Talents, Incorporated 7 – Leinster · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction
Talents, Incorporated 7Chapter 7
18
Literature · Science Fiction
Talents, Incorporated 7
Chapter 7
LeinsterEnglish
The Mekinese ship was a cruiser, and it broke out of overdrive within the Tralee solar system just two days, four hours, and some odd minutes after Gwenlyn predicted its coming. Presumably, it had made the customary earlier breakout to correct its course and measure the distance remaining to be run. In overdrive there was not as yet a way to know accurately one's actual speed, and at astronomical distances small errors piled up. Correction of line was important, too, because a course that was even a second off arc could mount up to hundreds of thousands of miles. But even with that usual previous breakout, the Mekinese cruiser did not turn up conveniently close to its destination. It needed a long solar-system drive to make its planetfall.
Bors's long-range radar picked it up before it was near enough to notify its arrival to the planet--if it intended to notify at all. Most likely its program was simply and frighteningly to appear overhead and arrogantly demand the services of the landing-grid to lower it to the ground.
Bors's radar detected the cruiser and instantly cut itself off. The cry of "Co-o-ntact!" went through the ship and all inner doors closed, sealing the ship into sections. Bors was already at the board in the control room. He did not accept the predictions of Talents, Incorporated as absolute truth. It bothered him that such irrational means of securing information should be so accurate. So he compromised in his own mind to the point where, when Talents, Incorporated gave specific information, it was possible; no more. Then, having admitted so much, he acted on the mere possibility, and pretended to be surprised when it turned out to be a fact.
That was the case now. A ship had appeared in this solar system at the time the ship-arrival Talent on the Sylva predicted. Bors scowled, and swung the Isis in line between Tralee and the new arrival. He turned, then, and drove steadily out toward it. The other ship's screens would show a large blip which was the planet, and in direct line a very much smaller blip which was the Isis. The small blip might not be noticed because it was in line with the larger. If it were noticed, it would be confusing, because such things should not happen. But the cruisers of Mekin were not apt to be easily alarmed. They represented a great empire, all of whose landing-grids were safely controlled, and though there was disaffection everywhere there was no reason to suspect rebellion at operations in space.
For a long time nothing happened. The Isis drove to meet the cruiser. The two vessels should be approaching each other at a rate which was the total of their speeds. Bors punched computer-keys and got the gravitational factor at this distance from Tralee's sun. He set the Isis's solar-system drive to that exact quantity. He waited.
His own radar was now non-operative. Its first discovery-pulse would have been observed by the Mekinese duty-officer. The fact that it did not repeat would be abnormal. The duty-officer would wonder why it didn't come again.
The astrogation-radar cut off. Then a single strong pulse came. It would be a ranging-pulse. Cargo-ship radars sacrificed high accuracy for wide and deep coverage. But war-vessels carried pulse instruments which could measure distances within feet up to thousands of miles, and by phase-scrambling among the echoes even get some information about the size and shape of the object examined. Not much, but some.
Bors relaxed. Things were going well. When four other ranging-pulses arrived at second intervals, he nodded to himself. This was a warship's reaction. It could be nothing else. That officer knew that something was coming out from Tralee. It was on approximately a collision course. But a ship traveling under power should gain velocity as long as its drive was on. When traveling outward from the sun and not under power, it should lose velocity by so many feet per second to the sun's gravitational pull. Bors's ship did neither. It displayed the remarkably unlikely characteristic of absolutely steady motion. It was not normal. It was not possible. It could not have any reasonable explanation, in the mind of a Mekinese.
Which was its purpose. It would arouse professional curiosity on the cruiser, which would then waste some precious time attempting to identify it. There wouldn't be suspicion because it didn't act suspiciously. Still, it couldn't be dismissed, because it didn't behave in any recognizable fashion. The cruiser would want to know more about it; it shouldn't move at a steady velocity going outward from a sun.
In consequence, Bors got in the first shot.
He said, "Fire one!" when the Mekinese would be just about planning to turn their electron-telescope upon it. A missile leaped away from the Isis. It went off at an angle, and it curved madly, and the instrumentation of the cruiser could spot it as now there, now here, now nearer, and now nearer still. But the computers could not handle an object which not only changed velocity but changed the rate at which its velocity changed.
