“I can guess why you’re here,” Nick told him.
“Officially, I’m here at the request of the Joint Interstellar Colony Authority. They got your request to send a warning message to Wunderland. They weren’t at all clear on what the situation was, and I couldn’t give them much help.”
“You had my report,” Nick said a bit stiffly.
“It wasn’t much of a report, Nick.”
After a bit Nick nodded. “My fault. I just didn’t want to talk about it — and don’t now, for the matter of that — and it was too bloody late. We didn’t just give up, you know. We’ve been tracking him.”
“What happened, Nick?”
“They’d done considerable work when I got there with Brennan. The idea was to rig two singleships together with their drive tubes aimed about ten degrees apart, then moor the framework to the cable from the Pak ship. There was eight miles of it behind the lifesystem section. We could have hauled them home at low thrust. But Brennan said that the Pak drive section would produce ten times the thrust.
“So we boarded the Pak lifesystem sphere and Brennan played around with the controls. I spent a couple of days in there watching him. It turns out you can make the whole hull transparent, or just part of it, the way it was when we found it. We widened the hole Tina Jordan left and fitted an airlock into it.
“Two days of fiddling, and then Brennan said he had it figured out and all we had to do was refuel the drive section. He said that if we tried to tow it backward we’d set off all kinds of failsafe systems. Garner, how the hell was I to know—”
“You couldn’t. It still doesn’t make sense.”
Nick ran a hand backward through his white wool crest. “They’d already rigged up a mating plug to match the fuel plug on the Pak ship. Brennan insisted on doing all the work himself, and even he had to use a radiation suit and shield. We moored his own singleship to the tow line, just in case something failed on the way home. That was my idea, Garner.”
“Uh huh.”
“He took off headed back toward Sol. We tried to fly formation with him, but he was putting the ship through maneuvers, testing the control sytems. We kept our distance. Then — he just turned around and headed out into interstellar space.”
“You tried to catch him?”
Nick yelped, “What tried? We flew alongside him! I didn’t want to make any threatening moves, but he wouldn’t communicate, and we were going to run out of fuel. I ordered Dubchek and Gorton to use their drives as weapons if he didn’t sheer off.”
“What happened?”
“I think he must have turned on his Bussard ramjet field. The electromagnetic effects burned out enough of our equipment to leave us dead in space. Were lucky the drives didn’t blow up. A fuel ship finally got to us, and we managed to make some repairs. By that time Brennan was up to ramscoop speed.”
“All right.”
“How the bell was I to know? We’ve got his food supplyl That bin of roots was almost empty. Was it just a fancy way to commit suicide? Was he afraid of what we’d do with a manned Bussard ramjet ship?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. You know, that could be it. Nick, do you remember him mashing out my cigarette?”
Nick chortled. “Sure. He apologized all over the place, but he wouldn’t let you smoke. I thought you were going to hit him.”
“He’s a protector. Whatever he does, it’s for our own good.” Luke scowled, remembering someone… no, that was all he remembered about her. A high school teacher? “He didn’t want us to have the Pak ship, or something we could learn from it, or from him.”
“Then why did he spend two months out there beyond Pluto? You don’t stop halfway with a Bussard ramjet! It costs reserve fuel! And theres nothing at all out there—”
“The cometary belt, they call it. Most comets spend most of their time out there beyond Pluto. It’s thin, but there’s matter out there. There’s a tenth planet too.”
“He never went near Persephone.”
“But he may have gone near any number of comets.”
“… Right. Okay, he spent two months out there, at rest as far as our monopole detectors could determine. Last month he started moving again. We followed him that long before we were sure. He’s accelerating toward Alpha Centauri. Wunderland.”
“How long before he gets there?”
“Oh, twenty years anyway. It’s a low thrust drive. But we can warn them, and set things up so that our successors warn them again in fifteen years. Just in case.”
“Okay, we can do that. What else? You knew that we dug up the cargo pod.”
“That’s all we know. The UN can keep secrets too.”
“We destroyed the roots and seeds. Nobody really liked the idea, but we did it.”
It was a long time before Nick answered, “Good.”
“Good or bad, we did it. We haven’t had any luck at all understanding the gravity polarizer. If that’s what it was. Brennan could have been lying.”
“It was a gravity polarizer.”
“Just how do you know that?”
“We analyzed the record of the Outsider’s course to Mars. His acceleration varies according to local gravitational gradients: not just by thrust but by direction too.”
“All right, that’ll help. What else can we do?”
“About Brennan, nothing. Eventually he’ll starve. Meanwhile we’ll always know exactly where he is.”
“Or where his monopole source is.”
Nick spoke with dwindling patience. “He doesn’t have a ship without his monopole package. He doesn’t have a food supply, period. He’s dead, Garner.”
“I keep remembering that he’s smarter than we are. If he can find a way to hibernate, it would get him to Wunderland. A thriving colony… and so what? What does he want with Wunderland?”
“Something we haven’t thought of.”
“I’ll never know what it is. I’ll be dead before Brennan reaches Wunderland.” Luke sighed. “Poor Outsider. All this way to bring us the roots that would let us lead a normal life.”
“His intentions were good. Life is hard on us heroes,” Nick said seriously.
INTERLUDE
How to describe a gap of two centuries? Events are the measure of time. A great many things happened in two hundred and twenty years.
The dry corpse of Phssthpok ended in the Smithsonian Institution. There was some discussion as to whether to class it among the hominids. His story was third hand by now, with Brennan unavailable, but his skeleton matched hominid bone structure, bone for bone.
Lucas Garner was dead when the Pak ship passed course midpoint. It did not make turnover. Nick Sohl was watching when its magnetic trace passed Wunderland, two years early and still accelerating toward nowhere. And he wondered.
Olympus Base on Mars was rebuilt to study Phssthpok’s cargo pod in situ, that being easier than trying to lift it against gravity with the gravity polarizer still going. The study group was reluctant to shut it down until they knew how to restart it. They used a hovering singleship to fuse the dust beneath the base, as protection against martians.
The Belt population increased considerably. Bubble worlds proliferated, some equipped with drives to move them around. Mining was becoming more difficult; the best lodes had been exhausted. Cities spread throughout the larger rocks. A decreasing percentage of Belters flew singleships.
A large ice asteroid impacted on Mars, causing dust storms and minor quakes to trouble Olympus Base.
The interstellar colonies prospered and changed. Jinx developed extensive vacuum industries, where the planet’s landscape rises out of the atmosphere at the East End. Society became repressive on Plateau. Wunderland’s population expanded and spread thinly across the major continent, so that cities were long in developing. Civilization developed underground on We Made It, to avoid the hurricane winds of summer and winter. Home was settled, and prospered, benefitting from new techniques and from mistakes made on the earlier colony worlds.