05-A Gift From Earth (29 page)

It still had a dot in the center.

“No,” said Hooker.

A black dot in the center of a blob which showed mostly blue.

“No. You’re going the wrong way. Turn around, you idiot!”

The ships were diving nose-on at each other.

Hurriedly Hooker swung his ship around.
I should have known
, he told himself.
Loeffler wants to ram. When I accelerate to the side, so does he, because otherwise I might get around him. But he won’t let me slow down.

If I get within three hundred miles of his ramscoop…

It was a stalemate. Loeffler couldn’t catch Hooker, and Hooker couldn’t escape Loeffler. But only Loeffler had the power to give up the game.

Loughery came to Plateau in a colonizing ramship, It was a common practice in those days for Earth to finance one-way trips to the colony worlds simply to get people off the planet. On his sixtieth birthday Loughery, having had enough of being a UN official, took the UN up on its offer.

He could have chosen any of the colony worlds. He chose Plateau because the social structure fascinated him. When he had learned enough, he intended to become a lawyer.

“That won’t be easy,” the mountaineer cop told him. Loughery had stopped the guy as he was coming off duty and offered to buy him drinks and dinner in return for information. “The mountaineer laws aren’t as difficult as Earth’s, at least from what I hear, but you may have trouble understanding the ethics behind them.”

“I gather a mountaineer is a Plateau dweller.”

“Right. Like a crashlander comes from We Made It and a flatlander comes from Earth.”

“About the ethics.”

“Hmmm.” The cop scratched the back of his head. “Tell you what. The records building is still open. Let’s walk over and I’ll find you a few examples.”

He had to use three electronic keys to get to the files. Once inside, he looked around him, lips puckered judiciously. “I’ll start you with an easy one,” he said. And he pulled a tape out of a drawer filled with similar tapes. “Let’s run this.”

They played it.

“Hooker,” said Loughery. “I remember him. Damnit, I’m the one who sent out the warning. I thought the 'doc had cured him. I’m as guilty as he is.”

The cop looked very coldly at Loughery. “Could you have stopped him?”

“No. But I could have stressed the warning.”

“As long as there was a warning. Now, do you understand the logic behind Hooker’s sentence?”

“I’m afraid not. He got two years imprisonment for negligent homicide, with simultaneous psychotherapy and conditioning. Psychotherapy is a lost art on Earth, by the way. I don’t question why he only got two years, but why negligent homicide?”

“There’s the crux. He wasn’t guilty of murder, was he?”

“I’d say yes.”

“But we say he was insane. That’s a legitimate plea.”

“Then why was he punished?”

“For letting himself become insane. He knew he was a potential paranoid; all he had to do was stay in reach of a working autodoc. And he didn’t. Four people died. Negligent homicide.”

Loughery nodded. His head was spinning.

“What isn’t here on the tape is the follow-up. Loeffler tried to kill Hooker.”

“Oh?”

“Hooker left in a ramship. Loeffler went after him. They had a big duel with com lasers. Now, let’s suppose Hooker had won that battle and killed Loeffler. What then?”

“Self-defense.”

“Not at all. Murder.”

“But why?”

“Loeffler was insane. And he was insane as a direct result of Hooker’s crime, not through Loeffler’s own negligence. Hooker could run or hide or yell for help or talk Loeffler into accepting treatment. He could not strike back. If he’d killed Loeffler, he’d have gotten fifty years for murder.”

“Maybe I should be a farmer. What did happen?”

“I wouldn’t know. Neither of them ever came back to Plateau.”

Fifty years?

The flap of a gnat’s wing.

The long chase was nearing its end. At first Hooker had gained on his pursuer, for Loeffler’s ramscoop was not getting as much hydrogen as Hooker’s. Loeffler’s ship was in the shadow of Hooker’s. At one time they had been lightyears apart. But now Loeffler’s ship was gaining, for Hooker’s ship had reached terminal velocity.

There had to be a limit on the velocity of a fusion-powered ramship. It was this: when the exhaust velocity of the fusion drive was no greater than the velocity of the interstellar hydrogen hitting the ramscoop, the ship could go no faster. Hooker had reached that limit tens of thousands of years ago. And so had his pursuer.

But Loeffler’s ship was using hydrogen that had, slipped through Hooker’s ramscoop. The hydrogen wasn’t hitting Loeffler’s ramscoop field as hard. It had absorbed velocity from Hooker’s.

Loeffler was close behind.

The chase could end within decades.

Once upon a time Hooker had hoped Loeffler would give up and turn around. Surely he would realize that Hooker could not be caught! But the years had stretched to decades, and every year Loeffler waited meant four years trying to get back to Wunderland. He’d have had to decelerate before he could begin the long flight home, and deceleration would take as many decades as he had spent fleeing. So Hooker had spent two hours a day before the scope screen, watching the stars crawl past year by year, waiting for Loeffler to turn around.

