Collected Short Fiction, page 383
“It really stirred us up, when we got that message saying you were coming home without anything gained. We were really counting on you, Baird. And then, about four hours later, came the second message—”
Ewing chuckled with a warmth he did not feel. “Something came up at the very last minute. Something that can save us from the Klodni.” He glanced around uncertainly. “What’s the news there? How about the Klodni?”
“They’ve conquered Borgman,” Davidson said. “We’re next. Within a year, they say. They changed their direction after Lundquist—”
“They got Lundquist too?” Ewing interrupted.
“Lundquist and Borgman both. Six planets, now. And we’re next on the list.”
Ewing shook his head slowly. “No, we’re not. They’re on our list. I’ve brought something back from Earth with me, and the Klodni won’t like it.”
HE WENT before the Council that evening, after having been allowed to spend the afternoon at his home, renewing his acquaintance with his family, repairing the breach two years of absence had created.
He took with him the plans and drawings and model he had wrung from Myreck and the College. He explained precisely how he planned to defeat the Klodni. The storm burst the moment he had finished.
Jospers, the delegate from Northwest Corwin, immediately broke out with: “Time-travel? Impossible!”
Four of the other delegates echoed the thought. Premier Davidson pounded for order. Ewing shouted them down and said, “Gentlemen, I’m not asking you to believe what I tell you. You sent me to Earth to bring back help, and I’ve brought it.”
“But it’s fantastic to tell us—”
“Please, Mr. Jospers. This thing works.”
“How do you know?”
Ewing took a deep breath. He had not wanted to reveal this. “I’ve tried it,” he said. “I’ve gone back in time. I’ve talked face-to-face with myself. You don’t have to believe that, either. You can squat here like a bunch of sitting ducks and let the Klodni blast us the way they’ve blasted Barnholt and Borgman and Lundquist and all the other colony-worlds in this segment of space. But I tell you I have a workable defense here.”
Quietly Davidson said, “Tell us this, Baird: how much will it cost us to build this—ah—weapon of yours, and how long will it take?”
Ewing considered the questions a moment. He said, “I would estimate at least six to eight months of full-time work by a skilled group of engineers to make the thing work in the scale I intend. As for the cost,”—he paused—“I don’t see how it could be done for less than three million stellors.”
Jospers was on his feet in an instant. “Three million stellors! I ask you, gentlemen—”
His question never was asked. In a voice that tolerated no interruptions Ewing said, “I ask you, gentlemen—how much is life worth to you? I have a weapon here. It sounds like nonsense to you, and expensive nonsense as well. But what of the cost? In a year the Klodni will be here, and your economies won’t matter a damn. Unless you plan to beat them your own way, of course.”
“Three million stellors represents twenty percent of our annual budget,” Davidson remarked. “Should your device prove to be of no help—”
“Don’t you see?” Ewing shouted. “It doesn’t matter! If my device doesn’t work there won’t be any more budgets for you to worry about!”
It was an unanswerable point. Grudgingly, Jospers conceded, and with his concession the opposition collapsed. It was agreed that the weapon brought back from Earth by Ewing would be built.
There was no choice. The shadow of the advancing Klodni grew longer and longer on the stars, and no other weapon existed. Nothing known to man could stop the advancing hordes.
But possibly something unknown could.
EWING SPENT most of his time at the laboratory that had been given him in North Broughton, supervising the development of the time projector.
The weeks passed. At home, Ewing found family life strained and tense. Laira was almost a stranger to him; he told her what he could of his brief stay on Earth, but he had earlier determined to keep the account of his time-shift to himself forever, and his story was sketchy and inconsistent-sounding.
As for Blade, he grew used to his father again. But Ewing did not feel comfortable with either of them. They were—perhaps—not really his, and, preposterous though the thought was, he could not fully accept the reality of his existence.
