“No time to do anything. It’s so sudden.” The team leader sounded desperate. “It’s terrifying how fast these things can blow. A star bums steadily for billions of years and then, in the space of minutes-” He broke off, sighing. “Perhaps they didn’t die in vain. The automatic stations carried on transmitting data right up to the instant they were vaporized. Perhaps we’ll lear something.”
Hakandra nodded. Knowledge of what made the stars in the Cave go nova at such a rate could be important in the impending struggle. As he had said to Shane, this was where the next stage of the war would be fought.
“Any news from the front?” he asked.
“We’ve been routing whole streams of messages between there and High Command. There’s a big quarrel building up. The military people in the field are doing a good job of covering the evacuation, but Sol seems more concerned with getting out as many intact battleships as possible, and to hell with civilians.”
“It’s a difficult decision,” Hakandra said, aware that reserves were dangerously low.
After a few further desultory comments he left Dl and talked to some of the other teams working in the Cave. So far their surveys had uncovered several hundred usable planets and soon the Legitimacy was going to have to decide which to invest and which to destroy.
Finally he killed the holo screen and sat brooding. The destruction of Team K5 had shaken him, despite himself.
What a hell of a place to have to make a stand, he thought. In the Cave, which to anyone brought up in Legitimacy philosophy was a region of horror, a bastion of the enemies chance and randomness.
The Cave of Caspar was so called not because it was empty, but because its thin scattering of stars made it comparatively empty. It had the form of a curved oblong, bounded on its long sides by neighbor—
26
ing spiral arms, and on the shorter ends by straggling limbs of stars that connected the spiral arms. It was now very nearly all that remained between the main bulk of human civilization and the advancing Hadranics; nearly all territory on the further side of the Cave had fallen, including the much-prized Hopula Cluster, and the thin margin of stars remaining were being hastily evacuated behind an improvised defensive screen.
To attack the central regions of man-inhabited space the Hadranics would have to cross this immensity, with its lack of cover and its dearth of worlds. A defensive strategy was slowly being worked out and soon fresh forces would move in to take up their positions. But there was a peculiar difficulty involved in any kind of activity in the Cave. All the stars there were unstable, liable to go nova at any time, without warning.
The reason for it was not understood-probably it had something to do with the unusual nucleonic resonance levels to be found in stellar material within the Cave. The problem was precisely identical to that of radioactive decay: one could calculate how many atoms would explode out of a given number in a given time, but it was impossible to say which particular atoms they would be. Yet it had been estimated that all stars in the Cave would have exploded in another hundred thousand years or less.
Grand Wheel operatives might feel more at home here, Hakandra thought sourly.
But the Legitimacy had found an answer-and that answer lay in people like Shane, a cold-senser. The term was a piece of jargon thought up by psychologists, mainly, Hakandra suspected, to cover up their own ignorance, but it meant that he was capable of perceptions that did not always have to be processed through the physical senses. More specifically, he had the ability to predict chance occurrences: how a pair of dice would fall, what number was due out of a sequence, even on a single throw.
27
He was an extreme example of what had once been known as a callidetic. For some years the Legitimacy had been nurturing people like him as part of its eternal struggle against the Grand Wheel. All cold-sensers were now, however, employed in the Cave:
in some manner they were able to predict when a star was about to blow, even though normal scientific observation would detect no difference in its activity. They could give just enough warning for a getaway. Cold-sensers were not completely reliable and the protection they gave was not absolutely dependable;
moreover they were hopelessly neurotic-over-stimulation of the thyroid gland was part of the treatment that heightened their talents-but it gave Hakandra a warm feeling to have one on his team.
After a while he left the corn room and worked on some reports. Then he went up into the observation room where he ate a sparse meal, afterwards sitting and watching the desert landscape through the glassite dome. The sun went down, its run flickering and bubbling on the horizon in a way that made Hakandra nervous every night, even though it was only a trick of the atmosphere. Then the dark purple sky took over, filled with the misty swathe of the Milky Way and the great patches of darkness.
A sound came from behind him. Shane entered the room, picking his way through the semi-darkness to lean against the glassite and peer into the sky.
“There was a nova over on the other side,” Hakandra told him after a long silence.
Shane nodded calmly. “I’m not surprised. I had a … premonition. I thought there might be one going off somewhere…”
Hakandra glanced at the youth. All his former neurosis seemed to have vanished. Hakandra had seen this transformation before: when Shane lost the almost psychopathic aspects of his personality and became collected, almost angelically graceful. But now he seemed, at the same time, depressed and fatalistic.
28
“The Cave is a terrible place,” the boy murmured. “It’s cursed.”
Hakandra snorted. “Don’t be superstitious.”
“I tell you it’s cursed. Lady has cursed it. How would you know? You have no sense for such things, but I can tell … It’s an accursed hole that the goddess has deserted. The very stars explode. Everything decays.”
Hakandra was disturbed to hear Shane talk in this religious way, smacking as it did of the mystique adopted by the Grand Wheel. “There is no goddess,” he said curtly. “Put that nonsense out of your head.”
As the sky darkened there was a faint glow in the south. It came from some ruins Hakandra had visited. They were made of a light-retentive stone and glowed at night like phosphorescent bones. The race that had built them had died ages ago, when the planet dried up.
It was the same story all over the Cave, which was littered with the ruins of dead civilizations, as though the force that generated life was insufficient to enable that life to survive the hazards of existence. There was not one example, as far as was known, of a living intelligence still surviving in the Cave.
It almost persuaded Hakandra to believe in Shane’s pessimistic mysticism. But he shook off the mood. It was unfitting, in an officer of the Legitimacy.
Chapter Four
Overhead, the sun beat down brilliantly on the extended wings of .the shuttle. Below, visible through the vehicle’s windows once they were within the atmosphere, were spread out chessboard squares of cloud,
29
land and sea: the pattern of Earth’s controlled weather areas.
As they descended the chessboard effect was reinforced by the fact that pieces stood on some of the squares. The pieces were vertical tower cities, complete with coronas and lumpy proturberances, creating the impression of chess kings and queens, knights and castles.
The shuttle planed down to the big dispersal center. Here there was no automatic immigration count, as there would have been on, say, Mars, a Legitimacy-dominated world. They walked straight off the shuttle and onto the force network platforms. Soon Scarne’s escorts had procured a vehicle and they were hurtling through the air towards their destination, propelled by the invisible inertial guidelines.
The landscape was mostly forest and empty plain, dotted here and there with vacation lodges. The population was all in the teeming, colorful cities.
It said much for the dichotomic nature of human civilization that Earth, the capital planet, was a Wheel world-one where the Grand Wheel’s influence was strong, unchecked by the Legitimacy’s repressive efforts. On Earth the game was the thing; it was the site of the original corruption, the birthplace of the Wheel. Here people spent their lives testing fortune, moving from one ingenious game of chance to another.
A vast pile loomed up and became a blur as the inertial vehicle slammed towards it at ten thousand-miles per hour, slowing to a mere sixty in the few seconds before entering the tower city. Briefly they sped through lighted tunnels, changing direction every now and then.
When the inertial beam brought the vehicle to a stop they were in what seemed to be a largish office, or study. An untidy desk was littered with papers, tapes and box files. One or two paintings, mediocre to moderately good, hung on the walls. Chairs, a couch, a service cabinet.