The Rape of The Sun Page 17

  We went into hot aerial pursuit. Far into space we chased the fleet, until its home planet Dhorn was a small ball behind and beneath us.. ..

  The fleet vanished. Just like that. But Collins was equal to this frustration; we were sharing his apperception that the ships had disappeared, not into space, but into time. So Collins time-dove, carrying us with him....

  Again we were at the rear of the bubble-bridge on the mighty manta-ship; and all outside the ship was featureless non-gray past-space in time-transition. Dhurk continued to sit in his chair; but he had swiveled it sidewise, so that we now saw him in left profile. Dhurk’s hands were behind his head supporting it as it tilted half upward. He was gazing at something half-above him at portside of the bridge. We were drawn to inspect the something. It was a broad luminous chart like a two-meter television screen: or rather, it was two charts, side by side on the same screen. .

  The chart to the left covered two-thirds of the screen. It I was a system of concentric part-circles or shells, with concentric arcs described in glowing orange, altogether like a tree-section showing annual rings, with the rings increasingly closer together as one moved inward toward a center which escaped below the screen. At the left and right extremes of the outer circle or surface, two small circles were marked with two different symbols which we with Collins comprehended as meaning something like and A and O for Alpha and

  Omega; while the concentric arcs were marked with other symbols which we grasped as ordinal numbers progressing from 1 for the outermost arc to 9 for the innermost. Further, there was a blue hatching describing a radial from A at arc 1 inward to arc 5; there was another hatched radial from 5 outward to 0; and a horizontal blue line crossed the diagram from the foot of the A radial at arc 5 to the foot of the 0 radial at arc 5, crossing arcs 6 and 7 in its course.

  The chart to the right covered one-third of the screen. It was a system of short straight-line segments in orange, one below another, and tighter together as they descended., These straight segments also were numbered from 1 down to 9; there was a small circle marked A centered on segment 1; blue hatching descended from A down to 5, whence a diagonal blue line descended rightward from the foot of the A vertical until it almost touched 6.

  And more. A bright scarlet manta-shape was diagonally descending the A radial on the left-hand chart, while a similar bright scarlet manta-shape descended the A vertical on the right-hand chart.

  It was clear to us that the chart on the right was a larger-scale detail of the chart on the left. Larger-scale in space, that is; as for the hatched radials, the scale on both charts was the same; and the scarlet manta representing the great ship and its fleet was descending left-radial and right-vertical in parallel.

  Twingeing with something like panic-thrill, I recognized that the hatched blue radial and vertical represented a course, not in space, but in time. And down into time the fleet was descending. The flagship which we had physically boarded was halfway down, and moving. We peered outside: the non-gray remained nondescript; but the ship-motion was represented in our belly-kinesthetics, and the feeling of the motion was not spatial.

  Holding onto ourselves, we waited, watching.

  Perhaps two minutes later, the scarlet mantas on both charts hit bottom at arc 5 simultaneously. “All the way down,” quietly said the captain. “Move out.” His copilot went to work on levers and buttons.

  On the left-hand small-scale chart, the fleet-spot stayed motionless, nestling content in the corner between the time hatching and the space line.

  But on the large-scale right-hand chart, sluggishly the fleet-spot began moving along the space line, on the pink diagonal downward-rightward. Or rather, the spot was stationary while the chart itself sluggishly moved with the spatial progress of the ship.

  For the right-hand chart spanned a mere parsec; but the left-hand chart spanned a distance that was cosmically inter-galactic.

  The motion-feeling had changed: now it was definitely spatial. Outside the ship, non-gray had given place to space-blackness pointed by tiny radiant stars.

  We came out of it in the salon of our own tiny capsule. Silence.

  Then Sven, harsh: “So they are on their way.”

  Collins, toneless: “Right.”

  Sven: “Wel, are all four missiles behaving themselves?”

  Wel, toneless: “Right.”

  Sven, seething: “Great God, six days ahead of us—”

  Bill, sober: “I’d remark, friends, that their chart is an astonishing parallel of my own old playful spacetime theory.”

