The Canopy Of Time Part 16

You glanced at the list over One-Eye's shoulder.

"It is ample," you said encouragingly.

4.

At first it must have seemed as if the scheme was to succeed. Again that feeling that you lived in an unlikely dream whose scenery you could puncture with a finger must have a.s.sailed you, as you sat in the flagship with the two commanders. You had no nerves; you did not worry. Welded and One-Eye, in their individual ways, both showed strain now that they were embarked on the journey. The captain of the ship, Fleet-Commander Prim, had to endure much quiet nagging.

The early days pa.s.sed uneventfully. Beyond the ports, s.p.a.ce hung like a becalmed flag, its blazing stars mere belches in the distance, its ancient splendours nothing more than points to navigate by. The other ships were not visible to the unaided eye: Flagship might have been travelling alone. When they blasted from Owlenj, the total number of ships in the invasion fleet was one hundred and seventeen; by the end of the first week five had had to give up and limp home again, their too hastily contrived light-drives burnt out. It would take them, under maximum thrust, half a year to regain port; by then, their crews would be asphyxiated or the sur-vivors breathing the oxygen of murdered men. The rest of the fleet sailed on, holds full of soldiers in suspended animation, all neatly stacked and racked like bottles.

They had been vacuum-borne sixteen days, and were past those stars generally regarded as being outposts of the great empire of Yinnisfar, when they were first challenged.

"A station calling itself Camoens II RST225," the communications officer reported, "asks us why we have pa.s.sed Koramandel Tangent Ten without identifying ourselves."

"Let it keep on calling," you said.

Other challenges were received and left unanswered. The fleet stayed silent as it startled to life the world about it. Communications began to intercept messages of alarm and warning between planetary stations.

"Galconder Sabre calling Rolf 158. Unidentified craft due to pa.s.s you on course 99GY4281 at 07.1430 Gal. approx. . . ."

"Acrostic I to Cutaligni Base. Look out and report on fleet now entering Home Sector Paradise 014. ...

"Peik-pi-Koing Astronomical to Droxy Pylon. Un-identified ships numbering 130 approx now crossing Scanning Area, Code Diamond Index Diamond Oh Nine"

"All stations on Ishrail Link Two. Procedure BAB Nine One into operation immediately. . . ."

One-Eye snorted his contempt.

"We've certainly set these tin-pot globes in a flutter," he said.

As the hours pa.s.sed, he grew less easy. s.p.a.ce, which had been almost silent a watch ago, now became mur-murous with voices; soon the murmur grew into a babel. The note of curiosity, at first indicating little more than mild interest, showed a corresponding rise through irritation into alarm.

"Perhaps we ought to answer them," One-Eye sug-gested. "Couldn't we spin them some tale to keep them quiet? Tell them we are going to pay homage, or some-thing?"

"You need have no worry about the messages we can understand," Prim said. "We are picking up several in code now; they are the ones which should cause us most concern."

"Can't we spin some sort of a yarn to keep them quiet?" One-Eye repeated, appealing to you.

You were looking out into the darkness, almost as if you could see through the veil of it, almost as if you expected to see the messages flashing like comets before the ports.

"The truth will emerge," you said, without turning round.

Two days later, the parasond picked up the first ship they had detected since leaving Owlenj. The sighting caused such a noisy squabble in Communication Bay that Prim went over to see what it was about. One-Eye, now remarkably unshaven, followed after him.

"It can't be a ship!" Communications Chief was say-ing, waving a filmlog with the report on.

"But it must be," his sub almost pleaded. "Look at its course: you plotted it back yourself! It's definitely turn-ing. What but a ship could manoeuvre like that?"

"It can't be a ship!" the chief repeated.

"Why can't it be a ship?" Prim asked.

"Beg pardon, sir, but the b.l.o.o.d.y thing's at least thirty miles long."

After a second's silence, One-Eye asked nervously, "Which way's it coming?"

The sub spoke up. He alone seemed delighted at the fish they had caught on their screen. "It has turned since we had it under observation through thirty to thirty-two degrees northerly from a course about due nor'-nor'-west with respect to the galactic quadrature."

One-Eye grasped the back of the sub's couch as if it were the sub's neck.

"What I want to know," he growled, "is if it's going away or coming towards us."

"Neither," said the sub, looking at the screen again. "It now seems to have finished turning and is moving along a course which is ... at ninety degrees to ours. That's a right-angle," he added artlessly.

"Any signal from it?" Prim asked.

"Nothing."

"Put a shot across its bows," One-Eye suggested.

"You are not grovelling along the streets of Owlenj now, taking pot shots at all and sundry; let it go!"

One-Eye turned angrily to find Welded there. The latter had come up on the bridge early. He stood and watched the blob fade from the parasond screen before he spoke again. Then, beckoning One-Eye aside and looking to make sure you were not then present on the bridge, he said in a low voice, "My friend, I have some-thing to confess to you."

