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course, that was the other reason why I was out here and they were back there.
“Now, we recommend that you do not get too close to the Peace Victory before we handle the matter. Af-ter all, if what you say is true the computer can regain control of you. You will be our check that the computer is dead. The PV was made by Macklock back on Earth and we don’t have all the plans and information on it we’d like. It was a long time ago.”
I smiled. I didn’t get out here to go back the fool, I thought. I would be there, and we’d all be in the freezer.
I’d neglected to tell them a few other things, too.
“You are getting the Cruiser Courrant under Gerald Alois Seiglein himself, along with two destroyers. After the PV is destroyed, approach and stand off the Courrant and we will attend to you.”
That was it, the end of the message.
And I didn’t like the end line at all.
Like hell I was going to come under those guns! Particularly not for second grandson Gerald Alois Seiglein.
103
Twelve
We laid off about two-thirds of the way to Patmos. Actually, I was in something of a bind, since I had no clear time sense and didn’t dare stick near the beacon nor go back to the vicinity of Moses. Fortunately, the timing mechanism for the L-jump was adaptable as a stopwatch of sorts, and my own calculations said that if Seiglein were coming he would be coming from Altara, his family’s private little fiefdom, and that would take one hundred ninety-seven days.
There was no hurry. We used the time well in teaching Ham and Eve, and we were very careful in the way in which it was done. This was, after all, the first time two Choz Seconds or later could be taught off-planet, in isolation, and it was a golden opportunity to tell them the right things.
One thing, for sure, was to avoid the initial mistakes of the Communards. Shocked by their new sta-tus, they had taught the Seconds as humans and had, in the process, painted something of an idealized view of the older race, the race with hands, with choice in sex, with optical visionwhatever that was. Not having experienced it, the young naturally had fantasized it into something marvelous.
Of course, these attitudes had been passed down as much as the rapid breeding would allow, losing any correspondence to reality in the translation, becoming ever more inflated.
Those who’d seen me land, the Seconds, Thirds, and so on, had felt sorry for me, pitied me for being trans-
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formed into one of them, a god suddenly stripped of power and position and cast among the damned.
That explained why I got a lot of respect and little resistance.
These children wouldn’t be like that.
We were determined that they would accept themselves for what they were, a different species; that they would regard man as an alien race, different, certainly, for that is what alien means, but not better nor worse than they. We were careful to tell them of the colony of Patmos as a history of a new race, not the remains of a discarded old one. They were not human, they would never be human. The humans were those folks Over There someplace, the funny ones who depended entirely on machines and didn’t have some of the wondrous things that the Choz had.
The process worked well, really, although it was unsettling to see them so receptive from the start and grow so quickly toward adulthood. Unlike human ba-bies, they were almost reasoning recorders (the better to memorize scripture, eh Moses?) who absorbed all that we threw at them. And, in our tiny, closed environment, they took all we said at face value, having nothing to compare it with.
The only thing we couldn’t really convey was the deep appreciation of and feeling for nature; they had never been off my ship. That would come later, the joy of discovery of the freedom of the Choz on the plain.
George and I often wondered what would have been the colony’s fate, shape, and health now if they had started with the Seconds like this and had this sort of close, intimate, moment-to-moment relationship with every Choz child during the formative first two years.
And, finally, as all good things must, the buzzer warned me that it was time. The old, nervous gut feelings were back. The fear was there, that nameless, shapeless thing that was in every thinking creature at one point or another: fear of the unknown.
The whole future of a race would be decided soon,
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we knew, and there was no clear way to predict how these things would go. How would Moses react? How would Seiglein?
In the interim we’d also been able to selectively grow and partially bale some grass as cushions; the L-jump wouldn’t be as much of a threat this time out.
“Are we going to Patmos now?” Eve asked me, excited and anxious.
I nodded. “Yes, I hope so. Eve,” I responded as cheerfully as I could manage.
They remembered the previous L-jump and needed no coaxing to get into cushioning positions. I triggered it, and we managed to get through it with only minor, quickly healable bruises. Hooves, it must be noted, hurt as much when jabbed into you as metal abutments.
