Singularity Station

CHAPTER 12

“Enforcement Service cruiser ranging. Course altering. Super-Phase engaged,” reported a scanner. They would have picked up Rosario, thought Liz Deffant. She sat quite still in the comfortable, deep seat as Maran soothed the disturbed high-grade machines. She had expected pain and terror, grotesque threats, Maran’s fury. And nothing had happened. Her reaction had been predictable, she recognized: resignation and a state of complete supineness. Not only did she feel that she could no longer interfere in the take-over of the ES 110: if there had been a practicable way of upsetting Maran’s schemes, she could not have brought herself to consider it. She was drained of nervous energy. Shock, her mind said again. You’re in shock. The shock of Maran’s totally unexpected treatment. He was a murderer, yet he had a strange dignity. He was a warped personality, yet he could talk sanely to her about her work with the New Settlements Bureau though three cruisers were ranging on the ES 110.

“You’re with the exploration teams, Miss Deffant,” he had said encouragingly. “I expect you know the planet where it was intended to send me?”

“Not that one. Not personally. I know of it.”

She had been able to answer in the same calm way. And what a conversation it had been. Herself, scared witless and only now able to control the shaking of her limbs; Maran, almost elegantly directing the machines that had once controlled the ES 110. Here she was on the bridge with a huge, black-clad man who regarded her with compassion and admiration. Maran the murderer. Maran whose bizarre machines had ripped out the minds of so many deluded men and women.

“I believe it’s an inhospitable planet,” he was saying, talking as if she were a respected colleague, discussing the planet at the Rim where this batch of expellees would have been ejected.

“It was tolerable,” she said. “A rather severe range of temperatures. But there were excellent indigenous building materials. There was a problem with carnivores—” She stopped. She was replying to him as if he were not the murderer of the guard and poor dead Tup. Maran saw her hesitate.

“Hence the primitive ballistic missile-projectors in the pods,” he prompted. “Resourceful thinking, Miss Deffant.”

“You killed them!” Liz burst out, unable to sustain the role Maran was offering her.

“Regrettably, yes.” Maran turned to the console and fed in commands. He turned back to look at her.

“But for you,” he said slowly, “I could turn this ship toward my own planet. Maran could begin again. Everything is ready.” Liz flinched as she saw the muscle straining in his neck. He was flabby, but the muscle was there. “Now, Maran must run.”

“I’m glad!”

“Naturally, Miss Deffant. But you must agree that you have caused me considerable harm.”

“Message beamed from Enforcement Service cruiser,” interrupted the Grade One robot. “Commander Lientand requests direct visual and sound contact with crew-members. Failing that, sir, he requests similar contact with you.”

“You can’t possibly get away,” Liz said quietly. “Not three cruisers—it just can’t be done. Talk to them. They’ll try to understand.”

It took all the strength she could summon up, this plea to Maran. She was fascinated by his impassive gaze. He was looking past her now, to the big operations screen which showed a shadowy representation of the gray-black form of the cruiser. The blue-pulsing screen was the center of all his thoughts. It seemed that he was willing some new contingency to arise. Liz had the feeling that, if he stared hard enough at the operations screen, some avenue of escape would open in the blank reaches between the arms of the Galaxy.

“Three cruisers now on converging course,” reported another scanner.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Liz said, more softly still.

“We leave a wake like a comet’s tail,” said Maran. His big white hands flickered over the console. Liz saw the cosmos pinwheel on the big blue operations screen.

The entire Quadrant lay before her. Another, sensitive motion of Maran’s hands brought the coruscating wakes of three cruisers into brilliant focus. “The cruisers,” said Maran, and the long black snouts had the look of night creatures. “I wonder if they know you are aboard?”

“Talk to them.”

“No, Miss Deffant.” And now he looked at her directly. “I wonder if they know you are aboard the ship?”

Liz said scornfully: “A hostage! They won’t worry about one Bureau employee—not now they know you’re loose! They’ll do anything to stop you!”

But Maran was not listening to her.

“Another request for reciprocal voice and vision contact, sir,” the Grade One robot said deferentially.

