The Rape of The Sun Page 13

  Part of Dhurk’s rumination was bittersweet. He held Hréda as his betrothed; intimately yet immaculately she had revealed herself to him. They had knelt before her grandfather the Horn to receive the blessing. But the ultimate blessing of bringing her to this his own house and possessing her as his wife must await the conclusion of his quest—must even depend on the success of his quest, which was exceedingly chancy any way you looked at it.

  Another part of his mood-blend was, startingly, a strong conflict of conscience. Courageously now Dhurk was re-facing that conflict, and as always he sought to understand and resolve it by going back to the decision which had precipitated it.

  With Collins, we four now swung into a witnessing of that origin in its originality....

  Dhurk’s private trouble had been bom immediately after the departure of the Horn from the cabinet meeting which had elevated Dhurk. Its essence emerged in an informal exchange between the Lord Ultramax and the Director of the Interscientific Institute.

  Laying a hand on a directorial shoulder, the ultramax remarked: “Dear brother, I just had a thought—no, spare me the obvious quip—I just had a pertinent thought. Oh, Dhurk, there you are, join us, I want you to hear this.”

  “With great difficulty,” blandly returned the director, “I am controlling my impatience to hear your pertinent thought.”

  “It is this, Director. I may be able to save you the trouble of looking for another ladiolis that is smaller than the one you like.”

  “How would you go about relieving me of this trouble?” “With heavy gas.”

  “Gas?”

  “Gas. Niedersinken."

  It rather shook Dhurk. He was seeing, a little.

  The director hummed, thinking. Then: “Eh, perhaps I see, a little. Only, Ultramax—the necessary quantity—”

  “You’ll recall, Director,” said the ultramax, “that your interscientific institute developed niedersinken about fifteen cycles ago as a means of defense against a hypothetical extra-planetary enemy, some rebel in our hegemony. Several years ago, after a successful revolution on one of our planets, such an enemy appeared to be somewhat more than hypothetical; and so we stepped up production of niedersinken and stockpiled it in highly condensed form. At a round guess, how much of it do you think would be necessary to, say, reduce the magnitude and mass of your proposed ladiolis by a factor of sixty-seven percent?”

  “Well, I’d imagine, at maxiumum condensation, a quantity of at least a double-one verga. If such a quantity were seeded through the ladiolis, it would produce a recession of something like four, hundred cycles in half a cycle. And that would about do it.”

  The ultramax answered: “Sir, we now have more than half of that quantity stockpiled—in megalite containers, of course, since niedersinken permeates everything else. Dhurk, how long would it take to reach the full quantity required?”

  “Sir, if we produce at full capacity, about one subcycle.” Then Dhurk turned to the director with some anxiety: “Tell me, sir, other than the reduction—it would not damage the ladiolis or any part of it?”

  He was assured: “Not in any way that now occurs to me.” The ultramax turned to his subordinate. “Ultrasuperior

  Dhurk, as task-force commander it is your decision to make, subject to the Horn’s approval transmitted through me. My recommendation would be that you have us go into highspeed production of niedersinken; and by the time when the full quantity is available, you can have a swarm of unmanned robot vehicles which you can move to the target ladiolis for the seeding. You may wish to prime the robots to self-destruct when their missions are completed, and most of them will in fact self-destruct. That will give you a half-cycle of lead-time to bring your task-force to readiness for retrieving the shrunken ladiolis.”

  Scene-shift: Dhurk’s austere office at Astrofleet headquarters on Dhom.....

  Dhurk, testing his new authority, was visiphoning the inter-scientific director. There was some difficulty in getting through, but eventually the director appeared on the screen. “Ah, Dhurk!” he saluted with restricted cordiality. “Glad to see you. What can I do for you?”

  Dhurk’s face and voice were sober. “Sir, you could begin by letting your secretaries and robots know that a call from me is always to be cleared without trouble. Forgive my bluntness, but you know that it is imperative.”

  The director’s face went blank, then suddenly he seemed earnest. “Of course, Ultrasuperior. You are right, and I will see to it.”

