Kenneth Bulmer, page 15
"Speak to Commodore Landsdowne. Tell him you can have what ships you like. Oh—don't tie up any fighting craft."
"Yes, sir—I mean, no, sir."
Things were shaping up. Soon there would be a whole new double solar system swimming here, with good people from the Solarian worlds populating it, a great fresh hive of humanity. That was man's work.
The speaker said: "The TSC Packet has arrived, sir."
"Good. Tell the TSC officer to handle the two-place scouter. I'll see him later."
He went back to his administration work feeling very cheerful.
The ident plate lit up and he turned—and his face froze. "Sarah—"
Off screen, a man's voice asid: "Captain Matlin, TSC, reporting to Chief Controller Strang. I'd like to speak to you."
Strang hesitated. Then he released the door and Matlin and Sarah walked in. He thought she looked fine—a little pale and her hps pinched in—he knew what that meant
"Hullo, Dad."
"I'm seeing your—ah—husband in line of duty. After that I don't want to see you again."
Matlin kept his temper. He said, "Preliminary reports on the TSC scouter indicate it has been subjected to intense energy—beamed." He wondered briefly if the old admiral had known the identity of the little scouter when he'd picked Matlin for the job. "I understand you knew Charlie and Myra Hastings—"
"No I" said Strang, genuinely shocked. "Not theirs?"
"Yes. This means we can date exactly when it happened. They'd been down on planet Seventeen. My technical team from the Packet are running the Globe-Trotter records now. I thought you would like to see—"
"Yes, yes." Strang rose, hurling down a file. "Ill come at once."
Despite the feelings of bitterness between them, they recognized the importance of this find. A small scouter from a terran ship, floating derelict in space for year after light-less year—and then she had been picked up again and now men would read in the records the dark story of that old tragedy.
A small select group settled down in the laboratory's tiny auditorium to watch projected on the screen the records taken from the damaged Globe-Trotter salvaged from the wreck of the Hasting's scouter. A great deal of work had been done in restoration, interpretation, in basic forensic science to bring up what little remained.
They saw the sharp-edged, hostile crystalline world of Planet Seventeen. On the screen before them, flickering in and out of detailed vision as the charred ends of tape and the damaged memory tanks yielded their knowledge, the brief excursion and tragedy unfolded.
Clarity had been lost. As the Globe-Trotter rounded a yellow jasper trail with chingling fronds of chrysoprase sliding and twirling over its back the scene in the icy valley below clouded and attenuated, came back to focus patchily, tantalized with visions of gargantuan structures shifting and merging in pearly mist.
"This is the interesting section." Matlin gestured and the film slowed to flicker a frame at a time and finally to stop. "There. That's the best image we can achieve."
Strang stooped forward. "It's just damnably out of focus. Can't you bring it any clearer?"
Matlin shook his head. He had no inclination to be more than civil to his father-in-law.
"That's a building—I think." Strang rubbed a finger across his eyes. "Can't the scanners build up the picture?"
"No better than this. I agree it seems to be a building. The valley is deep and the Globe-Trotter came around this quartz bluff and saw this. Then—"
The frames moved swiftly now and an orange flare spread all over the film. "That was when he was beamed. How he got back to the scouter well never know. He was in a hell of a mess."
"Go back to the valley," Strang ordered savagely. "If someone was on planet then—where are they now? We just shifted that planet into orbit around Shena."
The film spun back. Again they studied that enigmatic crystal valley with the spires of chalcedony and camelian rising sparkling and between them—what? A building? Something rounded and domed in a world of harsh angularity, something out of place, something made by an intelligence.
"Can you get a fix on that valley?" demanded Strang.
"There's absolutely no way of telling in the Globe-Trotter's records." Matlin felt a kinship with that icy world of jagged edges—that was the way he felt to this autocratic old man at his side.
Strang swung on Landsdowne. "Get your men down there, Morley. I want that planet gone over inch by inch. We've got to find that valley."
"Yes, sir," said Landsdowne. He rose at once.
As he went Colin Copping rose and left also.
