Statesman (11 page)

Thus, in about two years, the sample demonstration of the new technique was ready to be made. I deem it a significant event in the history of our species.

Dear Daddy,

So you got a tiger! Well, I guess it happened some time ago, but the new government put a hold on news from Saturn—they seem to be trying to heat up the cold war again, I don't know why—so I didn't learn of it until recently. But I think it's terrific! A big old Smilodon from Earth's paleontology! Just take care he doesn't bite you. I wish I could meet him!

Business is booming here, but I am uneasy, because I know they are flooding the economy with money so that things will be positive for the next election. That didn't happen during the Tyrancy. Oh, well, it's really not my business; I have enough to do just keeping up with education. There's a drive on to censor some of the texts used currently, and of course I have to oppose that. Thorley has been writing some pithy columns on the subject. It's amazing how eloquently he can arrange to call a governor an idiot without actually saying it outright.

Take care of yourself, Daddy, and watch that tiger!

It was time for the demo: the first demonstration of the process for transmission at light speed. I had discussed this with Spirit and with Forta, and come to an agreement. Then I had discussed it with Khukov, and he had demurred. “Tyrant, this project is moving well only because of you. I cannot afford to lose you.”

“But if you believe in the technology—”

“I do believe! But the risk is too great. We can use anyone for this, and after it is successful—”

“But after the test, there is still the remainder of the System to enlist,” I pointed out. “It stands to be a long, difficult task, at best, and perhaps it will fail. We have to have the resources of Uranus and Jupiter, or the effort is wasted. Only the united System can afford the expense of the major project. This will go far toward getting the attention of every planet.”

“You could do it after the technique has been proved reliable,” he said.

“But the point is, I must establish my faith in it at the outset. There will be no occasion as important as the first.”

“But if it fails, through some trifling error—”

"It will only fail if the theory is invalid. We already know from the laboratory that it works for matter, and for small living animals and plants. The only doubt remains about human beings, in a genuine travel situation. That doubt must be totally resolved, at the outset. There can be no better way to resolve it.

Then the political aspect will become possible. A technical success without the full political impact will be useless; the one is as important as the other, and we must have both."

And so, reluctantly, he agreed. The political aspect was, after all, my agreed domain, and I had the right to play it my way.

Thus it was that Spirit and Forta and Smilo and I were conveyed by shuttleship to the orbiting test ship, and given possession. It was small, intended for a crew of three and a passenger load of four, but Smilo's mass qualified him to be all four passengers. This was a public event; the newsships of all the major planets and many of the minor ones were present, and we interviewed them freely as we proceeded. I piloted the ship, enjoying the feel of her. She was named Hope , an honor I had not sought but did not regret. After all, she was the hope of the future of man, as we saw it.

“Yes, it is a three-light-hour test flight,” I said, in answer to a query from a reporter on the screen. "From the orbit of Saturn, here, to the orbit of Uranus, cutting across to the far side at a slant to avoid the sun.

We shall be transformed to light, and will then proceed at light speed in the direction the transmitter is aimed, until we are intercepted by the receiver tube at the other end. Three hours to Uranus!"

I knew the System audience would be properly impressed; that trip would ordinarily take three months, by standard travel. In fact, we would arrive there at the same time as the news of our departure did.

“But suppose the alignment is off, and you miss the receiver tube?” the reporter asked.

“Then we go to another star,” I replied, smiling. It was a joke, but a grim one; that was exactly what would happen. But there would be no receiving tube deep in the galaxy, so we would travel forever.

“But the computer aligns them perfectly,” Spirit put in. “If they are not aligned, the transmission will not be activated. There is no danger.”

“Still, there is a risk,” the reporter persisted.

“I wouldn't have anybody else take a risk I wouldn't take myself,” I replied, and smiled bravely. Oh, they would eat this up, all across the System! As a publicity ploy, this was working perfectly.

But as we approached the transmitter station, which most resembled a ship-sized tube in space, an alarm sounded. “Unauthorized vessel intruding!”

The newsships quickly oriented on the intruder. It turned out to be a destroyer that had masqueraded as a newsship itself; how it had gotten past the clearance procedure was a question whose answer I was sure would cause some heads to roll. It was headed for us.

A Saturn battleship guarded us. Immediately it challenged the intruder, but received no answer.