There had been other Ewings. He was firmly convinced he had been the first of the four, that the others had merely been duplicates of him, but there was no certainty in that. And two of those duplicates had given up their lives so that he might be home on Corwin.
He brooded over that, and also about Myreck and about Earth. Earth, which by now was merely a Sirian protectorate. Earth which had sent her boldest sons forth to the stars, and had withered her own substance at home.
He saw pictures of the devastation on Lundquist and Borgman. Lundquist had been a pleasure-world, attracting visitors from a dozen worlds to its games parlors and lovely gardens. The pictures showed the lacy towers of Lundquist’s dreamlike cities crumbling under the merciless Klodni guns. Senselessly, brutally, the Klodni were moving forward.
Scouts checked their approach. The fleet was massed on Borgman, now. If they held to their regular pattern, it would be nearly a year before they rumbled out of the Borgman system to make their attack on nearby Corwin.
Ewing counted the passing days. The conical structure of the time-projector took shape slowly, as the technicians, working from the Myreck model, carried out their painstaking tasks. No one asked exactly how the weapon would be put in use. Ewing had specified that it be installed in a spaceship, and it had been designed accordingly.
At night he was haunted by the recurring image of the Ewing who had willingly thrown himself under the jets of a descending spaceliner. It could have been me, he thought. I volunteered. But he wanted to toss for it.
And there had been another Ewing, equally brave, whom he had never known. The man who had taken the steps that would render him superfluous, and then had calmly and simply removed himself from existence.
I didn’t do that. I figured the others would be caught in the wheel forever, and that I’d be the only one who would get loose. But it didn’t happen that way.
He was haunted too by the accusing stare in Myreck’s eyes as the twin Corwinites plundered the College of its secrets and abandoned Earth to its fate. Here, too, Ewing had his rationalizations; there was nothing he could have done, he told himself, to help.
Laira told him finally that he had changed, that he had become bitter, almost irascible, since making the journey to Earth.
“I don’t understand it, Baird. You used to be so warm, so—so human. And you’re different now. Cold, turned inward, brooding all the time.” She touched his arm lightly. “Can’t you talk things out with me? Something’s troubling you. Something that happened on Earth, maybe—?”
He whirled away. “No! Nothing.” He realized his tone was harsh; he saw the pain on her face. In a softer voice he said, “I can’t help myself, Laira. There’s nothing I can say. I’ve been under a strain, that’s all.”
The strain of seeing myself die, and of seeing a culture die. Or journeying through time and across space. I’ve been through a lot. Too much, maybe.
He felt very tired. He looked up at the night sky as it glittered over the viewingporch of their home. The stars were gems mounted on black velvet. There were the familiar constellations, the Turtle and the Dove, the Great Wheel, the Spear. He had missed those configurations of stars while on Earth.
But there was nothing friendly about the cold stars tonight. Ewing held his wife close and stared up at them, and it seemed to him as if they held a savage menace. As if the Klodni hordes hovered there like moisture particles in a rain-cloud, waiting for their moment to descend.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ALARM came early on a spring morning, a year after Ewing had returned to Corwin.
The phone rang. He stirred, turned over, buried his face in the pillow. He was dreaming of a figure limned briefly in the white flare of jet exhaust on Valloin Spacefield. The phone continued to ring.
Groggily Ewing felt a hand shaking him. A voice—Laira’s voice—was saying, “Wake up, Baird! There’s a call for you! Wake up!”
Reluctant, he came awake. The wall clock said 0430. He jabbed thumbs into his eyes, crawled out of the bed, groped his way across the room to the phone extension.
“Ewing here. What is it?”
The sharp, high-pitched tones of Prime Minister Davidson cut into his sleep-drugged mind. “Baird, the Klodni are on their way!”
He was awake fully now. “What?”
“We just got word from the scout network,” Davidson said. “The main Klodni attacking fleet left Borgman about four hours ago, and they’re heading for Corwin. The reports say there are at least five hundred ships in the first wave.”
“When are they expected to reach this area?”
