Dresser thought about other people only when they impinged on his mission.
Dresser remembered that he wasn’t dealing with scout crewmen. “Hang tight,” he said. Even so, he spoke in a soft voice.
The AI pulsed red light across the cabin an instant after Dresser’s warning. A heartbeat later, the landing motors fired with a harsh certainty that flung the three humans against their restraints.
Approach thresholds for scout boats were much higher than the norm for naval vessels, and enormously higher than those of commercial ships. The little boats might have to drop into a box canyon at a significant fraction of orbital velocity in order to survive. The hardware was stressed to take the punishment, and the crews got used to the experience—or transferred out of the service.
SB 781 crunched down at the point Dresser had chosen almost at random. They were in the mid-latitudes of mantra’s northern hemisphere. That was as good as any other place on the featureless globe.
“Well, sirs . . .” Dresser said. The restraints didn’t release automatically. Scout boats were liable to come to rest at any angle, including inverted. The pilot touched the manual switch, freeing himself and the two scientists. “Welcome to mantra.”
* * *
“Was there a problem with the equipment?” Admiral Horwarth asked. “The Mantra Project was the first field trial, as I suppose you know.”
She gave the scout a perfunctory smile. “I don’t imagine that information stays compartmented within a three-man unit.”
The Ichton turned to face the pick-ups. It seemed to be staring into the admiral’s office, but that was an illusion. The link with the prisoner’s cell was certainly not two-way; and in any case, the Ichtons’ multiple eyes provided a virtually spherical field of view, though at low definition by human standards.
“The equipment?” Dresser said. “No, there wasn’t any difficulty with the equipment.”
He laughed. He sounded on the verge of hysteria.
* * *
“There,” Kaehler called as the pole set a precise hundred meters from the imaging heads locked into focus on her display. “We have it.”
“I’ll decide that!” Captain Bailey replied from the support module twenty meters away. He shouted instead of using the hard-wired intercom linking the two units.
The breeze blew softly, tickling Dresser’s nose with the smell of death more ancient than memory. He watched over Kaehler’s shoulder as the image of the pole quivered and the operator’s color-graduated console displays bounded up and down the spectrum—
Before settling again into the center of the green, where they had been before Bailey made his last set of adjustments.
“There!” Captain Bailey announced with satisfaction.
They’d placed the imaging module twenty meters from SB 781’s side hatch. The support module containing the fusion power supply and the recording equipment was a similar distance beyond. A red light on top of the fusion bottle warned that it was pressurized to operating levels.
Though there was a monitor in the support module, Bailey had decreed that in the present climate they needn’t deploy the shelters which would have blocked his direct view of the imaging module’s three-meter display. If Kaehler had an opinion, the captain didn’t bother to consult it.
Kaehler folded her hands neatly on her lap. “What has this proved?” Dresser asked, softly enough that he wouldn’t intrude if the scientist was really concentrating instead of being at rest as she appeared to be.
Kaehler turned. “We’ve calibrated the equipment,” she said. “We’ve achieved a lock on the target post, one second in the past. We’ll be able to range as far back as we need to go when the artificial intelligence harmonizes the setting with the actual output of the power supply.”
“That’s what the captain’s doing?” Dresser asked with a nod.
“The artificial intelligence is making the calculation,” Kaehler said. “Captain Bailey is watching the AI while it works. I presume.”
Dresser looked from Kaehler to the pole, then to the horizon beyond. “I don’t see how it could work,” he said to emptiness. “A second ago—the planet rotates on its axis, it circles the sun, the sun moves with its galaxy. Time is distance. Time isn’t—”
He gestured toward the distant target.