Therefore it warned all other ships clear so that it could commence firing. This was a formality; it could score readily enough on the intruder without hitting any of the authorized vessels.

In response, the intruder fired a missile cluster at us. We were far enough from it so that there was plenty of time for the battleship to laser the missiles down. But then the cluster split apart, and suddenly there were thousands of decoys, mixed with a few genuine missiles. That complicated things considerably.

The battleship attacked on two fronts: It fired a barrage of missiles at the intruder, and simultaneously used its lasers to knock out the missiles heading for us. But it was difficult to tell which were real and which were the decoys, as the latter were designed to simulate the real ones for just this purpose. The battleship had to take out all the apparent missiles—and I knew from my own Navy experience that some of them would reach us before that happened. With luck, those that reached us would be decoys, harmless. But it was a gamble.

Then a new alarm sounded. “Sub alert! Sub alert!”

Spirit whistled. “The nomens are really after us this time!” she said. “They sneaked a sub in under cover of the missile action.”

“And we know its target,” I agreed. “Hang on; I'm taking evasive action.”

I spoke figuratively, for we were already strapped in. But it was rough on Smilo, who didn't understand about erratic space maneuvers; his body was thrown back and forth. That couldn't be helped.

The missiles and decoys corrected course to maintain their orientation, closing the gap between us.

Those were sophisticated decoys! But the real menace was the sub, which would launch a torpedo when it got the range. That would be target-seeking too, and there was no chance it would be a decoy.

Sure enough, our torpedo alarm activated. The sub could not be seen, but the torpedo could, and it was uncomfortably close.

“Got to run for it!” I said. I maxed the drive, and we took off at four gees. Hoo! That just about stopped my old heart right there! But the missiles still gained on us, and so did the torpedo.

Then the torpedo detonated; the battleship had scored on it with a laser. But we knew the sub was still there, and it would fire another torpedo when ready; this was a loser's game, for us.

“Go for the transmitter!” Spirit said. She was cool, of course, though Fortuna seemed frightened. She had reason!

Of course! I went for the transmitter, which we had been approaching anyway. Its personnel, cognizant of the situation, would be ready; they would activate it the moment we entered it.

Our torpedo alarm sounded again. This one was closer, and closing on us faster; the sub had zeroed in on us.

But the transmitter was closer yet. “This demo had better work!” I muttered as I oriented on the seemingly tiny aperture of the tube and maintained acceleration. Because if it didn't, and we were not sent out at light speed, the torpedo would take us out at its speed.

I won the race to the transmitter. Our ship plunged into the tube—and out the other side.

“Oh, no!” Spirit breathed. “They didn't transmit us!”

But in a moment I knew she was wrong. “Look at the environment!” I exclaimed. "The light ambience is only a quarter what it was. This is Uranus orbit!

“But we didn't take any three hours!” Forta protested.

“We took it; we simply weren't aware of it. There is no time at light speed, as far as we're concerned; it's like being in suspended animation.”

“Of course,” Forta agreed after a moment. “Silly of me to forget.” In this manner she dismissed the magnitude of the accomplishment we had seen: successful light-speed travel. It had worked! Man could now travel to the stars, with no more apparent time lapse than we had experienced. We could colonize the galaxy!

Now we saw the escort ships of the Uranus nations arriving. We were definitely there!

In a moment we were in video touch with them, and I was repeating what was obvious: we had arrived in good form and, no, we had not been rendered into zombies. The mechanism was viable.

“But how is the tiger?” a reporter asked.

We checked. Smilo looked spacesick, but he was intact. “We had a little complication at the other end,”

I explained. “Smilo wasn't anchored, and he took a beating. But cats are tough. I'm sure he'll be available for interviews in due course.”

The reporter laughed, and so did we. It was a great feeling.

But our relaxation was premature. A ship with the emblem of Helvetia was approaching. Spirit and I accepted this with equanimity, because Helvetia, colonized by the historic Switzerland, was to be our host country during our stay at Uranus.