“We have conflicting estimates on that. It isn’t easy to compute super-light velocities. But on the basis of what we know, they’ll be within range of Corwin in not less than ten nor more than eighteen hours.”
Ewing nodded. “All right. Have the special ship serviced for immediate blast-off. I’ll drive right out to the spaceport and pick it up there.”
While Laira fixed a meal he stood by a window, looking outward at the gray, swirling pre-dawn mists, and listening to the thumping patter of the rain. He had lived so long in the shadow of the Klodni advance that he found it hard to believe the day had actually come.
He ate moodily, scarcely tasting the food as he swallowed it, saying nothing.
Laira said, “I’m frightened, Baird.”
“Frightened?” He chuckled. “Of what?”
She did not seem amused. “Of the Klodni. Of this crazy thing you’re going to do.” After a moment she added, “But you don’t seem afraid, Baird.”
“I’m not,” he said truthfully. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. The Klodni won’t even be able to see me. There isn’t a mass-detector in the universe sensitive enough to spot a one-man ship a couple of light-years away. The mass is insignificant; and there’ll be too much background noise coming out of the fleet itself.”
When he had eaten, he stopped off briefly in Blade’s bedroom to take a last look at the sleeping boy. He did not wake him. He merely looked in, smiled, and closed the door.
“Maybe you should wake him up and say goodbye,” Laira suggested hesitantly.
Ewing shook his head. “It’s only five in the morning. He needs his sleep at his age. Anyway, when I get back I guess I’ll be a hero. He’ll like that.”
DAWN streaked the sky by the time he reached Broughton Spacefield. He left his car with an attendant and went to the main administration building, where a grim-faced group of Corwin officials waited for him.
This is it. Ewing thought. If I don’t make it, Corwin’s finished.
A world’s destiny rode on the wild scheme of one man. It was a burden he did not relish carrying.
He greeted Davidson and the others a little stiffly; the tension was beginning to grip him now. Davidson handed him a portfolio.
“This is the flight-chart of the Klodni armada,” the Prime Minister explained. “We had the big computer extrapolate it. They’ll be overhead in nine hours fifty minutes.”
Ewing shook his head. “You’re wrong. They won’t be overhead at all. I’m going to meet them at least a light-year from here, maybe farther out if I can manage it. They won’t get any closer.”
He scanned the charts. Graphs of the Klodni force had been inked in.
“The computer says there are seven hundred seventy-five ships in the fleet,” Davidson said.
Ewing pointed to the formation. “It’s a pure wedge, isn’t it? A single flapship, followed by two ships, followed by a file of four, followed by eight. And right on out to here. That’s very interesting.”
“It’s a standard Klodni fighting formation,” said gravel-voiced Dr. Harmess of the Department of Military Science. “The flagship always leads and none of the others dares to break formation without order. Complete totalitarian discipline.”
Ewing smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.”
He checked his watch. Approximately ten hours from now, Klodni guns would be thundering down on virtually defenseless Corwin. A fleet of seven hundred seventy-five dreadnaughts was an unstoppable armada. Corwin had perhaps a dozen ships, and not all of them in fighting trim despite vigorous last-minute work. No planet in the civilized galaxy could stand the burden of supporting a military force of nearly eight hundred first-line ships.
“All right,” he said after a moment’s silence. “I’m ready to leave.”
They led him across the damp, rain-soaked field to the well-guarded special hangar in the rear where Project X had been installed. Security guards smiled obligingly and stood to one side when they recognized Ewing and the Prime Minister. Field attendants swung open the doors of the hangar, revealing the ship.
It was a thin black spear, hardly bigger than the vessel that had taken him to Earth and back. Inside, though, there was no complex equipment for suspending animation. Where that apparatus had been now rested a tubular helical coil whose tip projected micromillimeters from the skin of the ship, and at whose base was a complex control panel.
