Mavra felt a tingling sensation, as if circulation that had been cut off was gradually coming back. Her eyes hurt, and she managed to blink them, then continued to blink, releasing watery tears of relief. She had been frozen with them open.
She shook her head slightly to clear it, then looked at the guard. She was still too shaky to try anything, and the guard’s drawn and aimed pistol was more than a match for any moves or powers.
“All right, woman-or whatever you are-what are you doing here and how did you get here?” the guard demanded.
Mavra coughed slightly, bringing saliva back to a dry throat. “I’m Mavra Chang,” she told her captor. “I was hired to get Nikki off New Pompeii before the big test.” There was no use lying; the evidence was all around, and the truth might buy time for an opening.
Nikki gasped. “My father sent you, didn’t he?”
“In a way,” Mavra replied. “Without you they have no hold on him.”
The guard looked angry. “You louse! You common sewer rat! Her father wouldn’t have sent you. He’d know that Nikki would succumb to the sponge if she left here.”
Nikki’s boldness and the guard’s obvious concern for the girl heartened Mavra. As was common in cases of kidnapping, guard and captive had become friends. Such friendship could sometimes be exploited. She decided to take a chance on the complete truth. Time was running out anyway, and she had little to lose. This guard was more competent, which meant more cautious, than the others.
“Look,” she said sincerely, “I’m going to level with you. That test-it won’t go as Trelig expects. Zinder has held out some information. When it gets switched on, the odds are it’ll destroy this little world. I have enough sponge in my cruiser, parked outside the limit, to give her what she needs, and there’s an antitoxin I know how to make.”
“Oh, god! Daddy!” Nikki exclaimed excitedly. “You’ve got to save him!”
The guard thought for a moment, trying to sort things out. Before he could, there was the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. Into the room burst an incredible figure, pistol drawn.
He was fully two meters tall, solid muscle, tremendously hairy, and scary as hell. He saw that the situation was well in hand, then looked down on Mavra. He towered over her.
“So, half-man, you caught the prize, eh?” he growled in the deepest resonant bass voice Mavra had ever heard. Nikki’s expression was horror-struck; she feared this man most of all.
“Get out of the way, Ziggy,” the guard ordered softly.
The big man sniffed. “Ah, shit! What can this tiny little thing do to anybody now? I kill her the hard way, poke a hole right through her,” he boasted, leering.
“Get out of the way,” the guard repeated.
Instead, he moved up to Mavra and put out a huge hairy hand, lifting her face up slightly and mildly stroking her cheek and neck.
Mavra flexed the muscles in her left hand, felt the venom rise to her fingertips. All five in him for sure, in another two seconds, she thought.
She was about to make her move when she suddenly heard a high-pitched whine. The big man screamed, seemed to freeze, then fell over. Mavra jumped quickly to miss being crushed under the mountain of muscle.
The guard sighed, then pointed the pistol at Mavra again. She’d been too stunned to use the precious time.
“Is it true what you said?” the guard asked. “You have sponge, and you have an antitoxin?”
Mavra nodded numbly, still looking at the fallen man.
“Here, catch!” the guard said, and she looked up. The guard tossed her pistol back to her. She caught it, looked undecided for a moment, then bolstered it again.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what time it is?” Mavra asked woodenly. The guard looked at an area on the back of his holster. “Eleven fourteen,” he said.
“Come on, then!” she snapped, coming out of it. “That gives us just sixteen minutes to steal a spaceship.”
On the run, Mavra got the guard, whose name was Renard, to radio that the fugitive was caught and under restraint in the guard quarters. Trelig acknowledged the report and, in a tone that was more vicious than any he’d used before, the kind reserved for anticipating taking people apart cell by cell, ordered her brought to him.
They approached the spaceport. Nikki had received a treatment from Ben only a few days before, but she was still very fat and very slow. It couldn’t be helped; Mavra couldn’t take off without her.
The spaceport was quiet. “One guard, Marta, inside, and that’s it,” Renard told them. “Trelig figures even if you steal one, the robot guardians will shoot you down. You do have a way past that, don’t you?”
Nikki looked a little upset. “Now’s a fine time to ask that one!”
“Yes, it’s okay,” Mavra assured them. “If Nikki’s aboard the code will come to me. Posthypnotic.” I hope, she added silently.
“I’ll enter the terminal alone,” Renard suggested. “Marta won’t suspect me.” He paused, then added, “You know, she’s not really a bad person, either. We might take her.”
“You’re more than I bargained for,” Mavra replied. “No more. Stun her when I hit the weapons detector. Then get into the ship. Get the two stewards if you can.”
“No problem,” Renard assured her. “They’re like robots themselves. They just can’t handle anything outside their own experience.”
“Time’s wasting!” Mavra snapped. “Go!”
