TULAN
BY
C. C. MacAPP OR CARROLL MATHER CAPPS
To disobey the orders of
the
Council
of Four was unthinkable
to a Space Admiral of
the old
school. But
the trouble was,
the
school system had changed.
A man, a
fighter, an Admiral
had to think for himself
now, if
his
people were to live.
While facing the Council of Four his
restraint had not slipped; but afterward, shaking
with fury, the Admiral of the Fleets of Sennech slammed
halfway down the long flight of stone steps before
he realized someone was at his elbow. He slowed.
“Forgive me, Jezef. They made me so mad
I forgot you were waiting.”
Jezef (adjutant through most of Tulan’s
career, and for some years brother-in-law as well)
was shorter and less harshly carved than his superior.
“So they wouldn’t listen to you. Not
even Grefen?”
“Even Grefen.” That vote had stabbed
deepest of all.
Jezef took it with the detachment
that still irritated Tulan. “The end of
a hundred years of dreams; and we go back under the
yoke. Well, they’ve always been soft masters.”
They reached the ground cars.
Before getting into his own Tulan said coldly, “Since
you’re so philosophical about it, you’ll
be a good one to bear the sight of men saying good-bye
to their families. We’re to take full crews
to Coar and surrender them with the ships. Requisition
what help you need and get everybody aboard by noon
tomorrow.”
Jezef saluted with a hint of amused irony, and left.
Whipping through the dark icy streets,
Tulan smiled sourly, thinking how Sennech’s
scientists had reversed themselves on the theory of
hyperspace now that Coar had demonstrated its existence.
Maybe the Council was right in mistrusting their current
notions. As for himself, he saw only two things
to consider: that with Coar swinging behind the
sun, the accuracy of her new weapon had gone to pot;
and that before she was clear again he could pound
her into surrender.
His swift campaigns had already smashed
her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space,
but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties
from just a few days of the weird surprise bombardment,
was cowed.
He’d spent the previous night
at home, but wasn’t going back now, having decided
to make his farewell by visiphone. It was the
thing he dreaded most, or most immediately, so as
soon as he reached the flagship he went to his quarters
to get it over with.
Anatu’s eyes the
same eyes as Jezef’s looked at him
out of the screen, filling him with the familiar awkward
worship. “You’ve heard?” he
asked finally.
“Yes. You won’t be home before you
go?”
“No; I ...” He abandoned
the lie he’d prepared. “I just didn’t
feel up to it.”
She accepted that. “I’ll wake the
boys.”
“No! It’s ” Something
happened to his throat.
She watched him for a moment.
“You won’t be back from Coar. You’ve
got to speak to them.”
He nodded. This wasn’t
going according to plan; he’d intended it to
be brief and controlled. Damn it, he told himself,
I’m Admiral of the Fleets; I’ve no right
to feelings like this. He straightened, and knew
he looked right when the two sleepy stares occupied
the screen.
Their hair was stiff and stubborn
like his own, so that they wore it cropped in the
same military cut. It could have stood a brush
right now. They were quiet, knowing enough of
what was wrong to be frightened.
He spoke carefully. “I’m
going to Coar to talk to them about stopping the war.
I want you to look after things while I’m away.
All right?”
“All right, Dad.”
The older one was putting on a brave front for the
benefit of the younger and his mother, but the tears
showed.
As Tulan cut the connection he saw
that Anatu’s eyes were moist too, and realized
with surprise that he’d never before, in all
the years, seen her cry. He watched the last
faint images fade from the screen.
Sometime near dawn he gave up trying
to sleep, dressed, and began composing orders.
Presently Jezef came in with cups of steaming amber
liquid. They sipped in silence for a while, then
Jezef asked “You’ve heard about Grefen?”
Tulan felt something knot inside him.
He shook his head, dreading what he knew was coming.
“He killed himself last night,” Jezef
said.
Tulan remembered the agony in the
old Minister of War’s eyes when he’d voted
for surrender. Grefen had been Admiral in his
day; the prototype of integrity and a swift sledgehammer
in a fight; and Tulan’s first combat had been
under him. A symbol of the Fleet, Tulan reflected;
and his death, yes, that too was a symbol what
was there but shame in surrender, for a man or a fleet
or a world?
His hand clenched, crumpling the paper
it was resting on. He smoothed the paper and
re-read the order he’d been writing. He
visualized the proud ranks of his crewmen, reduced
to ragged lines shuffling toward prison or execution.
