The Prometheus Project Part 26

be armed at all. Why should it be? Its destination is a time and place where no other s.p.a.ce vehicles exist.

Ship-to-ship weapons would have no targets!"

I considered this. It seemed to hold up . . . except for one little problem Khorat had overlooked. The

peewee laser cannon the Medjavar had welded onto their ship would be manned-well, you know what I mean-by beings evolution had neglected to equip with a killer instinct. That hadn't occurred to Khorat for the simple reason that he himself was one of those beings.

"So, Khorat," asked Chloe, "if the original plan-the one involving us-has gone by the boards, then what are we doing here?"

"Complete with our new bodies," I added.Khorat showed the signs I'd learned to read as reflecting discomfort. "It is true that Nafayum's work has probably gone for naught. But, as I have indicated, this news forced an urgent revision of our plans, leaving no time to send the two of you back to Khemava. Besides . . . are you sure you would have wanted to be left behind, to wonder whether we had succeeded?"

"Now that you mention it, no," I admitted.

"One other question." Chloe spoke with an intensity which, like so much about her these days, I didn't

understand. "You're noted for your contingency plans, Khorat. What's the fallback position if we're notin time to catch Novak's ship 'before it commences its temporal displacement,' as I believe you put it?""In that event," said the old Ekhemar slowly, "we will have no alternative but to set out in pursuit."For a heartbeat or two, I genuinely didn't get it. Maybe it was because I was staring at Chloe, who had closed her eyes and was nodding repeatedly as though at the unsurprising confirmation of a suspicion.

But then, for some reason, I remembered Khorat's slip of the tongue when we'd first come aboard: something about the modifications to this ship, and the fact that some of them might not be illegal, strictly speaking. . . .

"Khorat," my mouth said for me before my mind had really come to grips with the notion, "are you, by

any chance, implying that this is a time ship?" "We truly believed that the capability would not be necessary. We still hope that it will not. But we had to face the possibility. We began fitting this ship with it at the same time we began installing the laser weapon."

"But Novak stole the data! And you told me the Medjavar don't believe in making copies."

"In this case, we made an exception. The potential consequences of a theft of this knowledge-not that

we ever really believed in the possibility-were such that we had to reserve to ourselves the capability of countering it. Indeed, we extended Imhaermekh's theoretical work. We discovered . . . Well, remember the a.n.a.logy I drew between time travel and falling? And my remark that there are dimensions in which one can 'fall' faster than in others?" Khorat paused, and I sensed his irritated frustration with the need to express these concepts in baby talk lest the translator simply shut down. English was as about as well-suited to this discussion as Mycenaean Greek would have been to teaching a cla.s.s in TV repair. "At any rate, we have knowledge that Novak did not steal. Using that knowledge, we have equipped this ship to access those 'faster' dimensions."

"So," I asked, "you think you can catch her if she doesn't get too much of a head start?"

Khorat gave the small backward jerk of the head that was his race's equivalent of a human's wince, and I tried to imagine how my question came across in translation. "That is, I suppose, one way to put it. But,

to repeat, we have every hope of arriving before it becomes necessary to use this capability. So with any luck the whole matter will prove academic."

"Luck is like government," I philosophized. "Everybody needs a little of it, but only a fool relies on it."

* * * The voyage to the Solar System took about as long as our previous journey to the Antyova system had. It just didn't seem as long.

I spent the time getting checked out on the laser weapon. I'd never had a chance to observe galactic-level shipboard weaponry. The Project had produced a few such weapons, at staggering expense. But they were just for show, as part of the deception. Otherwise, there was no point. We didn't have a prayer in h.e.l.l of actually going toe-to-toe with any of the starfaring powers.