"There's no more here for me." Strang lumbered to his feet. He turned his back on Matlin. "After all, this all happened a long time ago. I'm creating solar systems and that's happening now."
"The Hastings were my friends," Matlin said softly.
Strang refused to rise to the bait. He left abruptly. Sarah glanced helplessly at her husband. He forced a smile and said, "One day, dear, one day he'll see reason."
Susan was saying the same thing to Bruce Oquendo as they came aboard Anaxagoras. When word of their arrival was brought to Strang he was speaking to Craig Drummond on screen from the planet Vicksburg and he refused curtly to speak to his daughter. "I had to see Sarah because duty compelled me to deal with her husband. But I do not wish to see or hear of them again—any of them." He flicked angrily for the com robot to wheel the second screen away and went on with his conversation with Drummond.
"My son's a ninny," he said, chomping on the words. "And my two elder daughters married so far beneath them it hurts—at least you, Craig, in marrying Sally can carry on the Christopher Strang traditions."
"Uh—yes, sir," said Craig, with the feeling he had been caught up in a whirlwind. "We're doing well on Vicksburg. Should be moving day after tomorrow—" "I'll be there."
"Right, sir—ah—yes, thank you."
Strang flicked for the com robot without saying good-bye. If only Simon had a half the steely strength of that man Matlin, Sarah had married. . . . Ü only Bruce Oquendo wasn't so dominated by his family and now, it seemed, by Susan. . . . He had to believe in Craig Drummond. He had to. His wife Shena had gone through her allotted number of eggs—medicine these days did not allow the waste of a woman's reproduction capabilities in losing an ovum a month; they cherished them carefully so that a women of eighty— with the physical characteristics of a woman of twenty-five —could bear children with ease. But there was a limit. He could expect no more children from Shena. Grandchildren, now . . . But Susan and Sarah showed no inclination to rush into parenthood.
He was creating an empire, but that would mean nothing if he could not see clearly a firm future for the Strang family within his creation.
Once he had the Head of the House of Christopher in his grasp, once he had that power—then he might be able to influence events more directly. He would do so. He felt a profound psychic conviction that he was destined to be remembered as the founder of a dynasty that would take mankind to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
XIV
SUSAN AND SARAH flung their arms around each other and kissed and hugged with the intensity of shared misfortune. Oquendo and Matlin shook hands a little distantly, sizing each other up, awkward at their wives' display.
"Welcome aboard, Oquendo," said Matlin. He led the way from the airlock up to the bridge of the TSC Packet.
Lieutenant Commander Penkowski smiled. "We have the Hastings' scouter aboard, sir," he said. "We're all ready to space out."
"Good work, Commander. But I'd rather like to go across to Vicksburg. They're moving it today. Quite a sight." "Yes, sir!" said Penkowski eagerly.
And so hanging in space off the planet Vicksburg, Captain and Mrs. Matlin, and Mr. and Mrs. Oquendo joined Chief Controller Strang and his teams, Colin Copping, and Craig Drummond and Sally Strang. Many ships of the Solarían Confederation gathered, each with a special function or as observers. Strang saw his daughter and Drummond off.
He stood bluffly on the lip of Anaxagoras's airlock as they prepared to enter the pinnace.
"No, Craig, I won't be coming down with you this time. You can handle Vicksburg—the Strang System has proved highly successful. We're moving more planets than Amouf or Tung dreamed of I"
"Right, then, sir." Drummond coughed and moved back. Sally kissed her father. She wore a simple, short white shift-dress, as innocent as the dawn. "Cheerio, Dad. I'll bet you're pleased you don't have to go through the teleport down to the center of a planet any morel Craig's a real genius—"
"I know, Sally. I'll see you when you reach 'Sally.' " He smiled fondly on the last daughter left to him. "That sounds good, somehow."
"Sounds pompous to me, DadI You should have called the sun 'Stephen,' or something like. That would have been in keeping with what you're trying to do."
He kissed her again and let her fingers slide through his own as she went through the airlock into the pinnace.