She counted down from thirty after Renard entered the terminal. Then she walked brazenly out in the open, up the terminal walk, with Nikki waddling behind, removed her pistol, and shot the control box on the weapons detector.
“Now, Nikki! Run for the door!”
Nikki didn’t move. “No!” she replied stubbornly. “Not without my father!”
Mavra sighed, turned, and hypnoed Nikki with the nail of her right index finger.
“Hey! Wha-” the girl managed, then stiffened and relaxed, all thought gone from her. Mavra took a precious second to admire the new stuff, much quicker than the old.
“You will run as fast as you can after me,” she told Nikki. “Do not stop until I tell you!” And, with that, she took off for the doorway. Nikki followed, doing the best she could.
“You weigh ten kilos!” Mavra screamed at her. “Now, run!”
Nikki’s pace picked up, and she ran through the door at a speed much faster than anyone would have believed possible from one of her bulk.
Mavra took only a second to see the unconscious form of the guard Marta out cold on the floor, and then turned to Nikki. “Get into the ship,” she ordered, then turned, anxious. “Renard!” she called.
Two quick whines answered her from the far ship, and, a moment later, she saw the rebel guard dragging a New Harmonite out the hatch.
“Come, Nikki!” she ordered, and Nikki followed like an obedient dog.
Renard, puffing slightly, hauled the second, identical form out, and gestured for them to get in.
It was Trelig’s private cruiser, complete with bedroom, lounge, even a bar. Ordering Nikki into one of the lounge chairs, Renard strapped her in while Mavra went forward. A quick fine-line shot with the pistol blew the flimsy lock, and she opened the door to the cockpit.
Renard dashed in after her, took the copilot’s chair, and strapped himself in. Mavra was at work in seconds, flipping switches, punching orders into the activated computer, setting procedures for emergency lift.
“Hang on!” she yelled to Renard as the ship hummed and vibrated with full power buildup. “This will be rough!”
She punched E-Lift, and the ship broke free of its mooring pad and rose at near-maximum power.
“Code, please,” a mechanical voice demanded pleasantly over the radio. “Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship.”
Mavra grabbed frantically for the headset, tried to put it on, found it so large it wouldn’t stay on even at its smallest setting. Still, she got the mike activated and close to her mouth.
“Stand by for code,” she said into it, and then paused. Come on! Come on! she thought urgently. Nikki’s aboard and we’re away! Give me the goddamned code!
“For god’s sake give the code!” Renard screamed at her.
“Thirty seconds,” the robot sentry pointed out politely.
Suddenly she had it. The words burst into her mind, suddenly, so strangely that for a moment she doubted they were correct. She took a deep breath. That had to be, or that was it anyway.
“Edward Gibbon, Volume I,” she said.
No response. They held their breath together. The seconds ticked off in their minds, five … four … three … two … one … zero …
Nothing happened. Renard whistled and almost collapsed. Mavra started trembling slightly, and couldn’t stop for half a minute. She felt drained.
They sat there, silent, while they continued out at full thrust. Finally Mavra turned to the strange man who looked like a woman and said, almost in a whisper, “Renard? What time is it?”
Renard frowned, then reached over, flipped up his shoulder holster.
“Twelve ten,” he replied.
Mavra felt better. There was a better than even chance that they would make it hi time. If Trelig’s craft couldn’t, nothing could.
Then, suddenly, there was a blackness. Mavra’s eyes wouldn’t adjust to it, nor was there any sensation of a solid ship around them. They were in a deep, black hole, falling, falling fast.
Renard screamed, and so did Nikki, plaintively, from somewhere in back of them.
“Son of a bitch!” Mavra said with disgust. “They moved up the damned test!”
UNDERSIDE-NEW POMPEIi
Trelig had been impatient. The asteroid had been lined up early by the robotic tugs; Yulin was ready, the rest of the staff was monitoring all the necessary instruments. He saw no reason to delay until thirteen hundred because of some arbitrary time he’d set. He ordered the test to begin, and Yulin, following orders, gave the command to Obie.
For its part, the computer was upset. It couldn’t ignore Yulin’s direct command, although it had tried to divert them with several minor breakdowns. Obie had its own limits, and when Yulin gave the code, it had to obey, hoping that its agent had gotten away early.
The total blackness, and the sensation of falling, was unexpected to Zinder. Even Obie felt it; the computer knew that they were not falling anywhere and analyzed that the early fifty percent option had occurred. There was insufficient power to maintain New Pompeii hi a stable relationship with the rest of the universe; the pull had come, too strong to resist had it wanted to, and the planetoid had yielded without hesitation.
Unaffected by the terrible sensory sensations the others were feeling, Obie probed the state. There was nothing out there. Nothing.
New Pompeii was still intact; Obie managed to verify that fact. But it had switched to reserve power the moment the big disk had gone on; it could detect no other matter anywhere, not the tiniest dust particle beyond the proximity limits of the ray, a little under a light-year. They were in a separate cosmos all to themselves.
