MacRoscope (50 page)

Schön sighed. “Of course you are right. A captaincy in your navy would be an unheard of reward for a suspected spy, however meritorious his service.”

“Who said anything about — !” the Chief began, his shell crackling with righteous indignation. “A captaincy! I was thinking of Third Lieutenant, J. G., apprentice, probationary.”

Captain Schön docked his sleek destroyer and gave his crew thirty-hour planetary leave while the ship underwent preventive maintenance. He set the thermostat within his flame-red cloak of authority to an invigorating sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, making the mental conversion to local units effortlessly. The few civilians passing him on the street saluted with alacrity; he ignored them. Protocol did no require that an officer return courtesy to any person more than three grades below him, and of course civilians were beneath rank.

He mounted the ramp of the capital and brushed past the rigid guards. The other officers were already assembled in the presidential suite: the five supreme individuals of the planet, gathered about the giant semicircular table. The Monarch, the Prime Minister, the Fleet Admiral, the Chief of Intelligence and the Chancellor of the Exchequer — all waiting somberly for the meeting to begin.

Schön took his place. Not one of the others was particularly pleased at his presence, but they did not dare to make a key decision without him. They knew he was clever enough to foil anything arranged without his consent.

The Prime Minister elevated himself, lifting his venerable thorax above the table. “Gentlemen — we have received an ultimatum from the Hegemony of Lion. We are met here to consider our response.”

The Monarch turned to him. “A précis, if you please.”

“Surrender of all military equipment together with attached personnel. Deportation of hostages to Lion, as itemized. Indemnities. Reconstruction.”

“Standard contract,” the Chief observed.

“All present of this council appear on the hostage list?” the Monarch inquired.

The Minister rattled agreement. “All but the Captain. Together with households.”

The Chancellor coughed. “Households! That means our daughters get dinked.”

“Good for them, I’m sure,” the Chief muttered.

The Chancellor inflated angrily, but the Monarch cut him off by speaking again. “How strict are the indemnities?”

“Standard. Ten percent of Gross Planetary Product for Ram and environs, fifteen percent for subsidiary worlds. Exploitation of subsequently developed offworld resources, fifty percent.”

“Too high,” the Admiral said. “They should not get more than twenty percent of windfall acquisitions.”

“Academic, since we won’t have our navy,” the Chief pointed out. “No ships, no loot — unless you plan to refit merchant vessels for your piracy.”

“Piracy!”

“Gentlemen, let’s not quibble over terminology in this time of crisis,” the Monarch said. “The question is, do we acquiesce?”

“No!” the Admiral exclaimed. “We have the space fold coordinates of their main system updated to the second. We have the missiles for an inundation strike. Act now, and we can wipe them out. Solve the problem once and for all.”

“Very neat,” the Chief said dryly. “Except for their second-strike capability. What use mutual destruction?”

“Better that than slavery!”

“A standard contract is hardly slavery, even with fifty percent windfall appropriation. We have issued similar contracts to lesser species in the past.”

“What makes you think they’ll honor those terms, once our fleet has been dismantled?”

“Haven’t you heard of the Gemini Convention?”

“That’s passé. We never bothered with it. Not for fifty thousand years—”

“Gentlemen,” the Monarch repeated, and the argument subsided fretfully.

“It seems our various opinions are fairly set,” the Minister remarked. “Some are amenable to compromise, some feel we would be foolish to allow ourselves to be read out of power by such means.”

“Better read than dead,” the Chief murmured.

“Treason!” the Admiral exclaimed.

“
However
,” the Minister continued loudly, “we must agree on some recommendation before this session ends. The Monarch, of course, will make the decision.”

There was a silence.

“I am, as you know, from a far system,” Schön said after an interval. “Possibly my perspective differs from yours.”

They waited noncommittally, grudgingly allowing him to make his case.