Missiles came pouring out of the Mekinese ship. They were infinitesimal, bright specks on the radar-screen. They curved violently in flight trying to intercept the Isis's missile. They failed.
There was a flash of sun-bright flame very, very far away. There was a little cloud of vapor which dissipated swiftly. Then there was nothing but two or three specks moving at random, their target lost, their purpose forgotten. The fact of victory was an anticlimax.
"All clear," said Bors grimly.
The inner-compartment doors opened. The normal sounds of the ship were heard again. Bors began to calculate the data needed for the journey to Garen. There was the angle and the distance and the proper motions and the time elapsed.... He found it difficult to think in such terms. He was discontented. He'd ambushed a Mekinese cruiser. True, he'd let his own ship be seen, and the Mekinese had warning enough to launch missiles in their own defense. It was not even faintly like the ambush of a cruiser on the bottom of a Kandarian sea, waiting to assassinate a fleet when its complement went on board. But Bors didn't like what he'd just done.
The figures wouldn't come out right. Impatiently, he sent for Logan. The mathematical Talent came into the control room.
"Will you calculate this for me?" Bors asked irritably.
Logan glanced casually at the figures and wrote down the answer. Instantly. Without thought or reflection. Instantly!
Bors couldn't quite believe it. The distance between the two stars was a rounded-off number, of course. The relative proper motion of the two stars had a large plus-or-minus bugger factor. The time-lapse due to distance had a presumed correction and there was a considerable probable error in the speed of translation of the ship during overdrive. It was a moderately complicated equation, and the computation of the probable error was especially tricky. Bors stared at it, and then stared at Logan.
"That's the answer to what you have written there," said Logan condescendingly, "but your figures are off. I've been talking to your computer men. They've given me the log figures on past overdrive jumps and the observed errors on arrival. They're systematic. I noticed it at once."
Bors said, "What?"
"There's a source of consistent error," Logan said patiently. "I found the values to correct it, then I found the source. It's in your overdrive speed."
Bors blinked. Speed in overdrive could not be computed exactly. The approximation was very close--within a fraction of a tenth of one per cent--but when the distance traveled was light-years the uncertainty piled up.
"If you use these figures," said Logan complacently--and he scribbled figures swiftly--"you'll get it really accurate."
Having finished writing the equation, he wrote the solution. Bors asked suspicious questions. Logan answered absently. He knew nothing about overdrive. He didn't understand anything but numbers and he didn't know how he did what he did with them. But he'd worked backward from observed errors in calculation and found a way to keep them out of the answer. And he'd done it all in his head. It was unbelievable--yet Bors believed.
"I'll try your figures," he said. "Thanks."
Logan went proudly away, past an orderly bringing cups of coffee to the control room. Bors aimed the ship according to the calculation Logan had given him, scrupulously setting the breakout timer to the exact figure listed.
He was still uncomfortable about the destruction of the Mekinese cruiser when he said curtly, "Overdrive coming!" He'd have preferred a more sportsmanlike type of warfare. He faced the old, deplorable fact that fighting men had had to adjust to throughout the ages; one can fight an honorable enemy honorably, but against some men scruples count as handicaps.
"Swine!" growled Bors. "They'll make us like them!" Then into the microphone he said, "Five, four, three, two, one...."
He pressed the overdrive button. The sensation of going into overdrive was acutely uncomfortable, as always. Bors swallowed squeamishly and took his cup of coffee.
The Isis, then, lay wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space. Its properties included the fact that its particular type of stress could travel much more swiftly than the stresses involved in the propagation of radiation, of magnetism, or gravity. And this state of stress--this overdrive field--did not have a position. It was a position. The ship inside it could not be said to be in the real cosmos at all, but when the field collapsed it would be somewhere, and the way it pointed, and how long before collapse, determined in what particular somewhere it would be when it came out. But travel in overdrive was tedious.
As civilization increases man's control of the cosmos, it takes the fun out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In overdrive, Bors's ship traveled almost with the speed of thought, but there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about the journey, anyhow.
