“Disappeared,” said Mary Gallegher. She did not seem disturbed by Jim’s description of the explosion. “That’s the right word. How long ago did you say this was?”
“Over a hundred years ago,” said Jim. He turned and looked at General Mollen, with a glance that said plainlyWhat is this, sir?
“Look here, Jim,” said the general. “We’ve got something to show you.”
He pushed aside the few papers on the surface of the table in front of him and touched some studs on the control console near the edge of the top. The overhead lights dimmed. The surface of the table became transparent and gave way to a scene of stars. To the three seated around the desk top it was as if they looked down and out into an area of space a thousand lightyears across. To the civilian, Jim was thinking, the stars would be only a maze. To Jim himself, the image was long familiar.
Mollen’s hands did things with the studs. Two hazy spheres of dim light, each about a hundred and fifty lightyears in diameter along its longest axis, sprang into viewbright enough to establish their position and volume, not so bright as to hide the stars they enclosed. The center of one of
6 / Gordon R. Dickson
the spheres was the surf of Earth, and the farthest extent of this sphere in one direction intermixed with an edge of the other.
“Our area of space.” said Mollen’s voice, out of the dimness around the table. “-And the Laagi’s, Mary. They block our expansion in that direction, and we block theirs in this. The distribution of the stars in this view being what it is, it’s not practical for either race to go around the other. You see the Frontier area, Mary?”
“Where the two corne together, yes,” said Mary.
“Now Jim-” said Mollen. “Jim commands a Wing of our Frontier Guard ships, and he knows that area well. But nothing but unmanned drones of ours have ever gotten deep into Laagi territory beyond the Frontier and come back out again. Agreed, Jim?”
Agreed, sir,” said Jim. “More than twenty, thirty lightyears deep is suicide.”
“Well, perhaps,” said Mollen. “But let me go on. The Sixty Ships Battle wits fought a hundred and twelve years ago-here.” A bright point of light sprang into existence in the Frontier area. “One of the ships engaged in it was a oneman vessel with a s-.mianimate automatic control system, named by its pilot La Chasse Gallerie-you said something, Jim?”
The exclamation had emerged from Jim’s lips involuntarily. And at the same time, foolishly, a slight shiver had run down his back. It had been years since he had tun across the old tale as a boy.
“It’s a French-Canadian ghost legend, sir,” he said. “The legend was that voyageurs who had left their homes in Eastern Canada to go out on the fur trade routes and who had died out there would be able to come back home one night of the year. New Year’s night. They’d come sailing in through the storms and snow in ghost canoes, to join the people back home and kiss the girls they now wouldn’t ever be seeing again. -That’s what they called the story, `La Chasse Gallerie.’ It means the hunting of a type of butterfly that invades beehives to steal honey.”
“The pilot of this ship was a Canadian,” said Mollen. “Raoul Penard.” He coughed dryly. “He was greatly attached to his home. La Chasse Gallerie was one of the ships near the
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center of the nova explosion, one of the ones that disappeared. At that time we didn’t realize that the nova explosion was merely a destructive application of the principle used in phaseshift drive. -You’ve heard of the statistical chance that a ship caught just right by a nova explosion could be transported instead of destroyed, Jim?”
“I’d hate to count on it, sir,” said Jim. “Anyway, what’s the difference? Modern ships can’t be anticipated or held still long enough for any kind of explosion to be effective. The Laagi haven’t used the nova for eighty years. Neither have we.”
“True enough,” said Mollen. “But we aren’t talking about modern ships. Look at the desk schema, Jim. Forty-three hours ago, one of our deep, unmanned probes returned from far into Laagi territory with pictures of a ship. Look.”
Jim heard a stud click. The stars shifted and drew back. Floating against a backdrop of unknown stars he saw the oldfashioned cone shape of a one-man space battlecraft, of a type forgotten eighty years before. The view moved in close and he saw a name, abraded by dust and dimmed, but readable on the hull.
La Chasse Gallerie-The breath caught in his throat.
