Remember how my cables looked when you first found out I’d stolen Cupid’s Arrow? That’s what the field’s edge does.” He worried the ends of his moustache. “Anyhow, he’s not coming back, ever. But I’m sorry for those others on deck with him, the poor sods. Those below decks are probably all right. The locks probably closed automatically. But look—we can’t just stand here. Any time now you’re likely to have visitors, and we’d best not be here when they arrive. So finish lashing down your pick-a-back—”
“Let’s get crackin’!” shouted Latourette.
From a pocket of his pea jacket, Saul fetched a microflex, handed it to me. “Geoff, go up and feed this into your computer. It’ll take you where I’m going. I’ll flip off now and wait for you.” He patted Laure’s cheek. “See you in a few minutes, Auntie Laure. We’ll have a grand reunion.”
He jumped back to Cupid’s Arrow, and before we’d finished the job on Morveth, he and his ship had disappeared.
Just before we ourselves flipped back into Gilpin’s Space, we heard approaching engines in the sky.
6
Owl bore us westward, across the broad Atlantic, over the Appalachians and the Mississippi and the plains of Texas, all at what, for Gilpin’s Space, was a sluggard’s speed. At first, everybody talked at once. How had Saul known where to find us? How had he known we were in dire straits? How had he managed to get there in the nick of time?
“If you asked him those questions,” Laure said, “he’d probably answer you the way he did me—meus ex kachina. A very Saulish answer. I’m going to accuse him of only coming to our rescue so he could use his dreadful pun. We never thought that Cupid’s Arrow, like Owl and Pussycat, was designed and equipped to keep in touch with her sister ships automatically. Saul must have been aware of us ever since we hit the Solar System. He’ll probably explain how he knew we needed him when we get where we’re going.”
“And where might that be?” asked Molly, Alec’s wife.
“At a guess, I’d say probably in Hopi country,” Laure told her.
“Well, I hope there won’t be any Russian submarines waiting for us there.” Molly shivered. “I still haven’t gotten over that last one.”
Laure was right. High over Northern Arizona, above a landscape riven by vast canyons and shadowed by sheer escarpments thrown up by ancient cataclysms, Owl slowed, stopped dead, dropped. She dropped into a canyon that was a jagged slash in the Earth’s crust, its Gilpin ghost even more impressive than its reality ever could have been. Then, momentarily, she hovered. In the canyon’s wall, directly ahead of us, I saw what seemed to be a huge shallow cave, perhaps a hundred feet from top to bottom at its vertical maximum and half a dozen times as long. Owl headed directly into it, and we saw that the shallowness was an illusion. From our point of entry, the cave turned sharply to the right, burrowing through the striations of the solid rock. There was only the false light of Gilpin’s Space, very faint now. The cave turned left again, expanding both horizontally and vertically, and suddenly everything became clearly visible. Ahead of us I saw Cupid’s Arrow and another Gilpin ship. Owl’s computer signaled me to take over the controls. 1 set her down and shifted into normal space.
Saul and his Lillian, his daughter and her husband, the two Hopi who had appeared on our screen with him on the way out, and a dozen people whom we’d never met were there to welcome us.
Our lock was opened. Our gangplank was extruded. Laure leading, we stepped out, all of us, onto the rock floor of the cave. The light, soft and indirect, came from the vessels resting there. Otherwise, as far as we could see, the cave was completely empty.
Again, Laure and Saul kissed. For a long moment, he held her at arms’ length. “Laure, Laure!” he whispered. “My God, how wonderfully you’ve changed—no, not changed. You’re still yourself, but it’s as though you never were yourself before, not fully. But now—”
Shaking his head, he let her go. Polly Esther hugged her, then Lillian. After that, it was my turn. And then there were introductions all around.
“This cavern,” Saul told us, “is my headquarters, our headquarters—for the moment, that is. This means it’s headquarters for the Free Space underground—” He teased his squirrel-tail and grinned. “No pun intended.”
“So that’s who’s been running the Free Space operation,” said Laure. “Saul, we never suspected you of such administrative practicality.”