It seemed impossible, against the
laws of nature, that men should strive mightily and
win, then be awarded the loser’s prize.
His anger began to return. “I’ve
a mind to defy the Government and only take skeleton
crews,” he said. “Leave the married
men, at least.”
Jezef shrugged. “They’d
only be bundled into transports and sent after us.”
“Yes. Damn it, I won’t
be a party to it! All they did was carry out
their orders, and superbly, at that!”
Jezef watched him with something like
curiosity. “You’d disobey the Council?
You?”
Tulan felt himself flush. “I’ve
told you before, discipline’s a necessity to
me, not a religion!” Nevertheless, Jezef’s
question wasn’t unfair; up to now it really
hadn’t occurred to him that he might disobey.
His inward struggle was brief.
He grabbed the whole pad of orders and ripped them
across. “What’s the Council, with
Grefen gone, but three trembling old men? Get
some guns manned, in case they get suspicious and
try to interfere.”
Blood began to surge faster in his
veins; he felt a vast relief. How could he have
ever seen it differently? He jabbed at a button.
“All ships’ Duty Officers; scramble communication
circuits. This is the Admiral. Top Secret
Orders....”
Shortly before noon the four-hundred-odd
ships lifted out of Sennech’s frosty atmosphere,
still ignoring the furious demands from the radio.
Fully armed, they couldn’t be stopped.
Tulan’s viewer gave a vivid
picture of the receding fifth planet. The white
mantle of ice and snow was a backdrop for blue artificial
lakes and the dark green of forest-strips (hardy conifers
from Teyr) alternated with the lighter shades of surface
farms. The ice had been almost unbroken until
men came, bringing more heat than Sennech had ever
received from a far-off sun.
That had been before the First Solar
War, when Teyr (the race of Aum had originated there)
ruled. That awful struggle had bludgeoned the
home planet back to savagery, and left Coar and Sennech
little better off.
With recovery, Coar had taken over
and prospered immensely. Teyr stayed wild except
for small colonies planted there by the other two planets,
and Sennech lagged for a while.
Within Tulan’s lifetime his
world had found itself ready to rise against the lax
but profit-taking rule of Coar, and that rebellion
had grown into the present situation.
Sennech’s wounds were plainly
visible in the viewscreen; great man-made craters
spewing incandescent destruction blindly over farm,
city, or virgin ice. The planet was in three-quarters
phase from here, and Tulan could see the flecks of
fire in the darkness beyond the twilight zone.
Near the edge of that darkness he made out the dimmer,
diffused glow of Capitol City, where Anatu would be
giving two small boys their supper.
He checked altitude, found they were
free of the atmosphere, and ordered an acceleration
that would take them halfway to the sun in fifty hours.
It was uncomfortable now, with Sennech’s gravity
added, but that would fall off fast.
Jezef hauled himself in and dropped
to a pad. “I wish I had your build,”
he said. “Do you really think we can pull
this off?”
Tulan, in a good mood, grinned at
him. “Have I ever led you into defeat yet,
pessimist?”
“No; and more than once I’d
have bet ten to one against us. That’s why
the Fleet fights so well for you; we have the feeling
we’re following a half-god. Gods, however,
achieve defeats as terrible as their victories.”
Tulan laughed and sat down beside
Jezef with some charts. “I think I’ll
appoint you Fleet Poet. Here’s the plan.
No one knows what I intend; we could be on our way
around the sun to overtake Coar and either fight or
surrender, or we might be diving into the sun in a
mass suicide. That’s why I broke off the
siege and pulled all units away from Coar; the fact
that they’re coming back around to meet us will
suggest something like that.”
“Are they going to join up?”
“No; I want them on this side
of the sun but behind us. I have a use for them
later that depends on their staying hidden. Incidentally,
I’m designating them Group Three.
“In a few hours we’re
going to turn hard, this side of the sun, and intercept
Teyr. I want to evacuate our forces from the moon,
then decoy whatever the enemy has there into space
where we can get at them. That’s their
last fleet capable of a sortie, and with that gone
we can combine our whole strength and go around to
Coar. She’ll probably give up immediately,
on the spot.”
Jezef thought it over. “Will
they be foolish enough to leave the moon? As
long as they’re safely grounded there, they constitute
a fleet-in-being and demand attention.”
“We’ll give them a reason
to move, then ambush them. Right now we’ve
a lot of reorganizing to do, and I want you to get
it started. We’re splitting this Force
into Groups One and Two. Here’s what I want.”