The pinnace jetted from the spaceship's flank and fell away towards the fully-illuminated ball below. Watching the monitor screen, Strang felt the strength of purpose in him heightened and justified by his daughter Sally. A shadow flicked past and Landsdowne from the bridge said, "That was Copping aboard Simon's yacht Liberty, sir. Looks as though he's going down, too."
"Humph," said Strang. "I thought he was supposed to send that yacht back to Simon."
He stumped back to the bridge where he could be in the center of events.
Landsdowne greeted him and nodded towards the side screens. "That's the Survey Corps packet craft out there, sir. Captain Matlin—"
"I'm not interested, Morley. If they want a grandstand view of moving a planet I won't stop them." He lowered himself down into his own command chair, set back and above Landsdowne's. There had been changes incorporated when Anaxagoras had been built, lessons he had learned from Archimedes. "I wanted Copping here at this time. Send out a call for him, Morley."
"Yes, sir."
Sally's remark rankled in Strang's mind. Sure he didn't have to go down into the white-hot guts of a planet any more. He hadn't had to go down to control chamber for a long time, since the days when he'd started out as a Lan-sen tech, freshly joined from the TSC, and with Shena as a luscious prize within his grasp. But he knew well enough, and was courageous enough to admit it to himself, that Craig Drummond had come along with his Split-potential principle at the right time. Strang had shrugged off the experience; but those claustrophobic hours down in Vesta had left a scar.
"Can't raise Copping, sir." Landsdowne reported briefly. "We're still calling out."
"Check," said Strang. He sat back. No matter how many times he grasped a planet and wrenched it from the orbit it had followed since it coalesced from primeval hydrogen-no matter how many times he re-arranged the galactic structure—he experienced a deep and shudderingly satisfying thrill of pure enjoyment of the power vested in him.
Down on the surface of Vicksburg, Drummond carried out the last checks of the north polar tower. Vicksburg was a pleasant world; the cycle of evolution had here reached what on Earth had been called the Later Palaeozoic, where a lush surface teemed with fish, clumsy amphibia and the multifarious wonderments of widespread swamp forests. What men knew of the cycle of evolution as epitomized by Earth had been well-documented; against it the mere ninety-eight volumes of Patrick Tait Tait's century-old, AnOutline of Evolution on the Planets of Variant Stars, showed how much there was yet to learn, and understand, of the course of living evolution in the galaxy.
North and south poles here on Vicksburg were not as cold as they might have been and Drummond could wear normal planetary-proofs. Sally, too, had merely donned planetary-proofs over her white dress. They stood looking up at the tower. Carver, the scientist in charge, beckoned them across and they went into the domed building nested against the base of the tower. Here the controls waited the signal to go.
"Pleased to see you, Craig." "All set?"
"Waiting for the tremblers to synchronoize and then it's all systems go."
"Fine. I put up a shuttle here. Managed to cram in all the gear quite well. A pinnace is far too small."
Carver, although probably two hundred years older than Drummond, had no side in taking orders. He knew first-order brain power when he met it. The shuttle orbiting the planet around the equator took in signals from north and south pole towers, synchronized them, set up the trembler responses that would make and maintain the Split-potential at each pole exactly in phase. Landlines were out of the question and planetary radio was an anachronism when men used space for every communications use.
"We should do better than last time." Drummond looked cheerful, composed yet alert. On the job like this, he shed his vague nervous air. Sally looked at him and noticed the change and knew in a few years he would be as poised as the most sophisticated of career scientists. That, she worked for. Now she waited as her man went about the job he knew best in all the galaxy. She thought of that ball of mud back on Solishtar and she smiled. They had come a long way since the memorial service to the Hastings. And then to find their old s.couter like that. . . strange. . . .
Power flowed into the Strang System and Vicksburg's sun dimmed and fluctuated. Drummond watched everything with the cool eyes that reported back to a brain in complete command of everything that was taking place.
"We ought to make transit without shifting so much as a ton of the crust," he said conversationally. "We can put out more power than the Lansen generators, and we operate that power from the surface, holding the planet between the poles like a ball between finger and thumb."
