They centered on the destroyer source nearest Earth, jumping toward it and away again, but gaining from experience. The jumpspace map was sketchy, but it helped, and overall their approach was steady. Five thousand light-years from it; eight thousand, one thousand, seven thousand, four hundred, two thousand, seventy, twenty.
There they paused. “We can’t get any closer,” Afra said. “Our minimum jump is fifty years, and that would put us thirty years on the other side, or worse.”
“Nothing to do but back off and make another pass,” Harold said. “Shuffle the alignment and hope.”
“Schön says he can—”
“If he wants to give us the info, fine,” Harold said. “If he’s using it to buy his way into this enterprise, tell him to get lost. We idiots can muddle through on our own.”
They retreated and made another pass, coming within ten light-years. The third try was worse, but the fourth was very close: less than a parsec, or just over three light-years.
“This is probably about the best our luck has to offer,” Afra said. “We could renovate Joseph and row across, as it were. A few years in melt—”
“We’d have to reconstitute every year, for safety,” Ivo reminded her. “The melt’s shelf-life isn’t guaranteed indefinitely.”
“I am not a gambling man,” Harold said, “but I’d rather gamble. That is, try some more passes. I don’t want to approach the destroyer in the melted state. I want my wits about me, not my protoplasm.”
They gambled — and lost. Six more passes failed to bring them within five light-years of the target. That parsec had been their best, and they couldn’t even find that track again. Jumpspace was too complex a puzzle.
“Schön says—”
“Shut up!” This time it was Afra, and her vehemence gave him another warm feeling. He remembered the word LOVE in the balloting, and dared to wonder. His love for her had changed its nature but never its certainty; he knew her well, now, and understood her liabilities as well as her assets, and loved them all. It was a love without illusion; he expected nothing of her, and drew his pleasure solely from being near her. Or so he told himself.
But — had she written the word? Harold would not have done it, and Beatryx should not have thought of it. Still—
“I think,” said Harold, “we had better give up on this one. There are several others in the galaxy, and for our purpose any one of them should do for a beginning. Perhaps our channel runs closer to another destroyer.”
That much they had verified, coming down into the Milky Way: there were a number of destroyers. Their devastating signals had intercepted the human party at about eighteen thousand light-years, wherever they moved within or near the galaxy. Once they had had two destroyers in “sight” simultaneously, and had verified the similarity of the signals by superimposing one on the other.
They gambled again, going for a new target. Once more their luck changed. Their second pass at the second destroyer brought them to just within one light-day.
At last they learned why it had been so difficult to obtain normal macroscopic information about any destroyer. Here virtually all macronic impulses were overridden by the artificial signal; or perhaps they were preempted for its purpose. Only one flux emanated from this area of space, and hardly anything coherent entered it. Apart from the destroyer signal itself, it was blackout. The macroscope, for the first time, was out of commission.
Except for the traveler signal. That, oddly, came through as strongly as ever. This was one more evidence of the superiority of the extragalactic technology: the traveler could not be jammed or blocked or diverted.
“Damn lucky, too,” Harold said. “Think of the trouble we’d have getting out of here, otherwise.”
Afra busied herself with the telescopes while the others set about demothballing Joseph. The ship had been buried within Triton, which in turn was buried in Neptune, and extricating it and themselves whole was no offhand matter. Fortunately — though Harold denied that chance had been involved in such an engineering decision — they had also mothballed the heavy equipment. Harold had constructed it on macroscopic plans, and what could be done could be undone enough for storage. Anything not deposited well within the Triton drillhole had been melted down during the Neptune approach, of course.
“I have photographed the destroyer complex,” Afra reported at lunch. “Can’t actually see anything with these inefficient optical instruments, but as I make it the center unit is almost two miles in diameter and spherical. Definitely artificial. Metallic surface. Since we can’t use the macroscope on it, we’ll have to go inside ourselves.”
“We seem to be getting blasé about galactic technology,” Harold said. “Now we complain about imperfect detail vision at a distance of one light-day! Still, why not go inside, then?”
“Because they might tweak our tailfeathers with a contraterrene missile, that’s why not,” she said. “So I suggest we make a dry run first.” She appeared uncommonly cheerful, as though, perversely, a weight had lifted from her mind.
“How?” Harold asked her. “Joseph is all we have.”
“Catapult, stupid,” she said, smiling. “We have a spot gravity nullifier, remember? And plenty of material.”
Harold knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. He, too, seemed uncharacteristically lighthearted. “Of course! We can shape a mock ship and launch it toward the destroyer—”
“Let’s begin with the satellites,” she said. “I think they’re the battleships.”
“Satellites?”
“I told you. The destroyer is ringed with hundred-foot spheres — six of them, about five light-minutes out, north-south-east-west-up-down.”
“You did not, girl, tell me. You implied that you could not obtain such detail with optics. This complicates the problem.”
“I did tell you. Where were you when I said ‘destroyer complex’?”
“Who was it who said ‘There is no faith stronger than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own infallibility’?”
“Cabell said it. But he also implied that a bad-tempered woman needs an even-tempered man.” Both smiled.
Ivo went on eating, but Beatryx’s excellent cooking had become tasteless. Afra and Groton!
No — he was jumping to an unfounded suspicion. A ludicrous one! Their open banter merely reflected the increasing intimacy of the little group. It was almost the way the project had been, when he and Brad and all the others had batted inanities back and forth while pursuing deeper studies. Afra and Groton had had to work closely together ever since Triton — particularly when Ivo himself had skipped off to Tyre and left them stranded in deep space. And there had developed a kind of father-daughter relation between them since the trial. Afra had lost her own father somehow, so—
Groton and his waldoes and machines performed their miracles of construction again, and in due course Neptune had a planetary cannon. The bore was thirty-five feet across and two miles long, bottomed by the field-distortion mechanism. Slender tubes opened to the atmospheric surface of the planet in a circle many miles across, and fed into the nether sections of the bore. Great baffles stood ready to redirect the force of the gases that would converge the moment the generators opened the tunnel to space.
They gathered in the control room to watch the launching. Neptune was rotating, relative to the destroyer complex, and the action had to be properly timed. Afra had done the calculations, querying Ivo only for verification. She had made it plain, in similarly subtle ways, that the relation between them had changed. She was not dependent on him for such work.