He answered with a leer. “That it is a long way to Starkad.”
15
Saxo glittered white among the myriads. But it was still so far that others outshone it. Brightest stood Betelgeuse. Flandry’s gaze fell on that crimson spark and lingered. He sat at the pilot board, chin in hand, for many minutes; and only the throb of the engine and murmur of the ventilators were heard.
Persis entered the control room. During the passage she had tried to improvise a few glamorous changes of garment from the clothes in stock, but they were too resolutely utilitarian. So mostly, as now, she settled for a pair of shorts, and those mostly for the pockets. Her hair swept loose, dark-bright as space; a lock tickled him when she bent over his shoulder, and he sensed its faint sunny odor, and her own. But this time he made no response.
“Trouble, darling?” she asked.
“ ‘It ain’t the work, it’s them damn decisions,’ ” he quoted absently.
“You mean which way to go?”
“Yes. Here’s where we settle the question. Saxo or Betelgeuse?”
He had threshed the arguments out till she knew them by heart, but he went on anyhow: “Got to be one or the other. We’re not set up to lie doggo on some undiscovered planet. The Empire’s too far; every day of travel piles up chances for a Merseian to spot our wake. They’ll have sent couriers in all directions—every kind of ship that could outrun our skulker’s course—soon’s they learned we escaped. Maybe before, even. Their units must be scouring these parts.
“Saxo’s the closer. Against heading there is the consideration they can keep a pretty sharp watch on it without openly using warcraft in the system. Any big, fast merchantman could gobble us, and the crew come aboard with sidearms. However, if we were in call range, I might raise Terran HQ on Starkad and pass on the information we’re carrying. Then we might hope the Merseians would see no further gain in damaging us. But the whole thing is awful iffy.
“Now Betelgeuse is an unaligned power, and very jealous of her neutrality. Foreign patrols will have to keep their distance, spread so thin we might well slip through. Once on Alfzar, we could report to the Terran ambassador. But the Betelgeuseans won’t let us enter their system secretly. They maintain their own patrols. We’d have to go through traffic procedures, starting beyond orbital radius of the outermost planet. And the Merseians can monitor those com channels. A raider could dash in quick-like and blast us.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Persis said.
“Sweetheart, they’d dare practically anything, and apologize later. You don’t know what’s at stake.”
She sat down beside him. “Because you won’t tell me.”
“Right.”
He had gnawed his way to the truth. Hour upon hour, as they fled through Merseia’s dominions, he hunched with paper, penstyl, calculator, and toiled. Their flight involved nothing dramatic. It simply meandered through regions where one could assume their enemies rarely came. Why should beings with manlike biological requirements go from a dim red dwarf star to a planetless blue giant to a dying Cepheid variable? Flandry had ample time for his labors.
Persis was complaining about that when the revelation came. “You might talk to me.”
“I do,” he muttered, not lifting his eyes from the desk. “I make love to you as well. Both with pleasure. But not right now, please!”
She flopped into a seat. “Do you recall what we have aboard for entertainment?” she said. “Four animations: a Martian travelogue, a comedian routine, a speech by the Emperor, and a Cynthian opera on the twenty-tone scale. Two novels: Outlaw Blastman and Planet of Sin. I have them memorized. They come back to me in my dreams. Then there’s a flute, which I can’t play, and a set of operation manuals.”
“M-hm.” He tried putting Brechdan’s figures in a different sequence. It had been easy to translate from Merseian to Terran arithmetic. But what the devil did the symbols refer to? Angles, times, several quantities with no dimensions specified … rotation? Of what? Not of Brechdan; no such luck.
A nonhuman could have been similarly puzzled by something from Terra, such as a periodic table of isotopes. He wouldn’t have known which properties out of many were listed, nor the standardized order in which quantum numbers were given, nor the fact that logarithms were to the base ten unless e was explicit, nor a lot of other things he’d need to know before he could guess what the table signified.
“You don’t have to solve the problem,” Persis sulked. “You told me yourself, an expert can see the meaning at a glance. You’re just having fun.”
Flandry raised his head, irritated. “Might be hellish important for us to know. Give us some idea what to expect. How in the name of Copros can Starkad matter so much? One lonesome planet!”
And the idea came to him.
He grew so rigid, he stared so wildly out into the universe, that Persis was frightened. “Nicky, what’s wrong?” He didn’t hear. With a convulsive motion, he grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and started scrawling. Finished, he stared at the result. Sweat stood on his brow. He rose, went into the control room, returned with a reel which he threaded into his microreader. Again he wrote, copying off numbers. His fingers danced on the desk computer. Persis held herself moveless.
Until at last he nodded. “That’s it,” he said in a cold small voice. “Has to be.”
“What is?” she could then ask.
He twisted around in his chair. His eyes took a second to focus on her. Something had changed in his face. He was almost a stranger.
“I can’t tell you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“We might get captured alive. They’d probe you and find you knew. If they didn’t murder you out of hand, they’d wipe your brain—which to my taste is worse.”
He took a lighter from his pocket and burned every paper on the desk and swept the ashes into a disposal. Afterward he shook himself, like a dog that has come near drowning, and went to her.
“Sorry,” he smiled. “Kind of a shock for me there. But I’m all right now. And I really will pay attention to you, from here on in.”
She enjoyed the rest of the voyage, even after she had identified the change in him, the thing which had gone and would never quite come back. Youth.
The detector alarm buzzed. Persis drew a gasp and caught Flandry’s arm. He tore her loose, reaching for the main hyper-drive switch.
But he didn’t pull it, returning them to normal state and kinetic velocity. His knuckles stood white on the handle. A pulse fluttered in his throat. “I forgot what I’d already decided,” he said. “We don’t have an especially good detector. If she’s a warship, we were spotted some time ago.”
“But this time she can’t be headed straight at us.” Her tone was fairly level. She had grown somewhat used to being hunted. “We have a big sphere to hide in.”
“Uh-huh. We’ll try that if necessary. But first let’s see which way yonder fellow is bound.” He changed course. Stars wheeled in the viewports, otherwise there was no sensation. “If we can find a track on which the intensity stays constant, we’ll be running parallel to him and he isn’t trying to intercept.” Saxo burned dead ahead. “S’pose he’s going there—”
Minutes crawled. Flandry let himself relax. His coverall was wet. “Whew! What I hoped. Destination, Saxo. And if he’s steered on a more or less direct line, as is probable, then he’s come from the Empire.”
He got busy, calculating, grumbling about rotten civilian instrumentation. “Yes, we can meet him. Let’s go.”
“But he could be Merseian,” Persis objected. “He needn’t have come from a Terran planet.”