Patel's Eastern bumpkin face showed no change of expression. ''Yes, ma'am. If anything comes through from
Vee Twelve?"
She patted the side pocket of her tunic. "You can get me anytime you like—I have my personal communicator.
"Ma'am." Patel nodded. "When will you be back?"
"I'm not sure. It may be morning," she said. "Carry on, P.O." Without waiting for his answer, she turned and headed back down the ramp towards the ground carpark.
The Combat Information Display of
Venturer Twelve
gave a God's-eye view, and Tom Bruce, seated in his command position at the console of the Combat Control Computer, was God, looking down on the enormous tank-screen which presented a three-dimensional picture of space up to a range of half a light year. Translating the information from the ship's myriad exterior sensors, radar, video camera, gravity and radiation field detectors, CID showed
Venturer Twelve
at the center of a display which took in the entirety of the Kepler
sun system, with Kepler III a blue-green ball flanked by its satellites just off to the left. Beyond that lay the two barren rocky spheres of the inner planets; and farther away still, the Kepler sun itself, its blue-white brilliance damped down by the display to a more tolerable intensity.
Godlike too, was the tremendous destructive power represented by the controls beneath Bruce's fingertips, which were capable of releasing the massive armament of this, United Earth's largest and most advanced ship, armament capable of reducing a medium-size planet to a boiling mass of radioactive matter within a few minutes. Mankind had been preparing for this moment for over a century, and now, at last, here in this remote corner of the universe, fifteen parsecs from Earth, possibility was becoming reality. And Bruce was the man on the spot—Bruce, with his extension the Combat Control Computer, which could think faster, calculate with greater accuracy than any living creature, and was thus capable of making the necessary decisions in the four-dimensional chess game that was war in space.
Maranne's voice: "Missile proceeding, on course. Transmission normal. . . Approaching speed .25 light and holding...."
The Centaur Fifteen missile was shown on CID as a small dot, creeping along the green dotted line that was its predicted trajectory. A loudspeaker over Bruce's head relayed the continuous beep-beep transmitted by the small sub-etheric transmitter installed by Maranne's section in the heart of the missile.
Bruce, conscious of the smell of his own sweat, shifted slightly in his well-padded seat, and wondered, how long? How long before the missile made contact with the invisible barrier of radiation that had prevented
Venturer's
sub-etheric message from getting through to Earth? How long, and how far behind the barrier was the ship or ships, which had erected that barrier—the ships controlled by the unseen, long-awaited enemy, the creatures whose tracks had bred the Kilroy legend, whose handiwork he had seen there on the raped planet of Minos IV, and here on Kepler where they had altered the very seed of man? Wherever they were, those ships were still too far away to show up on any of
Venturer'
s detectors. Waiting there . . . for what?
"Fifteen million kilometers out, still on course." Maranne's voice again.
Beside
him
he could sense, at the periphery of his vision, the presence of Helen Lindstrom. She too would be watching the display, knowing what this moment meant to him, to all of mankind.
Beep-beep-beep-beep
. . . regular, metronomic, the measured pulse of the Centaur missile's transmitter.
All over
Venturer Twelve
men stood at battle stations, watching screens, armament prepared, awaiting orders...
. Beep-beep-bee...
Bruce sat, straining his ears for the next in the sequence, and there was a deadly quiet throughout the ship's tactical nerve center as everyone else did the same.
Transmission from the missile had ceased.
And yet, looking down into the CID tank-screen, the red dot of the Centaurus Fifteen still showed, climbing steadily up the ladder of green dots. It remained for almost a full minute, then flared briefly into incandescence and was gone.
Bruce knew that in reality the missile had died at the moment its transmission had ceased, and that the red dot in the CID had been a ghost, caused by the lagging snail-pace of radar and light waves as compared with sub-etheric. Galvanizing into action, he began to feed instructions into the battle computer. Instantaneously, under the direct control of the computer, the intensity of the ship's huge Grenbach drives began to increase, thrusting her forward with mounting acceleration, following the trajectory of the missile, plunging towards the unknown....
Piet Huygens lay naked on his* bed in the Medical Inspection Center, waiting for a sleep that refused to come. Despite air-conditioning, the air of the small room was hot and thick. Throughout the day there had been no time for external thought—he had been immersed in work, jvork of the kind he understood, for which he had been trained; cultures, tissue samples, the moving, tiny worlds of virus and bacteria viewed through a microscope. But now, once again, there was time to think, and he was haunted by the shadows of his guilt, and thoughts of Mia, so many miles away.
Perhaps it would have been best to have told them where she was, so that she could be brought back, but to do that would have been somehow compounding his first betrayal of her. He wanted Mia—but not as a prisoner. He wondered what she had been doing since his flight from Nisuno. Was she still there in Osuragi's small clinic? Had she decided to try to make some kind of life for herself among those people? Perhaps hoping vainly that he would one day return to her? Or had she cut herself off from him with a barrier of hate and resentment for his desertion of her? Was it possible that her love could have turned to hate?
Outside the building he heard the purring of a ground car engine approaching, then stopping. Someone else, who like himself was unable to sleep? No, no one else could carry such a burden of guilt
He wondered briefly if he should go back to the laboratory and continue his work—there at least there would be something to occupy his mind, to banish the shadows. He dismissed the idea almost as soon as it was formed. He was tired, beyond that point where he could work efficiently, and tomorrow there would be more and more for him to do. Tomorrow Doctor Osawa, Sato's assistant, would be joining him, and they would begin the task of correlating their results. Osawa had been working on the problem for some time, and there was just a chance that her information might be valuable. If he was to be fresh and alert for that meeting, he must have sleep, now. . . .