What I saw confirmed what I'd read. In theory, greater ranges could have been obtained by designing focusing optics that unfolded repeatedly to vast diameters until the ship itself was like a small spider in the center of a large web. But in practice, such an array would have been hopelessly vulnerable-not just to enemy action and s.p.a.ce junk, but also to Murphy's Law. As always with military hardware, rugged reliability counted for more than any number of fancy-pants refinements. This weapon, like all of its kind, was almost entirely contained in the ship's hull, into which it was normally faired. Only when it was time for action did it exude a small focusing array resembling your idea of a radar dish. It was not a serious weapon for s.p.a.ce warfare as the great Delkasu empires waged it. In human naval terms, it was like the popgun carried by a Coast Guard cutter. But for what Khorat had in mind, it ought to serve, just as a Coast Guard cutter could stop a smuggler's cabin cruiser.

The fundamental principle wasn't unfamiliar to me, inasmuch as the Project had arranged for the laser to be "invented" in 1959. Of course, the superconductor-loop "capacitors" stored energy at a density Earth's mainstream science denied was even theoretically possible, and there were a lot of other engineering details that smacked of Clarke's Law. But I could handle the basic concepts, rather like a Renaissance person looking at an automobile; the electrical systems would have been a mystery, and the internal combustion engine would have seemed fantastic (although I'll bet Leonardo would have picked up on it in no time), but the wheels and gears would have presented no problem.

The time machine was another matter.

I persisted in thinking of it as that, since the translator's "temporal displacement field generator" had too many syllables. It was a small thing, and as Khorat had explained it didn't draw much power. And yet, staring at it, I was like my imaginary Renaissance man studying an X-ray machine. I soon gave up.

Instead, I occupied myself with dry runs on the laser cannon. The controls took some getting used to. This was even more true of the handheld weapons in a locker that the Ekemasu mostly avoided with visible distaste. I pestered Thramoz, who was the equivalent of a human ship's master-at-arms, until he let me try the things out. They, too, were based on the laser principle; galactic-level energy storage technology made this practical for a weapon I could lift with no more difficulty than, say, a BAR. Designed by and for Ekhemasu, it was awkward as h.e.l.l for a human to hold and fire, but the total lack of recoil would help make up for that.

I antic.i.p.ated an argument when I suggested to Chloe that she also familiarize herself with the weaponry. She surprised me by falling in with the idea at once. The bulk and weight of the portables were more of a problem for her than for me, but she actually adapted better to handling the Ekhemasu-style grips and firing mechanisms, not having my burden of drilled-in habits to unlearn.

As we went through these sessions, I continued to observe her, trying to understand the change in her. She was still quite obviously concealing something behind shutters of superficial normalcy. But there was a subtle change in what that something was. Before, it had been appalled fear and uncertainty, whose origin was a mystery to me. Now, I sensed, all that had been replaced by a deep certainty, and an irrevocable decision based on that certainty-a certainty, and a decision, which I could not be allowed to share. And that still hurt.

So matters stood as we approached the Solar system.

* * * It came as no surprise that our ship had a state-of-the-art stealth suite, and was not announcing its presence through regular channels to the Project's faux governmental authorities. Nevertheless, it came to a halt somewhere outside the Oort Cloud, where the Sun was still just another zero-magnitude star.Chloe and I had no idea what was going on, for Khorat was inaccessible, deliberately or otherwise. So, with nothing better to do, we took ourselves to the observation lounge. We arrived just in time to see a small vessel enter the viewscreen's pickup as it rendezvoused with us. From the size of it and other indications, the stranger was a ship designed by and for Delkasu.

There was no physical contact between the two ships. The new arrival merely held position off our starboard side for a time, during which we a.s.sumed radio communications were being exchanged. After a while, the other ship swung away and disappeared. Almost immediately, the alarm sounded and our ship went back into field drive-but rather slowly, judging from the apparent motion of the stars.

Shortly thereafter, Khorat entered-he must have had a pretty good idea where we'd be. By this time,

we'd been among the Ekhemasu long enough to recognize a bearer of bad tidings."That ship belonged to the Osak gevroth," he began, earning my grat.i.tude by not going through the motions of pretending he didn't know we had been watching. "Their sources of information indicate that Novak is even closer to departure than we thought."