“It’s been floating around in Laagi territory all this time?” Jim said. “I can’t believe-”
“More than that”-Mollen interrupted him= `that ship’s under pilotage and moving.” A stud clicked. The original scene came back. A bright line began at the extreme edge of the desk and began to creep toward the back limits of Laagi territory. It entered the territory and began to pass through.
“You see,” said Mollen’s voice out of the dimness, “it’s coming back from wherever the nova explosion kicked it to, over one hundred years ago. It’s headed back toward our own territory. It’s headed back, toward Earth.”
Jim stared at the line in fascination.
“No,” he heard himself saying. “It can’t be. It’s some sort of Laagi trick. They’ve got a Laagi pilot aboard=
“Listen,” said Mollen. “The probe heard talking inside the ship. And it recorded. Listen-”
Again, there was the faint snap of a stud. A voice, a human
8 I Gordon R. Dickson
voice, singing raggedly, almost absentmindedly to itself, entered the air of the room and rang on Jim’s ears .
… en roulant ma boule, roulantroulant ma boule, roulant …
The singing broke off and the voice dropped into a mutter of a voice that switched back and forth between French and English, speaking to itself. Jim, who had all but forgotten the little French he had picked up as a boy in Quebec, was barely able to make out that the owner of the voice was carrying on a running commentary on the housekeeping duties he was doing about the ship. Talking to himself after the fashion of hermits and lonely men.
“All right,” said Jim, even while he wondered why he was protesting such strong evidence at all. “Didn’t you say they had the early sernianimate control systems then? They used brain tissue grown in a culture, didn’t they? It’s just the control system, parroting what it’s heard, following out an early order to bring the ship back.”
“Look again,” said Mollen. The view changed once more to a close-up of La Chasse Gallerie. Jim looked and saw wounds in the dust-scarred hull-the slashing cuts of modern light weapons, refinements of the ancient laser beam-guns.
`“The ship’s already had its first encounter with the Laagi on its way home. It met three ships of a Laagi patrol-and fought them off.”
“Fought them off? That old hulk?” Jim stared into the dimness where Mollen’s face should be. “Three modern Laagi ships?”
“That’s right,” said Mollen. “It killed two and escaped from the third-and by rights it ought to be dead itself, but it’s still coming, on ordinary drive, evidently. It’s not phaseshifting. Now, a control system might record a voice and head a ship home, but it can’t fight off odds of three to one. That takes a living mind.”
A stud clicked. Dazzling overhead light sprang on again and the desk top was only a desk top. Blinking in the illumination, Jim saw Mollen looking across at him.
“Jim,” said the general, “this is a volunteer mission. That
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ship is still well in Laagi territory and it’s going to be hit again before it reaches the Frontier. Next time it’ll be cut to ribbons, or captured. We can’t afford to have that happen. Its pilot, this Raoul Penard, has got too much to tell us, even beginning with the fact of how he happens to be alive in space at well over a hundred years of age.” He watched Jim closely. “Jim, I’m asking you to take a section of four ships in to meet. La Chasse Gallerie and bring her out.”
Jim stared at him. He found himself involuntarily wetting his lips and stopped the gesture.
“How deep?” he asked.
“At least eighty lightyears in toward the heart of Laagi territory,” said Mollen bluntly. “If you want to turn it down, Jim, say so now. The man who pulls this off has got to go into it believing he can make it back out again.”
“Mat’s me,” said Jim. He laughed, the bare husk of a laugh. “That’s the way I operate, General. I volunteer.”
“Good,” said Mollen. He sat back in his chair. “There’s just one more thing, then. Raoul Penard is older than any human being has a right to be and he’s pretty certainly senile, if not out-and-out insane. We’ll want a trained observer along to get as much information out of contact with the man as we can, in case you lose him and his ship, getting back. That calls for someone with a unique background and experience in geriatrics and all the knowledge of the aging process. So Mary, here, is going to be that observer. She’ll replace your regular gunner and ride in a two-man ship with you.”