The End of the Matter Page 22

  Chapter Thirteen

  Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory checked instrumentation, confirmed that the ship’s cargo handlers were operating properly. Everything read normal, performed efficiently—yet the artifact refused to enter the Teacher. Flinx had an idea, which Tse-Mallory quashed.

  “Why don’t we just back the ship around the object?”

  “No good, Flinx,” Tse-Mallory explained. “If the tractors can’t move the object, then I’m not sure it will move along with the ship. Try again.”

  Flinx did so, then tried a third time, each time at a different setting, using the four tractors in differing configurations.

  Hasboga looked awed. “It hasn’t moved a centimeter.” She stared at the screens.

  “Young feller-me-lad?” September looked from the screens over to the control console. “What’s your manipulation capacity?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand tons, dead-weight mass, per tractor. I’ve tried employing them along the same axis, one million tons of pulling power. No good—it doesn’t move.”

  September looked thoughtful as he stroked his chin. “Even if that artifact is unusually dense stuff, I don’t imagine it weighing anywhere near that much.”

  “ ‘Unusually dense’ leaves a great deal of room for variation, Mr. September,” said Truzenzuzex. “The duralloy this vessel is made of is composed of exceptionally dense metals.” A truhand fluttered in the direction of the screens showing the device. “That object may be composed of super-dense material.”

  “Maybe it’s as dense as the collapsar,” ventured Hasboga.

  Truzenzuzex stifled a laugh; the woman was not a physicist. “If that were so, then our device would weigh as much as several galaxies. I think that unlikely. We will have to find something more powerful to pull with.”

  “Or push with,” Flinx murmured.

  Truzenzuzex made a sound indicative of agreement mixed with hesitancy. “There are other ways to employ a KK field.”

  “I see what you’re thinking, you two.” Tse-Mallory looked doubtful and not a little worried. “I don’t know. It’s risky, very risky.”

  “But worth trying.” Flinx was sure it would work. “Instead of trying to pull the device, we’ll position the Teacher behind it, line up on course, and push with the field.”

  “Why not just pull it with the field?” Hasboga asked.

  “No,” Tse-Mallory replied, “we have to try to push. A Kurita-Kinoshita field is spherical when formed, but when you pass light-speed it becomes teardrop-shaped. The tip of the drop extends only to include that solid matter which is firmly connected to the field projector, meaning the ship. It’s possible, but if the field contracted sufficiently, and it should at the speed we’ll be traveling, then we could lose the artifact.”

  “We are much more certain of retaining control of it if it is riding in the front bulge of the field.” Truzenzuzex was gesturing with all four truhands and foothands now. “Assuming that the field exerts sufficient pressure to move it, which is by no means certain.”

  “We could lose the artifact that way also, Tru.”

  “That is so, ship-brother,” the philosoph conceded. “But can you think of anything else to try?”

  “No. No.” Tse-Mallory had to admit there was nothing else to do but try it.

  “I’m not sure I understand your worry, Bran,” Flinx confessed.

  Truzenzuzex tried to explain, although spatial physics was not his area of expertise either. “Even in the leading bulge of the sun mass, the Kurita-Kinoshita field is narrow, Flinx. The higher the speed, the flatter and more angular the bulge. If we should misjudge slightly coming out of Kurita-Kinoshita space, space-plus—or improperly form the field—then all or part of the Hur’rikku artifact could emerge into normal space while we are still in space-plus. The result would be either partial disintegration of the object or, if it drops whole into normal space, its loss. We would continue to travel at plus-light-speed velocity, while the artifact would be kicked out at an angle from our present course into normal space, at a speed of several . . . well, before we could so much as twitch an antenna, let alone slow speed or reverse direction or both, the artifact would have long vanished. Our chances of relocating it in free space would border on the infinitesimal.”

  Flinx looked crushed. “Maybe we’d better try something else, then.”