They cut drives and drifted in free
fall while supplies were transferred between ships,
then Tulan held an inspection and found crews and
equipment proudly shipshape. Despite the proliferating
rumors, morale was excellent.
A few hours later the realignment
began. Space was full of the disc-shapes; thin,
delicate-looking Lights with their projecting external
gear, and thicker, smoothly armored Mediums and Heavies.
He had twenty-three of the latter in Group One, with
twice as many Mediums and a swarm of smaller craft.
Group Two, composed of the supply
ships and a small escort, was already formed and diverging
away. That was a vital part of his plan.
From a distance they’d look to telescope or
radar like a full combat fleet.
He was almost ready to swerve toward
the third planet and its moon, but first he had a
speech to make. It was time to squash all the
rumors and doubts with a dramatic fighting announcement.
He checked his appearance, stepped
before the scanner, and nodded to Communications to
turn it on. “All hands,” he said,
then waited for attention.
The small monitor screens showed a
motley sampling of intent faces. He permitted
himself a tight smile. “You know I have
orders to surrender the Fleet.” He paused
for effect. “Those are the orders of the
Council of Four, and to disobey the Council would
be unthinkable.
“Yet it is also unthinkable
that a single ship of the Fleet should surrender under
any circumstances, at any time; therefore I am faced
with a dilemma in which tradition must be broken.
“The Council of Four has lost
courage, and so, perhaps, have many of the people
of Sennech. We have ways of knowing that the people
of Coar, far more than our own, clamor at their government
for any sort of peace.
“Coar’s fleets are smashed
and the remnants have fled from space.
“Clearly, courage has all but
vanished from the Solar System; yet there is one place
where courage has not wavered. That place is in
the Fleet of Sennech.
“At this moment we are the only
strength left in the Solar System. We dominate
the System!
“Would we have history record
that the Fleet won its fight gloriously, then cravenly
shrank back from the very brink of victory?
“We left Sennech fully armed,
though our orders were directly opposite. I need
not tell you that I have made the decision any man
of the Fleet would make.
“This is our final campaign.
Within a short time we shall orbit Coar herself and
force her surrender. That is all.”
There was a moment so quiet that the
hum of the circuits grew loud, then the monitors shook
with a mighty cheer.
Later, alone, Jezef congratulated
him amusedly. “They are certainly with
you a hundred percent now, if there was any doubt before.
Yet there was one argument you didn’t even hint
at; the strongest argument of all.”
“What was that?”
“Why, you’re offering
them a chance at life and freedom, where they might
be going to imprisonment or execution.”
That irritated Tulan. “I’m
sure you’re not so cynical about Fleet loyalty
and tradition as you pretend,” he said stiffly.
“I wouldn’t affront the men by using that
kind of an argument.”
Jezef grinned more widely. “Did
it even occur to you to use it?”
Tulan flushed. “No,” he admitted.
Teyr and her moon Luhin, both in quarter-phase
from here, moved steadily apart in the viewers.
Group One’s screen of light
craft probed ahead, jamming enemy radar, and discovering
occasional roboscouts which were promptly vaporized.
Far behind, Group Two showed as a small luminescence.
It would never be visible to Luhin as anything else,
and then only when Tulan was ready.
They reversed drives, matched speeds
neatly, and went into forced orbit around Luhin.
On the flagship’s first pass over the beleaguered
oval of ground held by Sennech’s forces unsupported
and unreinforced since the home planet’s defection Tulan
sent a message squirting down. “Tulan commanding.
Is Admiral Galu commanding there? Report situation.”
The next time around a long reply
came up to them. “This is Captain Rhu commanding.
Galu killed. Twenty percent personnel losses.
Six Lights destroyed; moderate damage to several Mediums
and one Heavy. Ground lines under heavy pressure.
Ships’ crews involved in fighting at perimeter.
Food critical, other supplies low. Several thousand
wounded. Combat data follows.” There
was a good assessment of the struggle, with some enemy
positions that were known.
The Fleet Force that had escorted
nearly one hundred thousand ground troops included
five Heavies and other craft in proportion, besides
the transports and supply ships. Alone, they’d
been pinned down by superior enemy ground forces and
by a sizable fleet holed up all around the satellite.
With Tulan’s support they could be taken off.
Tulan composed orders. “Withdraw
ships’ crews from lines and prepare to lift.