While the ship drove on, however, the cargo-ship seized on Tralee made its way toward Glamis and a meeting with the fleet, then gloomily sweeping in orbit around Glamis Two. The food it carried would raise men's spirits a little, but it would not solve the problem of what the fleet was to do. Morgan, on the flagship, expounded the ability of his Talents to perform the incredible, but nobody could find any application of the incredible to the fix the fleet was in. On Kandar, the population knew that there had been a battle off the gas-giant planet, but they did not know the result. The Mekinese fleet had not come. The fleet of Kandar had not returned. The caretaker government met in council and desperately made guesses. It arrived at no hopeful conclusion whatever. The most probable--because most hopeless--conviction seemed to be that the fleet of Mekin had been met and fought, but that it was victorious, and in retaliation for resistance it had gone away to send back swarms of grisly bomb-carriers which would drop atomic bombs in such quantity that for a thousand years to come there would be no life on Kandar.
The light cruiser, the Isis, was unaware of these frustrations. It remained in overdrive, where absolutely nothing happened.
Bors reviewed his actions and could not but approve of them tepidly. He'd sent food to the fleet, he'd destroyed two enemy fighting ships and he'd done what he could to harm the Mekinese puppets on Tralee. He'd had them publicly humiliated with well-chosen epithets. He'd destroyed the records and archives of the secret political police.... Many people on Tralee already blessed him, without knowing who he was. There might yet be hope of better days.
But all things end, even journeys at excessively great multiples of the speed of light. The overdrive timer rang warning bells. Taped breakout notifications sounded from speakers throughout the ship. There was a count-down of seconds, and the abominably unpleasant sensation of breakout, and the ship was in normal space again.
There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it. There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further out there were the smaller, frozen worlds. Nearer the sun, on the far side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen.
The Isis drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's computations.
Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast. Logan looked offhand and elaborately casual, but he fairly glowed with triumph.
"I found out the fact behind the bugger factor, Captain," he said condescendingly. "The speed of a ship in overdrive varies as the change in mass to the minus fourth. Your computers couldn't tell that! Here's a table for calculating the speed of a ship in overdrive according to its mass and the strength of the overdrive field."
"Fine," said Bors without enthusiasm.
"And to go with it," said Logan, his voice indifferent, but his eyes shining proudly, "just for my own amusement, I computed a complete table of overdrive speeds for this particular ship, with different strengths of field. They run from one point five light-speeds up to the maximum your equipment will give. You have to correct for changes of mass, of course."
Bors was not quite capable of enthusiasm over the computation of tables of complex figures. He simply could not share Logan's thrill of achievement in the results of the neat rows of numerals. Nor had he struggled unduly to grasp the implication of Logan's explanation.
Instead, he said politely, "Very nice. Thank you very much."
Logan's eyes ceased to shine. His wounded pride made him defiant.
"Nobody else anywhere could have worked out that table!" he said stridently. "Nobody! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a freak!"
Bors realized that he'd been tactless. Logan's experiences before Talents, Incorporated had made him unduly sensitive. He'd done something of which he was proud, but Bors didn't appreciate its magnitude. Logan reacted to the frustration of his vanity.
"Hold it!" said Bors. "I'm not unappreciative. I'm stupid and worried about something. You just figured an overdrive jump for me that's the most accurate I ever heard of! But I'm desperate for time and we've got to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can't make an overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we're losing forty-eight hours or more."
Logan said as stridently as before:
"But I just showed you you don't have to! Cut the field-strength according to that table."
Bors was jolted. It was suddenly self-evident. Logan had said he'd figured a table of overdrive fields for the Isis which would work for anything between one point five light-speeds to maximum. One point five light-speeds!
It was one of those absurdities in technology that so often go so long before they are noticed. During the development of overdrive, it had been the effort of every technician to get the fastest possible drive. It was known that with a given mass and a given field-strength, one could get an effective speed of an unbelievable figure. Men had spent their lives trying to increase that figure. But nobody'd ever tried to find out how slowly one could travel in overdrive, because solar-system drive took care of short distances!
"Wait a minute!" said Bors, staring. "Do you really mean I can drive this ship under two light-speeds in overdrive?"
"Look at the table!" said Logan, trembling with anger. "Look at it! You'll find the figures right there!"
Bors looked. Then he stood up quickly. He left the ship in the care of his second-in-command and plunged into a highly technical discussion with its engineers.