“As I understand it, Ram has historically had good relations with Lion. Both hegemonies rose to sapience about a million years before the Traveler appeared, and because of their proximity — within a hundred light-years of each other — an intense dialogue was feasible. The development of spacefold transport was hailed as the beginning of an era of splendor, now that these longtime and compatible correspondents could meet physically and without a time delay of centuries.”

“Ancient history,” snorted the Admiral.

“Yet instead of a mutually beneficial interchange — trade — you developed antipathy. You were at war within a thousand years, and have fought intermittently and inconclusively ever since, just as Tyre fought with Sidon.”

“Tyre? Sidon?” the Admiral inquired. “Where in the galaxy are they? What kind of fleets do they have?”

“Mixed fleets: war galleys and merchanters,” Schön replied straight-faced. “The point is, they depleted their resources and discommoded their navies by striving senselessly against each other, instead of mobilizing against their mutual enemies.”

“That’s an oversimplification,” the Minister said. “We have had numerous encounters with other systems—”

“Three wars with Centaur, two with Swan, altercations with Eagle, Horse, Dog, Hare—” Schön put in.

“Alliances with Bear, Beaver, Dragon—” the Minister interposed in turn, retaining his equanimity.

“All of which were violently sundered. Why? What happened to the mighty era of knowledge and prosperity heralded by the availability of interstellar travel?”

“Our neighbors disappointed us.”

“They all were unworthy. Sure. And now Lion has issued an ultimatum demanding your conditional surrender. Surely they had provocation?”

The Admiral and the Minister rustled their scales discordantly.

“There
was
a border incident,” the Chief admitted after a small delay.

“Of what nature. Practically speaking, you don’t
have
a border with Lion. You have to use spacefold — and you can’t just rub up against your neighbor by accident. Not when you have to compress an object of near-planetary mass into its gravitational radius in order to poke through. For that matter, spacefold transport and accurate coordinates make the entire galaxy your neighbor. Light velocity limitation means nothing anymore.”

“It was a reconnaissance mission,” the Admiral said.

“A two-thousand-mile diameter moon on reconnaissance? Equipped to service several thousand warships, each potentially armed with planet-busters? Your euphemism hardly becomes the situation. And I’ll bet you planted it within five light-seconds of their homeworld.”

“Three light-seconds,” the Admiral said almost inaudibly.

“And
you
didn’t bother with any ultimatum, did you? Just a nice, neat fait accompli. You thought. Sneak your battlemoon right within range of their capital-planet, while their own ships were elsewhere. So what happened?”

“They were ready for us,” the Minister said. “They had complete information.”

“Incredible bungling,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer muttered. “Have you any idea what a battlemoon
costs
?”

“Obviously there was a leak,” Schön said. He was beginning to get bored.

“Obviously.” The Admiral glared at the Chief, who averted his facets.

“So now Lion has your, er, expedition, and the balance of power has shifted in its favor. Thus the ultimatum.”

None of them replied.

“I have,” Schön continued after a pause, “been doing a little research. I find that this entire question is unimportant.”

Their eyes appraised him stonily.

“Ram and Lion are two principalities amid a galaxy of kingdoms, federations and empires. The only reason neither has been gobbled up yet is that there is insufficient wealth between you to warrant the trouble. However, the flux of major powers is at the state where it has become economically feasible to absorb you both, rather than tolerate your petty raids on civilized installations any longer. You Phoenicians and Greeks are ripe for Egypt or Assyria — or even Alexander.”

The Monarch contemplated him sadly through a golden facet. “Are you ready now to inform us whom you represent? This Alexander, perhaps?”

“I represent no one but myself. I am merely stating facts that should be obvious to any objective party. Your shortsightedness is destroying you. You are wasting each other’s resources while the wolves look on, and they are only waiting until you are at your weakest stage before snapping you up. You would be far better off to make an honest alliance with Lion — even to the extent of accepting that so-called contract — and thus perhaps postpone a more final loss of identity.”

Still they did not comment.

At last the Monarch looked up. “What you say makes sense to us, Captain. We are in the wrong, but it is not too late. We shall accept the contract.”

