He was concerning himself with trivialities, he knew, but it is sometimes helpful and healthy to let the mind be lured away, however briefly, from consideration of the greater issues.
Williams—lately Mr. Williams, Mate of Rim Mamelute, now Commander Williams, Executive Officer of Freedom—had the con. Under his control the ship was riding the beam from Lorn back to the position in which she had first been picked up by Orbital Station 3. It was there, the scientists had assured Grimes, that she would stand the best change of being blown back into her own continuum. The theory seemed to make sense, although the mathematics of it were far beyond the Commodore, expert navigator though he was.
The ship was falling free now, her reaction drive silent, dropping down the long, empty miles towards a rendezvous that would be no more (at first) than a flickering of needles on dials, an undulation of the glowing traces on the faces of monitor tubes. She was falling free, and through the still unshuttered ports there was nothing to be seen ahead but the dim, ruddy spark that was the Eblis sun, and nothing to port but a faint, far nebulosity that was one of the distant island universes.
To starboard was the mistily gleaming galactic lens, a great ellipse of luminosity in which there were specks of brighter light, like jewels in the hair of some dark goddess.
Grimes smiled wryly at his poetic fancies, and Sonya, who had guessed what he had been thinking, grinned at him cheerfully. She was about to speak when Williams' voice broke the silence. "Hear this! Hear this! Stand by for deceleration. Stand by for deceleration!"
Retro-rockets coughed, then shrieked briefly. For a second or so seat belts became almost intolerable bonds. The Executive Officer emitted a satisfied grunt, then said, "spot on, Skipper. Secure for the Big Bang?"
"You know the drill, Commander Williams. Carry on, please."
"Good-oh, Skipper." Williams snapped orders, and the ship shivered a little as the capsule containing the nuclear device was launched. Grimes saw the thing briefly from a port before the shutters—armor plating and thick lead sheathing—slid into place. It was just a dull-gleaming metal cylinder. It should have looked innocuous, but somehow it didn’t. Grimes was suddenly acutely conscious of the craziness of this venture. The scientists had been sure that everything would work as it should, but they were not here to see their theories put to the test. But I must be fair, Grimes told himself. After all, it was our idea. Mine and Sonya’s…
"Fire!" he heard Williams say.
But nothing happened.
There was no noise—but, of course, in the vacuum of Deep Space there should not have been. There was no sense of shock. There was no appreciable rise of the control room temperature.
"A missfire?" somebody audibly wondered.
"Try to raise Lorn," Grimes ordered the Radio Officer. "Orbital Station 3 is maintaining a listening watch on our frequency."
There was a period of silence, broken only by the hiss and crackle of interstellar static, then the voice of the operator saying quietly, "Freedom to Station Three. Freedom to Station Three. Do you hear me? Come in, please."
Again there was silence.
"Sample the bands," said Grimes. "Listening watch only."
And then they knew that the bomb had exploded, that the results of the explosion had been as planned. There was an overheard dialogue between two beings with high, squeaky voices, similar to the voice that had been recorded in Freedom’s signal log. There was a discussion of Estimated Time of Arrival and of arrangements for the discharge of cargo—hard to understand at first, but easier once ear and brain became attuned to the distortion of vowel sounds.
When the ports were unscreened, the outside view was as it had been prior to the launching of the bomb, but Grimes and his people knew that the worlds in orbit around those dim, far suns were not, in this Universe, under human dominion.
XII
"What’s their radar like?" asked Grimes.
"Judging by what’s in this ship, not too good," replied Williams. "Their planet and station-based installations will have a longer range, but unless they’re keepin' a special lookout they’ll not pick us up at this distance."
"Good," said Grimes. "Then swing her, Commander. Put the Lorn sun dead ahead. Then calculate what deflection we shall need to make Lorn itself our planetfall."
"Reaction Drive, sir?"
"No. Mannschenn Drive."
"But we’ve no Mass Proximity Indicator, Skipper, and a jump of light minutes only."
"We’ve slipsticks, and a perfectly good computer. With any luck we shall be able to intercept that ship coming in for a landing."
"You aren’t wasting any time, John," said Sonya, approval in her voice. The Commodore could see that she was alone in her sentiments. The other officers, including the Major of Marines, were staring at him as though doubtful of his sanity.
"Get on with it, Commander," snapped Grimes. "Our only hope of intercepting that ship is to make a fast approach, and one that cannot be detected. And make it Action Stations while you’re about it."
"And Boarding Stations?" asked the Major. The spacegoing soldier had recovered his poise and was regarding his superior with respect.
"Yes. Boarding Stations. Get yourself and your men into those adapted spacesuits." He added, with a touch of humor, "And don’t trip over the tails."
He sat well back in his chair as the gyroscopes whined, as the ship’s transparent nose with its cobweb of graticules swung slowly across the almost empty sky. And then the yellow Lorn sun was ahead and Sonya, who had taken over the computer, was saying, "Allowing a time lag of exactly one hundred and twenty seconds from… now, give her five seconds of arc left deflection."
"Preliminary thrust?" asked Williams.
"Seventy-five pounds, for exactly 0.5 second."
"Mannschenn Drive ready," reported the officer at the Remote Control.
Grimes was glad that he had ordered the time-varying device to be warmed up before the transition from one universe to the other had been made. He had foreseen the possibility of flight; he had not contemplated the possibility of initiating a fight. But, as he had told the Admiral, he was playing by ear.
He said to Sonya, "You have the con, Commander Verrill. Execute when ready."
"Ay, ay, sir. Stand by all. Commander Williams—preliminary thrust on the word Fire! Mr. Cavendish, Mannschenn Drive setting 2.756. Operate for exactly 7.5 seconds immediately reaction drive has been cut. Stand by all. Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six… Five…"
Like one of the ancient submarines, Grimes was thinking. An invisible approach to the target, and not even a periscope to betray us. But did those archaic warships ever make an approach on Dead Reckoning? I suppose that they must have done, but only in their infancy.
"Four… Three… Two… One… fire!"
The rockets coughed briefly, diffidently, and the normally heavy hand of acceleration delivered no more than a gentle pat. Immediately there was the sensation of both temporal and spatial disorientation as the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Drive began to spin—a sensation that faded almost at once. And then the control room was flooded with yellow light—light that dimmed as the ports were polarized. But there was still light, a pearly radiance of reflected illumination from the eternal overcast, the familiar overcast of Lorn. That planet hung on their port beam, a great, featureless sphere, looking the same as it had always looked to the men and women at the controls of the ship.