Sapenza surprised him by responding, “Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it. If you’re right, and Earth’s Last Trump already blew, then both of us missed it, Doctor. Not just me, but you, too. Look around, Doctor. This dirt ball is the kind of place you get when you think you got the One True Faith and you follow that one with the real truth blindly down any road and right into the sun to be consumed! That is your history, too. You don’t think old Mother Tymm didn’t believe it just as much as you believe your position? From my perspective, the only difference between you and your followers and she and her followers is that yours haven’t yet been led into their own circle of Hell yet. But when you do, when you do, then don’t take me along with you. If you’re going to Hell anyway, Doctor, you should have a really good time before you get there.”
The Captain’s words seemed to be having a serious effect on Woodward, who stood there, grim-faced, for the first time looking very old and not as cocksure of himself and all his views. For Robey it was even more devastating, putting into words what had been gnawing at his soul since the hostages had been taken.
“What exactly are you proposing, Sapenza?” Woodward asked in a hollow tone.
“Mutual mistrust and cooperation on that basis. I have a hundred and sixteen people here, plus your eighty-seven. We wire ourselves and those hostages together and we come aboard your ship over there as a group. Put us in one of the big rooms you have there—the thing’s designed as a traveling cathedral, after all. You seal us in there. We’ll have a floating dead man switch between us. Anything like a gas or energy attack, anything sudden, we all blow up. Or, we come aboard, and you feed us and take us out of here.”
“To where, exactly, do we take you?”
“It’s been a long time. I don’t know what’s still going where. If we can get to a place where we can get a replacement ship, fine. That’s good enough. At least some kind of civilization where I can bargain what I have.”
“And what do you think you can bargain for the likes of a ship? Even if we took you in this fashion and there was no double cross, we can’t take your cargo, your booty, whatever.”
“Don’t be stupid, Woodward. You were supposed to be a bright guy. With a diminishing supply of ships and repairs there’s little material that can be traded for anything big these days, although we’ll try and deal the salvage on my poor ship there. But I wasn’t kidding about having something of incalculable value. Knowledge that is worth more than anybody can pay for it.”
“You’re not going to come up with that Three Kings nonsense again,” Cromwell put in.
“Oh, but that’s exactly what I’ve got, sir. I’ve got the Three Kings. I’ve got their location, their general descriptions, full navigational information, requirements to force through to them, and some sampling that indicates that they at least partially live up to their reputation. You see, we found dear, sainted Mother Tymm’s vessel. She had the information. Where she got it from, I don’t know. I don’t think she’d ever been there, but she sure knew somebody who had. The data modules were scouting reports from a Vaticanus class scout. And, there were—samples. All the stuff the old legends never gave, but otherwise totally consistent with them.”
“How do you know she didn’t just create these out of her visions?” Cromwell asked him. “If she could astronavigate, it wouldn’t be that outrageous.”
Eve reached into her robe pocket and pulled out an egg-shaped object about the size of a child’s fist. She stretched out an arm straight in front of her, offering it to them. When neither of the older men moved, Robey stepped forward and took it from her, then stepped back.
It was smooth, smoother than glass, smoother than just about anything he could remember. It was also slightly warm; not hot, but certainly above body temperature, and it didn’t seem to be warm because it was next to anything. The colors of the thing were spectacular, a kind of crimson wash against a pale yellow; but although he could not catch it doing anything, the mixture seemed to move, so that you couldn’t quite find the same pattern or design if you looked away and then looked back at it.
John Robey stared hard into the egg-shaped thing and, somehow, half inside the thing, half inside his head, a shape, a picture of some sort, seemed to form and then sharpen into realistic three-dimensional clarity. He saw it, cried out, and almost dropped the thing. Cromwell moved quickly and caught it, then looked at it quizzically.
“What was it, son? What did you see?” the security man asked him.
“I—I saw her. Eve. She was—screaming. In agony. It was—horrible.”
Cromwell looked at it, turned it over in his hand, and shook his head. “Weird,” he muttered. “Doctor?”
Woodward took the thing, examined it, and nodded. “It’s just as the old stories say. There’s supposed to be some of these on Vaticanus, but of course a lot of the physical evidence was suppressed. There was always the hope that they could find the place again while convincing everybody else it was just a legend.”
He stared into it as Robey had, and for him, too, a vision coalesced, although clearly not the same one the younger man had seen. He looked at it, seemingly transfixed, fascinated by its image which seemed revealed to him alone.
Suddenly, he broke away, as if awakening from a trance. “What did you do to get this, Sapenza? Murder the crew?”
“Nothing of the sort! She’d been dead and so had the small crew of that ship for a century and a half before we lucked onto her, and that was only because we’d just had a professional disagreement, let’s say, with a former partner over some financial matters and then discovered he had bigger guns than we did even though we had a faster ship. We went through gate after gate at top speed, so scrambled even we didn’t know or care where we were going. We gave ’em the slip somewhere in the system, and came out an old gate and almost crashed into the wreck. Who knows how long it was there, or how many other ships might have gone past without even noticing it? Sheer luck, or chance. We did a salvage and strip, and the first thing we did, of course, was retrace its course to see if the colony was worth a look. As you can see, it wasn’t, but that last shot we’d taken and the stress of all that gating at speed caused the bubble to burst. We’ve been stuck here ever since. The Curse of Mother Tymm, you might call it. What with all the informational stuff, the Three Kings artifacts, and the Reverend Mother’s own personal possessions we were able to convince the yokels that we were the guardians until the dear Mother returned. She won’t, of course. Not in this life. Besides, she’d be almost four hundred anyway. A bit old for anybody’s taste.”
“Why did she die? And why did she leave the colony here?” Cromwell asked.
“I can tell you that there’s no gate at the Kings. It’s a free wormhole and its got a lot of energy. You’d need shields ten times stronger than what that old bucket of hers had. I think they tried it, but they found out in time that if they went through they’d wind up as the galaxy’s smallest neutron star. So they dropped here, figuring it would support the colony for years until she could get what she needed to go through, and she left. The thing must have been half torn to pieces by the first attempt. It was imploded. Ugly. But, at least, intact for all that. If it had exploded we’d never have figured out what it was.”