Get wounded aboard transports and prepare to evacuate
troops. Set up fire control network to direct
our ground support.”
The tedious job of shrinking the perimeter,
a short stretch at a time, began, harassed by the
quickly adapting enemy.
During the first twenty hours the
hostile fire was all from ground projectors, the enemy
ships not risking detection by joining in. By
that time one section of the front had pulled back
to where several ships, sheltered in a crater, would
have to lift.
Lines of men and equipment converged
on the ships and jammed aboard. The actual lift
was preceded by a diversion a few miles away, which
succeeded in pulling considerable enemy fire.
The ships got off in unison, slanting back across
friendly territory and drawing only light missiles
which the defenses handled easily.
Then, suddenly, a salvo of heavy stuff
came crashing in, too unexpected and too well planned
to stop. One of the lifting ships, a transport,
vanished in a great flash.
Tulan yelled into his communicator.
“Plot! Where did that come from?”
“I’m sorting, sir.
Here! A roboscout got a straight five-second plot
before they downed it!”
“Intelligence!” Tulan
snapped. “Get the co-ordinates and bring
me photos!”
There were already pictures of the
area where the salvo must have originated, and one
of them showed a cave-like opening in a crater wall.
“That’s it!” Tulan jabbed a pencil
at it. “You could hide a dozen ships in
there. Let’s get a strike organized!”
The strike group included four Heavies
besides the flagship, with twelve Mediums and twenty
Lights. They slanted down in a jerky evasive course
while pictures flashed on screens to be compared with
the actual terrain.
Ground fire, chemically propelled
missiles, erupted ahead of them and the small craft
went to work intercepting it. They were down to
a hundred miles, then fifty, streaking along the jagged
surface so close they seemed to scrape it. This
was point-blank range; as the computers raced with
the chaos of fire and counter-fire, human senses could
only register a few impressions the bruising
jerks, the shudder of concussions, white streaks of
rocket-trails, gushers of dirt from the surface, winking
flashes of mid-air interception.
Then the Heavies were on target.
The flagship jumped as the massive salvo leaped away not
chemical missiles, but huge space torpedoes propelled
by Pulsor units like the ships’ drives, directing
their own flocks of smaller defensive missiles by
an intricate network of controls. The small stuff,
augmented by fire from the lighter ships, formed momentarily
a visible tube down which the big stuff streaked untouched.
The whole crater seemed to burst upward,
reaching out angry fingers of shattered rock as they
ripped by, rocking and bucking with the blasts.
Tulan’s viewer swivelled aft to hold the scene.
Secondary blasts went off like strings of giant firecrackers.
Great black-and-orange fungi-like clouds swirled upward,
dissipating fast in the thin atmosphere. Then
Tulan spotted what he was looking for: three small
ships flashing over the area, to get damage-assessment
pictures. There was still a lot of ground-fire
from farther out, and it caught one of the three,
which wobbled crazily then disappeared in a flash which
blanked out the viewscreen.
“Intelligence!” Tulan shouted. “Casualties?”
Intelligence was listening to his
earphones and punching buttons. “Two Lights
lost, sir. Slight damage to seven more and to
one Medium.”
“All right. Get a telecopy
of those pictures as soon as you can; we certainly
hit something. Maybe a Heavy or two.”
He relaxed, aching, and reflected that he was getting
a little mature for actual combat.
The pull-back went on, drawing only
the local ground-fire now that the enemy had been
taught his lesson. Groups of ships lifted almost
constantly. The final position was an oval forty
by sixty miles, held almost entirely from the sky.
The last evacuees straggled in like weary ants, and
when the radio reported no more of them the last fifty
ships lifted together and ran the gauntlet with slight
losses.
Tulan pulled the Force away for rest
and repair. Group Two was idling at extreme radar
range, making a convincing blip, and he designed some
false messages to be beamed toward it with the expectation
of interception. The impression he wanted to
give was that Group Two was the Force that had been
bombarding Coar, coming in now to join him. Actually,
the latter fleet was farther away, hidden in the sun
and, he hoped, unsuspected.
Things were going according to plan
except for one puzzling item: there was no message
from Sennech’s small garrison on Teyr. All
he could get from the planet was a steady radar scan,
which might mean that Sennech’s colony had been
conquered by Coar’s.
He’d been hoping to get certain
supplies from Teyr, and now he took a strong detachment
in close to the planet to find out what was wrong.
The threat finally raised an answer. “This
is the Chief of Council. What is it that you
want?”