  But it was the querulous Tse-Mallory who objected to that idea. “No, Flinx. Tru is right. We have to try pushing with the KK field.” His eyes wandered to the waiting artifact. “Even if it is resting in a stasis field, no stasis field can resist the pressure of a KK drive.”

  “You left out one thing,” September interrupted. “Known. No known stasis field can resist a KK.”

  Flinx edged the Teacher around until the great curving disk of the field projector was properly positioned with regard to the floating artifact. Truzenzuzex had the computer check all positional calculations four times to make certain the field would engulf the Hur’rikku device from precisely the required distance.

  “All clear here,” said Tse-Mallory, looking up briefly from the readouts he was monitoring. “Engage the drive, Flinx.”

  Within the immensely complex instrumentation of the ship, Flinx’s subsequent instructions were computer-conveyed to the appropriate sections. A diffuse sphere of radiant purple energy began to form in front of the Teacher’s projector. No one in the ship’s piloting chamber could see the field begin to take shape. It was hidden in front of the projecting disk. So was the Hur’rikku artifact. But the field appeared in the form of changing readouts and shifting dials on the chamber’s instruments.

  Very slowly, the Teacher began to accelerate out of the Cannachanna system. It passed through the space where the alien device had been floating. Since it was no longer there, it was proper to assume that the artifact was now perilously ensconced slightly forward of the KK field’s gravitational nexus.

  Muted congratulations mixed with expressions of relief on board the ship. “It’s got to be there,” Flinx confirmed after an instrument check. “We’re using twice the power to accelerate half as fast as normal. The ship is handling the load all right, though.”

  Tse-Mallory lapsed into thought, pleased but puzzled. “I thought that once the artifact was moved, the stasis field would either collapse or be left behind. Yet if Flinx is correct, Tru, the stasis field is traveling with the device.”

  “There may be no stasis field involved. Our first guess, involving super-dense construction, may be the correct one. There is also a type of stasis field that is not really a stasis field in the way we know it. A theoretical state of matter that is called FCI, fixed cosmic inertia.” His mandibles moved idly, nibbling at one another. “I wonder, I wonder. Such a state of matter has been postulated but not proven mathematically. Not yet. An FCI object would appear to be motionless, Bran. Yet what one would see would not be the object itself, but only its most recent manifestation. The real object would consist of undetectable but very real energy built up within the object itself. The object moves, or seems to, with us. But the energy it has built up trails behind it.”

  “Tru,” a bewildered Flinx, interrupted, “you’re leaving me behind, too.”

  “Briefly, Flinx,” the philosoph explained, “what we may have ahead of us is an object that appears to move but in reality is motionless—the universe shifts around it. If we could move it, it would release its true inertial energy.” He shook his head. “I still do not understand how that could be sufficient to affect a collapsar.” He moved to a computer terminal. “I have work to do, gentlesirs.”

  Straining to move something which Truzenzuzex insisted wasn’t really moving, the Teacher raced out of the long-dead system, carrying them at maximum speed back through the Blight. Flinx tried with every instrument on board to detect the trail of energy which Tru hypothesized the Hur’rikku device was leaving behind it. He found nothing.

  However, if what Tru suspected was correct, then the artifact had been buildi
ng up FCI force for over a half million years. Trying to imagine what such power could do (if indeed it existed) if released in one small place simultaneously left Flinx a little dizzy.

  So instead he found a small ball, and he and Pip played a lot of catch.

  What no one had yet detected, since it had taken great care not to be detected, was another ship, which had arrived in the system of Cannachanna shortly behind them. Instead of following them to the world of the Hur’rikku, it had been content to remain just behind the horizon of the gas giant, concealed by that protosun’s energy fields and extensive tenebrous atmosphere.

  It had remained there, monitoring their activity without rest. While its occupants had to take care not to be observed, a caution which somewhat inhibited the efficiency of their surveillance, they were still able to track the Teacher’s hasty departure and plot its course.

  As soon as the Teacher passed into space-plus, this small but very fast craft sped at engine-warping velocity to a thinly populated world on the fringes of the Commonwealth. There it made contact with a mining colony which was as efficient in its true function as it was at its geological deception.