He looked anxiously and with distaste at One-Eye's whiskery countenance before continuing.

"My early fears are coming back to me," he said. "You know I am a man of courage, but even a hero does wisely to be afraid at times. Every hour we dive deeper into a hornet's nest; do you realize that?

Why, we are only two and a half weeks from the fabled Yinnisfar itself! I cannot sleep for asking myself if we are not running our necks into a noose from which there will be no escape."

Reluctant as he was to agree with an old enemy, One-Eye could not miss this chance of confiding his own anxieties.

"They have ships thirty miles long!" he exclaimed. "How could we fight anything that big? But what can we do? We must go on now we have started. Have you any ideas?"

Nodding mysteriously, Welded persuaded the other down to his cabin before he would say more. Then he thumped the bulkhead.

"Only a watch's journey from here," he said, thumping again for emphasis, "are many rich planets. They will be as plunder-worthy as the planets in the heart of the Region-but less well-guarded. Can't you just picture them at this very moment: loaded with plump semi-blondes with rings on every finger, and fat little men dallying with big bank accounts? They're wide open! Defenceless! Why go on to Yinnisfar, where undoubtedly we shall meet with resistance? Why not stop here, plunder what we can, and get back to Owlenj while the going's good?"

One-Eye hesitated, his lip thrust out. He liked the suggestion every bit as much as his ex-enemy had expected he would. But there was one major obstacle, and he voiced it now.

"He's set his heart on getting to Yinnisfar itself."

"Yes! I think we've put up with him long enough," Welded replied.

They did not need to mention your name. When away from the aura of your presence, their misgivings about you were mutual. Welded crossed to a cupboard, taking out a small and tightly-stoppered bottle, which he handed to One-Eye.

"That should solve that problem," he said.

"Good G.o.d!" One-Eye said, and put the bottle down gingerly. It contained the venom of the grusby, a deadly Owlenj an tropical snake; to smell one drop of it a yard away would give a man headaches for a week.

"Something to flavour his wine with tonight," Welded said.

5.

When the wine went round the Captain's table after dinner, One-Eye accepted his gla.s.s but could not drink. He felt sick with suspense, and with the sickness went a loathing for Welded; not only did he disapprove of poisoning as a namby-pamby method of killing, but he understood clearly that the little bottle held more than enough to spare for him, too, should Welded feel Eke disposing of all his opposition at once.

You had no such qualms. As always, you were in good fettle. You took your gla.s.s when it was filled, toasted, as you did every night, the success of the expedition, and drained down the wine.

You made a moue of displeasure.

"This wine tastes flat," you said. "We will stock up with better vintages on Yinnisfar."

Everyone round the table laughed with you, except One-Eye; the muscles of his face had seized up. He could not even force himself to look at Welded.

"What did you make of the thirty-mile-long object we sighted earlier?" Prim asked you, taking his wine at a more sedate pace.

"Oh, it was a Yinnisfar ship all right," you said easily. "Don't worry about it. Evolution will take care of it, just as evolution took care of the monster prehistoric reptiles which once roved Owlenj and other planets."

The Captain spread his hands.

"For a practical man, that is a strangely unpractical remark," he said. "Evolution is one thing, super-ships quite another."

"Oh no, not at all-or only so if you forget that evolu-tion is nature's scientific method, and s.p.a.ce ships, not being organic creatures, are a part of man's evolution. And man himself-he's only part of nature's scientific method."

The Captain, who distrusted speculation, withdrew into his sh.e.l.l of primness.

"I trust you don't imagine, at this late date in time, that man is not the end-product of evolution?" he asked you. "We are constantly being told the galaxy is too old for anything more but final extinction."

"I imagine nothing," you told him pleasantly. "But remember; what triumphs ultimately is something too big for your comprehension or mine."

You stood up, and the others followed suit. Soon the dining-room was empty except for the two conspirators. One-Eye swabbed his brow.

"You had me on tenter-hooks," he said. "Couldn't you manage to smuggle that muck into his wine tonight?"

Welded was as stiffly military as ever; but he quivered like a taut bowstring. He found difficulty in getting the words round his dry tongue.

"He didn't have any wine tonight," Welded managed to whisper. "That was the grusby juice he drank-neat. We should have been pushing him feet-first through the airlock by now!"

For just over four weeks, the Owlenj fleet had been vacuum borne. By now they were deep into the star-clotted heart of the galaxy and within six days' flight of Yinnisfar itself. Suns which carried as an incidental burden hundreds of millions of years of the histories and myths of man burned on all sides of them like funeral torches. The graveyard air was reinforced by silence over all wavebands: the chatter of alarmed planets had died away to nothing.

"They're waiting for us!" One-Eye exclaimed, not for the first time. He lived on the bridge of the flagship now, making his bed there and taking his meals sitting on his bed. For hours at a time he peered out at the seemingly motionless spectacle of the universe, haunted by two fears: the fear of you had grown to rival and even eclipse the fear of Yinnisfar.

