He was suddenly struck by an idea so brilliant that he was quite sure it couldn’t possibly work. The radio on his suit was a tunable one, covering an unusually wide band, and somewhere not far away the Doradus was pumping out power on everything from a thousand megacycles upward. He switched on the receiver and began to explore.
It came in quickly-the raucous whine of a pulse transmitter
not far away. He was probably only picking up a sub-harmonic, but that was quite good enough. It D/F’ed sharply, and for the first time K.15 allowed himself to make long-range plans about the future. The Doradus had betrayed herself: as long as she operated her missiles, he would know exactly where she was.
He moved cautiously forward toward the transmitter. To his surprise the signal faded, then increased sharply again. This puzzled him until he realized that he must be moving through a diffraction zone. its width might have told him something useful if he had been a good enough physicist, but he couldn’t imagine what.
The Doradus was hanging about five kilometers above the surface, in full sunlight. Her “non-reflecting” paint was overdue for renewal, and K.15 could see her clearly. As he was still in darkness, and the shadow line was moving away from him, he decided that he was as safe here as anywhere. He settled down comfortably so that he could just see the cruiser and waited, feeling fairly certain that none of the guided projectiles would come so near the ship. By now, he calculated, the commander of the Doradus must be getting pretty mad. He was perfectly correct.
After an hour, the cruiser began to heave herself round with all the grace of a bogged hippopotamus. K. 15 guessed what was happening. Commander Smith was going to have a look at the antipodes, and was preparing for the perilous fifty-kilometer journey. He watched very carefully to see the orientation the ship was adopting, and when she came to rest again was relieved to see that she was almost broadside on to him. Then, with a series of jerks that could not have been very enjoyable aboard, the cruiser began to move down to the horizon. K. 15 followed her at a comfortable walking pace-if one could use the phrase-reflecting that this was a feat very few people had ever performed. He was particularly careful not to overtake her on one of his kilometer-long glides, and kept a close watch for any missiles that might be coming up astern.
It took the Doradus nearly an hour to cover the fifty kilometers. This, as K. 15 amused himself by calculating, represented considerably less than a thousandth of her normal speed. Once she found herself going off into space at a tangent, and rather than waste time turning end over end again fired off a salvo of shells to reduce speed. But she made it at last, and K.15 settled down for another
vigil, wedged between two rocks where he could just see the cruiser and he was quite sure she couldn’t see him. It occurred to him that by this time Commander Smith might have grave doubts as to whether he really was on Phobos at all, and he felt like firing off a signal flare to reassure him. However, he resisted the temptation.
There would be little point in describing the events of the next ten hours, since they differed in no important detail from those that had gone before. The Doradus made three other moves, and K.15 stalked her with the care of a big-game hunter following the spoor of some elephantine beast. Once, when she would have led him out into full sunlight, he let her fall below the horizon until he could only just pick up her signals. But most of the time he kept her just visible, usually low down behind some convenient hill.
Once a torpedo exploded some kilometers away, and K. 15 guessed that some exasperated operator had seen a shadow he didn’t like-or else that a technician had forgotten to switch off a proximity fuse. Otherwise nothing happened to enliven the proceedings: in fact, the whole affair was becoming rather boring. He almost welcomed the sight of an occasional guided missile drifting inquisitively overhead, for he did not believe that they could see him if he remained motionless and in reasonable cover. If he could have stayed on the part of Phobos exactly opposite the cruiser he would have been safe even from these, he realized, since the ship would have no control there in the moon’s radio-shadow. But he could think of no reliable way in which he could be sure of staying in the safety zone if the cruiser moved again.
The end came very abruptly. There was a sudden blast of steering jets, and the cruiser’s main drive burst forth in all its power and splendor. In seconds the Doradus was shrinking sunward, free at last, thankful to leave, even in defeat, this miserable lump of rock that had so annoyingly balked her of her legitimate prey. K. 15 knew what had happened, and a great sense of peace and relaxation swept over him. In the radar room of the cruiser, someone had seen an echo of disconcerting amplitude approaching with altogether excessive speed. K.15 now had only to switch on his suit beacon and to wait. He could even afford the luxury of a cigarette.
“Quite an interesting story,” I said, “and I see now how it ties up with that squirrel. But it does raise one or two queries in my mind.”
“Indeed?” said Rupert Kingman politely.
I always like to get to the bottom of things, and I knew that my host had played a part in the Jovian War about which he very seldom spoke. I decided to risk a long shot in the dark.
“May I ask how you happen to know so much about this unorthodox military engagement? It isn’t possible, is it, that you were K. 15?”
There was an odd sort of strangling noise from Carson. Then Kingman said, quite calmly: “No, I wasn’t.”
He got to his feet and went off toward the gun room.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’m going to have another shot at that tree-rat. Maybe I’ll get him this time.” Then he was gone.
Carson looked at me as if to say: “This is another house you’ll never be invited to again.” When our host was out of earshot he remarked in a coldly cynical voice:
“You’ve done it. What did you have to say that for?”
“Well, it seemed a safe guess. How else could he have known all that?”
“As a matter of fact, I believe he met K. 15 after the War: they must have had an interesting conversation together. But I thought you knew that Rupert was retired from the service with only the rank of lieutenant commander. The Court of Inquiry could never see his point of view. After all, it just wasn’t reasonable that the commander of the fastest ship in the Fleet couldn’t catch a man …