  By now the Teacher was many parsecs distant. That did not matter to the crew of the small vessel. In conveying their information to the inhabitants of the station, they had accomplished their assigned task.

  The beings who had piloted that ship and who ran the purported mining station below were neither human nor thranx. They had longish mouths filled with sharp, pointed teeth, and expressions which conveyed their utter contempt for anything not like themselves, Their skins were hard, shiny, and scaly, the minds beneath crested skulls active and devious.

  Carefully scattered throughout the Commonwealth were others of their kind, some disguised surgically to resemble men. (None were disguised to look like thranx, for these were a bipedal, two-armed folk, in no way insectoid. Their blood, unlike that of Earthly reptiles, was warm. And though they preferred a warm, dry climate, they now moved vigorously about the cold world they occupied.

  There were several functional mine shafts around the station. The AAnn occupied this borderline world by treaty with the Commonwealth, so appearances were important. The mine shaft beneath the station itself contained, not valuable mineral deposits, but a subatomic-particle acceleration communicator, known more commonly as a deep-space beam.

  Metamorphosed into a stream of charmed positively charged quarks, a message could be flashed from accelerator to accelerator, world to world, at dizzying speed, far faster than a restricted tridee beam. A tridee beam employed high-speed leptons to carry its messages. Tridee leptons and Kurita-Kinoshita sun fields traveled through space-plus. But the less-than-perceptible quarks moved through something so esoteric it could not be properly described, and so had been labeled null-space, or space-minus.

  At each successive receiving station the positively charged charmed quarks were carefully redirected and reaccelerated to their next destination. Eventually they would reach an ultimate destination. Instead of being reaccelerated there, the unstoppable beam would be read by a subelementary-particle counter and its message deciphered. Only another counter lying directly in the path of the message could intercept it, and the chances of that ever happening were as remote as the region where such beams eventually ended up. Only an enormous vessel, not smaller than a dreadnought, was large enough to contain a deep-space-beam station.

  So the Teacher raced on, oblivious to the fact that its probable destination had been guessed. Its inhabitants were of mixed emotions. But no matter what each individual wished for in the way of an eventual destination, all hoped that their journey would soon meet with success.

  Months later, they finally arrived in the vicinity of the Velvet Dam. A swirling blackness, the dark nebula hid everything behind it from view of any humanx-occupied world.

  “That is what the rogue will be coming through in less than nineteen years, on collision course with the sun of Twosky Bright.” Tse-Mallory studied the shuddery emptiness coolly. “Unless we do something to stop it. It will announce itself to general and amateur astronomers then because of the hole it will leave behind as it sucks in gas and particles from the nebula.”

  Flinx stared at the vast black brush stroke through which only a few large suns shone faintly and tried to imagine it with a hole cut out of its middle. The scale of the danger they were soon to confront was beginning to be appreciated. It was one thing to talk about a collapsar, another thing entirely to confront it.

  Under Tse-Mallory’s instructions, the Teacher altered its course slightly for the last time, to rendezvous with the predicted position of the binary system and the onrushing collapsar. The Hur’rikku artifact remained in position ahead of the field center.

  September compared their feat thus far to a seal swimming the Atlantic Ocean with a ball balanced on its nose. Flinx knew what the Atlantic Ocean was—it was one of Terra’s three major bodies of water. But a seal?

  “It looks kind of like a Largessian, young feller-me-lad,” the giant informed him. “Only smaller, without hands, and with a smaller head.”

  That description enabled Flinx to conjur a picture, though it was difficult to imagine one of the lazy natives of Largess swimming an ocean while balancing anything on its nose.

  Days passed, and the ship gradually decellerated under the two scientist’s careful supervision. They could still drop the device in a trillion cubic kilometers of empty space. Having successfully brought it this far, neither man nor thranx was prepared to risk losing it. Finally they slowed to a point where everyone experienced a brief instant of somewhere-elseness and nausea. The Teacher had returned to normal space.