“Chief of Council? What
are you talking about? I want the Garrison Commander.”
“I suppose you’re Admiral
Tulan. There’s been a change here, Tulan;
Teyr is now an independent planet. Your garrison,
with Coar’s, comprise our defense forces.”
Tulan stared at the planet’s
image. “You’re at war with Coar!”
“Not any more, we aren’t.”
There was a chuckle. “Don’t sound
so shocked, Admiral; we understand you’re in
mutiny yourself.”
Tulan slapped the microphone onto
its hangar. He sat, angry and bewildered, until
he remembered something, then buzzed Communications.
“Get me that connection again. Hello?
Listen. I have sixty thousand troops in transports,
with almost no food. I intend to land them.”
“They’re welcome as noncombatants,
Admiral. They’ll have to land disarmed,
in areas we designate, and live off the country.
We’ve already got more refugees than we can
handle.”
“Refugees from where?”
“Haven’t you been in contact with Sennech
at all?”
“No.”
“Oh.” There was a
thoughtful pause. “Then you don’t
know. There’s bad radiation in the atmosphere
and we’re hauling as many away as we can.
We can use your ships if you’re finished playing
soldier.”
Tulan broke the connection again and
turned, fuming, to Jezef. “We’ll
blast our way in and take over!”
Jezef raised his eyebrows. “What
good would that do?” he asked.
“Why; they for one
thing, we’ve got to think of those troops!
We can’t land them unarmed and let them be slaughtered
by the savages!”
Jezef grinned. “I doubt
if they’ll refuse to let them have enough small
arms to defend themselves. They can’t stay
where they are.”
“But they’re military men, and loyal!”
“Are they? The war’s
over for them, anyway. Why not let them vote on
it?”
Tulan jumped up and strode around
the command room, while Jezef and the staff watched
him silently. Gradually, the logic of it forced
itself upon him. “All right,” he
said wearily, “We’ll let them vote.”
A few hours later he studied the results
gloomily. “Well, after all, they’re
not Fleet. They don’t have the tradition.”
Jezef smiled, then lingered, embarrassed.
“Well?” Tulan asked.
“Sir,” (that hadn’t
come out, in private, for years) “I’d like
to be relieved.”
It was a blow, but Tulan found he
wasn’t really surprised. He stared at his
brother-in-law, feeling as if he faced an amputation.
“You think I’m wrong about this whole
thing, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to judge
that, but Sennech’s in trouble far worse than
any question of politics, including your own family.”
“But if we turn back now Coar
will recover! It’s only going to take us
a few more hours!”
“How long does it take people to die?”
Tulan looked at the deck for a while.
“All right. I’ll detach every ship
I can spare, and put you in charge. You’ll
have the transports too, as soon as they’re
unloaded.” He stared after Jezef, wanting
to call out to him to be sure to send word about Anatu
and the boys, but somehow feeling he didn’t
have the right.
He took the fighting ships away from
Teyr, to where Group Two could join up without being
unmasked, then started sunward as if he were crossing
to intercept Coar. A few miles in, where they’d
be hidden in the sun, he left a few scouts.
As he saw it, the enemy commander
on the satellite, noting the armada’s course
and finding himself apparently clear, would have no
choice but to lift his ships and start around the
sun by some other path to help his planet.
That other path to Coar could be intercepted,
and as soon as Tulan was lost near the sun he went
into heavy drive to change direction. He drifted
across the sun, waiting for word from his scouts.
At about the time he’d expected, they reported
ships leaving the satellite.
He looked across the room toward Plot.
“Plot! Feed that data to Communications
as it comes in, will you?” And to Communications:
“Can we beam Group Three from here?”
“Not quite, sir; but I can relay through the
scouts.”
“All right; but make sure it’s
not intercepted. I want Group Three under maximum
acceleration for Luhin, and I want them to get running
reports on the enemy.”
“Right, sir.”
Tulan was in the position he wanted,
not needing to use his own radar, but able to pick
up that of Coar’s fleet at extreme range, too
far to give them a bounce. He’d know their
course, speed, and acceleration fairly well, without
even being suspected himself.
He held that position until the enemy
was close enough to get a bounce, then went into drive
on an intercepting course.
One of the basic tenets of space maneuver
was this: if two fleets were drawing together,
with radar contact, neither (barring interference from
factors such as the sun or planets) could escape the
other; for if one applied acceleration in any direction
the other could simply match it (human endurance being
the limitation) and maintain the original relative
closing speed.
