“What’s he trying?” the young lieutenant demanded. “He can’t get away,” he said, echoing Liz Deffant’s words. “There’s nowhere he can go!”
The field man frowned. There was a pattern about the runaway ship’s moves: one that made no sense at all. But a pattern nevertheless.
“Sir—” he began. He was interrupted by an excited report.
“Sighting of survival-cylinders, Commander!” a robot reported.
“Scores of them!” echoed the lieutenant. “It’s the expellees—maybe the crew!”
“The ship could be breaking up!” another voice called. Lientand rapped out orders. The three cruisers wheeled to claw in the scores of pods. It was a decision that had to be made instantly, for the cylinders were not designed for deep-space use. True, they had a certain capability of endurance, but a limited one. Rosario had been lucky.
“Maran’s abandoned the ship!” yelled a crewman jubilantly. “We’ll have him in a few minutes!” The field man forgot his unformed yet uneasy moment. He was elated, like the other crewmen; the hunt was over. Lientand was smiling. There would be no need for the frightful holocaust of the sungun. They all watched the bobbing, weaving kaleidoscopic patterns in the prison-ship’s wide, swirling wake. A successful action. The integrity of the Service had been preserved: never had they lost a ship. A particular delight was that the machines had failed: the robots had been unable to cope with the emergency.
“Sir!” yelled the field man, the first to realize that the ES 110 had slipped away like some incorporeal manifestation faced with the dawn. He pointed to the screen. Thin tendrils of broken space showed where the prison-ship had been.
And then the reports came in.
The ES 110 had jerked itself violently away from the space-time where the slowing cruisers and the oscillating survival-cylinders were making their rendezvous.
“I knew it made sense!” the field man yelled. “I didn’t think anyone would use it—look, sir!” he shouted, pointing to a growing blotch on the screen. “That’s where he was making for!” Lientand cursed silently. Maran had used the pods to conceal his latest maneuver. Maran had outwitted him. “Engage main drive!” he called. “Emergency!” Seconds later, he added: “Range on the ES 110
—main armament.”
The young lieutenant gasped: “Sungun, sir?”
“He used the expellees as cover to delay us,” said Lientand. “I should have guessed.”
“But where can he go, sir?”
The field man pointed to the screen. “The Jansky Singularity.” The normal bodily processes seemed to he utterly irrelevant to what he had witnessed. Nevertheless, Buchanan found himself to be ravenously hungry. He was tired, too, he realized. He had not slept at all since the first sighting of the Jansky Singularity by the long-range scanners, and not much for days before that. Living seemed to be telescoped. Everything focused on the search. Buchanan ate and wondered at his appetite. Was it that, by finding the Altair Star, by locating it, he was free of the tensions of the past three years? The thought disturbed him, for it led to other prospects. It led, for one thing, to thoughts of a time when he should have completed his mission. But that way led to despair. There was nothing for him now.
In a moment of clairvoyance, he understood that only a Liz Deffant could have brought him back into the range of normal human feeling. There would be no more of her kind. Not for Al Buchanan.
“Sleep,” he told the cone-shaped pedestal.
“Yes, sir.”
The bridge dimmed agreeably. A couch slid toward him, deeply foamed, utterly inviting.
“Six hours,” he said. Six hours of deep, conditioned sleep, and then the eerie tunnel. He could watt that long. When he woke, he would take the station down into the depths and search out his ship. Satisfied that he had almost come to the end of his quest, Buchanan settled to sleep. It was so nearly over. A bridge to that cocoon of forever…. It was possible. It had to be.
CHAPTER 13
Liz watched the operations screen as Maran indicated the ES 110’s course. Under his skilled direction, the scanners swam out through the uncertain dimensions, seeking their object. And they found it. Ripples of power surged in the blank regions. A network of bizarre serpentine coils spun across the cosmos. It all had a terrible familiarity. At the center of the whirling, coruscating mass was a sulking darkness.
“I have to lose the cruisers, you understand, Miss Deffant,” Maran said. “In order to do so, I am taking this vessel briefly near the outer reaches of the Singularity. Our warp-shift wake disintegrates once we get near. It’s a simple choice, you see, Miss Deffant. Maran on an obscure planet, or the culmination of a life’s work.”
Liz listened, a curious sense of relief drifting around her mind. She would be near Al. What a bitter coincidence of events, the take-over of the prison-ship and Al’s haunted mission! As the ES 110 shuddered under the strain of Maran’s reckless urgings, Al would be somewhere at the peripheries of the Singularity trying to solve his own obsessive riddle. They were all to rendezvous at the raging efflorescence of the Jansky Singularity.
“The cruisers have slowed to take on the expellees,” Maran said. “I used your idea, Miss Deffant.”
“It was Commander Rosario’s idea.”
“Nevertheless, you were the decisive factor. I needed a small delay. I had to distract the cruisers so that they would think I had abandoned the ship.”
“You think it’s going to survive in that?”
They both looked at the coiled and majestic phenomenon that dominated the cosmos with its raging might.
Maran was serious to the point of portentousness:
“Miss Deffant, Maran must be free! There are things that only Maran can do. Never before has such a mind been brought to bear on the ultimate mystery.” He put his hands to his large, gleaming skull. “Within this brain is a conjunction of powers and creative insight that is without parallel. Maran is the culmination of decades of research and dedicated experiment. And he is near—so near!—the realization of man’s supreme vision!”
It was lunatic. Egocentric, megalomaniac, self-obsessed boasting that was almost ludicrous. Yet the sweat-streaked, huge face, the dark brooding eyes with their strange beauty, the very posture of that big body, all of these things, and then the resonant voice to give them meaning: Liz could understand how he had gained his proud followers.
“Give up,” she said quietly. “Go to the Rim. Work there—plan but don’t experiment. Your work will be recognized.”
Maran spoke to her as if she were a child. “Maran on a bare rock, Miss Deffant, Maran? A stone hut and a musket? No, Miss Deffant. My unique genius needs the tools of this millennium.”
“You could begin.”
“Yes. Ten years, Miss Deffant. That’s how long it would take. Ten years to mine the ores, refine the metals, make the primitive tools, begin to build the technological capacity for the equipment I must have.” He looked at his big, white hands. “I am not a young man, Miss Deffant.”
“They won’t let you escape. They can’t.”
Maran sent scanners ranging far out into the uncertain dimensions. They brought back the cruisers’ feral shapes. One of the hunted, Liz could also share the feelings of the hunters. She saw the three cruisers hanging starkly in the boiling incandescence of interdimensional haze. They left a huge triple parabola across the cosmos as they tried to sniff out the trail of the ES 110.