There was no dissent, of course. The Monarch of Ram had spoken.

Two weeks later Schön’s ship berthed within the transport satellite: another moon of minimum effective mass. It had been stripped, the Chief informed him, and was nothing but a ball of rock, with the exception of the tube leading down into the compression mechanism compartment. The equipment, Schön knew, was far more sophisticated than that constructed by the human party on Triton; this could make use of a far smaller mass, and the location perceptors were precise. This, together with the up-to-date spacefold maps of this area of the galaxy, made a controlled jump routine. He had done his homework here, too, and was familiar with the equipment.

He was alone. He had been selected to make the trip to Lion bearing the capitulation message. “They would not trust any sizable party,” the Chief had explained. “But you, an alien, can negotiate the details, and return with their expeditionary party. We shall be ready, then.”

Yeah, sure, bugeye
.

Schön entered the control compartment and examined the telltales. The mechanism had been set and locked: transport was scheduled to occur within the hour, and this had been timed exactly. The express position of the object was important, as the human explorers had known; what the dull-witted humans had not suspected was that the precise
time
of transport was equally critical. For the universe was not stable; it had been expanding, and now was in a state of flux preparatory to contraction, and this affected every part of it. Some sections were
still
expanding, while others were already contracting, and special stresses acted even on the interiors of galaxies and stellar systems that appeared to the fleeting animate observer to maintain their original sizes and positions. And this flux caused a drift between adjacent surfaces of jumpspace; the loops were fairly constant, but their fabric continued to stretch, eventually forming new loops of similar size or abolishing old ones. As a result, the differential between adjacent surfaces could be a swift current. In some instances, as shift piled upon shift and jumpspace warped frantically to compensate, the passage of minutes meant a similar number of light-minutes deviation from the calculated location of emergence.

So his journey had been carefully calculated in advance, and the equipment sealed to prevent potentially disastrous distortion. Emergence at the wrong point in space, even if only a few million miles off, could be taken as an indication of betrayal, and the waiting warships would open fire.

Schön unlimbered the special equipment he had brought (smuggled) and powdered the locking devices with single applications of his limited-slip laser. The panel opened, exposing the intricate circuitry. He manipulated his tools with the dexterity and competence he naturally possessed and made certain minor adjustments.

He was not traveling quite where the good Monarch of Ram had arranged.

He returned to his ship, sealed himself in, and entered the melting chamber. The ten-second melt-radiation warner sounded; then—

He came out of it whole, knowing that many hours had passed while his body melted, vaporized and finally compressed along with the ship and moon into a comparative speck — and then reversed the process at the other end of the jump.

He set himself before the ship’s macroscope and looked out at the universe.

There was no destroyer signal, as he had known. The ship’s computer shifted through the configurations and matched his present location: approximately one light-hour away from his scheduled rendezvous in the home-system of Lion.

He smiled. It had worked.

He had set the contraction mechanism for a triple sequence with a delay of only minutes between each effort. Thus the moon had made the first jump to Lion, hesitated momentarily, and gone into the return cycle before protoplasmic reconstitution could start. The brief interim and the relative motion of the two surfaces of space had sent it back at an angle, and it had emerged several light-minutes from its origin. Before the home-crowd could respond, since it took minutes for them even to see it, it had gone into the third compression, to emerge at its present spot. Its route had been a kind of N figure, the displacement magnified by the stress exerted on the fabric of space by adjacent punchthroughs. Dangerous — but what were heroes for, if not to brave danger?

Only then had the reconstitution process commenced. This had taken hours — but his displacement in space should have been sufficient for security. Just about now things should be popping.

They were. The sweep showed the traces that indicated an armada encircling the inhabited world of this system: battleships traveling at speed. The Lions had anticipated treachery.

And the anticipation had been well fulfilled. Two uncharted moons drifted within the system, light-hours apart, and he knew that at least one more was present on the far side, too far from his own location to register yet. Observation by optics or macronics was so
slow!
It was an all-out attack; the inundation strike the Ram Admiral had urged.