But, he said, vibrissae twitching happily, Jupiter nodding glad agreement beside him, they were not such fools as Miranda seemed to think! Having dissected her ship, they now had a good idea of what weapons the next one might carry. They could not prevent the Han from using those weapons—not, at least, until they were on the World side of the spaceway. But they could make sure they used them unprofitably.
A-Belinka turned to an index screen and called up pictures of what they had already done. Long since, they had supplemented the scout ship with small drone eyes. These were tiny, remote-controlled spacecraft that had been flashed through the spaceway toward Earth over the past weeks. The scout ship would hang back, out of range, and covered by a screen of drones. If the Chinese fired their weapons they would surely fire first at the nearer, more worrisome drones. They would be diverted, at least for a short time—and once the Han vessel was within range of the spaceway, a hundred thousand kilometers or so, it would take only moments to generate the field and swallow the ship up.
"And," finished the erk, twittering with excitement, "they are almost within range now, Secretary Miranda! Let us waste no more time. Our fleets are ready to deploy for the invasion—once we deal with this Chinese ship, which is already approaching the spaceway."
"And how do we do that?" demanded Miranda, bristling. "Are we going to do something or just sit around talking?"
A-Belinka said humbly, "We're going to do something, Secretary Miranda. Here. Let us look at what we have to deal with." He chirped quick commands to his erk assistants and then pointed with his vibrissae to an index screen.
The Han Chinese ship appeared before them, boosting itself out of low-Earth orbit toward the waiting scout ship. "We have fed into the data storage everything we know about your ship and its weaponry," said A-Belinka, "and also everything that any of you have told us or that we observed from our spy-eye drones."
"Yes, yes," said Miranda impatiently, studying the image on the screen. She listened with half an ear while the erk droned on about the biases that had been placed on the machines, the conjectures that had been fed in, the data from a score of other wars—other wars? Her ears pricked up, but A-Belinka was rattling on. The machines, he said, took all that in and appraised it. They considered the facts, the guesses, the theories. They studied the optical image of the Chinese ship, as well as what their other remote sensors could tell them about its radiations and its physical structure. Then Miranda saw something on the screen that had not been there before.
"Look at those ridges along the hull," she cut in. "They weren't there when they moved the ship to the gantry! And I think there are more antennae than there were—"
"Ah, very good, Secretary Miranda," said A-Belinka, chittering an aside to his helpers. The uncorrected optical blurred and was replaced by a stripped schematic. A-Belinka peered at the screen and said, "Missile weapons! And, oh, what big ones!"
"How did you do that?" Miranda demanded, staring at the index screen. Under the former bulges lay slim cylinders with bright tips.
"It is a most probable case, Miranda," the erk explained. "The machines have taken all the data and produced a best estimate. Usually they are quite reliable. Now the antennae—" And the smart erk assistants did something else with the controls, and the blisters that marred the smooth surface melted away. Underneath were parabolic dishes, great and small. "Why," said the erk with pleasure, "I think those are radiation weapons! You didn't tell us that the Chinese had radiation weapons."
"I don't know what you're talking about," snapped Miranda.
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said the erk dreamily, "but the machines have deduced that the Chinese understand that the spaceway is immaterial—energy, rather than matter—and so they intend to try to jam it. It will not work, of course—but how interesting, to find that the enemy is cleverer than we hoped!"
Miranda cast a doubtful look at Jupiter and a worried one at the erk. "'Hoped'?" she repeated. "That doesn't worry you?"
The erk bounced up and down happily. "It makes the game more fun!" he declared. "Where is the pleasure in shooting inklings on the nest? No, it is good that they should offer real opposition—for then, when we triumph, the satisfaction will be much greater!" He hopped off his perch and scuttled toward the door. "Come along, everyone," he sang. "Let's capture this dangerous enemy before he makes real trouble. The game is about to begin!"
And Miranda, tugged along by the firm, joyous hand of Jupe, followed slowly and thoughtfully. The liberation of America had been a hopeless dream for most of her life— only in the last few days a real and thrilling prospect. It had been something she was willing to die for, even to kill for.
She had never once considered it as a "game."
Part IV
I
MANYFACE lay in his cocoon, watching the alien ship grow larger on the spaceship's screen. Manyface was not the only one in a cocoon. Every space traveler had a cocoon to cushion him against the shocks and drags of space travel, but Manyface's had to be more huge and more complex than most, since Manyface himself was. The part where his huge head rested, the part that cushioned the head against squeezing and the neck against snapping, was jelly-filled and twice the size of the others. It did not keep Manyface from seeing what was going on, although it reminded him that his survival was far more precarious than the rest of the crew.
But so was all of Manyface's life. Manyface had taken on himself the burden of ten other minds in his own. Those ten other samples of brain tissue tucked inside his own imposed restraints on everything he did. If Manyface, high Party member, chose to overrule the restraints, that was the privilege of his position. It was also the risk of his choosing, for the launch directors had warned him that the flight might cost him his life. Or, more accurately, his lives. Some of the eleven lives that made up the committee called Manyface had opposed the plan.
Manyface twisted slightly in the cocoon. His head ached fiercely, and not just with the acceleration he had endured. For any human being, the venture of space required cosseting and armoring and training. Space was a sea where the sharks were swimming. One did not venture into it bare. For as peculiar a person as himself, thought Many-face—thought one of the personas of Manyface, and the rest of the committee concurred—the armor had to be twice as strong and all precautions doubled.
Lying supine in his cocoon, twitching uncomfortably at every slight change of thrust, Manyface decided that there was one other noteworthy thing about space travel. It was boring. He had been warned of dangers. He hadn't been warned that there would be so many long hours with nothing to do but lie there while the ship painfully lifted itself away from the Earth. Nor had anyone mentioned that other unpleasantness of space travel, that you smelled all your companions in all of their animal aroma. Like all Han, Manyface intensely disliked body odors. In the spaceship, they were part of the air he breathed, inescapably.
He drowsed off, thinking about the last few days. When the traitorous peasant woman Feng Miranda stole aboard the first ship, when that ship disappeared, suddenly and terrifyingly, there had been upheavals on Hainan-ko. All precautions were doubled at once. Tchai Howard had seen to that. He had been made to look a fool, and rage as well as prudence made him recheck every precaution. No treacherous young female would steal into a dressing room and stun an astronaut again! Nor would there be as easy a hijacking of this second ship as there had been of the President's yacht.