Still they did not comment.
At last the Monarch looked up. “What you say makes sense to us, Captain. We are in the wrong, but it is not too late. We shall accept the contract.”
There was no dissent, of course. The Monarch of Ram had spoken.
Two weeks later Schön’s ship berthed within the transport satellite: another moon of minimum effective mass. It had been stripped, the Chief informed him, and was nothing but a ball of rock, with the exception of the tube leading down into the compression mechanism compartment. The equipment, Schön knew, was far more sophisticated than that constructed by the human party on Triton; this could make use of a far smaller mass, and the location perceptors were precise. This, together with the up-to-date spacefold maps of this area of the galaxy, made a controlled jump routine. He had done his homework here, too, and was familiar with the equipment.
He was alone. He had been selected to make the trip to Lion bearing the capitulation message. “They would not trust any sizable party,” the Chief had explained. “But you, an alien, can negotiate the details, and return with their expeditionary party. We shall be ready, then.”
Yeah, sure, bugeye.
Schön entered the control compartment and examined the telltales. The mechanism had been set and locked: transport was scheduled to occur within the hour, and this had been timed exactly. The express position of the object was important, as the human explorers had known; what the dull-witted humans had not suspected was that the precise time of transport was equally critical. For the universe was not stable; it had been expanding, and now was in a state of flux preparatory to contraction, and this affected every part of it. Some sections were still expanding, while others were already contracting, and special stresses acted even on the interiors of galaxies and stellar systems that appeared to the fleeting animate observer to maintain their original sizes and positions. And this flux caused a drift between adjacent surfaces of jumpspace; the loops were fairly constant, but their fabric continued to stretch, eventually forming new loops of similar size or abolishing old ones. As a result, the differential between adjacent surfaces could be a swift current. In some instances, as shift piled upon shift and jumpspace warped frantically to compensate, the passage of minutes meant a similar number of light-minutes deviation from the calculated location of emergence.
So his journey had been carefully calculated in advance, and the equipment sealed to prevent potentially disastrous distortion. Emergence at the wrong point in space, even if only a few million miles off, could be taken as an indication of betrayal, and the waiting warships would open fire.
Schön unlimbered the special equipment he had brought (smuggled) and powdered the locking devices with single applications of his limited-slip laser. The panel opened, exposing the intricate circuitry. He manipulated his tools with the dexterity and competence he naturally possessed and made certain minor adjustments.
He was not traveling quite where the good Monarch of Ram had arranged.
He returned to his ship, sealed himself in, and entered the melting chamber. The ten-second melt-radiation warner sounded; then—
He came out of it whole, knowing that many hours had passed while his body melted, vaporized and finally compressed along with the ship and moon into a comparative speck — and then reversed the process at the other end of the jump.
He set himself before the ship’s macroscope and looked out at the universe.
There was no destroyer signal, as he had known. The ship’s computer shifted through the configurations and matched his present location: approximately one light-hour away from his scheduled rendezvous in the home-system of Lion.
He smiled. It had worked.
He had set the contraction mechanism for a triple sequence with a delay of only minutes between each effort. Thus the moon had made the first jump to Lion, hesitated momentarily, and gone into the return cycle before protoplasmic reconstitution could start. The brief interim and the relative motion of the two surfaces of space had sent it back at an angle, and it had emerged several light-minutes from its origin. Before the home-crowd could respond, since it took minutes for them even to see it, it had gone into the third compression, to emerge at its present spot. Its route had been a kind of N figure, the displacement magnified by the stress exerted on the fabric of space by adjacent punchthroughs. Dangerous — but what were heroes for, if not to brave danger?
Only then had the reconstitution process commenced. This had taken hours — but his displacement in space should have been sufficient for security. Just about now things should be popping.
They were. The sweep showed the traces that indicated an armada encircling the inhabited world of this system: battleships traveling at speed. The Lions had anticipated treachery.
And the anticipation had been well fulfilled. Two uncharted moons drifted within the system, light-hours apart, and he knew that at least one more was present on the far side, too far from his own location to register yet. Observation by optics or macronics was so slow! It was an all-out attack; the inundation strike the Ram Admiral had urged.
What of the Lion second-strike capability the Chief had so carefully mentioned? Schön smiled again. The solution to that inhibitor was obvious. The Rams had underestimated the perspicacity of the stranger, thinking to set him up as a duped emissary. They had staged a mock meeting and made a mock decision, while the war preparations moved ahead full-scale. There had never been a true capitulation, and probably not even a genuine ultimatum. This thrust had been decades in the making.
Lion ships still cruised in the vicinity of the supposed emergence, though the bulk of that fleet was already heading toward him. They had thought that his moon was merely another unit in the invasion — as indeed it was. But it had not stayed long enough to allow their planet-busters to score, and now was in an unscheduled location. Doubly unscheduled: naturally the Ram schedule differed from that set up for the truce mission, and his own schedule differed from Ram’s.
He adjusted the macroscope to focus within his own moon and took a look on sweep. Sure enough, the buried warships were already coming to life, their crews having emerged from mass gasification. He had at least done them the favor of saving them from the planet-busters; Lion intelligence was better than Ram’s. Not that it made any difference to him.
Strange that they had trusted him with the spacefold mechanism. Perhaps they had feared that he would recognize a dummy-panel — a correct assumption — and had felt that the lock sufficed against incidental mischief. If they really thought he was an important Lion spy, verisimilitude required that he be allowed to observe the setting for himself.
There were hundreds of simpler and surer ways of doing it, naturally. But the military mind had never been noted for its subtlety or efficiency, fortunately. Fortunately? It would not be the military mind if it were clever. Most likely, the Ram strategists had simply underestimated him by a factor of two or three.
In due course his Ram escort would get around to dispatching him as superfluous. His ship was unarmed — theoretically in accordance with the negotiations setup — and lacked working fluid for any extended trip. They were sure they had him penned safely; their immediate concern was the approaching fleet of Lion.
He refocused the scope on the farther reaches of the system. Sure enough: the third expedition had appeared. No moonlet, this; Ram had transported its entire home-world! That was their answer to Lion’s second-strike capability, as he had suspected. Removal of the target from the target-system.