Much to the Captain's unstated disapproval, the bridge had also become Welded's living quarters. He spent most of the time lying on his bed with a fuser under his pillow, and never looked out of the ports.

You came frequently up to the bridge, but spoke in-frequently to the two generals. You were detached; it might have been all a dream to you, a dream in which the lineaments of illusion had worn thin. . . . Yet for all that, you were at times noticeably impatient, speaking abruptly sometimes, sometimes clicking your fingers in suppressed irritation, almost as if you wished to wake from the tedium of your sleep.

Only Captain Prim remained completely unchanged. The routine of command stayed him. He seemed to have absorbed all the confidence One-Eye and Welded had lost "We shall ground on Yinnisfar in six days," he said to you. "Is it possible they intend to offer us no resistance?"

"It is possible to think up excellent reasons for their non-resistance," you said. "Owlenj has been isolated from the Federation for generations and has no knowledge of current intellectual att.i.tudes within the Region. They may all be pacifists, eager to prove their faith. Or, at the other end of the scale, their military hierarchy, without war to thin its ranks, may have collapsed like piecrust under our unexpected pressure. It's all speculation....."

"Supposing," the communications sub ventured from his couch, "supposing the whole lot-everyone on all these worlds-had died long ago, and n.o.body outside the Region knew about it.... I mean, it's so dead quiet...."

They were the last words he ever spoke. At that second, the parasond exploded, shattering the sub's head like a coconut. An icy clatter rang along the floor as ruptured metal and gla.s.s showered out of the panel, while gusts of acrid smoke settled like mesh over the bridge. A babble of frightened voices broke out.

"Fetch Communications Chief from his bed," Prim barked, but Continuity was already on the job, calling over the intercom for a stretcher party and the elec-tronics crew.

Welded was inspecting the damage, fanning away smoke which still siphoned out of a red-hot crater in the panels. His spine arched as tensely as a pre-stressed girder.

"What caused that?" he asked. "A circuit fault? A transistor blowing?"

"Couldn't be," Prim snapped, for once happy to con-tradict his superior. "Would you mind standing clear, please? The repairs crew must see to it at once."

"Look!" called One-Eye. The hysterical edge to his voice was so compelling that even in this moment of crisis every eye present swivelled to where his finger pointed. Out, out they stared into the hard pageant of night beyond the ports. Their eyes had to probe and focus before they saw.

Flies. Flies, rising in a cloud from a dark stream on whose surface sunlight glittered, so that between dark and light the insects were almost lost to view. But the stream was s.p.a.ce itself and the glitter a spangle of suns, and the flies spread across them a cloud of ships. The ancient forces of Yinnisfar were rising to the attack.

6.

"You can't count them!" One-Eye said, glaring aghast at the swarm of ships. "There must be thousands of them. What are we going to do? They blew out the instrument panel-it was a sort of warning, don't you see! By Pla and To, they'll blow us into eternity at any moment!"

He coughed the words like sand out of his throat then it was as if he had to do something at any cost, to hide his helplessness. Turning on a heel, he crossed the promenade and confronted you.

"You brought us into this!" he shouted. "What are you going to do to get us away? How do we save our-selves?"

"Leave that to the Captain and be .silent," you said. You moved away before he touched you and stood by the Captain. Prim was at his primmest, dealing out orders with the iron efficiency of a school marm.

The short wave being unimpaired, he spoke rapidly to the squadron leaders of his fleet. On a live schematic above his head, the results of those orders immediately became apparent. The Owlenjan fleet was deploying into its individual squadrons, spreading into a fan pa.r.s.ecs wide. They moved towards the curtain of flies like an opening hand. At maximum speed they moved, straight for the enemy navies.

"They're too ready for us," Prim said to you out of the corner of his dry mouth. "This will never shake them. We'll never get through! There aren't enough of us to be effective. It's nothing but suicide."

"What else do you suggest?" you asked him.

"If every ship made for a planet, orbited it, held it under threat of demolition-no, they'd pick us off one by one.. .." He shook his head. "This is the only possible way," he said quietly, again turning all his attention to this manoeuvre.

Further talk was impossible. The waiting ships and the handful of charging ships slid together. The gulf between them was suddenly trellised with blue flame, electric, blinding. Square links of force opened and shut like champing mouths. Whatever its power source, the drain must have been phenomenal, consuming the basic energies of s.p.a.ce itself.

The Owlenjan ships found themselves on to the strange defence before evasion was more than a panicky thought. That chopping trellis flared before their ports, snapped, was gone, flared and snapped again, bathing every bridge in its eccentric luminance, dazzling them, consuming them. It was the last light thousands of eyes ever saw. The ships on which those blue jaws closed burned magnesium-bright; they burned, then sagged like rotten bananas into limbo, leeched of life.