"Those two conversations you had over the emergency phone were, of course, taped and the playback concealed in the ship. Psych scripted them on the basis of fitting any need. Apparently they worked. The second one was supposed to be the final touch of realism, in case you should start being doubtful. Then we used a variation of deep freeze that suspends about ninety-nine percent of the body processes, — it hasn't been revealed or published yet. This along with anticoagulants in the razor cut on Tony's chin covered the fact that so much time had passed.
"What about the ship?" Hal asked. "We saw it — it was only half-completed."
"Dummy," the colonel said. "Put there for the public's benefit and all foreign intelligence services. Real one had been finished and tested weeks earlier. Getting the crew was the difficult part. What I said about no team finishing a practice exercise was true. You two men had the best records and were our best bets.
"We'll never have to do it this way again, though. Psych says that the next crews won't have that trouble; they'll be reinforced by the psychological fact that someone else was there before them. They won't be facing the complete unknown."
The colonel sat chewing his lip for a moment, then forced out the words he had been trying to say since Tony and Hal had regained consciousness.
"I want you to understand. . both of you. . that I would rather have gone myself than pull that kind of thing on you. I know how you must feel. Like we pulled some kind of a…"
"Interplanetary practical joke," Tony said. He didn't smile when he said it.
"Yes, something like that," the colonel rushed on. "I guess it was a lousy trick — but don't you see, we had to? You two were the only ones left, every other man had washed out. It had to be you two, and we had to do it the safest way.
"And only myself and three other men know what was done, what really happened on the trip. No one else will ever know about it, I can guarantee you that."
Hal's voice was quiet, but cut through the room like a sharp knife.
"You can be sure Colonel, that we won't be telling anybody about it."
When Colonel Stregham left, he kept his head down because he couldn't bring himself to see the look in the eyes of the first two explorers of Mars.
Survival Planet
"But this war was finished years before I was born! How can one robot torpedo — fired that long ago — still be of any interest?"
Dall the Younger was overly persistent — it was extremely lucky for him that Ship-Commander Lian Stane, both by temperament and experience, had a tremendous reserve of patience.
"It has been fifty years since the Greater Slavocracy was defeated— but that doesn't mean eliminated," Commander Stane said. He looked through the viewport of the ship, seeing ghostlike against the stars the pattern of the empire they had fought so long to destroy. "The Slavocracy expanded unchecked for over a thousand years. Its military defeat didn't finish it, just made the separate worlds accessible to us. We are still in the middle of that reconstruction, guiding them away from a slave economy."
"That I know all about.” Dall the Younger broke in with a weary sigh. "I've been working on the planets since I came into the force. But what has that got to do with the Mosaic torpedo that we're tracking? There must have been a billion of them made and fired during the war. How can a single one be of interest this much later?"
"If you had read the tech reports," Stane said, pointing to the thumb-thick folder on the chart table, "you would know all about it." This advice was the closest the Commander had ever come to censure. Dall the Younger had the good grace to flush slightly and listen with applied attention.
"The Mosaic torpedo is a weapon of space war, in reality a robot-controlled spaceship. Once directed it seeks out its target, defends itself if necessary, then destroys itself and the ship it has been launched against by starting the uncontrollable cycle of binding-energy breakdown."
"I never realized that they were robot-operated," Dall said. "I thought robots had an ingrained resistance to killing people?"
"In-built rather than ingrained would be more accurate," Stane said judiciously. "Robotic brains are just highly developed machines with no inherent moral sense. That is added afterwards. It.has been a long time since we built man-shaped robots with human-type brains. This is the age of the specialist, and robots can specialize far better than men ever could. The Mosaic torpedo brains have no moral sense — if anything they are psychotic, overwhelmed by a death wish. Though there are, of course, controls on how much they can kill. All the torpedoes ever used by either side had mass detectors to defuse them when they approached an object with planetary mass, since the reaction started by a torpedo could just as easily destroy a world as a ship. You can understand our interest when in the last months of the war, we picked up a torpedo fused only to detonate a planet.
"All the data from its brain was filed and recently interpreted. The torpedo was aimed at the fourth planet of the star we are approaching now."
"Anything on the record about this planet?" Dall asked.
"Nothing. It is an unexplored system — at least as far as our records are concerned. But the Greater Slavocracy knew enough about this planet to want to destroy it. We are here to find out why."
Dall the Younger furrowed his brow, chewing at the idea. "Is that the only reason?" he finally asked. "Since we stopped them from wiping out this planet, that would be the end of it, I should think."
"It's thinking like that that shows why you are the low ranker on this ship," Gunner Arnild snapped as he came in. Arnild had managed to grow old in a very short-lived service, losing in the process, his patience for everything except his computers and guns. "Shall I suggest some of the possibilities that have occurred even to me? Firstly— any enemy of the Slavocracy could be a friend of ours. Or conversely, there may be an enemy here that threatens the entire human race, and we may need to set off a Mosaic ourselves to finish the job the Slavers started. Then again, the Slavers may have had something here — like a research center that they would rather have destroyed than let us see. Wouldn't you say that any one of these would make the planet worth investigating?"
"We shall be in the atmosphere within twenty hours," Dall said as he vanished through the lower hatch. "I have to check the lubrication on the drive gears."
"You're too easy on the kid," Gunner Arnild said, staring moodily at the approaching star, already dimmed by the forward filters.
"And you're too hard," Stane told him. "So I guess it evens out. You forget he never fought the Slavers."
Skimming the outer edges of the atmosphere of the fourth planet, the scout ship hurled itself through the measured length of a helical orbit, then fled back into the safety of space while the ship's robot brain digested and made copies of the camera and detector instrument recordings. The duplicates were stored in a message torp, and only when the torp had started back to base did Commander Stane bother personally to examine the results of their survey.
"We're dispensable now," he said, relaxing. "So the best thing we can do is to drop down and see what we can stir up." Arnild grunted agreement, his index fingers unconsciously pressing invisible triggers.
They leaned over the graphs and photographs spread out on the table. Dall peered between their shoulders and flipped through the photographs they tossed aside. He was first to speak.
"Nothing much there, really. Plenty of water, a big island continent — and not much else."
"Nothing else is detectable.” Stane added, tickling off the graphs one by one. "No detectable radiation, no large masses of metal either above or below ground, no stored energy. No reason for us to be here."