“Female Deffant has authority to launch survival-cylinders!” the Grade Two executive confirmed. “Deffant confirmed as of crew status!”
“Red Alert condition exists,” pondered the Grade One controller. “In such conditions human personnel have some executive functions!”
Liz heard the machine’s analysis as she ran to the cover of the ranks of cylinders. It was essential that Maran should believe her to be in the second survival-pod, if only for a few minutes. She knew what she must do. She had always been good with simple machinery.
“The launch proceeds,” decided the robot. The port closed silently. The black grab retreated. Liz gasped with relief. The deck shook slightly as the pod winged away from the ship.
“Red Alert condition! Emergency!” bawled the robotic controller. “Survival-cylinder launched prematurely!”
Liz looked down at the heavy package.
She could have been safe by now. The cylinders would last for hours. Maran would not have tried to pick them up. Not with the patrol-cruisers alerted.
Why hadn’t she gone?
She knew that she was at the limit of her courage and strength; why not let the Enforcement Service hunt down the ES 110?
There was a reason.
Against all odds, Maran had somehow overcome the deep conditioning of the coma-cells. Against all that was reasonable he had managed to avoid the continual monitoring of the machines. His desperate energies had conquered the ship.
Liz was sure, with a deep conviction, that Maran would have a plan to escape the Enforcement Service cruisers. The man was a towering monstrous genius.
She placed the heavy package beside her. She could only hope now that Maran believed her and the rest of the crew dead or gone.
The words on the package gleamed, black on white: Instructions for assembly of expansion-principle firearm.
A weapon for use on an unknown planet.
Liz began to strip off the protective packaging.
Buchanan thought of the structure which, in theory, lay at the heart of the Singularity. Strange black hole… cold neutron star, or both? Perhaps neither. If Kochan was right, the Singularity contained the densest matter known. It had more bizarre properties.
To create the rotating vortices of the Singularity, it must have the strangest architecture imaginable; perhaps a form that was beyond conjecture, one that defeated human imagination. Matter so dense that the enormous contracting pull continued and continued so that all that was left was a hole in the fabric of the Universe.
Matter bent and compressed until space itself parted.
And what when space itself was broken?
It was idle to speculate.
But Buchanan was fascinated by the idea of a black hole in the time-space fabric of the Galaxy. A hole—leading where? Into another framework of space-time that bore no relation to this?
What was it that had defeated the robots?
Why were they so sure that the Altair Star must join that briefly-glimpsed graveyard of ships?
And why would the robot not acknowledge the existence of the graveyard?
For hours Buchanan ran projections of the framework of the Singularity. He observed roaring upheavals from deep within the writhing Singularity: their source could be small cracks on a crusted core of matter so dense that it would take the energy of a thousand lifetimes for a man to climb a one-centimeter hill on its surface.
And always Buchanan’s thoughts returned to his lost command.
He was still in the grip of a somber vision where the survivors of the Altair Star hung in an undead limbo when a new robotic voice clamored for attention:
“Galactic Alert! Galactic transmission on Red Alert channels! I have a message with top priority for all ships within this Quadrant, Commander Buchanan!”
“Let’s have it,” he said. It must be important. Red Alerts went out for full-scale disasters. They took precedence over all other beamed communications.
“Enforcement Ship One-One-Zero reports unauthorized handling of automatic systems. All ships scan for position and course! Do not approach! Enforcement Service cruisers are now proceeding to intercept!” Buchanan could imagine the scene aboard the vessel. A failure of a robotic monitor. Nothing serious, but the machines would take no chances with the resourceful, vicious, opportunistic men and women who had been expelled from the settled worlds.
Buchanan shrugged.
There were fail-safes. The Enforcement Service had never lost a ship.
It was not his problem. The cruisers would soon reach the Enforcement Service ship.
“Scan,” he ordered, forgetting that the robot controlled his ship.
“It has been done, Commander.”
“And?”
“No readings,” the robot controller said at once. “No contact with ES 110.”
“We’re not specifically asked to take action?”
“My Grade One colleague made no mention of action other than repeating the report.”
“Then I need do no more?”
“Nevertheless, Commander—”
“Leave it to the Service.”
“There was a full-scale Red Alert—”
“Forget it!”
“I can hardly do that, sir!”
“Keep me informed,” Buchanan said. Old habits of command died hard. So did the deep-held sense of responsibility that came with the years of Galactic Service.
“Very good, sir.”
Buchanan looked about the bright deck. The ES 110 was not his concern.
“Let me see the Singularity again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Buchanan dismissed the prison-ship and its minor problems from his mind. Before him flowered the wispy outline of the Singularity. He marveled at the flow of energies within its depths. Magnetic fields a trillion times larger than those in powerful stars boiled in its rotating interior. If some combination of black hole and neutron star configuration was the epicenter of the starquakes that shook the cosmos around the Singularity, then the station might well be in peril. He would not be deterred.
More than ever now that Kochan’s team of scientists had come up with a new and utterly strange idea of an eternal moment of death, he was determined to enter the uncertain dimensions. Maran flung away the skeletal arm of a robot attendant as he emerged from unconsciousness. He had been in a state that was not sleep, but one which allowed him to dream. It seemed that he was back at the start of his experiments. Men and women he had known drifted into his thoughts, calling to him that the ultimate mystery lay only just beyond the moment. They were proud, almost arrogantly proud, to have joined him. A little more perseverance, they called; another, more searching, machine that would rip through the layers of consciousness and point to the primal source of intelligence. They vanished in a blaze of light as he opened his eyes.
Almost instantly he knew the long months of planning might be so much wasted effort. He blinked, pushed away the restraining arm of the robot, and felt strength pulsing through his big body. His mind was startlingly clear, so different from the pain-racked half-mind of those ferocious moments as he crawled from the ooze….
He said aloud: “The crew!”
“No emergency exists,” a fairly high-grade system was saying. “Therefore no further Red Alert calls need be beamed.”
“Red Alert—” Maran roared. “A Red Alert?”
“In the absence of instructions to the contrary, sir,” began the smooth voice from the pedestal, “this system took it upon itself, in accordance with programmed data, to beam signals to—”
“Leave it! Why send the Alert?”
“Second survival-cylinder launched!” a Grade Two system announced. The robotic controller added its own comment, without answering Maran’s question: “Therefore a Red Alert signal must be beamed!”