When the enemy commander discovered
Tulan’s armada loafing ahead of him, he’d
been accelerating for about ten hours and had a velocity
of a million miles per hour, while Tulan was going
the same direction but at half the speed. The
quarry began decelerating immediately, knowing it
could get back to Luhin with time enough to land.
Tulan didn’t quite match the
deceleration, preferring to waste a few hours and
lessen the strain on his crews. He let the gap
close slowly.
He could tell almost the precise instant
when the other jaw of his trap was discovered, for
Plot, Communications, and Intelligence all jerked up
their heads and looked at him. He grinned at them.
What they’d picked up would be an enemy beam
from Luhin, recklessly sweeping space to find the
Coar fleet and warn it of the onrushing Group Three.
The enemy commander reacted fast.
It was obvious he’d never beat Group Three to
Luhin, and he made no futile attempts at dodging, but
reversed drives and accelerated toward the nearest
enemy, which was Tulan. Tulan was not surprised
at that either, for though Coar’s fleets had
bungled the war miserably, when cornered they’d
always fought and died like men.
He matched their acceleration to hold
down the relative speeds. The swift passing clash
would be brief at best. He formed his forces into
an arrangement he’d schemed up long ago but
never used: a flat disc of lighter ships out
in front, masking a doughnut-shaped mass behind.
He maneuvered laterally to keep the doughnut centered
on the line of approach.
Roboscouts appeared and blossomed
briefly as they died. The fuzzy patch of light
on the screens swelled, then began to resolve into
individual points. The first missiles arrived.
Intricate patterns of incandescence formed and vanished
as fire-control systems locked wits.
A sudden, brilliantly planned salvo
came streaking in, saturating the defenses along its
path. Ships in Tulan’s secondary formation
swerved frantically, but one darting, corkscrewing
missile homed on a Heavy, and for an instant there
were two suns.
Tulan, missing Jezef’s smooth
help, was caught up in the daze and strain of battle
now. He punched buttons and shouted orders as
he played the fleet to match the enemy’s subtle
swerving. Another heavy salvo came in, but the
computers had its sources pinpointed now, and it was
contained. These first few seconds favored the
enemy, who was only fighting the light shield in front
of Tulan’s formation.
Now the swelling mass of blips streaked
apart in the viewers and space lit up with the fire
and interception. Two ships met head on; at such
velocities it was like a nuclear blast.
Then Coar’s ships crashed through
the shield and into the center of the doughnut.
Ringed, outgunned, outpredicted, they hit such a concentration
of missiles that it might as well have been a solid
wall. Ships disintegrated as if on a common fuse;
the ones that didn’t take direct hits needed
none, in that debris-filled stretch of hell.
Tulan’s flagship rocked in the
wave of expanding hot gasses. There was a jolt
as some piece of junk hit her; if she hadn’t
already been under crushing acceleration away from
the inferno she’d have been holed.
From a safer distance the path of
destruction was a bright slash across space, growing
into the distance with its momentum. It was annihilation,
too awful for triumph; there was only horror in it.
Tulan knew that with this overwhelming tactic he’d
written a new text-book for action against an inferior
fleet. He hoped it would never be printed.
Sweating and weak, he slumped in his straps and was
ill.
While brief repairs and re-arming
were under way, he sent scouts spiraling out to pick
up any radio beams from Sennech or Teyr. There
were none. The telescopes showed Sennech’s
albedo down to a fraction of normal; that, he supposed,
would indicate smoke in the atmosphere. He wavered,
wondering whether he should detach more ships to send
out there. Reason and training told him to stick
to the key objective, which was Coar’s surrender.
He waited only for Group Three to achieve a converging
course, then started around the sun again.
They didn’t encounter even a
roboscout. He crossed the sun, curved into Coar’s
orbit, matched speeds, and coasted along a million
miles ahead of the planet, sending light sorties in
to feel out any ambushes. Still there was no
sign of fight, so he went in closer where the enemy
could get a good look at his strength. Finally
he took a small group in boldly over the fourth planet’s
Capitol and sent a challenge.
The answer was odd. “This
is Acting President Kliu. What are your intentions?”
Tulan realized he was holding his
breath. He let it out and looked around the silent
command room, meeting the intent eyes of his staff.
He had an unreal feeling; this couldn’t be the
climax, the consummation this simple exchange
over the radio. He lifted the microphone slowly.