  “No problem, then,” said Dhurk, suppressing a smile. “Of course again, it is early in the next day after the birth of this imperative. I dislike swinging my new authority, but I’m afraid that at first I have to.”

  Now the director was all receptivity. “Of course you must But—can we simply be Dhurk and Hedrik?”

  “That would be good, Hedrik. Do you mind if I press ahead now with the point of my call?”

  “Pray press, Dhurk.”

  “Hedrik—is there intelligent life in your chosen ladiolis?” “Aha! Well. Our macroscopic and spectroscopic studies have been reasonably good, but we haven’t gone further. We do not know whether there is life in the ladiolis; but at least one planet, the third one, could support life. If it does support life, it may or may not have evolved high intelligence.”

  “You can tell me no more than that?”

  “Dhurk, if you follow your chiefs advice and dispatch advance robots to seed niedersinken, they can send the information back by robot carrier—which is far faster than electromagnetic communications, as you know, because of time-chord travel.” •

  “That will be helpful, Hedrik, but there is a dilemma. Until I know for sure about the presence or absence of intelligent life, I will not know whether ethically I should or should not dispatch that advance force to use niedersinken. It’s a bit circular, isn’t it?”

  “I see your difficulty, Dhurk. I even admire you for feeling it. Will it help you if I mention that should you refuse to cooperate, the Horn would most likely replace you with someone who would use niedersinken? I need not mention the other unfortunate entailment.”

  Miserably Dhurk comprehended that such an event would also cancel Hréda for him. Nevertheless he insisted: “It does not help me at all, Hedrik; for if I use niedersinken, it will be I who chooses to use it.”

  Scene-shift: Dhurk and Hréda on a palace terrace, the presence of artificial night being signaled by muted illumination....

  Dhurk: “My beloved, there is something that I must tell you. Do you understand that when I bring you your ladiolis, it will be only one-third its original size?”

  Hréda: “I know, Dhurk, my grandfather told me. I think it will be cute, and much more manageable. And besides, itN will still be awfully big and bright, won’t it?”

  Dhurk: “But there may be people in it. And we will have reduced those people to one-third of their natural sizes.”

  Hréda: “Then they should be proud to shrink in the service of our sublime religious cause. Besides, I think they would be perfectly darling!”

  Dhurk: “Hréda—suppose that you and I were suddenly reduced to one-third our natural sizes. Would you like that?” Hréda: “If everything else in our world were also one-third its natural size, what difference could it possibly make to us?”

  Into the mind-vision of Collins now came again—and into our enthralled mind-visions came for the first time—a clear holographic view of the entire solar system from Pluto and several minuscule outer planets all the way in to the sun hot-bulbous at center.

  Item: New pairs of scarlet and blue contrails helixing the solar system outside Pluto orbit, then progressively crossing the plane of the system above and below; lines diffusing as they lagged until they merged into royal purple translucently cocooning the system and drifting inward among the planets.

  Item: Cut to a small outer segment of the growing purple: tail-seeding the scarlet and blue color-haze trails, a malevolent creature like a manta ray with long helical horns and a nasty-toothed
bat-snout. (I released a little cry: it was my space-dragon.)

  Item: Cut to a cut of Earth, a cross section from surface down to center; the purple haze enveloping Earth, seeping into Earth: down through crust, through mantle, through molten magma, and all the way in to heart of hot-rigid core.

  Penultima: All the earth diminishing.

  Ultima: All planets and the sun diminishing, each drawing in upon itself and the others.

  13

  Heads around our table came up slowly. We five stared at each other, then four of us stared at Collins, who lowered his head.

  Sven was the first to come fully to life. Reaching over to Bill’s host buzzer, he summoned our prompt waiter and called for more brandy all around. Then he turned fiercely upon Collins: “Can you time-out these visions? their time in terms of our time, I mean.”