And yet there was something only Obie could feel. The pull, and the tremendous field of force, the stability equation for their physical existence, snapped now, like a stretched rubber band slipping off one of its anchors. That was the pull, the computer realized. All matter and all energy hi the cosmos had its linkages to the master computer somewhere; when that linkage was disturbed or disrupted, the reality involved dissolved into its primal energy pattern. That was why they could sense no reality, why they could not touch the solid planetoid of New Pompeii even though Obie’s instrumentation said it was there. It was not. They were all, Obie included, an abstract mathematical concept set now, returning to their creator.
Then, suddenly, there was stability again. Power returned, and Obie could feel solar energy bathing the plasma which, miraculously, seemed to have held up as well.
All of the humans were sprawled over the walkway and control room, stunned, shocked, or unconscious.
Then, suddenly, one figure groaned and sat up, moving his head around as if to flex painfully twisted muscles. Breathing hard, half-walking, half-crawling, he made his way to the control room, ignoring the groans from others around him.
Yulin had been knocked out, tossed from his chair against a panel. There was a nasty cut on his forehead.
The man didn’t care. He opened a switch.
“Obie! Are you all right?” he called.
“Yes, Dr. Zinder,” the computer replied. “That is, much better than you or I expected.”
Gil Zinder nodded. “What’s our status, Obie? What happened?”
“I have been analyzing all the data, sir, and correlating it as much as I can. We were removed from reality, as we anticipated, and reassembled elsewhere. We appear to be in a stable orbit approximately forty thousand kilometers above the equator of a very strange planet, sir.”
“The brain, Obie!” Zinder called excitedly. “Is it the Markovian brain?”
“Yes, sir, it appears to be,” the computer answered, sounding more than a little upset.
“What’s wrong, Obie?” Zinder said.
“It’s the brain, sir,” Obie replied, sounding hesitant and slightly confused. “I have a direct link with it. It’s incredible, as far beyond me as I am beyond a pocket communicator. I can decipher just a little under a millionth of the signal information it is transmitting, and I doubt if I could ever comprehend it fully, but-”
“But what?” Zinder prodded, not even seeing Yulin get up behind him.
“Well, sir, as near as I can figure out, it seems to be asking me for instructions,” Obie replied.
ON TRELIG’S SHIP, HALF A LIGHT-YEAR OUT FROM NEW POMPEII-1210 HOURS
The world returned suddenly. Mavra Chang looked around, slightly dazed, then checked the instruments. They read total nonsense, so she looked over at Renard and saw him groggily shaking his head.
“What happened?” he managed.
“We were caught in the field and carried along with them,” Mavra explained with more authority than she felt. She looked down at the instruments again, then punched a random search pattern. The screen flickered but remained blank in front of her. Finally, she turned the damned thing off.
“Well, that tears it,” she said, resigned.
Renard looked over at her strangely. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I just punched the star chart navigational locator. Inside the little chip is stored every known star pattern, from every angle. There are billions of combinations. It went through them ail-and didn’t flash once. We’re not in any section of known space.”
He envied her calm acceptance of the fact. “So what do we do now?” he asked apprehensively.
Mavra flipped a series of switches and then pulled back on the long handle to her right. The whine and vibration of the ship’s engines slowed. “First we see what the neighborhood looks like, then we decide where in it we want to go,” she told him matter-of-factly.
She punched up another series on the small control board, and the main screen in front of them, which usually showed a simulated starfield, showed something else entirely. There were stars there-more stars than either of them had ever seen before. They were so close together it looked as if the firmament were on fire with a white heat. It took some filters to get any definition, and that didn’t help much. There were also great clouds of space gas, glowing crimson and yellow, and there were shapes and forms never seen, not even in astronomical photos.
“We’re definitely in somebody else’s neighborhood,” Mavra commented dryly, and, after checking speed, started to turn the craft around. “We’re just about dead still now,” she told him. “I’m going to give us a panorama.”
The enormous clouds of stars and strange shapes did not diminish; they were surrounded by them. A small green grid to Mavra’s left was mostly blank, indicating nothing within a light-year or more of them. Then, suddenly, a small series of dots appeared.
“Look, Trelig’s robot guardians,” she noted. “Everything else is debris from the rest of that fragmented system. It seems the whole neighborhood moved. If that’s true-yes, see it? The big dot, there, with the slightly smaller one just off it. That’s New Pompeii and its would-be target.”
Renard nodded. “But what’s that huge object just to its right?” he asked.
“A planet. From the looks of it, the only planet in the system. Funny it took the whole solar system with it but not the star. That star’s definitely larger and older,” she pointed out.
“It’s moving,” Renard said, fascinated in spite of himself. “New Pompeii’s moving.”