“No,” said Maran. “There is no need to accede to the request.”

“There’s no likelihood you can use me as a hostage,” repeated Liz. “What good can it do to try to escape?”

Maran was intent on the screen. She had ceased to exist for him.

“Time,” he muttered. “Time! It’s possible, but once they know, they can range on the ship!” Liz felt blackness crawling into her head as Maran suddenly jerked the enormous Enforcement Service ship out of its course and plunged it wildly among the storms of hyperspace. Gold-shot sable-edged shards of jangling molecules slipped through her brain-cells, leaving an impression of pure chaos. The robots howled reports. Alarms screeched out across the bridge.

Momentarily, Liz saw the cause of Maran’s lightning action.

The three cruisers had turned in a skilled and predetermined move, each flinging out a vast skein of force-fields to inhibit the ES 110’s drive. Traceries of power flashed toward the ship in a careening, terrifying onrush of pyrotechnics. Maran had seen the maneuver. And he had evaded the cosmic whirlwind.

“Evasive action!” the robotic controller called. “This ship must take evasive action against Enforcement Service cruisers’ apprehend procedures! Why?”

Maran punched commands and it was silent.

Liz was deep in the shelter of a soft couch, whose restraint bands had automatically cocooned her against the violent forces surrounding the ship. Maran’s bulky strength kept him at the console, the command chair enfolded him in its protective cushioning as he faced the whining, flashing bank of controls, his massive jaw jutting out over the sensor-pads, his deep dark eyes half closed in concentration. Liz looked at the screen and saw the three wakes weaving a million-mile-wide pattern against the emptiness of the Quadrant. A great, jagged shard of energy hung momentarily around them.

“Now!” Maran bawled as it began to creep across the intervening reaches toward the ES 110. And again the prison-ship danced madly into sable darkness, always away from the advancing onrush of force-fields. The drives faltered. Liz cried aloud, and Maran grated fresh commands. The ship seemed to hang still as the great cloud of forces neared it. Momentarily, the thrusting drive was inhibited.

“Emergency Phase!” Maran yelled. “Burn the engines out!” The fabric of the vessel creaked.

“There’s nowhere you can go!” Liz cried above the scream of the overworked drive and the complaints of a hundred systems.

Maran ignored Liz. His hands wove a fresh spell. Liz could wonder at his steadfast power. Without a tremor, he was working some fresh legerdemain that would take the ship beyond the reach of the cruisers.

The machine responded.

The ES 110 howled, jangled, screamed!

“Kindly confirm latest instructions regarding expellees,” said a Grade Two System.

“I advise an alteration of course,” the Grade One robot said before Liz could begin to ask herself what the machines meant.

Maran again worked his strange chicanery and the machines were soothed. Nevertheless, the Grade One robot asked nervously:

“I take it, sir, that it is essential for the ES 110 to continue the course indicated?” It waited “If you say so, sir. Scanners report objective in view.”

Liz looked at the operations screen.

There was a great blotch across the cosmos. She had seen it before. “No,” she whispered, staring in disbelief. “Not now—not there!”

The ship gave a series of small, abrupt jerks.

Scanners ranged on the wake of the ship as Maran gave orders.

Dazed by the transition from the strange, spreading blotch that had so astounded her, she saw another incomprehensible sight.

In the eddying wake of the ship, scores of tiny objects tumbled end over end in a jerky, unsure jumble. She looked back at Maran. He was watching her.

“I should have sent you, too, Miss Deffant, but I could not.” His hypnotic eyes held her. “Miss Deffant, have you ever met a person for the first time and had the most powerful intuition that you and that person were inextricably bound together?”

Liz knew the terrible irony of his words.

The grim-faced commander of the Enforcement Service cruiser saw the erratic movement of the prison-ship and wondered how long its drive could sustain the colossal pressures exerted on it.

“Anything from Rosario?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said the young lieutenant. “He’s in a coma.”

“And we still don’t know the situation out there.”

“If it’s Maran—”

“It’s Maran.”

“Then he’s keeping us guessing, sir.”

