“And what do we do then?”
Gann frowned. “Then, I’m afraid, we’ll have to improvise. There’ll still be the rest of the crew to deal with. But we’ll be in a good position – at the nerve centre of the ship, and with plenty of weapons at our disposal. At least they’ll know they’ve been in a fight.”
Murder isn’t my business, thought Heshke as they made their way toward the execution of Gann’s plan. I’m an archaeologist, a middle-aged archaeologist. I wish there was some way out of this.
But there wasn’t.
In a way their being devs made it easier; not like killing True Men.
But even killing a dog was unpleasant.
The thoughts were still spinning around in his mind when they came to the last intersection before the control room. Gann touched his elbow encouragingly and slipped off down a side passage.
Heshke continued on until he arrived at the demilune where some swing doors gave entrance to the control room. There was always a Chink standing here, like a commissionaire before the door of an expensive hotel. At the sight of him Heshke froze, momentarily paralysed. The Chink was so young, so affable-looking.
The young Chink turned and saw him, apparently noticing the stricken look on his face. Lieutenant Gann hove into view on the other side, a tall, comparatively sinister figure. He surreptitiously motioned to Heshke to get on with it; Heshke took a step forward.
And then, impatient with Heshke’s hesitancy, Gann sprang. He hooked an arm around the Chink’s neck, forcing his head back to expose his throat to the knife. Heshke’s eyes bulged; he couldn’t look, he couldn’t turn away.
But just as the worst was about to happen something, a sliver of light, darted from the ceiling and struck Gann in the back. Scarcely any change of expression came over the Titan’s face; his body went limp, collapsing to the floor and nearly dragging the Chink with it.
The Chink recovered his balance and stared down at the body, his eyes wide with consternation. Then he flung open the swing doors and shouted something in a high-pitched, singsong voice. More Chinks came running from the control room, looking first at Gann and then at Heshke and chattering to him, their faces expressing commiseration, concern, regret.
One of them took Heshke by the arm and led him into the control room. He gazed blankly around at it, at the curved control panels sweeping by on either side, at the flickering screens whose rapidly changing images meant nothing to him.
His guide stepped up to one of the panels and began punching something out on a keyboard. After a pause words appeared on a screen over the Chink’s head.
Ship programmed protect itself. Very sad friend die. Should have warned. So sorry.
Heshke nodded dismally, turned and walked back into the demilune, where a small crowd was still collected. For some reason Ascar arrived. He stood looking down at the dead Lieutenant, his expression unreadable. Then he suddenly gave the Titan hooked-arm salute.
“Salute to a brave officer,” he said wryly.
“He was a brave officer,” Heshke answered.
“Yes, I know.”
Heshke felt unutterably weary.
He returned to his room and remained there for the rest of the voyage. He felt defeated, but oddly the death of Gann did not affect him as much as he might have imagined.
And neither did he kill himself. He had come to the conclusion that Ascar was right: Gann had been too presumptuous concerning the people who had rescued them from non-time. There was nothing substantial to indicate that they were hostile at all.
He slept, ate and slept, ate and slept until he felt rested. Eventually a Chink came and took him to the control room again. Ascar was already there; he gave Heshke a glance and a nod. He seemed to be familiar with the control room, as if he had made himself at home there.
The Chink pointed to a screen, and Heshke suddenly understood. He was being shown their destination. He stared entranced at the glittering shape, like an elongated hourglass, that hung suspended against ebon space, backed by hard, shining stars. A touch of the old apprehension came over him. Was this some alien stronghold, or—
Or what was it?
8
Watching through the transparent wall of his spatio-temporal observatory, Shiu Kung-Chien saw the ship return from Earth and dock in the nearby sphincter. He could pretend no enthusiasm for the event; the ship’s drive interfered with his apparatus and until the docking was completed he was obliged to suspend his current experiment.
He spent the time sitting patiently, drinking green tea and contemplating the dark, star-clouded universe all around him. He derived a satisfying feeling of insignificance from regarding it thus; a feeling that, as an organic, thinking being, he was a stranger in it. For it was an infinite expanse of non-time, a universe that had been made, in the first instance, without any time at all. Here and there localised processes of time had started themselves up, mostly weak, some quite powerful, proceeding in all directions, at all angles to one another. Occasionally they even met. They were accidental, small-order phenomena of limited period, but because of them life was able to exist.
On Earth, the most unhappy circumstance that could happen in the whole of existence had arisen: two distinct time-streams associated with the same planet. What was more, they were on a direct, head-on collision course.
Not that events of this nature were impossibly rare, especially in galaxies where the forces of yin and yang were so much out of balance as to cause numerous time-systems to arise. It was one good reason, in fact, for living in interstellar space, away from the traffic, as it were. Even so, Retort City itself had suffered a near-miss some centuries ago – a glancing blow by some entity travelling obliquely to its own time-direction. Shiu Kung-Chien still maintained contact with this entity: actually it was the object of his current experiments.
Pouring his third cup of fragrant tea, he noted that the space-time-ship had now slipped through the sphincter. No doubt the Earth passengers it carried would be full of hysterical pleas for assistance and he foresaw a tiresome time ahead. Personally he had opposed offering Earth any help at all, on the grounds that it might involve the full capacity of the Production Retort and cause inconvenience, particularly with regard to delays in the delivery of equipment he had ordered for his own work. But the other members of the cabinet, out of some sort of filial respect for the planet where mankind had been bred, had disagreed with him.
The meter by his side informed him that the incoming ship had shut down its engines. He rose, beckoning his cybernetic servitors.
“The area is clear. Let us begin.”
The machines rolled across the work area to make final preparations. But Shiu Kung-Chien was interrupted yet again by a gentle introductory tone from the observatory’s entrance door. Into the observatory came the sedate figure of Prime Minister Hwen Wu.
“Welcome to my retreat, honoured colleague,” said Shiu Kung-Chien in a voice that bore just a trace of exasperation. “Your visit is connected, presumably, with the arrival of the ship from Earth.”
The other nodded. “One of the passengers, it seems, is a scientist of some repute – no less than the brain behind the Terrans’ recent discovery of time travel. He is hungry for knowledge. He’ll certainly demand to speak at length with you.”
Shiu Kung-Chien tugged at his beard and cursed. “So now I must waste my time conversing with barbarian dolts! Can you not give him someone else to vent his ignorance on? There are plenty of people adequate for that.”