“What?”
“A widget. Something I dreamed up after we found the Pak fleet, when I saw that there might be Pak scouts around. The designs are in the computer.”
Roy did not fear loneliness. He feared its opposite. Brennan was an odd companion, and Protector was going to be cramped when they finally left the Flying Dutchman. For a week or so Roy stayed away from the observatory, consciously savoring his alone-ness. In the empty exercise room he hovered in midair, swinging his arms and legs in wide circles. Later he would want to remember the room. Even this half-hollowed ball of rock was too small for a man who would rather be climbing a mountain.
Once he suggested another dry run. Brennan’s models of the Pak scouts would be more accurate now. But Brennan wasn’t having any. “You know as much as you’re ever going to about fighting Pak. Does that scare you?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Glad to bear it.”
One day Brennan wasn’t in the laboratory. Roy went looking for him. The longer it took the more stubborn he got; but Brennan didn’t seem to be anywhere aboard.
He finally asked himself, “How would Brennan handle this? Logic. If he’s not inside, then he’s outside. What’s outside that he might need?”
Right. Vacuum, and access to the surface.
The tree, the grass, the mud of the pond bottom were all freeze-dried and dead. The stars were bright and eerie, and more real than they had seemed on a vision screen. Roy could see them as a battlefield: the unseen worlds as territories to be fought over, the gas shells around stars as death traps for an unwary warrior.
He spotted Brennan’s torch.
Brennan was working in vacuum, building… something. His redesigned pressure suit seemed both alien and anachronistic, and the chest design was a detail from Dali: a Madonna and Child, very beautiful. A torn loaf of bread floated within the window in the Child’s torso, and he looked down at it with an adult, thoughtful gaze.
“Don’t come too close,” Brennan said into his suit mike. “I had plenty of time to fiddle with this ball of rock while I was shaping Kobold. There are deposits of pure elements under all this landscaping.”
“What are you making?”
“Something that should collapse a polarized gravity generator at a distance. If generated gravity is what they’re using to hold their ships in tandem, they’ll have to polarize it to make it work over those distances. We know they know how to do it. They’ll put the generator on the trailing ship, because that’s the ship that’s producing enough excess power to maintain the field.”
“Suppose they’re using something else?”
“So I waste a month. But I won’t believe they’re using cables. In deceleration mode even a Pak cable won’t stand up to the exhaust from the trailing ship. I might believe they loaded everything on the trailing ship and used the lead ship purely as a stripped Bussard ramjet compressor. But they’d lose power and maneuverability.
“I’ve been trying to design a Pak scout ship myself. It isn’t easy, because I don’t know what they’ve got. The worst thing I can think of from our viewpoint is two independent ships with heavy, versatile ram field generators. That way if you lost a couple of lead ships in a battle, you could link the trailing ships, and vice versa.”
“Yah.”
“But I don’t believe it. The more widgetry they put into each ship, the fewer ships they wind up with. I think they’d compromise. The lead ship is a Bussard ramjet, built to fight, but not too different from ours. It’s the trailing ship that’s versatile, with the oversized adjustable ram field generator. You could link two trailing ships, but not two lead ships. The lead ships are more vulnerable anyway. You saw that.”
“Then these scouts are tougher than what I fought.”
“And there are three of them.”
“Three.”
“They’re coming in a cone, through — you remember that map of the space around Sol? There’s a region that’s almost all red dwarfs, and they’re coming through that. I think the idea is to map an escape route for the fleet, in case something goes wrong at Sol. Otherwise they’ll see to it that Sol is clean, then go on to other yellow dwarf stars. At the moment they’re all about a light year from Sol and about eight light-months apart.”
Roy looked up. Where within the battlefield — ? He found Sol easily, but he couldn’t remember the direction of the first scout. He shivered in his suit, though it was far more comfortable than it had ever been. Brennan had been tinkering with it.
“There could be more.”
“I doubt it,” said Brennan. “I didn’t find any more beryllium traces at any frequency shift.”
“Suppose they came in ones instead of twos. They’d show as ordinary Bussard ships.”
“I don’t believe it. Look, they need to be able to see each other. If a scout disappears, the others want to know it.”
“All right. Now we’ve got to keep them away from Sol. How about using ourselves as a decoy?”
“Right.”
That absent-minded monosyllable was disconcerting. It happened every so often, this implication that Brennan had already thought it through, in every detail, long ago. When he didn’t say any more, Roy asked, “Anything I can do to help?”
“No. I’ve got to finish this. Improve your mind. Brush up on local astronomy; it’s our battle map. Look up Home. We’re not going to Wunderland now. We’re going to Home, if we get the choice.”
“How come?”
“Let’s say I’m planning to make a right angle turn in deep space. Home’s the easiest target after that. They’ve also got a good industrial civilization.”
HOME: Epsilon Indi 2, second of five planets in a system which also includes 200 asteroids randomly distributed in charted orbits. Gravity: 1.08. Diameter: 8800 miles. Rotation: 23 hours 10 minutes. Year: 181 days. Atmosphere: 23% oxygen, 76% nitrogen, 1% nontoxic trace gasses. Sea level pressure: 11 pounds/square inch.
One moon, diameter: 1200 miles, gravity: 0.2, surface composition: roughly lunar.
Discovery reported 2094, via ramrobot exploration probe. Settled 2189, by a combination of slowboats and ramrobots…
Settling Home had been made easier by two new techniques. The slowboats had carried sixty colonists each, in stasis. Sixty colonists would have filled three or four slowboats a century earlier. And, though no living thing could survive travel in a ramrobot, it had proved possible to ship fuel to the slowboats via ramrobot. An older technique was used extensively: colony supplies were shipped via ramrobot to orbit about Home, saving room aboard the slowboats. Rams that failed on the way would fail in time for replacements to be sent.
The original colonists had planned to call their new world Flatland. Perhaps it amused them to think of themselves and their descendants as flatlanders. Once on Home they had changed their minds: a belated attack of patriotism. Population: 3,200,000. Colonized area: 6,000,000 square miles. Principal cities… Roy spent some time memorizing the maps. Cities and towns had tended to form in the forks of rivers. The farming communities were all near the sea. Home had sea life but little land life, and farming of any kind required a complete ecology; but sea life was used extensively for fertilizer.
There were extensive mining industries, all confined to Home itself.
Communication with Earth formed a principal industry, which tended to produce other industries at a steady rate.
Three million… A population of three million at this date meant a heavy birthrate, even if initially augmented by bottle-grown babies and later by more colony ships. Roy hadn’t thought of that aspect of moving to a colony world. There was a pride in being the father of many children… a pride that would have less meaning on Home, where you didn’t have to prove genius or invent the wheel or something just to get the license. Still… he would have children on two worlds.