Ewing nodded in approval. The field attendants wheeled the ship out; gantry cranes tilted it to blasting angle and carried it to the blast-field.
A black ship against the blackness of space. The Klodni would never notice it, Ewing thought. He sensed the joy of battle springing up in him.
“I’ll leave immediately,” he said.
The actual blastoff was to be handled automatically. Ewing clambered aboard, settled himself in the cradle area, and let the spinnerettes weave him an unshatterable cradle of spidery foamweb. He switched on the visionplate and saw the little group waiting tensely at the edge of the clear part of the field.
With an almost impulsive gesture Ewing tripped the blasting-lever, and lay back as the ship raced upward.
The ship arced upward in a wide hyperbolic orbit, while Ewing shuddered in his cradle and waited. Seconds later, the jets cut out. The rest of the journey would be carried out on warp-drive. That was less strenuous, at least.
The pre-plotted course carried him far from Corwin during the first two hours. A quick triangulation showed that he was almost one and a half light-years from the home world—a safe enough distance, he thought. He ceased forward thrust and put the ship in a closed million-mile orbit perpendicular to the expected line of attack of the Klodni. He waited.
Three hours slipped by before the first quiver of green appeared on his ship’s mass detector. The line wavered uncertainly. Ewing resolved the fine focus and waited.
The line broadened. And broadened. And broadened again.
The Klodni wedge was drawing near.
EWING felt utterly calm, now that the waiting was over. Moving smoothly and unhurriedly, he proceeded to activate the time-transfer equipment. He yanked down on the main lever, and the control panel came to life; the snout of the helical core advanced nearly an inch from the skin of the ship, enough to insure a clear trajectory.
Working with one eye on the mass detector and one on the transfer device’s control panel, Ewing computed the necessary strength of the field. The Klodni formation opened out geometrically: one ship leading, followed by two, with four in the third rank, eight in the fourth, sixteen in the fifth. Two massive ranks of about two hundred fifty ships each served as rearguard for the wedge, providing a furious double finishing thrust for any attack. It was the width of these last two files that mattered most.
No doubt they were traveling in a three-dimensional array, but Ewing took no chances, and assumed that all two hundred and fifty were moving in a single parallel bar. He computed the maximum width of such a formation. He added twenty percent at each side, for safety. If only a dozen Klodni ships slipped through, Corwin still would face a siege of havoc.
Programming his data, he fed it to the transfer machine and established the necessary coordinates. He punched out the activator signals. He studied the mass-detector; the Klodni fleet was less than an hour away now.
He nodded in satisfaction as the last of his computations checked and cancelled out. Here goes, he thought.
He tripped the actuator.
There was no apparent effect, no response except for a phase-shift on one of the meters aboard the ship. But Ewing knew there had been an effect. A gulf had opened in the heavens, an invisible gulf that radiated outward from his ship and sprawled across space.
A gulf he could control as a fisherman might a net—a net wide enough to hold seven hundred seventy-five alien vessels of war.
Ewing waited.
His tiny ship swung in its rigid orbit, round and round, carrying the deadly nothingness round with it. The Klodni fleet drew near. Ewing scratched out further computations. At no time, he thought, would he be closer to a Klodni ship than forty light-minutes. They would never pick him up at such a distance.
A minnow huddled in the dark, waiting to trap the whales.
The green line on the massdetector broadened and became intense. Ewing shifted out of his locked orbit, placing the vessel on manual response. He readied his trap as the Klodni flagship moved serenely on through the void.
Now! he thought.
He cast his net.
The Klodni flagship moved on—and vanished! From Ewing’s vantage-point it seemed as if the great vessel had simply been blotted out; the green wedge on the scope of his mass-detector was blunt-snouted now that the flagship was gone.
But to the ships behind it, nothing seemed amiss. Without breaking formation they followed on, and Ewing waited. The second rank vanished through the gulf, and the third, and the fourth.
Eighteen ships gone. Thirty-two. Sixty-four.