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, he rose to his feet and walked over to the wash basin. He drew off a glass of water, and was standing with the two yellow sleeping pills in his left hand, when there was a light tap on the door.
"Come in," he spoke reflexively, without thinking.
She entered the room quietly, closing the door behind her and leaning against it as she stood looking at him. "Hallo, Piet," she said, her ice-blue eyes glinting. "Sleeping pills? You won't be needing them, now."
"Trudi! What the hell do you want?" He put the pills and glass down on the washbasin, conscious of the curious prudery of the action as his hands moved awkwardly to cover his nakedness.
She moved towards him, her moist lips smiling. "What did I ever want?"
"With me? After what's happened?"
"Of course, with you—we suit each other, remember?" she said, tense, a tigress in heat Her hand trembled as she unzipped her tunic.
"But me . . . my seed ... the Johannsen's. . . ." He could feel the coolness of the washbasin against his bare buttocks.
"Christ! What's the matter with you? You used to like it as much and as often as me. I don't want to breed with you, for God's sake!"
"No Trudi—Leave me alone!"
"Leave me alone!"
she mimicked him, contemptuously. "You're not still thinking about that little monkey woman, are you? You'll never see her again. Come to
think
of it, you won't get a lot of opportunities where you're going, will you? They don't cater much for sexual athletes in Earthside jails, as far as I hear... better make the most of what you can get now, eh?"
"No—I don't want you—how many times?" He grabbed a towel from the rail by the basin, and draped it about his waist
She stood, one hand paused on the zip of her trousers, and laugjhed with a sudden harshness. "Oh, no! It's just occurred to me. Maybe you're not still pining for your little yellow whore at all—maybe you just can't do it any more—is that it?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You mean you don't know? You're so mixed up with your bloody microscopes and cultures you haven't heard? No, perhaps he didn't think it would be a good idea to tell you...."
He moved forward, propelled by his anger, his hands grasping at the firm flesh of her shoulders. "What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded, shaking her.
"Well, it's obvious, isn't it? People like you—and all the rest of those with this thing in their genetic structure. They can't be allowed to breed. . . . ever, can they? What do you think this examination program of Maseba's is for, anyway? Those—the ones who are found defective genetically, they aren't just going to get a shot of anti-Johannsen's serum; they'll have to be permanently sterilized, because there's no way of changing them back."
It made sense ... of course, it was the only way Maseba could tackle the problem. There could be no more monster births ... that much was obvious. Memory flooded back into his mind, combining with his tiredness, and her hate-filled contemptuous voice . . .
"Maseba's been there already with his scalpel, hasn't he?" she said, spitting the words in his face, her blue eyes flaring with contempt. "Is that it? Did I come too late for the party?
You bloody eunuch!"
The word pierced through the confusion of his mind, a burning torch thrust into the straw of his frustration, and erupted into a flaming rage that demanded physical release. She was a strong, fit woman, with a big, athletic body, but before such fury she was helpless.
When at last he was able to think clearly again, his rage burned out, she was lying, her body crumpled in an awkward, doll-like position, beneath die washbasin, the ice-blue eyes still open, staring up at him.
Bending down beside her, he begged her forgiveness.
'Trudi, I don't know____"His hand behind her head...
felt the pulpy softness of a smashed skull, and he stopped, knowing beyond doubt that she was dead, the raging ache of her loins ceased forever.
Rinsing the blood from his hands, he began to dress quickly. His doubts, his uncertainties were gone now. Her death had resolved the situation—pointed at him the only possible way in which he could go. Certainly, whatever happened now he could never return to
Vee Twelve.
As a murderer, he was a certain candidate for complete psyche erasure and reconditioning. There was no appeal. And even though the fact of being Piet Huygens was, had been, agony, anything was preferable to the idea that Piet Huygens, as Piet Huygens, should cease to exist
Pausing only to take the keys of Trudi's ground car from the pocket of her tunic, he hurried out of the building. He knew where he was going, and there was no alternative. The ground car purred into life, and he steered it out onto the highway.
"Mia, love, Tm coming back, Mia . . ." he murmured as the car gathered speed.
"Point four-five light," said Lindstrom's voice at his elbow. "In ten seconds we shall be at the point where the Centaurus missile was destroyed."
Ten seconds, nine, five . . . Bruce felt them slip away from him, draining away like drops of his life-blood. His hands moving over the console keys, he demanded information, but on the screens above the CID nothing showed. Tuned to their farthest limits the ship sensors could still not detect the presence of the aliens. And yet they must be there, somewhere...
The words of Kavanin's poem rattled crazily in his head:
But they are there somewhere... . They have to be. By all the laws of probability...
Soon they must be within effective range—the destruction of the missile demanded that it should be so. But that effective range—was Kilroy effective range so much farther than that of
Venturer?
Could they remain oiit there, beyond reach of the Earth ship's sensors, and still destroy her?
Three seconds... two... one...
"My God! Look at that!" Lindstrom's voice was a strangled gasp, her arm pointed to the heart of the CID display.
There, way over to the left-hand side of the tank, close by the blue-green ball of Kepler III, was something like a great, luminous jellyfish. It hung there, its brilliance pulsing up and down the spectrum, its size indeterminate.
Bruce fingered the keys swiftly, punching his instructions into the computer, and a moment later an enlarged view of the thing appeared in an auxiliary screen above the CID. It appeared to be an amorphous mass, brilliant in its luminosity, a flickering mirage that strained the capacity of the human optical faculties.