I couldn’t help it. It was a fight, and I was rooting for my side. There was no doubt the fight had commenced. You can’t see rays in space, not even the converted Heechee digger rays that were the JAWS fleet’s main armament, but there were bright flashes of chemical explosions and worse, startlingly visible, as the JAWS ships launched their secondary missiles.
The myriad Foe vessels bored on. They were untouched.
Considered purely as spectacle, it was, my God, tremendous. Even though at the same time it was terrifying. Even if I didn’t know exactly what was going on.
It was my very first space battle. For that matter, it was everybody else’s first, too, because the last fight between ships in space had been between the Brazilians and the ships of the People’s Republic of China, nearly a century before, in that last bloody and inconclusive struggle that led to the foundation of the multinational Gateway authority. So I was no expert on what should have happened next, but what did happen was a lot less than I could have expected. Ships should have exploded or something. Bits and pieces of wreckage should have flown all over.
There wasn’t any of that.
What happened was that the cone of Foe ships opened up and surrounded the battling JAWS vessels. They englobed them; and then they well . . . what they did, they vanished. They just disappeared, leaving the JAWS cruisers huddled together in space.
And then the cruisers disappeared, too.
And then, just below us, the Watch Wheel itself ffickered and was gone.
Space was empty around us. There was nothing to be seen except the pearly whirl of the Galaxy below, the distant external firefly galaxies, the smoky yellow blobs of the kugelblitz.
We became visible to each other; it was too lonesome otherwise. We looked at each other uncomprehendingly.
“I wondered if something like this might happen,” said Albert Einstein, soberly sucking his pipe.
Cassata roared: “Damn you! If you know what’s going on, tell us!”
Albert shrugged. “I think you’ll see for yourself,” he said, “because I imagine it will be our turn next.”
And it was. We looked at each other, and then there was nothing else to see. Nothing outside the ship, I mean. Nothing but the pebbly gray of faster-than-light travel. It was like looking out of an airplane window into dense fog.
And then it wasn’t.
Fog vanished. The ship’s sensors could see clearly again.
And what we suddenly saw, without warning, was solid, familiar black space and stars . . . and even a planet and a moon . . . and, yes, I knew what they were. That planet and that moon were the ones human eyes (or nearly human eyes) had looked at for half a million years.
We were in orbit around the Earth; and so were a good many other artifacts I recognized as JAWS cruisers, and even the immense Watch Wheel itself.
It was more than I could handle.
I thought I knew what to do about that, though, because when things are too much for me there is always one thing I can do to get help. I did it. “Albert!” I cried.
But Albert just went on gazing out at the Earth and the Moon and the other objects outside the True Love, and smoking his pipe, and didn’t answer.
20
BACK HOME
Albert Einstein was not the only appliance that seemed to have stopped functioning. The JAWS ships had problems of their own. Every control system for weaponry of any kind had been simply fried. They didn’t work.
Everything else was fully operational. Communications were fine—and busy, with everyone asking everyone else just what the hell had happened. Nothing nondestructive was damaged. The lights on the Wheel still worked, and so did the air-changers. The workthings prepared meals and tidied up spills. The bunks in the commodore’s cabin in the JAWS flagship continued to make themselves, and the trash receptacles emptied themselves into the recycling pools.
The True Love, which had never had any arms, was as good as new. We could have started it and flown right off to anywhere at all.
But where should we go?
We went nowhere. Alicia Lo took the controls and kept us in a safe orbit, but that was it. I didn’t bother. I was focused one hundred percent on my faithful data-retrieval system and very dear friend. I said desperately, “Albert, please.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at me absently. “Robin,” he said, “I must ask you to be patient for a while.”
“But Albert! I beg you! What’s going to happen next?” He gave me what is called an unfathomable look-at least, I certainly couldn’t fathom it.
“Please! Are we in danger? Are the Foe going to come down and kill us all?”
He looked astonished. “Kill us? What an idea, Robin! After they met you and me and Mrs. Broadhead and Miss Lo and General Cassata? No, of course not, Robin, but I must excuse myself, I’m quite busy now.”
And that was all he would say.
And after a while the shuttles began to come up from the launch loops, and we had our datastores taken back down to the good old Earth, and we tried-oh, for a long time we tried-to sort things out.
21
ENDINGS
I didn’t know how to begin this, and now I find I don’t know how to end it, either.
You see, that was the ending. There’s nothing else to tell except what happened.
I know that to linear meat ears that must sound odd (not to say revoltingly cute), just as so many of the other things I have said sounded odd (or worse). I can’t help that. The odd cannot be expressed nonoddly, and I have to tell it like it is. What “happened” next didn’t really matter, because what happened had done so already.
Of course, even vastened folks like myself are somewhat linear and so it took us a while to find that out.
What Essie and I wanted more than anything else, we agreed, was breathing space-to rest up; to try to find out just what was going on; above all to collect our awry thoughts. We actually had our physical datastores taken to the old house on the Tappan Sea, the first time we had done that in a fairish number of years, and we settled down to get our heads straight.
Albert’s datastore came with us.
Albert himself was another question. Albert no longer responded to my call. If Albert was still in the datastore, he did not show himself.
Essie was not about to admit defeat from one of her own programs. The first thing she did was to busy herself with program checks and debugging routines. Then Essie gave up.
“Can find nothing wrong with Albert Einstein program,” she said, “except does not work.” She looked angrily at the datafan that had held Albert Einstein. “Is only corpse!” she said fretfully. “Is body whence the life has died, you know?”
“What can we do?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. I just was not used to having my machines fail me.
Essie shrugged. She offered a consolation prize: “Can write new Al-bert program for you,” she said. I shook my head. I didn’t want a new program. I wanted Albert. “Then,” she said practically, “can rest and cultivate our gardens. How about nice swim and then scrumptious huge fattening lunch?”
“Who can eat? Essie, help me! I want to know,” I complained. “I want to know what the hell he was talking about when he told us not to worry-what do you and Cassata and Alicia Lo have to do with it? What do the three of you have in common?”
She pursed her lips. Then she brightened. “How about ask them?”
“Ask them what?”
“Ask them all about selves. Invite them here-then can all have nice lunch!”
It didn’t happen quite that fast.