I also had to warn them about lowering the temperature. About 1°C felt safe enough, but it would also slow down our food supply. I hoped we wouldn’t have to worry about that for long. I cooled us down just before emergence and made sure that we had a full-grown crop in our lounge garden.
The cold and excitement made us ignore any problems with the bump out of the jump this time.
I set the ship’s scanners on full around. We were still some distance from Patmos, too far to spot it, but I would have picked up the human force’s signals if they had arrived. They hadn’t, and I had to consider how long we could exist in this cold, unprotected condition waiting for them,
I took a nav fix and found that we were probably within Moses’ receptor range. I quickly headed us out of there after putting some more distance between us, set the sensors on standby so that I wouldn’t be caught off guard by the computer again.
“How long do you think it’ll be?” George asked apprehensively.
I shook my head. “I have no idea. If Baby Seiglein is true to form, he waited until he loaded his pet press
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and Creativision crews. If the boy comes out of the retreat, it’s to full bands and fanfares.”
Ham looked over at me. “You don’t like them very much, do you, Bar?”
“The Seiglems?” I responded with a snigger. “Hardly!”
“No, no,” he replied innocently. “The humans.”
I’d picked it pretty good at that. Three days later, sensors picked up three objects emerging from the L-jump in mild disarray. This was all to the good.we were miserably cold, had gotten little sleep, and our cautious nibbling at the now dormant grasses and tubers only made us hungrier.
The three shipstwo standard navy vessels and a monster that could only have been the Courrant quickly arranged themselves into standard formation and headed toward Patmos.
Nervously I tried to guess the Courrant’s range. The little babies I’d cut my teeth on, but the monsters were few and far between and I’d never even been on one.
“I wish we could see what was going on,” Eve com-plained, and I agreed with her. There was little I could do on that scoredespite the fact that it sounds like it to laymen, the link with my ship wasn’t by some sort of telepathy; rather, it was a symbiosis in many ways as complete as that between the virus and the Choz. Through its sensors I could follow the ships as dots on a screen; the images were fed directly to my brain. But that would be it.
“Well,” I murmured. “Maybe you can’t see, but you can hear it.” I opened up the communications channels on the Seiglein frequency.
“… to Channel 161, B mode …” came a tinny, unpleasant voice. “Repeating this recording: To Bar Holliday. You are to switch to the battle frequency. Turn to Channel 161, B mode …” came the full message, which started to repeat a third time.
I switched, one of those operations requiring a man-
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ual resetting of four dials, and, with hooves, terribly tough on the middle dials. I managed; when you know the frequency and channel you’re starting from it’s easier to count the digits than to move the wheels.
I chose a million kilometers to trail them. This was outside the range of just about anything I’d ever heard of short of a robomissileand I’d have a small time lag in communications. Well, that lag would be enough for an emergency L-jump if I spotted anything hurled at us. I set it up, random pattern, to activate just in case.
Scouts were the expendable property of Seiglein. I didn’t think he’d do anything rash, but you never knew.
“Holliday here on 161,” I called. “Tracking you, task force.”
“Affirmative, Scout Holliday,” came the reply Olag, I noted with amusement. Something had finally pried her out of that velvet cocoon.
The star the Patmosians called Christmas was now visible, and, with adjustments for my scope range, I could pick out the planets, particularly the all-important number four, Patmos itself.
“I intercepted him between planets two and three,” I warned them. “Stationary orbit. However, he has full motive power and he chased me nicely. Watch itI don’t think anybody’s built a computer like that one since.”
“For which we can all be thankful,” Olag responded, a touch of nervousness in her voice. I smiled inwardly at this; about time some of the desk jockeys found out what being human was really all about.
How I would have loved, this once, to have scanned her face and aura!
We approached cautiously; the wide scan field of the Courrant almost reached me, as far back as I was. I saw it as little ripples on the screen.
Either Seiglein had a good captain or he wasn’t a bad admiral.
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“Nothing so far,” reported Olag, tension building in her every word.
