Could he do it?
Getting hold of enough exotic matter to build the warp drives of the modified VNMs would be a problem, but his father had contacts, so that could come later. He had to get away first.
He could do that. A random series of jumps around the galaxy, eventually returning to Earth. Enough jumps, executed quickly enough, and nothing would be able to retrace his course.
Good. Now, how about slotting back into normal life? Would anyone suspect him? More to the point, would the EA suspect anything? Their senses were everywhere. They said the EA could look into someone’s soul and weigh the good and evil contained therein to twenty decimal places, and yet…and yet…
Herb was different. He had known it since he was a child. Sometimes it was as if he was merely a silhouette. Like he was there in outline, but they couldn’t fill in any of the specific details.
If anyone could get away with it, it was Herb.
A gentle breeze brushed his face and he felt his spirits lift. He took another gulp of whisky and felt a flood of warm relief as he swallowed. The plan was good. He could get away with it.
“I can get away with it,” he whispered to himself, his confidence growing. Another sip of whisky and that familiar sense of his own invulnerability swung slowly back into place. Get back home, and he would be able to examine the design of his VNM and discover what had gone wrong with it. He drained the glass and began to stride around the room, feet padding on the wooden floor, energy suddenly bubbling inside him.
“I’m going to get away with it!” he said out loud, punching at the air with a fist. And then, once he was home, once he had found the error in his design, he could find himself another planet. Build his city there instead.
“I will get away with it!” he cried triumphantly.
“No you won’t.”
The glass slipped from Herb’s fingers. He spun around and fell into a crouch position, ready to run or fight, though where he would run to in a three-room spaceship his body hadn’t yet decided.
A slight, dark-haired man with a wide, white, beaming smile and midnight-black skin stood on the sheepskin rug between the facing sofas. He wore an immaculately tailored suit in dark cloth with a pearl grey pinstripe. Snowy white cuffs peeped from the edge of his sleeves; gleaming patent leather shoes were half hidden by the razor-sharp creases of his trousers. The man raised his hat to Herb, a dark fedora with a spearmint green band.
“Good afternoon, Henry Jeremiah Kirkham. My name is Robert Johnston. I work for the Environment Agency.”
Herb slowly straightened up. He felt naked and exposed.
“What are you doing on my ship?” he said, the faintest tremor in his voice.
Robert Johnston gave a sad little shrug of his shoulders.
“Oh Herb, I don’t like this any more than you do, but, well, I have no choice. You have put me in this position; your actions have led me to this juncture. I’m afraid that I am going to have to punish you for the destruction of this planet.” He shook his head in regret.
Herb frowned back at him. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant, how did you get on my ship? You can’t have stowed away; it’s too small. I’d have heard the alarms if you tried to come through the airlock.”
Herb bit his lip in thought. “Ergo, you can’t be here,” he murmured. “What are you? Externally projected V-R?”
“Sorry, Herb, no.” He suddenly became more animated. “I’m as real as the next man. I’m here in person, in the flesh. Accept no substitutes, the One and Only, the real McCoy, the Cat in the Hat.” At this he skimmed his broad-brimmed hat across the room toward Herb, who ducked quickly to avoid it. The hat spun over Herb’s head and hit one of the glass ornaments on the sideboard, knocking it over. It fell to the floor and shattered. Herb ignored the noise. His anger was building, his arrogance asserting itself. He fanned it, forced himself to hold Johnston’s gaze and speak with a level voice that belied the tension that was building in his stomach.
“Okay, if you’re real, how did you get in here? The ship’s integrity has not been breached since we left Earth, or I would have known about it. Every particle of onboard matter will have been tracked by the ship’s AI since it was loaded, and you are to be found nowhere on the manifest. You cannot be here. I can only surmise that I am hallucinating.” He looked thoughtfully for a moment at the bottle that sat on the floor near his feet and murmured to himself, “Possibly drugged by this vanilla whisky that I don’t remember putting out here on the table…”
He frowned. Robert Johnston tilted his head back and laughed. His neatly knotted green-and-pearl tie shimmered in the light.
“The lengths some people will go to to avoid the simple truth! The whisky has been tampered with, but only to the extent of adding a mild sedative. That is what allows you to stand there arguing rationally with me, rather than following the more natural urge to crouch shivering in the corner. Anyway, if I’m a hallucination, how could I have put the whisky bottle there in the first place?”
Herb frowned thoughtfully. He did feel a lot calmer than he would have expected to under the circumstances.
“Why have you drugged me?” asked Herb, after a pause.
“The EA is concerned about your health. The shock of me suddenly appearing in your ship could have had severe consequences.”
“Good for the EA. So how did you get here? Matter displacement?”
“No. Nothing so exotic. I came down the secret passage.”
Herb was silent for a moment as he considered the statement. When he spoke, it was with icy calm.
“You don’t have secret passages on spaceships.”
“Yes, you do. There’s one underneath that armchair. Look.”
At that, Johnston walked across the room, the heels of his shoes clicking on the polished wooden floor. He seized the armchair by its back, his fingers making deep dimples in the soft white leather, and pulled it to one side. The outline of a trapdoor could be seen, a knife line through the contrasting colors of the parquetry. Johnston pressed one corner of the outline with an elegantly manicured finger and the trapdoor popped up with a soft sigh. He pulled it back to reveal a long metal tube dropping away into the distance. Herb felt the gentle pull of air leaving his lounge, sighing its way down the dark, yawning passageway.
“I don’t believe it,” whispered Herb softly. “Are you sure you’re not a hallucination?”
“I feel it in my bones,” said Robert Johnston.
They both crouched down by the edge of the secret passageway, staring into its depths.
Johnston stroked his chin. “The floor of your lounge is built into the port wall of your ship. I attached my ship to yours just after you completed your first jump from Earth. The pipe you can see is the connection between us. A simple deep scan ensured that the hatch was located beneath your armchair for concealment.”
Herb gazed at Johnston in disgust. He hated being patronized. “What are you talking about? How could you attach your ship to mine without me noticing it? I’d have picked it up the first time I scanned any system on reinsertion from warp.”
Johnston shook his head sadly. “Oh, Herb. And you’re supposed to be quite intelligent.”
“What do you mean, quite intelligent?” snapped Herb.
“Do you find that offensive? I’m sorry.” Johnston gazed at the tips of his fingers for a moment, an enigmatic smile playing around his lips, then continued.
“What I mean is that I’m surprised you haven’t worked it out. Surely you have heard of stealth technology?”