He ran into violent objections. The whole purpose of overdrive was high speed between stars. The engineers insisted that one had to use the strongest possible field. If the field were made feeble, it would become unstable. Everybody knew that the field had to be of maximum strength.
"We'll try minimum," said Bors coldly. "Now let's get to work!"
He had to do much of the labor himself, because the engineers found it necessary to stop at each stage of the effort to explain why it should not be done. He had almost to battle to get an auxiliary circuit paralleling the main overdrive unit, with a transformer to bring down voltage, and a complete new power-supply unit to be cut into the overdrive line while leaving the standard ready for use without delay.
He went back to the control room. He took a distance-reading on the huge planet off to port. He threw on the new, low-power overdrive field. He held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight.
The speed of the Isis, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point seven lights.
Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of Garen. He'd saved two days and secured the promise of many more such valuable feats.
As soon as the Isis broke to normal space near Garen, there was a call on the communicator. A familiar voice;
"Calling Isis! Calling Isis! Sylva calling Isis!"
Bors said softly, "Damnation! For the second time, what are you doing in this place?"
Gwenlyn's voice laughed.
"Traveling for pleasure, Captain Bors! I've news for you. We were allowed to land and then told to leave again. There's a warship down below. I told you about it before. It's still there. There's a huge cargo-ship, too, and there are riots because it's almost finished loading with requisitioned foodstuffs for Mekin. Mekin is--would you believe it?--unpopular on Garen!"
"Very well," said Bors. "I'll see what can be done. Will you carry a message for me?"
"Happy to oblige, Captain!"
"Tell them that--" Then Bors stopped short. It was not probable that the fleet wave-form and frequency were known to Mekinese ships. But the possibility of low-speed overdrive travel was much too important a military secret to risk under any circumstances. He said, "I'll be along very shortly with some highly encouraging news."
"Who do I tell this to?"
"I name no names on microwaves," he told her. "Get going, will you?"
"To hear," said Gwenlyn cheerfully, "is to obey."
Her communicator clicked off. The Sylva showed on a radar-screen, but had not been near enough to be sighted direct. The blip shot out from the planet.
Bors growled to himself. The Isis floated a hundred thousand miles off Garen. There was no challenge. There was no query from the planet. But Gwenlyn said that there were riots down below. They could be serious enough to absorb the attention usually given to routine. But there was another reason for this inattention. Garen was a part of the Mekinese empire which was not encouraged to trade off-planet except through Mekin. Very few non-Mekinese ships would ever land there, and therefore wouldn't be watched for. It was unlikely that a long-range radar habitually swept space off Garen. The battleship should be more alert, but again there was no danger of space-borne rebellion, and the affair of Kandar might not have been bruited so far away.
But the spaceport would respond to calls, certainly. Bors considered these circumstances. A large cargo-ship loaded with foodstuffs requisitioned to be sent to Mekin. A population which had been rebellious before--witness the battleship aground to overawe resistance--and now was rioting.
Bors called for the extra members of his crew. He uncomfortably outlined the action he had in mind. There was one part that he disliked. He had to stay on board ship. The important action, as he saw it, would take place elsewhere. It was so obviously painful for him to outline a course of action in which other men must take risks he couldn't share, that his men regarded him with pleased affection which he did not guess at. In the end he asked for twenty volunteers, and got fifty.
He swung the Isis around to the night side of the planet. Its two port blisters opened and two boats floated free in the orbit Bors had established. The ship moved on ahead.
Just at sunup where the spaceport stood, a voice growled down from outer space.
"Calling ground!" it said contemptuously. "Calling ground! This is the last ship left of the fleet of Kandar. We're pirates now and we're looking for trouble! There's a battleship down there. Come up and fight or we blast you in your spaceport! Just to prove we can do it--watch!"
Bors said, "Fire one," and a missile went off toward the planet. It was fused to detonate at the very tip of the fringes of the planet's atmosphere.
It did. There was light more brilliant than a thousand suns. The long low shadows of sunrise vanished. The new-rising sun turned dim by comparison.
The voice from space spoke with intolerable levity. "Come up with your missiles ready! We'll give you ten thousand miles of height. And if you try to duck out in overdrive...."
The voice was explicit about what it would do to the Mekinese-occupied areas of Garen if the battleship fled.
