Rostock shrugged. «Will you not sit down?» he invited, and resumed his own place on the couch. Diaz took a chair across the table from him, feeling knobby and awkward. Rostock pushed a box forward. «Cigarette?»
«Thank you.» Diaz struck and inhaled hungrily.
«I hope your arm does not bother you.»
Diaz’s belly muscles tightened. «No. It’s all right.»
«The surgeons left the metal ulna bone in place, as well as its nervous and muscular connections. Complete replacement would have required more hospital equipment than a spaceship can readily carry. We did not want to cripple you by removing the bone. After all, we were only interested in the cartridge.»
Diaz gathered courage and snapped: «The more I see of you, General, the sorrier I am that it didn’t work. You’re big game.»
Rostock chuckled. «Perhaps. I wonder, though, if you are as sorry as you would like to feel you are. You would have died too, you realize.»
«Uh-huh.»
«Do you know what the weapon embedded in you was?»
«Yes. We tell our people such things. A charge of isotopic explosive, with a trigger activated by a particular series of motor nerve pulses. Equivalent to about ten tons of TNT.» Diaz gripped the chair arms, leaned forward and said harshly: «I’m not blabbing anything you don’t now know. I daresay you consider it a violation of the customs of war. Not me! I gave no parole—»
«Certainly, certainly.» Rostock waved a deprecating hand. «We hold… what is your idiom?… no hard feelings. The device was ingenious. We have already dispatched a warning to our Central, whence the word can go out through the fleet, so your effort, the entire project, has gone for nothing. But it was a rather a gallant attempt.»
He leaned back, crossed one long leg over the other, and regarded the American candidly. «Of course, as you implied, we would have proceeded somewhat differently,» he said. «Our men would not have known what they carried, and the explosion would have been triggered posthypnotically, by some given class of situations, rather than consciously. In that way, there would be less chance of betrayal.»
«How did you know, anyway?» Diaz sighed.
Rostock gave him an impish grin. «As the villain of this particular little drama, I shall only say that I have my methods.» Suddenly he was grave. «One reason we made so great an effort to pick you up before your own rescue party arrived, was to gather data on what you have been doing, you people. You know how comparatively rare it is to get a prisoner in space warfare; and how hard to get spies into an organization of high morale which maintains its own laboratories and factories off Earth. Divergent developments can go far these days, before the other side is aware of them. The miniaturization involved in your own weapon, for example, astonished our engineers.»
«I can’t tell you anything else,» Diaz said.
«Oh, you could,» Rostock answered gently. «You know as well as I what can be done with a shot of babble juice. Not to mention other techniques—nothing melodramatic, nothing painful or disabling, merely applied neurology—in which I believe Unasia is ahead of the Western countries. But don’t worry, Captain. I shall not permit any such breach of military custom.
«However, I do want you to understand how much trouble we went to, to get you. When combat began, I reasoned that the ships auxiliary to a dreadnaught would be the likeliest to suffer destruction of the type which leaves a few survivors. From the pattern of action in the first day, I deduced the approximate orbits and positions of several American capital ships. Unasia tactics throughout the second day were developed with two purposes: to inflict damage, of course, but also to get the Ho so placed that we would be likely to detect any distress signals. This cost us the Genghis—a calculated risk that did not pay off—I am not omniscient. But we did hear your call.
«You are quite right about the importance of this ship here. My superiors will be horrified at my action. But of necessity, they have given me carte blanche. And since the Ho itself takes no direct part in any engagement if we can avoid it, the probability of our being detected and attacked was small.»
Rostock’s eyes held Diaz’s. He tapped the table, softly and repeatedly, with one fingernail. «Do you appreciate what all this means, Captain?» he asked. «Do you see how badly you were wanted?»
Diaz could only wet his lips and nod.
«Partly,» Rostock said, smiling again, «there was the desire I have mentioned, to… er… check up on American activities during the last cease-fire period. But partly, too, there was a wish to bring you up to date on what we have been doing.»
«Huh?» Diaz half scrambled from his chair, sagged back and gaped.
«The choice is yours, Captain,» Rostock said. «You can be transferred to a cargo ship when we can arrange it, and so to an asteroid camp, and in general receive the normal treatment of a war prisoner. Or you may elect to hear what I would like to discuss with you. In the latter event, I can guarantee nothing. Obviously I can’t let you go home in a routine prisoner exchange with a prime military secret of ours. You will have to wait until it is no longer a secret—until American intelligence has learned the truth and we know that they have. That may take years. It may take forever, because I have some hope that the knowledge will change certain of your own attitudes.
«No, no, don’t answer now. Think it over. I will see you again tomorrow. In twenty-four hours, that is to say.»
Rostock’s eyes shifted past Diaz, as if to look through the bulkheads. His tone dropped to a whisper. «Have you ever wondered, like me, why we carry Earth’s rotation period to space with us? Habit; practicality; but is there not also an element of magical thinking? A hope that somehow we can create our own sunrises? The sky is very black out there. We need all the magic we can invent. Do we not?»
Several hours later, alarms sounded, voices barked over the intercoms, spin was halted but weight came quickly back as the ship accelerated. Diaz knew just enough Mandarin to understand from what he overheard that radar contact had been made with American units and combat would soon resume. The guard who brought him dinner in his cubicle confirmed it, with many a bow and hissing smile. Diaz had gained enormous face by his audience with the man in the suite.
He couldn’t sleep, though the racket soon settled down to a purposeful murmur with few loud interruptions. Restless in his bunk harness, he tried to reconstruct a total picture from the clues he had. The primary American objective was the asteroid base system of the enemy. But astromilitary tactics were too complicated for one brain to grasp. A battle might go on for months, flaring up whenever hostile units came near enough in their enormous orbitings to exchange fire. Eventually, Diaz knew, if everything went well—that is, didn’t go too badly haywire—Americans would land on the Unasian worldlets. That would be the rough part. He remembered ground operations on Mars and Ganymede far too well.
As for the immediate situation, though, he could only make an educated guess. The leisurely pace at which the engagement was developing indicated that ships of dreadnaught mass were involved. Therefore no mere squadron was out there, but an important segment of the American fleet, perhaps the task force headed by the Alaska. But if this was true, then the Ho Chi Minh must be directing a flotilla of comparable size.
Which wasn’t possible! Flotillas and subfleets were bossed from dreadnaughts. A combat computer and its human staff were too big and delicate to be housed in anything less. And the Ho was not even as large as the Argonne had been.