  Ahead of them should be the twin-sun system newly catalogued as RNGC 11,432 and 11,433. Everyone hurried to the fore observation port, in the observation-piloting blister, as the ship was positioned to provide them with a view.

  No one spoke about the sight which greeted them until Tse-Mallory said quietly: “Gentlesirs and lady, we are a few days late. The rogue has already arrived.”

  What lay slightly to one side of them as the Teacher slowed to a stop was a sight that almost precluded description. The rogue, the multiple collapsar, could of course not be directly observed, but its effects could. And they could be heard, as was amply proven when Flinx opened all sensor equipment to monitor the precise position of the rogue. A violent, teeth-grating scream filled the room before Flinx, in a cold sweat, could lower the volume.

  Hasboga winced, her hands covering her ears to shut out that inorganic wailing. Her eyes were squinched tightly closed. Next to her, September reached out with a comforting arm. No humorous twinkle was in his eyes—not now.

  Flinx turned the sound level down to where the howl was bearable, but he could not bring himself to cut it out entirely. There was something mesmerizing about that shriek, an effect caused as much by the knowledge of what was behind it as by the sound itself. He became aware of his own rapid breathing, and forced himself to calm down.

  “What is it?” Hasboga glanced up at September and leaned against his massive shoulder. “I’ve never heard anything like it in my life.”

  “I doubt anyone has, Isili.” September wore a peculiar expression as he regarded the phenomenon visible through the port. “A man being killed slowly has a tendency to scream. Interesting to learn that a star reacts the same way.”

  “You are romanticizing,” Truzenzuzex commented. “That so-called scream is only the result of torn-apart matter releasing energy as it is sucked into the collapsar.”

  Flinx reflected that although the philosoph’s explanation was more accurate, September’s provided a more effective description.

  Leaving the controls on automatic, he moved in for a better look. RNGC 11,432 was an orange, K-9 supergiant. Its companion star, which rotated counter-clockwise as opposed to its giant brother, was far smaller but much hotter, a yellow-green furnace.

  From each sun, according to the direction of its rotation, a long
tendril of glowing matter extended to Flinx’s right. One curled in a tightening clockwise spiral to vanish into nothingness; the other twisted inward from the opposite direction. Around both tendrils clustered a vast, diffuse cloud of energy particles and gases which had also been pulled from both stars. A black circle rested in the center of that cloud, a circle that looked like a black cutout on fluorescent paper. At its center was a minuscule point with the mass of suns.

  How many stars lay crushed and collapsed to that point? Dozens, hundreds—maybe thousands. How much of the universe had the wanderer already gobbled up? Flinx envisioned whole galaxies with thin black lines running through them, forming the trail of the wandering rogue where suns, worlds, populations had disappeared.

  Was there a pit in Andromeda? Perhaps a hole in the middle of the Magellanic Clouds? Yet that was the force they were going to try to counter with the metal-glass-plastic something riding in front of the Teacher. Something which September had estimated could be reduced to less than dust by a single SCCAM projectile.

  Even the old philosoph’s description of what FCI could mean seemed insignificant by comparision with an object which presently was draining the mass of two stars as easily as a sponge could soak up two drops of water.

  Too bad for Carmague and Collangatta, Flinx mused silently. Too bad for the bright star of humid Twosky Bright. Too bad, too sad for the untold vanished worlds already destroyed in unknown galaxies unimaginable ages ago.

  They could throw a billion SCCAM shells, a hundred suns at the rogue. Nothing could destroy it. The billion SCCAM projectiles would add infinitesimally to the collapsar’s mass. The hundred suns would add a bit more. Both would only make the rogue that much more powerful, that much more destructive.

  Flinx was on the verge of suggesting they turn and go home when Tse-Mallory looked over at him and said matter-of-factly, “I suppose we might as well get started.”

  September commented without smiling, “You don’t mean that now that you’ve seen the thing you’re going to try to do something with that little-bitty hunk of iron or whatever it is?”