“Sure!” came the cheerful bellow. “But it would have scared a lot of people. I didn’t want to make that many waves. I shouldn’t even have done that duplicate Stonehenge.”
“We’ve not only found Vandervecken,” Alice whispered. “We’ve found Finagle Himself!” Roy laughed.
“Come on up!” Brennan bellowed. “It’ll save shouting. Don’t worry about the gravity. It adjusts.”
They were exhausted when they reached the top of the tower. “Esher’s Relativity” ended in a spiral stair, and that seemed to go on and on, past slits of windows designed for archery fire.
The room at the top was dark, and open to the sky. By Brennan’s whim its roof and sides seemed smashed away, as by rocks fired from ballistas. But the sky was not the sky of Earth. Suns glared there, hellishly bright, fearfully close.
Brennan turned from his controls — a wall of instruments six feet tall and twelve feet long, prickly with lights and levers and dials. In the dim light of the suns he looked like some ancient mad scientist, bald and disfigured, pursuing knowledge at any cost to himself and the world.
Alice was still staring at the altered sky. But Roy bowed low and said, “Merlin, the king commands thy presence.”
Brennan snapped, “Tell the old buzzard I can’t make him any more gold till the lead shipments arrive from Northumberland! Meanwhile, how do you like my telescope?”
Alice said, “The whole sky?”
“Lie down, Alice. You’ll strain your neck in that position. It’s a gravity lens.” He read their puzzlement. “You know that a gravity field bends light? Good. I can make a field that warps light into a focus. It’s lenticular, shaped like a red blood platelet. That’s how I get my sunlight. Sol seen through a gravity lens, with a scattering component to give me blue sky. One fringe benefit is that the lens scatters light going the other way, so you can’t see Kobold until you’re right on top of it.”
Roy looked up at the suns burning close. “That’s quite an effect.”
“That’s Saggitarius, the direction of the galactic hub. I still haven’t found that goddamn ship, but it makes for pretty lights, doesn’t it?” Brennan touched a control and the sky slid past them, as within some faster-than-light craft moving through a globular cluster.
Roy said, “What happens when you find him?”
“I told you that. I’ve played it out a hundred times in my head. It’s as if I’ve lived it all before, in all possible ways. My ship’s a duplicate of the one Phssthpok used, except for some refinements. I can get up to three gravities with the ram alone, and I’ve got two hundred years’ worth of weaponry developments in the cargo pod.”
“I still think—”
“I know you do. It’s partly my doing that you haven’t had a war in so long. So you’ve grown soft, and it makes you more likable, bless you. But this is a war situation.”
“But is it?”
“What do you know about the Pak?”
Roy didn’t answer.
“There’s a Pak ship coming. If the Pak in question ever finds out the truth about us he’ll try to exterminate us. He may succeed. I’m telling you this, dammit! I’m the only man who’s ever met a Pak. I’m the only man who could ever understand one.”
Roy bristled. The arrogance of him! “Then where is he, O All-Knowing Brennan?”
Another might have hesitated in embarrassment. Not Brennan. “I don’t know yet.”
“Where should he be?”
“On his way to Alpha Centaurus. From the strength of the signal—” Brennan manipulated something, and the sky surged past them in streaks of light. Roy blinked, fighting vertigo.
The stars jarred to a halt. “There. In the middle.”
“Is that where your funny chemicals are coming from?”
“More or less. It’s not exactly a point-source.”
“Why Alpha Centaurus?”
“Because Phssthpok would have gone almost in the opposite direction. Most of the nearby yellow dwarf suns are all to one side of Sol. The Centaurus suns are an exception.”
“So this second Pak would look around the Centaurus system, and if he didn’t find Wunderland he’d head on away from Sol.”
“That was my best guess. But,” said Brennan, “the direction of his exhaust shows him coming dead on. Now I have to assume he’s been watching for Phssthpok to leave here. I did send Phssthpok’s ship off toward Wunderland. I have to assume it didn’t fool him. If Phssthpok hasn’t left here, he may have found what he was looking for. So Pak number two is coming here.”
“And where would he be now?”
The sky surged again. Bright suns backed by tiny suns, dim-lit gas and dust clouds, a panorama of the universe flowed past and lurched to a stop. “There.”
“I don’t see him.”
“I don’t either.”
“So you haven’t found him. Do you still claim to understand the Pak?”
“I do.” Brennan didn’t hesitate. In all the time he knew him, Roy Truesdale only saw him hesitate once. “If they’re doing something unexpected it’s because of a change in their environment.”
Unexpectedly Alice spoke. “Could there be a lot of ships?”
“No. Why would the Pak send us a fleet?”
“I don’t know. But they’d be further away than you’d guess from the density of your funny chemicals. Harder to find,” she said. She was cross-legged on the floor, with her head thrown back to see the stars. Brennan didn’t seem to be listening — he was working the telescope controls — but she went on. “The exhaust would be more blurred. And if they were further away they’d be moving faster, wouldn’t they? You’d get higher velocity particles.”
“Not if they were carrying more cargo,” said Brennan. “That would slow them.” The sky surged toward them, and blurred. “But it’s so damn unlikely! There’s only one assumption that would fit. Please bear with me; this takes a lot of fiddling, getting these fields just right.” The starfield half-cleared, then blurred again. “I’d have had to do this eventually anyway. Then we can all stop worrying.”
The blur of the sky condensed into hard white points. Now there was no giant sun in the field of view.
But there were a couple of hundred blue points all the same size, tiny, set wide apart in what Roy gradually realized was a hexagonal array.
“I just didn’t believe it,” said Brennan. “It was too much coincidence.”
“It is. It’s a whole fleet!” Roy felt horror and the beginnings of panic. A fleet of Pak, coming here — and Brennan, the Protector of Man, hadn’t anticipated it.
He’d trusted Brennan.
“There must be more,” said Brennan. “Further in toward the galactic core. Too far to see with my instruments. A second wave. Maybe a third.”
“These aren’t enough?”
“They aren’t enough,” Brennan agreed. “Don’t you understand? Something’s happened to the galactic core. It’s the only thing that could bring this many ships this far. That implies that they’ve evacuated the Pak world. I don’t see enough ships to do it, not even with the wars that must have been fought, with each protector trying to get his descendants on the first ships.”
Little blue lights against a sky of too-bright stars. All that, from little blue lights?
Alice rubbed her neck. “What could have happened?”
“Any kind of thing. Black holes wandering through the core suns, picking up more and more mass, maybe wandering too near Pak. Or some kind of space-born life. Or the galactic core could be exploding in a rash of supernovae. It’s happened in other galaxies. What burns me is that it had to happen now!”
“Can’t you think of any other explanation?”
“None that fits. And it’s not quite as coincidental as it sounds,” Brennan said wearily. “Phssthpok built the best astronomical system in millennia, to chart his course as far as he could. After he left they must have looked around and found — something. Supernovae in a dense cluster of older suns. Stars disappearing. Places where light was warped. It’s still a Finagle’s Coincidence. I just didn’t believe it.”