“This is Admiral Tulan, commanding the Fleets
of Sennech. I demand your immediate and unconditional
surrender.”
There was something in the reply that
might have been dry amusement: “Oh; by
all means; but I hope you’re not going to insist
upon an elaborate ceremony. Right now we don’t
give a damn about the war; we’re worried about
the race.”
There was more silence, and Tulan
turned, uncertainly, looking at the bare spot where
Jezef ought to be standing. He buzzed for Communications.
“Connect me with Captain Rhu. Rhu; I’m
advancing you in rank and leaving you in charge here.
I’m going down to accept the surrender and find
out what this man’s talking about.”
Kliu was gaunt and middle-aged, wearing,
to Tulan’s surprise, the gray of Coar’s
First Level of Science. He was neither abject
nor hostile, agreeing impatiently to turn over the
secret of Coar’s weapon and to assist with a
token occupation of the planet. Again Tulan had
the unreal, let-down feeling, and judging by Kliu’s
amused expression, it showed.
Tulan sent couriers to get things
started, then turned back to the scientist. “So
you have had a change of government. What did
you mean, about the race?”
Kliu watched him for a moment.
“How much do you know about the weapon?”
“Very little. That it projects
matter through hyperspace and materializes it where
you want it.”
“Not exactly; the materialization
is spontaneous. Mass somehow distorts hyperspace,
and when the projected matter has penetrated a certain
distance into such distortion, it pops back into normal
space. The penetration depends mainly upon a
sort of internal energy in the missile; you might
think of it more as a voltage than as velocity.
You’ve made it very hard for us to get reports,
but I understand we successfully placed stuff in Sennech’s
crust.”
“Yes; causing volcanoes.
Our scientists speculated that any kind of matter
would do it.”
“That’s right. Actually,
we were projecting weighed chunks of rock. When
one bit of matter, even a single atom, finds itself
materializing where another already is, unnatural
elements may be formed, most of them unstable.
That’s what blew holes in your crust and let
the magma out.”
Tulan considered the military implications
of the weapon for a few moments, then pulled his mind
back. “I see; but what about the radiation?
It wasn’t more than a trace when I left.”
Kliu looked away for a while before
answering. “When we learned you’d
defied your government, our own military got out of
hand. They had a couple of days before the sun
cut us off completely, and they began throwing stuff
as soon as it could be dug and hauled to the projectors.
They used high energies to get it past the sun.
As we realize now, a lot of it hit the planet deeper
than at first, below the crust. Under such pressure
a different set of fissionables was formed. Some
of them burst out and poisoned the atmosphere, but
most of them are still there.” He leaned
forward and eyed Tulan hard. “We’ve
got to get an expedition out there to study things.
Will you help?”
There was another of the palpable
silences, and when he spoke Tulan’s voice sounded
unnatural. “I yes; we’ll
help. Whatever you want. Is ... Sennech
finished?”
Kliu smiled tightly. “Sennech,
for sure; and she may take the rest of us with her.
Nobody conceived what this might come to. A lot
of those deep materializations produced pockets of
dense fissionables, and they’re converging toward
the center under their own weight. When they get
to a certain point, we’ll have a fine monument
to Man’s ingenuity. A planet-size nova.”
He stood up. “I’ll start organizing.”
Tulan existed someway through the
preparations, and when they were in space again the
solid familiarity of his ship helped. His staff
was carrying on wonderfully; shielding him, he suspected,
from considerable hostility. Discipline held
up.
A technology that had spanned five
orbits and probed beyond was at bay, and the expedition
was tremendous. Hardly an art or science was
unrepresented. If need be, whole ships could be
built in space.
A beam from Teyr as they passed told
of refugees by the hundreds of thousands, dumped in
the wilderness with a few ships still trickling in.
Tulan would have traded everything he could command
to hear a word of Jezef or the family, but Teyr wasn’t
concerned with individuals and he didn’t ask.
Sennech was dull gray in the telescopes,
showing, as they neared, flecks of fire. They
went in fast, using her gravity to help them curve
into a forced orbit as they strained to decelerate.
Thermocouples gave readings close to the boiling point
of water; that, probably, was the temperature of the
lower air.
Roboscouts went down first, then,
as conditions were ascertained, manned ships.
Tulan took the flagship down once. Her coolers
labored and her searchlights were swallowed in murk
within a few feet. Sounds carried through the
hull; the howl of great winds and the thumps of explosions.