Though he did not allow it to show, the commander was worried. A humane and compassionate man, Commander Lientand had policed the cosmos for thirty years in a Service which he admired. He wished retirement had come earlier. He thought of what he might be called upon to do. Only once had he seen the ghastly, gobbeting power of the cruiser’s main armament. It was a sight to forget. Somewhere within the depths of the cruiser, the golden pellets would be ready.

The ship on the huge screen suddenly leaped into a new framework of dimensions. The field man fought silently to align the force-field which should have snuffed out the ES 110’s drive like a candle in a gale. Twice now, the prison-ship had eluded the blanketing concentration of energies.

“What’s he trying?” the young lieutenant demanded. “He can’t get away,” he said, echoing Liz Deffant’s words. “There’s nowhere he can go!”

The field man frowned. There was a pattern about the runaway ship’s moves: one that made no sense at all. But a pattern nevertheless.

“Sir—” he began. He was interrupted by an excited report.

“Sighting of survival-cylinders, Commander!” a robot reported.

“Scores of them!” echoed the lieutenant. “It’s the expellees—maybe the crew!”

“The ship could be breaking up!” another voice called. Lientand rapped out orders. The three cruisers wheeled to claw in the scores of pods. It was a decision that had to be made instantly, for the cylinders were not designed for deep-space use. True, they had a certain capability of endurance, but a limited one. Rosario had been lucky.

“Maran’s abandoned the ship!” yelled a crewman jubilantly. “We’ll have him in a few minutes!” The field man forgot his unformed yet uneasy moment. He was elated, like the other crewmen; the hunt was over. Lientand was smiling. There would be no need for the frightful holocaust of the sungun. They all watched the bobbing, weaving kaleidoscopic patterns in the prison-ship’s wide, swirling wake. A successful action. The integrity of the Service had been preserved: never had they lost a ship. A particular delight was that the machines had failed: the robots had been unable to cope with the emergency.

“Sir!” yelled the field man, the first to realize that the ES 110 had slipped away like some incorporeal manifestation faced with the dawn. He pointed to the screen. Thin tendrils of broken space showed where the prison-ship had been.

And then the reports came in.

The ES 110 had jerked itself violently away from the space-time where the slowing cruisers and the oscillating survival-cylinders were making their rendezvous.

“I knew it made sense!” the field man yelled. “I didn’t think anyone would use it—look, sir!” he shouted, pointing to a growing blotch on the screen. “That’s where he was making for!” Lientand cursed silently. Maran had used the pods to conceal his latest maneuver. Maran had outwitted him. “Engage main drive!” he called. “Emergency!” Seconds later, he added: “Range on the ES 110

—main armament.”

The young lieutenant gasped: “Sungun, sir?”

“He used the expellees as cover to delay us,” said Lientand. “I should have guessed.”

“But where can he go, sir?”

The field man pointed to the screen. “The Jansky Singularity.” The normal bodily processes seemed to he utterly irrelevant to what he had witnessed. Nevertheless, Buchanan found himself to be ravenously hungry. He was tired, too, he realized. He had not slept at all since the first sighting of the Jansky Singularity by the long-range scanners, and not much for days before that. Living seemed to be telescoped. Everything focused on the search. Buchanan ate and wondered at his appetite. Was it that, by finding the Altair Star, by locating it, he was free of the tensions of the past three years? The thought disturbed him, for it led to other prospects. It led, for one thing, to thoughts of a time when he should have completed his mission. But that way led to despair. There was nothing for him now.

In a moment of clairvoyance, he understood that only a Liz Deffant could have brought him back into the range of normal human feeling. There would be no more of her kind. Not for Al Buchanan.

“Sleep,” he told the cone-shaped pedestal.

“Yes, sir.”

The bridge dimmed agreeably. A couch slid toward him, deeply foamed, utterly inviting.

“Six hours,” he said. Six hours of deep, conditioned sleep, and then the eerie tunnel. He could watt that long. When he woke, he would take the station down into the depths and search out his ship. Satisfied that he had almost come to the end of his quest, Buchanan settled to sleep. It was so nearly over. A bridge to that cocoon of forever…. It was possible. It had to be.