  I added, “Even to the A and the O.”

  Sven let out a string of words that I knew but hadn’t heard him utter. Elastically arising, he muttered, “I’m for the sack. ’Night.”

  18

  Sven changed at that, point. I had seen the change coming since the first revelations by Collins in early May: from having always fluctuated between firmness and easy friendly wit—and, at intimate times, driving passion—he had shifted into variation between firmness and sheer hardness; clearly he was obsessed by the threat to Earth and the role he might play in combating it. My ruling out of sex in the capsule clearly hadn’t upset him; tacitly he’d ruled it out himself, for weeks. But now—eh, he grew hard, hard: not as a driver, not as a Captain Bligh, but in the entire stony way of him, operating in his ship with his friends. Oh, he could soften and relax, particularly during happy hours with a couple of drinks in him, and over subsequent chow; but immediately afterward, when we went into a bull-shoot, Sven would go sober again; typically doing little except listening, sometimes injecting some comment of a serious nature.

  And never, in any bull-shoot, did Sven omit to ask Collins about Dhomer progress—if Collins was present. Usually the Collins answer was, “Nothing more yet,” after which Sven would be silent for a while and then would excuse himself.

  Wel and I talked about it some. We had our anxieties about it, and yet we understood. Admit that Sven did have the weight of our world on his shoulders. And he was carrying it, not as a novice, but as a seasoned and tactically thoughtful veteran. Our only concern was that he might go brittle on us, and snap. I kept remembering what Wel had said about Sven sometimes overplaying his hand. Unhappily, I had barred myself from giving Sven the kind of relaxation that he badly needed; on the other hand, probably he wouldn’t have accepted it.

  Not until we reached Sun and went behind him were we out of communication with Earth. But two-way communications grew more labored as our distance from Earth stretched out the seconds between questions and answers. By the end of a week of falling, from “How are you?” to “Fine, how’s 159

  yourself?” took nearly three minutes. If Sven should cry out to Earth, “Mayday! Mayday! Meteor hit, we will be depressurized in two minutes,” we would never hear the reply.

  Under those conditions, routine communication with Houston was cut to once daily. No more was needed; NASA had monitors on us, and would know if something should go wrong. The protocol was that Sven would talk with Houston as long as necessary, whereafter Wel would take over and Houston would patch Wel into the Herald-Trib offices while Wel filed his daily communique. These filings at first were always front-page news; but as trip-sleepiness set in, what was on page one dwindled to a box saying “SUN-VOYAGE DIARY, by Welland Carr: today’s installment on page 3.”

  None of Wel's filings mentioned shrinkage, extra-galactic enemies, or our nuclear missile complement. Much to Bill’s disgust, and to my applause, Wel, after deep and tortured thought, had declined to publish. Nobody on Earth knew about shrinkage, or would acknowledge it if they knew. Speculations about star-brightness were rife, and some commentators hit close to the mark; but so far, only general skepticism, no panic—best of all states of mind—because what could one do, other than what we secretly planned to do?

  During an early bull-shoot, Sven politely inquired how Wel's daily filings were going; and Wel said, “Okay, I guess,” and Bill snarled, “Who the doggone hell cares?” A bit of con
cerned probing by me elicited that Bill continued to smart because Wel had never published Bill’s cosmic leak.

  Chagrined, Wel patiently explained once more: “Now Bill, look. If I had published scientifically, I would have had to say that the solar system would fly apart directly and nobody knew what to do about it; what kind of moral sense would that make?”

  Bill rejoined: “But we know that it won’t fly apart!”

  Wel demanded: “And just how does a science editor say in his newspaper that we know this despite the whole science of physics? that our system stays cohesive because we have been shrunk by being pushed four centuries into our past? Do I tell my readers that a mystic has given me the word? Oh-oh, Collins, have I offended you now?”

  “Not at all, Doctor Carr,” serenely said Collins. “It will be much better if you publish what I told you after we have proof that it was right.”