"Then why are we dawdling?" I demanded, waving my arm at the viewscreen.

"Security reasons," said Khorat succinctly.

"Security? You mean you're afraid Novak will find out we're coming? And what has that got to do with

our speed?"

"Not her. We don't know what galactic ships are currently in this system. If there are any, and they have the proper sensors, a field drive operating at transluminal velocities is easy to detect-indeed, difficult to miss. Remember, the Medjavar's possession of this ship is not generally known. We could be badly

compromised."

My mouth was half-open to inquire just exactly what difference that would make, given what he himself had told us about the consequences of Novak getting away into the past. But then I thought better of it.

What was the use? I knew from experience how security procedures could take on a life of their own,

like religious rituals that had lost their meaning. And what about a habit of concealment that dated back thousands of years?

"All right." I sighed. "So we're proceeding at less than lightspeed, despite the news you've just gotten.

Does this mean we're going to have to travel into the past after all?"

"It appears increasingly likely," Khorat admitted, "that we will indeed have to pursue Novak and destroy her ship while in temporal transit."

"Well," I said . . . and found myself at a loss for anything further to say.

Chloe spoke up hesitantly. "Khorat, don't get me wrong: I don't in any way condone what Renata has

done. But you talk like destroying her ship is the only option. Couldn't we at least try to . . . well,

apprehend her and bring her back to the present day?"

Khorat turned his huge, somehow melancholy eyes on her, and spoke after a long pause. The voice in my earpiece was so expressionless it was barely recognizable as Khorat's.

"Oh, no. That's quite out of the question. Traveling forward in time is a theoretical possibility-indeed, Imhaermekh succeeded in sending subatomic particles a few microseconds into the future-but as a practical matter the energy curve involved rises swiftly to infinity."

For a moment, we sat in a silence of bewilderment . . . or, perhaps, of unwillingness or inability to credit what we'd just heard. Chloe finally broke it. "Khorat, I'm not talking about traveling into the future. I'm talking about returning to the time you set out from in the first place."

"That's not the way it works." Had a hint of compa.s.sion crept into the artificial voice? "There is no such thing as the future or the past. There is only time on one side or the other of the constantly advancing wave front we call the present. It is a.n.a.logous to the relativity theories your civilization has already evolved: a time traveler's 'native' point in time has no 'privileged position.' Or, to put it another way, once one goes backwards in time, one's original point of departure becomes part of 'the future.' The unattainable future."

"But . . ." I shook my head and tried again. "But in that case how do you get back to where . . . I mean when you came from?"

"You don't." Khorat's bluntness was merciless. "It is strictly a one-way trip."

It is possible for anger to reach such a level that it defeats itself, leaving you strangely calm. Staring at Khorat, I found I had entered into that state of emotional overload.

On the fringes of my consciousness, I heard Chloe's quiet voice. "Does Novak know this?"

"She must. She has all the relevant data at her disposal." Khorat turned brisk. "And now I must consult with my colleagues, as we will be nearing your sun shortly." He departed hastily.

For a moment, I stared at the hatch through which he had disappeared. I discovered that the eerie

calmness I'd felt was like the eye of the hurricane: a deceptive pause in the storm. Without a word I

strode out of the lounge and toward my cabin. I could hear Chloe following me.

As soon as the hatch closed behind us, I smashed my fist hammer-style into a bulkhead. The pain broke my inhibitions. "That lying c.o.c.ksucker!" I roared, indifferent to whether or not the cabin was bugged.

"That motherf.u.c.king son of a b.i.t.c.h! He never told us!"

You have to understand: I was born in 1936, to middle-cla.s.s American parents. In the world I came from, men were about as foul-mouthed among themselves as they would be in later times-this always seems to come as a shocking surprise to my juniors-but you simply didn't use obscenities in the

presence of a lady . . . unless, that is, you were so enraged as to be past caring about such things. And I had never been so furious in my life. I raved on until I ran out of breath.

"Well," Chloe ventured, "he never actually claimed it was possible to return from a temporal

displacement into the past."