She set off, hurriedly retracing her steps toward the lock through which she had first entered. When she was halfway there a flicker of movement appeared at the end of a corridor.
“Paul?” She paused, her hand on the wall of the corridor. “Paul Chu? Is that you, Paul? Who is there?”
The corridor supported a full atmosphere, and her voice went echoing along the narrow passageway. There was no reply, but suddenly a little machine came scuttling into view and moved toward her. Ten feet away it paused. Sylvia was thrilled to see it. Unlike the others she had seen, this one she recognized as a very advanced model, one that was scarcely out of the development labs. It was a GA machine, a general assistance model that would perform hundreds of tasks with vocal direction and little human supervision. It if had to, it could fly her home in her own transit ship.
“What’s been happening here?” She advanced on it confidently. No machine would harm her—no machine could harm her, except by accident. “Where are the people? Is Paul Chu here?”
It said nothing. The arrays of detectors on the front of the machine had tilted her way, and there was no doubt that it was aware of her presence. But when she was within a couple of paces, it began to back away. A second machine of the same design had appeared at the end of the corridor and advanced to stand next to the first.
“Come on.” Sylvia was becoming impatient. “I want answers. Don’t pretend you can’t understand me, I know you’re a lot too smart for that. What’s been going on in this place?”
From a circular aperture at its base, the second machine suddenly extruded a pair of long, rubbery arms. Before Sylvia could retreat, they had moved forward to circle her ankles.
“Hey! Let got of me!”
It took no notice, and then arms from the first machine came forward to wrap around her forearms and waist. She was gently lifted off her feet and held in midair. Both machines moved in unison along the corridor, holding Sylvia as delicately but firmly as an armed bomb.
“There is no problem.” The first machine finally spoke in a voice that Sylvia recognized at once. It sounded just like Paul Chu. “We will be going on a journey. You will be quite safe. One moment.”
While Sylvia struggled as hard as she could, yet another pair of arms appeared to check the closure of her suit helmet.
“What do you mean, a journey? Damn you, let go of me. Take me to see Paul Chu. I order you to release me.”
That had to work. No machine could hold a human against her will, unless it was to save a life.
“We cannot do that.” The voice was suitably regretful and apologetic. “We cannot set you free; not yet. But we can take you to Paul Chu’s present location. Maybe you will see him there.”
“When?” They were already in the lock, and there was a hiss of escaping air.
“When we reach our destination. Ten days journey from here.”
They were outside, drifting along in a glimmer of starlight. The second machine had stayed behind at the lock, so she was held only by her arms and waist. Sylvia saw a new shape in front of her, a small ellipsoidal object only twenty meters long. It was like no ship she had ever seen. “We can’t fly in that.” She spoke into her suit radio, offering what should have been for a machine the ultimate threat. “If you make me fly in that, it will kill me.”
“Not so.” The machine sounded shocked, but it did not even pause. “Otherwise, of course, we would never permit it. Ten days will quickly pass. Perhaps when we are on the way you would like to play chess with me? We will be alone.”
“I hate chess!”
As Sylvia was carried into the ship, she had a final unhappy thought. She had given Cinnabar Baker the coordinates of this destination and had felt pleased with her foresight. But how much use would that information be wherever she would be in another ten days?
Chapter 21
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Aybee had seen many transit ships during his wanderings through the Outer System. The design was standard. It differed only in detail, depending on whether the fabrication was done at the Vulcan Nexus, whispering its way across the surface of the Sun, or out in the Dry Tortugas, wandering the remote and ill-defined perimeter of the Oort Cloud.
Each transit ship had a thick disk of dense matter on the front end. Each one also had a passenger cabin that could slide backward or forward along the two-hundred-meter central spike jutting out behind the mass plate. The McAndrew vacuum energy drive sat at the plate’s outer edge. The whole assembly looked like an axle with only one wheel attached.
It was a shock to be taken by Gudrun to the front of the ship and be shown a smooth, spikeless ellipsoid just twenty meters long.
Aybee stared at it as if he were in the audience at a magic show, waiting for the missing bluebird to appear. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“There is no more,” Gudrun laughed. She was bubbling with excitement. “I told you, Karl, the surprises are just beginning. This is the ship for our journey. It arrived from headquarters two days ago.”
Aybee made a complete circuit of the outside. The ovoid had a smooth glassy hull, polished and unmarked. He could see his own distorted reflection in the convex surface. That alone was sufficient to make it out of place in the dingy and grimy environment of the old cargo ship. It was as new as its surroundings were old. Odder yet, it showed no sign of a drive mechanism. There was nowhere to attach the massive disk that balanced gravity and acceleration, and the clear ports suggested that at least half the internal space was passenger quarters.
As a supposed trainee, Aybee could not tell Gudrun what he was thinking. Either this supposed ship was a total hoax and would go nowhere—or there were whole realms of physics unknown to the best minds in the Inner and Outer Systems.
Instead he asked, “Who built it?”
“Headquarters. It’s very new and very fast. The old ships took weeks to get to headquarters—it’s over six hundred billion kilometers away. We’ll be there in five days!”
“What’s the acceleration?”
“That’s not relevant. This works on a new principle. They are making more of them, but today there are only a handful of others like this ship.”
But there ought to be none like it, Aybee reflected. He did the instant mental conversion: five days for six hundred billion kilometers meant about five hundred g’s. Then he at once ignored his own answer. The range calculation made sense only if the ship performed like a transit ship, with an acceleration phase, a crossover, and a deceleration. There was no reason for that assumption. If the ship were as new as it seemed, headquarters could be on the other side of the galaxy. Aybee had no idea how it could function. At the moment he did not even know what questions to ask.
“How is it powered?” he said at last. “With a kernel?”
That was fishing. The transit ships used the McAndrew vacuum drive, not kernels.
“No. But apparently it has a low-mass kernel at the center.”
Curiouser and curiouser. Even a small kernel weighed a few hundred million tons. Why accelerate that mass if one did not need it?
They went aboard, and Aybee’s confusion performed a quantum jump to a higher-level state. The internal living space on the ship was ten times what he had expected. There was too little space for any reasonable power supply, engines, or drive mechanism.