“I see. And you don’t know if we can build a ship?”
“I know damned well we can’t build anything’ like their ships,” MacKinnie said. “Dougal, you can’t imagine what their equipment is like. Even the library. A box no larger than that sideboard there — we were told that could contain every book on Prince Samual’s World with room to spare. The things we brought home are about this big.” MacKinnie held up thumb and forefinger to indicate the size. “And each one holds a whole library. If we can read them.”
“So you learned nothing?”
“It wasn’t my job to learn,” MacKinnie said. “I was hired to get them there and bring them back. I did. All but two guardsmen.”
“So we must rely on Kleinst.”
“Kleinst and Todd. They spent days in the library. Not as long as they’d have liked to, but I didn’t dare wait any longer before starting back. As it was we only had five days to spare before the ship left, and I gather there won’t be another for a while. Something strange is going on in another part of the Empire. They wouldn’t tell me what, but they take it seriously.”
“Indeed?” Dougal looked thoughtful. “We will have to see if we can find out,” he said. “It may affect us.”
He’s a good liar, MacKinnie thought. But he knows something he’s not telling me. I wonder if it’s important …
“As for this audience,” Dougal said, “there will be many present who know nothing about your true purpose in going to Makassar, and we suspect the Imperials can listen to conversations in the audience chamber. You will continue the pretense of a simple trading mission.”
“You didn’t even tell the king?” MacKinnie demanded.
Dougal laughed. “His Majesty knows all,” he said. “But many in the government do not. We intend to keep it that way. Come, let’s get this over with. I am anxious to talk to all of you, and I will not feel really comfortable until we are out of Haven.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“We have a large military research post in the Corliss Grant Hills,” Dougal said. “Most of what goes on there is weapons research, which the Imperials know all about. But it is a large place, and much goes on that we do not tell them.”
“I see. You’ve organized well,” MacKinnie said.
“As best we could. But now it all depends on what you have brought us. And we are running out of time.”
Their quarters in the Corliss Grant research station were comfortable, but they were prisoners.
“I prefer you do not think that way,” Dougal told MacKinnie. “You have weapons. You are all housed in the same building. All of you, including your soldiers. From time to time one of you — I prefer Academician Longway, he has a knack for talking — will go to Haven to be seen and speak to the press. But think, Colonel. You will be recognized if you are seen often. And if there is no one to tell your secrets to, you will not reveal them.” He threw up his hands as if in dismay. “I have given you every possible assurance of your safety. I make no doubt that with your skill and the number of men I have left you, you could escape at any time. I rely on your word, Colonel. You have sworn loyalty to Haven and Prince Samual’s World. Can I not trust you?”
There wasn’t any answer to that, as MacKinnie later told Mary.
“So we’re our own jailors,” she said.
“It comes to that,” MacKinnie said. “He even has me in the security department. I don’t really blame him. I’d do the same thing myself. But as Hal would say, this spy business gets old pretty fast.” He tried to laugh, but the sound was unpleasant.
“Are you sorry?” she asked.
“Sorry I lost Hal? I’ll always be sorry.”
She moved closer to him, and he held her, clinging to her. They stood for a long time. Finally he let her go. “But I’m not sorry I found you. Which reminds me, I have to speak to your father—”
“No.”
He frowned. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “That’s not what either of us wants. Haven is ruled by customs and duties — we don’t need them with each other.”
He was silent for a moment. “All right, let’s say I want to speak to your father. It’s time I made an honest woman of you-”
“Or an honest man of yourself.”
They lived in luxury, but there was nothing to do. The research station was isolated, far from any town, sealed from the rest of Prince Samual’s World, and keeping it “secure” required no effort at all.
Since no one objected, Nathan went to technical conferences. Much of the discussion involved forces, and specific impulse, and other meaningless terms. He did understand that Kleinst had no way of reading the cubes they had brought back.
“It’s enough to drive me mad,” Kleinst said. A dozen older engineers seated around the conference table nodded sympathy. “It’s all right here.” He held up one of the small plasticine cubes. “And if I had nothing else to do, I might, in ten years, be able to read this. I know the theory-”
“We’re working on it,” Academician Taylor said. Taylor headed a group who worked on long-distance communicators and other electrical matters. They thought they had a method of reading the Makassar data, but so far it had not worked.
“But I have to spend time on the ship also,” Kleinst said. “And I fear that is hopeless.”
“We’ve got your liquid oxygen,” Todd said. He looked pleased with himself, and MacKinnie thought he had a right to be. In his days in the library on Makassar, Todd had found books on ancient technology — methods ancient even in the days of the First Empire — and studied how they’d done things. MacKinnie had never thought of air as something that could be made liquid, but Todd had done it by putting oxygen under high pressure, then rapidly letting it expand and cool. It all seemed simple once it was done-
“Yes,” Kleinst said. “But we can’t build pumps. And the stabilizing mechanisms.” He shook his head sadly. “We have large gyroscopes, but every attempt to make small ones with electrical connections to guide the ship has failed. Everything we can make is large, too large—”
“In time we can make it smaller,” Douglas Starr said.
“Time is what we don’t have,” MacKinnie said.
Starr glared at him. “My mechanics are working themselves to death now. I can get no more from them. There are no more hours in the day!”
“I know. I meant no disrespect,” MacKinnie said. And I shouldn’t even be here. But what else do I have to do? Every day he examined the political maps. Haven’s reach extended far to the east, all the way to the eastern ocean. In one memorable four-day period seven city-states capitulated to King David. One large kingdom on the eastern coast of the continent was holding out, and even though it looked as if it would take only a short campaign to conquer it, MacKinnie had asked for a command in Haven’s army. Of course Dougal refused to consider his request.
“Go back to first principles,” Todd said. “We can’t build true spacecraft. We can’t even build anything like the Empire’s landing boats.”
“So we must build rockets,” Kleinst said. “And large liquid rockets are very complex—”
“Why rockets?” Todd asked.
Kleinst frowned. “What else is there?”
“It largely depends on what you mean by a spaceship,” the midshipman said. “Or rather, what the Empire will accept as a spaceship …”
“If it will take us to space, it is a spaceship,” Kleinst muttered. “We have no time for senseless debate on definitions. What have you in mind?”
“There was an ancient document,” Todd said. “I hesitate to say how ancient—” He saw the intense interest of the others and laughed self-consciously. “Before the second millennium of the Christian era,” he said. “In the time of the first spacecraft, on Earth.”