  Without raising his head, Collins murmured: “I have a strong feeling that except for the last sequence, all of them—that is, the decision conference and the betrothal and the subsequent conferences of Dhurk with Hedrik and with Hréda—occurred about a week into November of last year. They came to_me variously between February and May of this year. But the final vision—the seeding of the solar system—came to me first, and it came to me live while it was happening on January 11,1995. Which is this year.”

  I found strength to demand: “Wel, Sven—remember the diabolical beauty from our deck on January 11?”

  “That had to be it” Sven said. “Collins, what can you figure about the rest of the timing?”

  “Captain Jensen, as to that, I have no prevoyance of a datable nature. But I have some clear intellectual impressions about the Dhomer calendar. I feel that their day is about twenty-two of our hours and that their cycle around their star is about four hundred of their days—which makes their cycle surprisingly about the same length as our year: their cycle is about 8800 earth-hours, our year is about 8760 hours. And -their sub-cycle appears to be forty of their days, a neat and arbitrary one-tenth of their year. Sir, did you memorize those figures as I spoke them?”

  “I did, sir-”

  “Then if you remember the figures mentioned in their initial conference, you can compute for yourself what the futurities may be.”

  “Hel is our computer,” Sven declared- “You remember the conference timings, Hel?”

  “From the Dhom planning conference when Dhurk was promoted, yes,” I affirmed. “Collins times the conference for the first week in November 1994. We can maybe assume about three days afterward for immediate start on niedersinken production—which was going to require one subcycle or forty of their days, which puts completion into the second week of December. Assume minimum time for loading and dispatch, and let us say for the argument that the robots were launched from Dhom on December 15. And it seems that the robots arrived here and dumped their niedersinken by January 11 of this year, the Day of Diabolical Beauty. Which means that the robots made the trip from Dhorn to Earth in twenty-six earth-days. Right here I pause: doesn’t this mean that Dhom is relatively nearby? twenty-six days is exactly the time we need for falling to Sun.”

  Softly said Collins: “Dhom is not nearby. Their interscientific director estimated the distance at two million palarids. I comprehended a palarid as being a light-year.”

  “Christ!” Bill blurted. “Andromeda! In twenty-six days?” “All right,” I intoned, “regardless of the difficulty about super-translight velocity, I will accept the data for my calculations. Heigh-ho. We have to assume that the transit time for the sun-snatching task-force would be about the same as that for the robots: twenty-six days, more or less. And the Dhora conference estimate for readying that task-force was six subcycles, which according to Collins would be 228 earth-days. And that would mean launch from Dhom late in June of this year, allowing the Dhom task-force to reach Sun late in July.

  “I will make some assumptions and time this out. Date of Dhom planning conference: put it at November 6, 1994. Date of production start on additional niedersinken, additional cargo robots, and task-force augmentation and equipage: November 9. Date of robot launch: December 16. Date of robot arrival and dump: January 11, 1995, a fairly firm date—and, Sven, one of those robots had to be the one that the shuttle picked up on April 22, it was one that didn’t self-destruct. Then, date of task-force launch from Dhom: this we can expect about June 25 of this year—little more than two months in our future. And on the twenty-six-day transit hypothesis, the Dhomers would arrive at Sun and commence their snatch about July 27. End of assumptive computation: your comments?”

  Silently all of them tried to absorb my calendar. Then Sven, agitated, to Collins: “And when the Dhorners arrive at Sun?”

  Ventured Collins: “Presumably they will harness our shrunken sun and tow it back to their planet Dhorn. And all the sun’s creature-planets will sheepishly follow.”

  “But how can the planets follow Sun,” Bill demanded, “if our system is flying apart because of reduced gravity?”

  “I do not know how,” Collins demurred. “I only know that it will happen.”

  Sven swung to me. “Helen, one more time, make explicit our schedule.”

  “Launch date August 1,” I answered. “Two weeks assembly in orbit. Start of drop to Sun, August 15. Insertion into sun orbit, September 10.”

  “And their arrival schedule, again?”

  “If the assumptions are right—about July 21.”

  Unused spoons jumped and jingled as Sven’s fist hit the table. “I am Goddamned,” he roared, “if I am going to get to the sun six weeks after they have stolen it! Hel, for the love of some god, can’t you move up that schedule significantly?”

