Wan-To considered that fact. Very likely one (or more) of the seven was the one who was trying to kill him, calling to see if he was still alive.
But there were the three silent others to think about. They hadn’t called. That might be even more significant. Perhaps they had been zapped; or perhaps they were the ones who were doing the zapping, lying low in the hope that the others would think they were gone.
What a pity it was, Wan-To thought ruefully, that it should always come to this in the end.
Restlessly he checked his sensors. Everything was going as planned. Five separate groups of stars, the smallest with only half a dozen members, the largest with well over a hundred, were already accelerating out of their positions in the sky, in random directions. (Let Haigh-tik try to figure that out, Wan-To thought gleefully.) They would be going pretty fast before long; his constructs tapped the energy of the stars themselves to drive them, converting their interior particles in gravitons to create attractors, even bending the curvature of space around them to isolate them and speed things up.
He wondered if Haigh-tik and the others would really assume that Wan-To himself was in one of those clusters, running away. That would be a useful deception—if it worked—but Haigh-tik in particular was too much like Wan-To himself to be fooled very long.
No, Wan-To thought regretfully, deception wouldn’t work very long between Haigh-tik and himself. Sooner or later one of them would have to destroy the other.
It was a great pity, he told himself soberly. Then, for something to do, he sent out the pulses that would turn three more possible targets into seminovae.
It would have been so nice if they could all have lived together in peace . . .
But, things being as they were, he had to protect himself. Even if it meant blowing up every star in the galaxy but his own.
CHAPTER 8
When the engineers from the message center came after Pal Sorricaine to see if he could explain what was going wrong with their incoming transmissions from the third interstellar ship, the old man looked at them uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then he slapped his forehead and bugled like a hound. “Holy sanctified Jesus,” he moaned. “I should’ve guessed!”
He hadn’t, though. Neither had anyone else. With all the commotion and speculation and uneasy, scared excitement that the movements of the nearby stars had caused, no one had stopped to think that the arrival of the interstellar ship, New Argosy, might also be affected.
Affected it was.
True, the messages that were still coming in from New Argosy were normal enough, even cheerful. The ship was still in its deceleration phase, still a long way out. Therefore it would be the better part of a year before the comm center on Newmanhome would receive anything the third ship had to say about the sudden decision of a dozen stars and their orbiting bodies to begin running away.
The engineers hadn’t expected to hear anything like that. They had expected that the incomings from Argosy would keep on their frequency lock, as they were supposed to do. The incoming messages didn’t oblige.
They, too, were Doppler-shifted.
Nobody wanted to believe the probable explanation for that, but the mislock was systematic and increasing. They couldn’t doubt it any more.
New Argosy was not a part of the volume of space that was theirs. Newmanhome was on the move. Argosy was not moving with it.
The scary part, the part that frizzled the nerves of the colonists, was that New Argosy didn’t yet know what was happening. Their transmissions reported everything on course, no troubles at all, not even any more of those pesky, worrying flare stars— landfall at Newmanhome expected right on time!
But that was now impossible, since Newmanhome had become a moving target.
That was a personal matter for every colonist. New Argosy wasn’t a mere astronomical object. It was something every one of them was waiting for. It was Santa Claus’s bag, laden with gifts. New Argosy held people—more people than either of the first two ships had carried, a passenger list of three thousand more corpsicles, intended to be thawed out to join the first colonists on Newmanhome—many of them friends, colleagues, even relatives of those already there.
It also held supplies.
It was crammed full of things that had not been high enough priority to go into either Ark or Mayflower, but that the colonists wanted very much, all the same. It held grand pianos and violins, tubas and trumpets; it held a thousand new strains of flowering plants and about fifteen hundred species of birds, beasts, and arthropods that Newmanhome would never see without it. It held the wonderful solar-power satellite that was their only chance of making more antimatter to replenish the dwindling stores in orbit. It held the three small spacecraft that they could use to explore their system. Most of all, it held hope. What New Argosy contained was the promise of a future—the promise that the colonists on Newmanhome were not finally, totally, cut off from the Earth that had borne them . . .
And it was lost.
The colonists had to have a town meeting to talk it over. The meeting couldn’t decide anything, of course—there weren’t any useful decisions they could make. The meeting was just so that everyone could hear and say everything that could be said—and then, with the catharsis of getting all that out of their systems, get back to their real world—meaning Newmanhome, the only world they had left.
Although the plague had decimated Newmanhome’s population, there were 3,300 people still alive. The only ones over the age of four not present there were the work crews in orbit, at sea, or in the small parties on South Continent and the other somewhat inhabited parts of the planet. Twenty-six hundred people gathered on the hill outside the town, with the loudspeakers relaying what was said to the fringes of the crowd.
They had set up a committee of twelve to put all the information together and make some kind of a report. Pal Sorricaine was on it, of course. So was Billy Stockbridge, and sick old Frances Mtiga (flown back specially from West Archipelago), and old (but far from sick or feeble) Captain Bu Wengzha. As soon as the committee had finished saying what everyone already knew, hands began to go up.
“If we can see that they’re out of position, why can’t the people on Argosy?” someone asked.
Pal Sorricaine stood up, tottering on his artificial leg; he hadn’t been doing much drinking, in all the excitement, but he was showing signs of wear. “By now they probably can. Remember, they’re still almost a light-year away. The messages we’re getting from them were sent nearly two Newmanhome years ago.”
Another hand, a woman from Delta: “But we notified them about what was going on, didn’t we?”
“Of course we did!” Captain Bu replied. “But they haven’t had time to receive the message yet. The speed of light is the same in all directions.” He turned to the rest of the committee behind him, where Billy Stockbridge had said something. “What is it, Billy?”
Billy pointed. “It’s my brother. He’s busting to ask something.”
There was Freddy Stockbridge in the front row, conspicuous in clerical garb; he had been studying for the priesthood long enough and, for lack of a handy pope or cardinal, had finally appointed himself ordained. He grabbed one of the roving microphones from an usher and shouted into it. “Can you tell us what is going on, really?”
Pal Sorricaine shrugged. “We’ve told you everything we can,” he said. “The data is clear. Relative to the rest of the galaxy, our little local group is moving—and accelerating. It looks like some other groups are beginning to move in a different direction, too, but we’re not as sure of that. As to why all this is happening—God knows.”
And Freddy Stockbridge said strongly, “Yes, that’s right. We don’t know. But He does.”
Viktor walked Reesa home from the meeting. She paused outside her house and gazed up at the stars. “They don’t look any different to me,” she said.
Viktor squinted up. “I can’t see colors in stars most of the time anyway,” he confessed. “They all look about alike, just bright spots. Anyway, we couldn’t really tell the difference with the naked eye.”
She shivered, although the night, like almost every Newmanhome night, was muggily warm. “Let’s tuck the kids in,” she said.
It didn’t take long. Viktor found himself attracted in a way that he wasn’t used to by the sight of Reesa cuddling the baby, whispering to him, changing his diaper, and feeding him. The feeling wasn’t sexual. He didn’t think it was sexual, at least, although that was certainly there, too. It was just, well, appealing. “Taking care of kids is a lot of work,” he said sympathetically when they were sitting outside again.