Uranus, you see, is more fragmented than is Jupiter or Saturn. It equates to the ancient Europe, and has many languages and cultures, and a turbulent history. Because it would have been confusing to have all the political entities of Earth represented by identical names in their colonies, the colonies assumed names of their choosing, and these were generally based on long-standing cultural affiliations. On Earth of twenty-five centuries ago, the territory later to be known as Switzerland was occupied by the Helvetian people, and so this was the name selected for their colony on Uranus. They have maintained their policy of nonviolence, and their interest in technology and finance; Helvetian equipment is some of the finest in the System, and their city of Rich is perhaps the leading financial center of Uranus. (Cities tend to be abbreviated forms of their counterparts on ancient Earth, so Rich derives from Zurich appropriately.) At any rate, we felt quite comfortable about accepting the hospitality of Helvetia, though this was our first visit to Uranus.

“I smell a rat,” Forta said.

I glanced at her. “You don't like Helvetia?”

“I like it well; I have been here before. But Helvetia has no ships of that class in its Navy.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Historically, on Earth, the region was landbound, but there is no such thing in the System. Helvetia can have any navy it can finance—and it is a rich little nation.”

“Isn't that a cruiser?” she persisted. “A ship of war?”

“She's got a point, Hope,” Spirit said. “Why should a peaceful nation support a war vessel?”

“They don't support any warships,” Forta said. “It's policy, not finance. That ship can't be theirs.”

“We can verify its credentials in a moment,” I said, reaching for the communications panel.

Spirit's hand intercepted mine. “If that ship is a ringer, it will blast us out of space the moment we try to verify it. Our assassins are fanatics.”

“But if we don't go with it, it will realize that we know,” I said. “And if we do go with it—”

“The tube,” Forta said tightly. “Will it—?”

“Titan personnel operate that tube,” I said. “Let's see how smart they are.” I spoke casually, but we all knew that we were in trouble.

I touched the communications panel. “Glad to see you, Helvetia,” I said, addressing the cruiser. “Bear with me a moment; I want to fetch something at the tube.” And I cut my drive, going into free-fall, turned my ship about, and accelerated back toward the tube. Of course this meant I was still traveling the way I had been going; it would take a few minutes for our drive to reverse our course. But since the cruiser had been matching our velocity, this had the effect of making us draw away from it.

The cruiser did not reply. It simply matched our velocity again, performing a similar maneuver and accelerating to compensate for our change. It was not about to let us get away.

I goosed the drive, increasing our gee. Smilo gave a growl, not liking this. The cruiser matched us again.

There was no longer doubt in my mind; that ship was stalking us, determined to keep us within the range of its weapons so that it could take us out anytime. Because a cruiser is a major ship, worth a lot of money to someone, it was not eager to become a suicide mission; it preferred to wait for opportunity or necessity to deal with us, always hoping that we would finish our minor errand and then dock with it, the four of us walking quietly into its trap like flies into the web of a spider. Then we would disappear, and so would the cruiser, and the powers of Uranus would be left with a mystery, and no Tyrant to meet with.

I guided our ship straight toward the tube. “Minor matter,” I transmitted to the tube personnel. “You know what I want.”

There was a pause. Then the Rising Sun technician came on my screen. “As you wish, Tyrant,” he said politely.

We oriented on the tube and accelerated right for its aperture. Because this was a pilot model, it wasn't trim; it was oversized, with clumsy-seeming attachments. Later generations would be sleek and trim, instead of big enough to handle the proverbial barn. The pursuing ship closed on us, perhaps becoming nervous about our destination. If we transmitted back to Saturn—

By the time we entered the tube, the cruiser was almost on our tail. We shot through, and out the other side. The cruiser entered right behind us, barely squeezing in—and disappeared.

We experienced an abrupt jolt, as though a star had just gone nova behind us. Our tail section heated and melted, and our drive cut out. We were boosted forward, but we were dead in space. Smilo took another bad fall.

But ships were constructed for exactly this type of acceleration. Our drive was gone, but our hull was intact and our cabin power remained on. We had survived.

“What was that?” Forta asked. Her bun of hair had come apart, and she looked disheveled.

“We may have been struck by a laser,” I said, “or the equivalent.”

“Oh—they fired at us!” she said.

“Perhaps,” Spirit agreed.

“Where are we?” Forta asked nervously.

“Right where we were,” I said, checking out the equipment to ascertain whether we retained communication. “The tube did not activate, for us.”

“Then where is the other ship?”

I smiled grimly. “That may be difficult to determine. You see, the tube did activate for it.”

“You mean it's a light beam, on its way to Saturn?”