I laid off and they made a complete circuit of the orbit. When they reappeared on the other side of Christmas still alone, I knew Moses wasn’t there.
“Doesn’t make sense,” George said to me. “I can’t imagine that he’d desert them like that. He has too much of a sense of responsibility for the colony.”
I nodded. “Agreed. He’s here somewhere, and he knows we’re all here. I think he’s just feeling us out. Whoops! Wait a minute!”
“Large UHVO closing fast, three o’clock,” came a crisp male voiceone of the destroyers, almost certainly.
I checked. It wasn’t Mosestoo small for that but it was a large chunk of rock, a small planetoid, and it was fast, like it had been shot from a great can-non. It closed rapidly on the fleet, which didn’t budge. Their energy shielding was already deployed.
“Locked on,” came another, different male voice. “Go!”
A strong beam, like lightning, lashed out from the bow of the Courrant, striking the object squarely. It reacted as if it had hit a wall, then split into several small chunks thrown by recoil in all directions but forward.
The charge hadn’t been strong enough to completely destroy the rock, but it had done the job. I calculated the trajectory of the pieces, found none would come close enough to worry about, and promptly ignored them.
“They just shot the rock away,” I told my three anxious listeners in the downstairs lounge. “That thing was almost two kilometers around and he just pushed it away. There’s a lot of power on that big baby.”
“I wonder how much?” George mused, mostly to himself. Then he called up to me, “Hey! Bar! Where do you suppose the thing came from?”
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“Jillions of them in space,” I responded. “Could be just chance.”
But I doubted it.
Instantly I was replaying the previous scene, revers-ing trajectory on the object. From Planet Sixno, near Six, really. Too close not to have been affected by the giant gas ball’s gravity if it had been that close on its own.
I knew that the task force had already done the same thing, and saw them move out.
“It’s Moses, testing weaponry,” I reported to the Choz. “He slingshot the thing around the planet.”
“What’s a slingshot?” I heard Eve ask, and George explained the term in context without ever telling her what a slingshot really was.
“He’s four kilometers long,” I murmured under my breath. “Dammitall, he can’t hide forever.”
But he wasn’t there when they got there, and there was no telltale energy trace to show where he’d been.
Where the hell was Moses hiding?
Seiglein must have been thinking along similar lines. I heard Olag say, “Okay, we’re sure it was a slingshot at us, a test. Deploy and root him out. He’s got to be so close in to the planet that he’s beyond our sensor pickup.”
They broke, the huge Courrant standing off station while the two destroyers did a sweep. I watched as one rounded the big planet, waiting for him to emerge around the other side.
“Nothing yet,” came the first male voice. “Still I”
Suddenly the transmission was cut off.
“Deputy, Deputy, do you read? Come in, please! Report!” Olag pleaded.
There was silence.
“MacAlester, rendezvous with Courrant,” came the sudden, terse order from the mother ship. The remaining destroyer broke off and joined up with the big ship, about a kilometer off the big one’s screens.
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“Does that mean they lost one?” George asked incredulously.
“I think so,” I replied almost absently, mind glued to the scan.
“But how is that possible?” George persisted. “Moses isn’t armed!”
I sighed. “He’s got a mouth,” I reminded the old Choz. “He tried to swallow us. I think he gobbled up the destroyer. If he did, they couldn’t use any weapons without blowing themselves to bits as well.”
“But couldn’t they talk?” Eve cut in. “I mean, why can’t we hear them?”
“I don’t know, honey,” I responded honestly. “But, like I said, there’s never been a computer like this be-fore or since.”
“Bar! We’ve lost Deputy!” Olag called to me.
“I heard,” I told her. “I warned you about this son of a bitch.” Quickly, I told her and the MacAlester what I thought happened.
“Well, then, they’ll get a signal to us somehow and we’ll have him,” she said confidently.
“Uh uh, O-O,” I responded drily. “Think about it. What would you do if you spotted the bastard now?”
“Zap him,” came the coldly determined answer from the MacAlester captain on our party line.
“Right,” I responded. “So if it was you in that thing, would you broadcast? You suicidal?”