“That first pair, anyway. And if I turn now it’ll give us a better window.”
“Window?”
“For that right-angle turn.”
“Listen, you can eitber explain that right-angle turn business or stop bringing it up.”
Brennan chuckled. “I have to keep you interested somehow, don’t I?”
“What are you planning? Close orbit around a black hole?”
“My compliments. That’s a good guess. I’ve found a nonrotating neutron star… almost nonrotating. I wouldn’t dare dive into the radiating gas shell around a pulsar, but this beast seems to have a long rotation period and no gas envelope at all. And it’s nonluminous. It must be an old one. The scouts’ll have trouble finding it, and I can chart a hyperbola through the gravity field that’ll take us straight to Home.”
Casual as Brennan sounded, that sounded dangerous. And the Pak scouts moved steadily closer. Four months later the first pair of ships was naked-eye visible, a blue-green point alone in a black sky.
They watched it grow. Its drive flame made wiggly lines on Brennan’s instruments. “Not too bad,” said Brennan. “Of course you’d be dead if you went outside for awhile.”
“Yah.”
“I wonder if hes close enough to try the gravity widget.”
Roy watched, but did not understand, as Brennan played his control board. Brennan had never showed him how to use that particular weapon. It was too delicate, too intuitive. But two days later the bluegreen light went out.
“Got him,” Brennan said with evident satisfaction. “Got the hind ship, anyway. He probably fell into his own black hole.”
“Is that what your widget does? Collapse somebody else’s gravity generator into a hypermass?”
“That’s what it’s supposed to do. But let’s just see.” He used the spectroscope. “Right. Helium lines only. Hind ship gone, lead ship coming on at about one gee. He’ll be passing me sooner than he expected. He’s got two choices now. Run or ram. I think he’ll try to ram — so to speak.”
“He’ll try to throw his ram field across us. That’d kill us, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Him too. Well—” Brennan dropped some missiles, then started a turn.
Two days later the lead ship was gone. Brennan swung Protector back on course. It had all seemed very like one of Brennan’s dry runs, except that it took even longer.
The next pass was different.
It was six months before the remaining Pak came close; but one day they were naked-eye visible, two wan yellow dots in the blackness astern. Their speed had dropped to not much above Protector’s own.
From an initial separation of eight light-months the scout pairs had converged over the years, until they were nearly side by side, thirty light-hours behind Protector.
“Time to try the gravity widget again,” said Brennan.
While Brennan played with the controls, Roy looked up at two yellow eyes glowing beyond the black shadow of the drive section. Intellectually he knew that he would see nothing for two and a half days…
And he was wrong. The flare came from below, lighting the interior of the lifesystem sphere. Brennan moved instantly, stabbing out with a stiff forefinger.
For a moment afterward, then, Brennan hovered wiretense over the dials. Then he was himself again. “Reflexes still in order,” he said.
“What happened?”
“They did it. They built a gravity widget like mine. My own widget collapsed into a hypermass, and the hypermass started eating its way up the cable. If I hadn’t blown the cable in time it would have absorbed the weapons pod. The energy release would have killed us.” Brennan opened the keyboard panel and began closing control elements down against future need. “Now well have to beat them to the neutron star. If they maintain their deceleration, we will.”
“What are they likely to throw at us in the meantime?”
“Lasers for sure. They need heavy lasers anyway, to communicate with the main fleets. I’m going to opaque the twing.” He did. Now they were locked inside a gray shell, the scouts showing only in the telescope screen. “Other than that… we’re all in a bad way for throwing bombs. We’re all decelerating. My missiles would be like going uphill; they couldn’t reach them at this distance. They can reach me, but their bombs are going in the wrong direction. They’ll go right through the ram field from behind.”
“Good.”
“Sure. Unless they’re accurate enough to hit the ship itself. Well, we’ll see.”
The lasers came in two beams of searing green light, and Protector was blind aft. Part of Protector’s skin boiled away frighteningly. The underskin was mirror-surfaced.
“That won’t hurt us until they get a lot closer,” said Brennan. But he worried about missiles. He began dodging at random, and life became uncomfortable as Brennan played with Protector’s acceleration.
A cluster of small masses approached them. Brennan opened the ram field constriction wide, and they watched the explosions in relative comfort, though some of them shook the ship. Roy watched almost without fear. He was bothered by the growing feeling that Brennan and the Pak protectors were playing an elaborate game whose rules they both understood perfectly: a game like the space war games played by computer programmers. Brennan had known that he would get the first ships, that the others would ruin his widget, that in matching courses for a proper duel they would slow too far to catch him by the time they discovered the neutron star ahead…
A day out from the neutron star, one of the green war beams went out. “They finally saw it,” said Brennan, “They’re lining up for the pass. Otherwise they could wind up being flung off in opposite directions.”
“They’re awfully close,” said Roy. They were, in a relative sense: they were four light-hours behind Protector, closer than Sol is to Pluto. “And you can’t dodge much, can you? It’d foul our course past the star.”
“Let me get this done,” Brennan mumbled, and Roy shut up.
The thrust dropped easily to half a gee. Protector swung left, and the lifesystem pod swung oddly at the end of its cable.
Then Brennan turned the ram field off entirely. “There’s a bit of a gas shell,” he explained. “Now don’t bug me for awhile.”
Protector was in free fall, a sitting duck.
Eight hours later there were missiles. The scouts must have fired as soon as they saw the sparkle of Protector’s ram field go out. Brennan dodged, using the insystem drive. The missiles he’d thrown at the scouts had no apparent effect: the hellish green light from the lead ship continued to bathe Protector.
“He’s cut his ram field,” Brennan said presently. “He’ll have to cut his laser too, when he runs out of battery power.” He looked at Roy for the first time in hours. “Get some sleep. You’re half dead now. What’ll you be like when we round the star?”
“All dead,” Roy sighed. He reclined his chair. “Wake me up if he hits us, will you? I’d hate to miss anything.”
Brennan didn’t answer.
Three hours away, the neutron star was still invisible ahead of them. Brennan said, “Ready?”
“Ready.” Roy was suited up, floating with one hand on the jamb of the airlock. There was still sleep in his eyes. His dreams had been fearsome.
“Go.”
Roy went. The lock would pass only one man. He was at work when Brennan came through. Brennan had cut this close, to reduce radiation exposure from the neutron star’s thin gas envelope, and to reduce the time the Pak had to blast away at unprotected men.
They detached the cable that led to the drive section, then used it to reel the drive section close, coiling the cable as it came. It was thick and heavy. They stowed it against the stern of the drive section.