  On our twelfth day aboard Mazda, July 12—having fallen uneventfully 52 million kilometers from Earth but still 97 million out from Sun—we crossed Venus’s orbit. Venus wasn’t there; but when we blanked-out Sun, we could see Venus distantly as a triple-size morning star. Her trebling had nothing to do with our diminution: Venus too had shrunk; but even though she was occupying a distant quarter of her orbit, she was much closer to Mazda than she was to Earth, and she appeared proportionately larger and more glorious.

  It was intrinsic to our close-in Venus viewing that we should look back and compare Earth—not by video using cameras pointed rearward, but through raw polarcrystal windows. Sven, momentarily relaxing the command attitude, swung Mazda sideways: on one flank we could view Earth directly; on the other, Venus. Great Christ, they were the same size! For all of us, it was rather a profound moment.

  Between Sven and NASA had arisen a serious hassle during our planning. NASA wanted to send Mazda one way and our satellites another during our final earth-orbit, so that only very minor course corrections would be required. Sven had insisted otherwise: the satellites must stay with Mazda until course-momentum was well established aiming at Sun’s heart.

  In the end, Sven had won: it was, after all, Southeastern Power’s expedition.

  Since our twelfth day, Wel had been firing our satellites off to the right, positioning them on their new course which would bring them into counterclockwise orbit eight million miles above sun-surface. Satellite Skiddoo departed us on Day 10, diverted about 4.5 degrees to our right; Three zinged-off on Day 12, and Two on Day 13.

  Day 15 saw a double-header. After Wel had dispatched One about 5.5 degrees right (wider divergence because we were 10 million kilometers closer to Sun, but aimed at the same satellite course), it was time for Mazda to execute her major course correction—and physically it was going to be a dilly.

  The reason for the thirty-one-hour spacing of the satellite launches was not, however, to get them into sun-orbit at that time-interval. Such a tactic wouldn’t work: Skiddoo, for example, fell during the thirty-one hours before Three was discharged, so without extra attention they would fall into echelon with Three right behind Skiddoo. But the intervals between launches gave Wel time for two kinds of adjustments-at-great-distance: to stabilize each satellite in its new course; and to brake it, rotating it so its booster pointed toward Sun and firing the booster to slow its fall-velocity. Skiddoo, Three, and Two were braked in progressively diminishing amounts; One was not braked at all. Thirty-one-hour orbital intervals between them would result, as we intended.

  And then it was Mazda’s turn.

  To understand our manner of correcting course, think of Mazda as the bob on the sunward end of a lever which was our course between Earth and this Day 15 position, a lever 64 kilometers long hinged on Earth. Sideways force brought to bear on the Mazda-bob would swing Mazda and its lever five degrees portside. However, since Mazda would not stop dead in her sunward course while the thrust was in progress, the lever would keep lengthening as it swung to the left Hence the correction course described by Mazda would be a long sigmoid, a stretched-out and middle-flattened S, with the bottom end pointing toward Earth on the old course while the top end would point toward Sun on the new.

  Several hours before executing the maneuver, Sven used lateral jets to brake and halt the Mazda artigrav rotation: maneuver problems would be subjectively complicated if the craft was spinning, and the crew needed a few advance hours for accommodating to non-gravity interior freefall. Next, slowly Sven tilted Mazda's attitude so that her belly (defined by the bases of her computer consoles and the bottoms of her instrument dials) faced toward Sun and the tail-jets of her booster pointed away from the direction that her course-change would take. Already, during fifteen days beyond Earth’s atmosphere and ever nearer to Sun, the booster had stored a good deal of solar energy, enough to bring off the course change.

  At what he judged to be the proper instant, Sven activated 360 seconds of power bum. During six excruciating minutes, the lateral thrust felt by us crew members amounted to five g's—a face-and-gut squashing comparable to accelerating in a jet plane from zero to 1757 kph in ten seconds and then crushing onward at the same accelerating thrust for another 350 seconds.