The years had stretched into centuries, and still Hooker spent two hours a day watching the rear scope screen. Now there were no more stars ahead, but only the distant muddled dots of galaxies, and the stars behind were taking on a vagueness like curdled milk. And when the centuries had become millennia, Hooker no longer believed his enemy would let him go. But still he spent two hours per ship’s day before the scope screen, watching the galaxy drop away.

He was totally a man of habits now. He had not had an original thought in centuries. The ship’s clock governed his life in every detail, taking him to the autodoc or the kitchen or the gym or the steam room or the bedroom or the bathroom. You’d have thought he was an ancient robot following a circular tape, no longer able to respond to outside stimuli.

He looked more like an aged robot than an aged man. From a distance he would have looked twenty. The 'doc had taken good care of him, but there were things the 'doc could not do. The oldest living man had been short of four hundred years old when that machine was made. Moscow Motors had had no way of knowing what a man would need when his life could be measured in tens of thousands of years. So the face was young; but the veneer was cracked, and the muscles no longer showed any kind of expression, and the habit patterns of the man were deeply grooved into the DNA memory processes of the brain.

By now the chase meant nothing to Hooker. In any case he should have been incapable of original thought.

They had come up along the galactic axis. Hooker, looking into the scope screen, saw the galaxy face-on. It was not bright, but it was wide. The galaxy showed like varicolored dyes poured into viscous ink, red dye and yellow and blue and green, but mostly red. Then the whole mass swirled around the center of the pot, so that the center glowed all colors—a continuous mass of stars packed so closely as to blot out the blackness behind, but it was not bright. There is dust even in intergalactic space. Nearly one hundred thousand lightyears of dust shaded the galaxy from Hooker’s view. The arms were almost black, the glowing areas spotted with black gaps and dust clouds. Everything was reddened and dimmed by Doppler shift.

He could not see Loeffler.

Habit used his fingers to magnify the view, slowly. The galaxy, already wide enough to fill the scope screen, expanded. In the core, individual, red giant stars appeared, bigger than anything in the arms. A blue-white spot appeared, and grew.

It grew until it filled the screen. There was a black dot in the center. And that grew too.

Hooker had watched for nearly an hour before the thought stirred in his brain. That hadn’t happened for a long time, but it did happen. Hooker’s memory capacity was nearly full, but his brain was in good working order, and he was guaranteed sane.

I wonder how much damage I did.

The thought threatened to skip away, but he grabbed for it, sensing somehow that it might be important.
I held my com laser on him for hours. I may have damaged him. I’ve never seen him broadside; I’d have no way of knowing. But if his ship is badly hurt, I could finish the job with my laser, it never burned out. His did.

He’d have to wait until Loeffler got closer. The thought slipped away… and returned two days later.
I wonder how much damage I did?
How would I find out?

Every day he remembered the problem. A month and a half after he had first thought of it, he thought of the answer.

He could turn the ship sideways to fire the fusion drive laterally. Loeffler would imitate him to keep him from sneaking past and home. That would put Loeffler broadside to him.

He had done it once before, trying to make turnover for Wunderland. But Loeffler had been too far away for the scope to show details. If he did it now…He did.

Then he focused one of the side scopes on Loeffler, enlarged the image as far as it would go, and waited.

The time came when he should have gone to the steam room. He was half out of his seat, but he couldn’t leave. Loeffler hadn’t turned yet. The ships were lighthours apart. Hooker forced himself to sit down and to stay down, gripping the arms of the control chair with both hands. His teeth began to chatter. He shivered. A deadening cold spread through him. He sneezed.

The shivering and the sneezing continued for a long time, then passed. Steam-room time was over.

Loeffler began to turn. And Hooker knew why he had never turned for home.

There was no lifesystem at all. The lifesystem had always been the most fragile part of the ship. Aeons ago Hooker’s laser had played over Loeffler’s lifesystem and melted it to slag. Nothing was left but tattered shards, polished at the edges by gas molecules slipping through the ramscoop shield.

Loeffler hadn’t died fast. He’d had time to program the autopilot to arrange a collision course with Hooker’s ship.

Loeffler might have given up the chase long ago, but the autopilot never would, never could.

Hooker turned off his scope screen and went down to the steam room. His schedule was shot to hell. He was still trying to readjust when, years later, Loeffler’s ramscoop field swept across his ship like an invisible wing.

Two empty ships drove furiously toward the edge of the universe, all alone.

Dan Adkins
artwork from
IF Science Fiction