Operation Interstellar, George O. Smith [best mobile ebook reader .txt] 📗

guess the answer, he—but Nora Phillips had turned up just as Haedaecker was getting nasty. Had she turned up to stall Haedaecker? Hoagland wanted the Z-wave business stalled for some reason. Nora's actions appeared to be that of someone bent upon aiding Grayson. Even—in the long run—her falsification of the Z-wave reception on Proxima I was one step in getting mankind interested in the problem of communicating with Neoterra.

"So you erased him? When he failed, I mean?"

Hoagland looked unhappy. "Unfortunate but necessary. However, Joel Walsh was a type of character that Mankind can well do without."

Grayson grunted angrily. "Why not bump him first?"

"Until he proved completely useless, he had a place," said Hoagland coldly. "There's just enough bad in the best of us, to quote an old cliche."

"I suppose when a player has enough pawns he can afford to sacrifice."

"Only useless pawns."

Paul looked sourly cynical. "And I am the White Knight?"

Hoagland smiled affably. "And you balance very badly while sliding down that poker. Again your humility signifies the beginning of great wisdom. I'd hardly call you a Bishop."

Paul snorted through his nose. "If we want to make some more puns," he said flatly, "I'll admit that I've been Rooked. But who is the Queen in this mad game, Nora Phillips?"

"Hardly."

"You mean you'll not tell me the objective. Okay, Hoagland, we'll play one more gambit. I suppose the capture of the White Knight is worth the sacrifice of two pawns."

Hoagland smiled self-confidently. "I call it the capture of a Rook as well as the White Knight for—did you say two pawns?"

Grayson eyed Hoagland distastefully. "Who was the guy on Proxima?"

"Proxima?"

Paul sat back in his chair with the first feeling of returning self-confidence that he had enjoyed since the moment of his downfall in the lecture hall. "Hoagland," he said, "you've made me very happy."

"How?" snapped the other.

"I've always had the conviction that God was a swell Fellow, Who like the rest of us, was still seeking the completely Holy Truth. But happy, understand, in knowing that He did not really know everything because when He did there was no more future, for Him, for us, for anybody. Equally less-than-perfect is the Devil, who does not know everything either. Hoagland, you're just a minor devil."

"What do you mean?"

"There was a guy on Proxima about to impersonate me—or maybe impersonate the impersonation you provided. I can see one faction bumping off parties of the second part. But Hoagland, old devil, if you don't know about the mess on Proxima, you don't know that instead of one conflicting faction against you, you've got two!

"Because the guy you did not know about was polished off by another gang that you do not know about! How do you like them apples?"

Hoagland blew out a breath that sounded like the sigh of Autumn.

CHAPTER 11

Considering that the time elapsed between Paul's first contact with Nora Phillips and his meeting with Hoagland was less than one month, during which Paul lived in an incomprehensible maelstrom, the following ten months were sheer boredom. For Paul was removed from 7111 Bridge Street and taken aboard a spacecraft bound for Neoterra, one hundred and forty light years by distance and three hundred and eighteen days by the fastest spaceliner going. Ten months plus, spent in a shell of metal, completely self-contained. There were no viewports for a ship exceeding the speed of light was enclosed in its own warp of space and one could not see out. There was a broad port-dome for the landing and take-off pilot, but looking out through that dome of glass into the awesome nothingness of supervelocity made men a little bit crazy. Some went stark mad.

Time was measured by ship's clocks and ship's calendars, timed in divide-down networks from the master micro-timer that measured the flight-time in microseconds from the moment of superdrive until the end of the flight.

Paul had a lot of time to think, but nothing to do. Eventually Paul knew that thinking supplied nothing but additional complications introduced by his own mind. By the time the trip was half over, the network of fact and fiction revolving around Nora Phillips was so involved that any single additional fact would have destroyed the whole picture. Nora was either angel or she-devil.

It was the latter reasoning that stopped Paul from brooding over the problem. Paul wanted neither saint nor she-devil. One was untouchable and the other undesirable. Paul wanted an uninhibited loveliness, with the indefinably correct admixture of bawdiness and propriety, of Madonna and Magdalene, of soul and sex—sana mens in sana corpore, as Julius Caesar would have put it.

The fact that the Galactic Network was progressing week by week only gratified Paul, even though he knew that someone else was racing madly back and forth across the star-trails checking the signals in one after the other. All Grayson needed was the initial radio contact, the Z-wave contact could progress from there.

To while away the time Paul called upon his memory to fill in the spaces between the stellar radio stations between Sol and Neosol. He did this with the aid of the pilot's star maps which were made available to him. It was a flat map instead of the three-dimensional space-model necessary for true distances, but it served as well as a Mercator Projection of the earth, which is a spherical body and far from flat.

In the space model, the first link was to Proxima, a sort of test link started some time before the rest. There were four other links that led from Sol to nearby stars, spread out in space-angles from one another. From these, each had three or four lines out and still away from Sol, some crossing the near gap and some crossing back between the other first-step stations until a complete pyramidal cross-connection of solid triangulation was obtained.

Then across the longer reaches of space, long-term links were running between longer-distance stations. These would complete other space-triangulations across the galaxy, year by year until the final radio beam from Sol to Neosol landed, one hundred and forty years from the start.

