Not until they had plied her with the finest food and liquor that the house could boast did they consent to turn to the subject preying on her pith: the promised doom of Aglabec.
With infuriating leisureliness, after consulting a time-pulser hung beside the telescope, Ugant finally invited her to take her place at its ocular and stare at Swiftyouth.
“That’s where we’re going to send our spores,” she said. “Before the end of summer, certainly, we shall have grown enough floaters, we shall have retested our star-seeker, we shall have enlarged and improved our driver. Once beyond the atmosphere, at a precisely calculated moment, the raw heat of the sun will expand and eventually explode a carefully aligned container, so that it will broadcast spores into the path Swiftyouth will follow as it reaches perihelion … Why, you’re shaking! What in the world for?”
“I don’t know!” came the helpless answer. “But … Well, just suppose we’re wrong after all. Just suppose not all of what Aglabec teaches is complete invention! Do we have the right to put at risk creatures on another world?”
There was a pause. At length Ugant said grayly, “If there are any life forms on Swiftyouth—and I admit that, without voyaging there, we can never be certain—then they are due for suffering worse than any we have been through. Be patient. Watch.”
Not knowing precisely why, Chybee obeyed, and waited. And then, just as she was about to abandon the telescope with a cry of annoyance…
That tiny reddish disc changed to white, and shone out more brilliantly than half the stars.
“Congratulate your colleagues at the Hulgrapuk Observatory, Wam,” said Ugant dryly. “They were most precise in their calculations.”
“But what are you showing me?” demanded Chybee.
“The kind of proof we needed to destroy Aglabec,” the scientist replied composedly. “We maintain a constant watch for massive bodies drifting into the system. Recently we spotted one larger than any on record, or more precisely a whole cluster of them, perhaps the nucleus of a giant comet which was stripped of its gas when passing by a hot white star, then whipped into the void again. At first we were afraid they might collide with us, but luckily … Well, you’re seeing what saved us: the attraction of an outer planet. So how exactly is Aglabec going to account for the collision of Swiftyouth with not one meteorite but maybe half a score of them, each greater than the one that washed Voosla and half an ocean high into the hills?”
At that very moment the whitened disc of Swiftyouth redoubled in brilliance. Chybee drew back from the ocular and tried to laugh at the prospect of Aglabec’s discomfiture.
But she could not, any more than she could explain why to her concerned companions. She only knew she was in mourning of a sudden, for all the marvelous and lovely beings on—or in—the other planets, whom she had known so briefly and who now, even to imagination, were lost for evermore.
PART SEVEN
WELL
AND FITLY
SHAPED
I
Even before the sun had broached the dawn horizon, warm breezes wafted over the launching site and made the laqs of gas-globes swell. The mission controllers revised their estimates of available lift to record levels, and congratulated one another on the accuracy of their weather-sense. All was set fair for the first piloted flight beyond the atmosphere, the first attempt to link a group of orbiting ecosystems into what might become a colony, a settlement, and finally a vehicle, a junq to sail the interstellar sea. Compared to this climactic venture, all that had gone before was trivial. The seeding of the moon, the fact that the spectra of Swiftyouth and Sunbride kept changing in amazing fashion since those planets had been sprayed with spores intended to assure the continuance of life after its home world met disaster—those were experiments whose results might well not become known until after the race responsible was extinct. Here, on the other claw, was an undertaking designed to ensure that its extermination was postponed.
Now, just so long as their chosen pilot didn’t let them down…
Karg was elated. He felt the eyes of history upon him. Soon his name would join the roster of the famous; it would be coupled with those of Gveest, Yockerbow, even Jing—