"I have no hesitation in saying I'm pleased we don't have to go down to a chamber." Carver followed Drum-mond's lead. "And we cut out six to nine month's effort boring."
"All set!" called a tech from his board. "Potential is high —and matching!"
"It's all yours, Craig." Carver nodded to the main board.
Drummond did not reply. To him the grandeur and mystique in moving a planet bodily through hyperspace and popping it out the other end into orbit represented a mathematical problem, a physics problem, even a psychological problem if you counted the human element. Geopolitics, for Craig Drummond, meant less than nothing. Although his future father-in-law had given him cogent reasons for calling the principle the Strang System he accepted that decision because Strang had made it.
Sally put an arm on his shoulders. Then she withdrew and sat down demurely to wait while he moved a planet. There was no skylarking now over a ball of mud.
Everything looked good. The split-potential matched exactly and the automatics would keep it matched, sending their multitudes of signals via the shuttle orbiting the planet, from north to south poles and back again.
All systems go . . .
Aboard Simon Strang's space yacht Liberty, Colin Copping sat before bis fully automated controls, alone in the ship, and he laughed. The laugh echoed eerily in the metal hull The sound carried a bestial ring of imbalance, of a mind relieved of the tether of conscience and human feeling.
"I made you suffer a little on Vesta, Strang," Copping said, aloud, to himself. "You sweated a little. But you got out of it. You knew you would. I knew you would. But you didn't like it, did you, Mister stinking Chief filthy Controller rotten Stephen Strang? Oh, no, you didn't enjoy that."
Copping reached for the gun controls. He thought of Rainscarfe and Dirk Tiamat, of Gunderson and his father, Arthur Copping, as they had stood and listened there in their town of Happy Landings, to the smooth lies of this man Strang. They had believed him. But then, they had been naive innocents in the galaxy. Then they had thought that man would help man along the starways. Well—Colin Copping had quickly found out the truth.
He set up a firing pattern and swung the sights across. This time he was going to settie with Strang in a way that would make Strang writhe, would tear the heart and guts out of him, would cripple him mentally, would make him suffer as Copping and all the people of Jethro of the sun Jezreel had suffered.
Then a little whisper to reach the ears of Gerban Arnouf —and then, dallied with and played upon but to follow with certainty—a Smeeson, or a Carpenter—never a Lee-Johns—something to cause a hurtful and painful end. Arnouf had come to Jethro and set about stealing the planet. But Strang had told the lies and buoyed hope when all hope was dead. Amouf had been the executioner. Strang had been the torturer.
The shuttle orbiting around Vicksburg swam up over the far limb of the planet. Copping gave a final check. His escape into hyperspace must be made swiftly, before the gathered ships could react. He centered the sights on the shuttle. He activated the automatic firing pattern and then sat back, one hand poised above the hyperspace control, waiting for the guns to fire and release the years of hate within him.
Among that gathered assemblage, Major General Jelal rode an army ferret in towards Anaxagoras. He felt the impending moment of triumph when he would lay before Strang the results of patient and fanatically dedicated forensic science. From infinitesimal clues scrutinized with all the rigor of a scientific technology his men had at last told him, with a ninety-nine point nine percent predicated accuracy, the name of the man responsible for the debacle on Vesta and Firedrake. Colin Copping. Well. The young squirt had been getting too friendly with Strang lately. Jelal relished his position as confidant of the Chief Controller. Another obstacle removed and a smart piece of detection into the bargain— Oh, yes, Major General Jelal felt very pleased as his ferret blasted space towards the flagship.
On his forward screen the familiar shape of Simon Strang's spaceyacht Liberty swam up, crossing ahead of him, vectors and courses automatically computed and adjusted so that the rarity of a space collision should never occur. Jelal had no time for Simon Strang. Then he pondered. Surely Copping had sent the yacht back to Solishtar? Odd.
Jelal had spaced in from Vesta and obviously Copping had not returned the yacht. He went back to thinking of his coming moment of triumph. Around the curve of the planet, Vicksburg, the shuttle that Drummond put up squirted into view, far below the horizon from Liberty.