Each completed link between star and star would improve the surveying of the galaxy and bring Neosol's dimensional error down and down through the banks of figures best stated by exponents of ten. Astronomers work in light years, man works in miles. An error of a 'light month' in one-forty light years is not much error, but an error of 2,000 million miles is still a long way for man to correct-for.

So Paul made a planar chart of the galaxy between Sol and Neosol, and from memory and calculations he filled in, week by week, the completed links.

The first linkage had been computed and started so that a small group of men (of which Paul was one) could race from star to star checking-in the arrival of the radio beam. It took ten days to go from Sol to Proxima, the rest of the network had been started so that—at the best of astronomical calculations—the whole pattern would end up, one after the other, spread apart long enough to enable the group of beam-checkers to go from station to station.

The map would not be fixed. Stars move with respect to one another, and this factor would be part of the measurements. On a star map or planetarium, this motion was impossible to show from one year to the next, these were 'fixed stars.' But for data fed into the Elecalc to determine the time of drive, the angle, and the velocity, the finest measurement of distance was none too good.

But even some grasp of the true immensity of space, with its tiny pinpricks of solid matter scattered sparsely in a vastness of sheer, black nothing, was lost on the travellers between Sol and Neosol. For as far as they were concerned the journey was not much longer than the famous voyage of Columbus. Miles meant nothing; there were too many of them. Time was the essence, and ten long months passed between take-off and the ultimate recovery of their own time and space, where the cheerful stars winked out of a coal-black sky.

The dispersion was not too bad. Neosol was a light-week away, at about a forty-five degree angle from their course and position. The small-copy of the Elecalc went to work in the course computing room and once more the ship took to the silent, black vastness of supervelocity until the second drop into reality. They were a half-million miles from Neoterra on the second hop, and there was no room to use supervelocity now, so the next few hours were spent in matching the galactic drift of Neosol, and finally Neoterra. But after ten months of living in an electric-lighted capsule of metal, a half day of jockeying before landing was pleasant.

But as the ship started to drop down toward the planet, Paul realized with a shock that it was not Neoterra. As space-trained as Paul was, even he could not tell one star or one sun from another until something more featureless is offered for comparison. The planet was definitely not Neoterra, and this Paul knew only because it obviously bore no atmosphere. All he could be sure of was that this star was close to Neoterra as stellar distances went, but which star he had no way of knowing. He knew that the star was not Neosol because none of the planets of Neosol were without atmosphere.

Such an absolutely minimum of negative evidence could only tell Paul where he was not; he was not on a planet of Sol nor Neosol.

As the ship came close to the surface of this planet, Paul noted the radio-relay station below them, and here his recollection bore fruit. This planet was of a star about five light years from Neosol.

He thought carefully. The star from Sol bore no more than a catalog number, being of insufficient size to warrant notice by the ancients who gave the stars their names. Someone had dubbed the planet Harrigan's Horror in dubious honor of Lew Harrigan, who had been the engineer who put up the relay station and had lived in pressure-buildings for several months.

Harrigan himself would be coming to Harrigan's Horror in about two months to check in the arrival of the beam from Neoterra, just as Paul had gone to Proxima ten months before. Just what Hoagland's crew of cutthroats intended to do on Harrigan's Horror, Paul could not determine from the myriad of unpleasant possibilities he could conjure up.

But he knew—and he was not wrong—that they would tell him very soon.

Below them, a half mile or so from the relay station, a small spacecraft stood with its nose in the air. The big spacecraft landed near the small one, and Paul was handed a space suit.

"Get in," said Evans. Evans had been one of the pseudo-policemen back on Terra.

"What's next?" asked Paul.

"Get in—you'll find out."

"Why not let me in on it."

"You'll learn. Get in it or we'll be glad to take you out across this airless planet without a suit."

"That wouldn't do you much good."

"No?"

The man's attitude convinced Paul that this was the termination of any idea of keeping him alive. Up to now they had been saving him. Obviously for this. Paul's faith in the idea that kidnapers do not kill people after keeping them alive for almost a year began to wane. For some reason it had been necessary to keep Paul alive this long, but now—

But Paul had no intention of dying by going out across Harrigan's Horror in his city clothing.

Paul looked across the face of Harrigan's Horror, and blinked. The huge emblazoned registry number was half-hidden around the side of the space ship, but Paul knew every rivet in her. That ship was Paul Grayson's BurAst P.G.1.!

A glimmer of hope came. He got into the space suit and was led across to the smaller ship by Evans. A pilot in the BurAst ship let them in through the airlock and swung his helmet back over his head and greeted Evans glumly.

"Thought you'd never get here," he said.

"When did you take off?"

"Hour after you did."

"Been here long?"

"Hundred and seven hours Sol."

Paul looked around. Everything was in place, everything in order. "What goes on?" he asked.

Evans turned to him. "I don't mind telling you. Hoagland has no intention of letting you or anybody else start this Z-wave business between here and home."

"Then why this stuff? Why this set-up?"

"You've stirred up enough interest to make some men curious. Now you'll stop it."

Paul scowled at Evans. "Look," he said testily, "this Z-wave communications is not going to die with me. Killing one man isn't going to stop curiosity one bit."

Evans laughed. "You've stolen a spacecraft belonging to the Bureau of Astrogation, the one filled with Z-wave gear. A fugitive from justice, you've come to this station, which will be the next radio beacon checked in which is also close