“Ordinance Officer,” said a voice from one of the twenty-odd speaker grills in the room. “We have a trace at Green Twelve Thirty-one which I’m putting on your repeater screen Five. Trace is putting out patterned interference against missile attack and considerable radar window, suggesting that it has a guilty conscience and is smaller than we are. Instructions, sir?”
Williamson glanced at the repeater screen. “Do nothing unless it does,” he said, then turned to Stillman and Conway again. When he spoke it was with the calming, confidence-inspiring tone of the senior officer who bears, and accepts, full responsibility, a tone which insisted that they were not to worry because he was there to do it for them.
He said, “Don’t look so distressed, gentlemen. This situation, this threat of interstellar war, was bound to come about sometime and plans have been devised for dealing with it. Luckily we have plenty of time to put these plans into effect.
“Spatially the Empire is a small, dense association of worlds,” he went on reassuringly, “otherwise we could not have made contact with them so soon. The Federation, however, is spread thinly across half the Galaxy. We had a star cluster to search where one sun in five possessed an inhabited planet. Their problem is nowhere near as simple. If they were very lucky they might find us in three years, but my own estimate is that it would be nearer twenty. So you can see that we have plenty of time.”
Conway did not feel reassured and he must have shown it, but the Captain was trying to meet his objections before he could make them.
“The agent who made the report may help them,” Williamson went on quickly. “Willingly, because he doesn’t know the truth about the Empire yet, he may give information regarding the Federation and the organization and strength of its Monitor Corps. But because he is a doctor this information is unlikely to be either complete or accurate, and would be useless anyway unless the Empire knows where we are. They won’t find that out unless they capture an astrogator or a ship with its charts intact, and that is a contingency which we will take very great precautions to guard against from this moment on.
“Agents are trained in linguistics, medicine or the social sciences,” Williamson ended confidently. “Their knowledge of interstellar navigation is nil. The scout ship which lands them returns to base immediately, this being standard precautionary procedure in operations of this sort. So you can see that we have a serious problem but that it is not an immediate one.
“Isn’t it?” said Conway .
He saw Williamson and Stillman looking at him-intently and cautiously as if he was some kind of bomb which, having exploded half an hour ago was about to do so again. In a way Conway was sorry that he had to explode on them again and make them share the fear and horrible, gnawing anxiety which up to now had been his alone. He wet his lips and tried to break it to them as gently as possible.
“Speaking personally,” he said quietly, “I don’t have the faintest idea of the coordinates of Traltha, or Illensa or Earth, or even the Earth-seeded planet where I was born. But there is one set of figures which I do know, and any other doctor on space service in this Sector is likely to know them also. They are the coordinates of Sector General.
“I don’t think we have any time at all.”
CHAPTER 12
The only constructive thing which Conway did during the trip back to Sector General was to catch up on his sleep, but very often the sleep was made so hideous by nightmares of the coming war that it was more pleasant to stay awake, and his waking time he spent in discussions with Williamson, Stillman and the other senior officers on Vespasian. Since he had called the shots right during that last half hour on Etla Williamson seemed to value any ideas he might have, even though problems of espionage, logistics and fleet maneuvers were hardly within the specialty of a Senior Physician.
The discussions were interesting, informative and, like his dreams, anything but pleasant.