Once a geyser of glowing lava spattered the ship.
Within hours the picture began to
form. The surface was a boiling sea broken only
by transient mountain peaks which tumbled down in quakes
or were washed away by the incessant hot rain.
It would have been hard to find a single trace of
the civilization that had flourished scant hours before.
The slower job was learning, by countless
readings and painful deduction, what was going on
inside the planet. Tulan occupied himself with
organizational tasks and clung to what dignity he could.
After an eternity Kliu had time for him.
“She’ll blow, all right,”
the scientist said, sinking tiredly into a seat.
“Within half a year. Her year.”
“Twenty thousand hours,”
Tulan said automatically. “How about the
other planets?”
“Coar has one chance in a hundred,
Teyr possibly one in ten.”
Tulan had to keep talking. “The
outer satellites. We can do a lot in that time.”
Kliu shrugged. “A few thousand
people, and who knows what will happen to them afterward?
It’s going to be a long time before the System’s
inhabitable again, if ever.”
“Ships ... people can live a long time in ships.”
“Not that long.”
“There must be something!
The power we’ve got, and this hyperspace thing.”
Kliu shook his head. “I
can guess what you’re thinking; we’ve been
all over it. There’s no way to get to the
stars, and no way to move a planet out of its orbit.
Don’t think we haven’t been pounding our
skulls, but the figures are hopeless.”
Tulan stared at the ulcerous image
on the screen, built up by infra-red probing through
the opaque atmosphere. “She looks ready
to fall apart right now. How much of her could
you blast off?”
Kliu smiled wearily and without humor.
“We’ve worked that idea to the bone, too.
If you could build a big enough projector, and mount
it on an infinitely solid base, you could push something
deep enough and accurately enough to throw off stuff
at escape velocity, but it’s a matter of energy
and we can’t handle one percent of what we’d
need. Even if you could generate it fast enough,
your conduits would melt under the current.”
He got up and walked a few steps, then sat down again.
“Ironic, isn’t it? All we can do is
destroy ourselves.”
Tulan’s mind couldn’t
accept it; he was used to thinking that any amount
of energy could be handled some way. “There
must be something,” he repeated, feeling foolish
as he said it.
He went over the figures he knew so
well; the acceleration and the total energy necessary
to drive a ship to the nearest stars. Even a ship’s
Pulsors, pouring energy out steadily, were pitiful
compared to that job. Schoolboys knew the figures;
mankind had dreamed for generations ...
He sat up abruptly. “This
hyperspace; didn’t you tell me there were such
things as velocity and momentum in it?”
Kliu’s eyes focussed. “Yes; why?”
“And that a projector could
be built to put an entire ship into hyperspace?”
Kliu stared at him for a second.
“Kinetic energy! Built up gradually!”
He jumped to his feet. “Come on! Let’s
get to the computers!”
Several hundred hours later Tulan
lay watching the pinpoint on his viewscreen that represented
Sennech. He’d been building up speed for
a long time; he ached from the steady double-gravity.
The ship, vastly beefed up, was moving at a good fraction
of the speed of light. It wouldn’t be much
longer.
The cargo of carefully chosen matter,
shifting into hyperspace at the right instant, would
be taken deep into Sennech by the momentum he’d
accumulated in normal space. If the calculations
were right, the resulting blast would knock a chunk
completely out of the planet. Each of the thousands
of other ships tied to him by robot controls would
take its own bite at the right time and place.
Providing the plan worked.
The Solar System would have a few
hot moments, and would be full of junk for a long
time, but the threatening fissionables inside Sennech
would be hurled far apart, to dribble away their potence
gradually. Kliu admitted no one could calculate
for sure even how much, if any, of Sennech would remain
as a planet, but Teyr, at least, with her thick atmosphere,
should withstand the rain of debris.
He wondered about his family, and
Jezef. Kliu had tried to get word, but the tragically
few refugees were scattered.
He smiled, recalling how severely
he’d had to order his staff to abandon him.
He was proud to remember that much of the fleet would
have come along, if he’d let them; but live
men were going to be at more of a premium on Teyr
than heroic atoms drifting in space. Machines
could handle this assault. He himself had not
had to touch a single control.
The indicators began to flash, and,
sweating with the effort, he hauled himself erect
to attention. It was good to be winding up here
in his own command room, where he’d lived his
moments of triumph. Still, as the red light winked
on, he couldn’t help thinking how very quiet
and lonely it was without Jezef and the staff.