  I reflected, under great pressure. “Significantly would mean arrival at Sun soon after they arrive and before they can move out with our star. A week after they get there, maybe?” Sven pressed: “Even a week—”

  “That,” I reminded him, “would mean advancing our preparation schedule by nearly a good six weeks. And we have less than two months for that advance. I don’t know, Sven, I just don’t know—”

  “I dare you to try it! I dare you to try it and win!"

  “I can only promise to hit up J.C. tomorrow, it would mean paying for a hell of a lot of overtime and weekends—” “Hel, think! the alternative is, Earth dies! How would Southeastern go about paying for that?”

  Wel interposed: “If we should get there in time to stop them—how would we stop them, Sven?”

  “By God, Wel, we have to stop them!” Sven snarled. “For instance, why don’t we bring along some overweight nuclear missiles? Hel, don’t shake your head, I know you’re thinking about maximum payload. No problem, really; we add one or two shuttles in order to loft the missiles, and they fall separately from us and the satellites—Wel can control them all—and when we locate the enemy, Wel can set them to find and destroy him. This is what we have got to do, don’t you see?”

  Bill demurred: “I see your point, but I don’t see how we can get the President to approve missiles—”

  “Never mind all that,” Sven snapped. “Bypassing the President, I know how to get them—and how to get them lofted without NASA approval.”

  “Forget that!” I counter-snapped. “Southeastern Power is not going to shoulder responsibility for war in space without Presidental approval.”

  Sven and I were eye-to-eye hot. Wel cooled it: “Why don’t we now break from the Pipkin and go to our house? For sure we can be more comfortable during what looks like a long evening.”

  In our rumpus room, I set out snacks while Wel started strong coffee. Nobody wanted any more alcohol that night.

  Bill was fussily packing and lighting a big-bowled quarter-stem pipe. Once it was properly smoldering, he looked around and noticed that he was being watched by the rest of us. He demanded: “What? I thought everything now say able had been said.”

  “Not quite,” Wel asserted. “I want to press ahead on the assumption that Collins is showing us the truth. But we don’t altogether know wh
at truth. For instance, Bill—how would a gas operate to diminish us? what is this niedersinken, and how would it work?”

  Bill said curtly, “I don’t know.”

  I thrust: “How in the name of any saint could Dhurk and his task-force travel nearly two million light-years in a matter of twenty-six days? That must be around 150 billion times the distance of our trip to the sun—and even for that, we take twenty-six days!”

  “They are using,” Collins loftily reminded me, “a time-chord technique.”

  “And what in the hell may that be?” Wel politely queried.

  “You know,” muttered Bill, tending his pipe with a pocket tool, “that reminds me of something. . . . Wel, do you remember that cockeyed space-time theory that I beered-up in a tavern?”

  Wel was all smile-crinkled. “Omigod yes. Wait, before you spill the theory, let me tell them the buildup—”

  It seemed that Astronomer Bill, who had his offbeat moods, a number of years ago had concocted a theoretical mode of faster-than-light velocity. So simple was his ftl hypothesis that it had made him laugh aloud in the tavern where it had hit him over beers with some colleagues, including Wel. When a female prof, who had been in process of arguing cultural genesis for sex-styling, registered indignation at Bill’s irrelevant laugh-interruption, Bill had to improvise complicated mollification. Wel recalled how Bill, walking home with him, had confessed his invention to Wel but had dismissed it as a whimsy. Tonight, considering Dhom’s time-chord method of kicking off two million light-years in twenty-six days, Bill was seeing his fantasy as possibly something more.

  “To explain this,” Bill told us, “I ought to show a rough diagram. Wel, does your wonder-house have an overhead projector?” Going to a wall, Wel buttoned-back a panel, ’ revealing a fixed projection screen and several sorts of projectors; he rolled-out the overhead, plugged it into a floor outlet, handed Bill a blank transparency and a grease pencil, touched another button which closed the wall except for the exposed screen, rheostated down the room lights, sat.