  When we cut power, we were coasting laterally at,63,360 I kph while continuing to fall sunward at 202,000 kph. The , thrust had taken us 2350 kilometers, which was most of the I required lateral distance; and meanwhile, we had fallen more than 20,000 kilometers sunward—hence the S-curve of the maneuver. We would now drift into our new course in a long falling trajectory, and by next day we’d be on it. No more lateral drift for Mazda after that: she would be controlled by her sunward momentum, which could be called her self-commitment to her high-velocity hurtling.

  Now the spatial attitude of Mazda made no difference; and Sven restored gravity rotation for comfort. Once our new course would be established, he would also restore the nose-down attitude, which had psychological value. Our fall-velocity would continue to grow; but because we were no longer I falling directly toward sun-center, the increase would be faintly more gradual than it would have been on the old course. After seven more days, for example, on the old direct fall our velocity would have been 75 kps; on this new course, it would be more like 74. But the difference was not enough to delay us as much as half a day altogether.

  After supper that evening, Sven was ready for a bull-shoot, but he found no takers. His crew, with much less space experience, was ready for the sack.

  Next evening we managed a bull-shoot; even Collins attended. And of course, the first thing thrown was Sven’s question to Collins: “Where are the Dhomers now?”

  “Best procedure might be to show you,” Collins returned. We all assumed the attitude and were again on the bridge of the Dhomer flagship, with Captain Dhurk turned sidewise to watch the glowing charts. On the small-scale cosmic-spread diagram at left, the scarlet manta had now moved most of the distance along the time-chord toward the destination radius whose upward terminus was marked O. The manta remained in the center of the right-hand large-scale chart, but the chart itself had moved so far leftward that the A symbol for the galaxy of their origin had vanished off the left edge.

  We returned to Mazda-consciousness....

  Rising out of his chair, Sven grasped both Collins’s shoulders and shook him, railing: “Goddamn it, Collins, you did it, stop them—” It was Wel who seized Sven from behind, one arm across Sven’s throat and another around his midriff, and hissed: “Cool it, you damn fool! cool it!”

  Enraged Sven began energetic body-motions to shake Wel off—and then abruptly Sven calmed, and stilled in Wel's arms, and felt Wel's arms drop away, and went to his seat, and muttered: “Sorry, Collins. Thanks, Wel.”

  Mutually uncomfortable lull. I have been at pains to make it clear that outbursts like Sven’s could not be attributed to our tight togetherness.

  Up came Sven’s chin; he was composed now. “I will say this as much to settle myself as to settle the rest of us. We have got to assume truth from Collins. If he is right, it would damage us to b
e surprised; if he is wrong, a surprise would be unimportant. I am opting on the assumption that in fact these guys from Dhorn are out to kidnap our solar system, and that around the sun we will encounter them. Who opts with me?”

  Four hands went up promptly.

  “Good,” said Sven. “All right. .If we do encounter them, we have Tinker, Evers, Chance, and Hoolihan. Wel, are you certain that you can deploy them effectively with split-second timing?”

  Wel said dryly: “I know the technique, I’ve tested it under lab conditions. Besides, they’re smart.”

  Sven pressed: “But do you have the will to fire them?” Scratching his head, Wel murmured: “Sven, I’ve distrusted this approach from the start. I’d much rather try first to dissuade the enemy.”

  “Now how are you going to do that?" Sven demanded; and I could see that he was controlling himself with difficulty. “In the first place, they are out to abduct our sun and our worlds; if they see us approaching for parley, their only intelligent response is to destroy us—and, God, intelligent they must be, to bring this off! And if we should somehow penetrate their defenses to reason with them—can you speak their otherworldly language, Wel? Can they understand ours?”

  Wel frowned, shaking his head slowly. “Nevertheless—” “Look, Wel, tell me honestly—do you have the will to fire? Because if you don’t, I’ll take over—and I want to know before the occasion arises.”

  Wel looked at him squarely. “Sven, if we are attacked first, I will have the will; otherwise;—take over.”