Maran wove a spell over the console. Robotic systems hesitated. Buchanan did not doubt Maran’s powers. As the big, white hands gentled the sensor-pads into compliance, the station edged nearer the glittering tunnel. The screens were filled with an astonishing glory. Then, Buchanan again glimpsed the emptiness that lay a whole Universe beyond the strange glittering tunnel. He saw a terrifying emptiness that sent his thoughts awry and brought a spangled, reeling and roaring confusion inside his mind. When it cleared, Maran was giving orders in his calm, insistent voice: “Scan.”
“Sir?” asked the robotic controller.
“For ships.”
“I have intermittent contact-potential with three Enforcement Service cruisers, sir.”
“Not those.”
“I have readings of the debris of a large transport, with implosion immediately preceding breakup.”
“The ES 110,” said Buchanan.
Maran held up a hand to indicate that he should be silent. Two flat carapaces regarded Buchanan with no menace at all. Yet they conveyed alert tension. He gritted his teeth in frustration. Patience, he tried to tell himself. All led to the Altair Star. Once he had determined the fate of the hundreds he had led to their doom, he could begin to plan, estimate, take decisions, find the single chink in Maran’s armor of self-confidence.
“Scan,” repeated Maran.
“Sir?” asked the robot.
“The temporal discontinuity observed by Commander Buchanan.”
“An interesting theory,” said the flat, metallic voice. “One that Mr. Kochan supports. It is, of course, impossible, sir.”
Maran did not hesitate: “Reduce screen levels.”
“Yes, sir.”
The station had an oddly defenseless feeling. Buchanan tensed again, aware of the gigantic forces that might boil up and leave the ship in submicroscopic, jangling fragments. But it held.
“Project a warp to the temporal discontinuity,” ordered Maran.
“To what, sir?”
“The discontinuity.”
Buchanan sensed the rebelliousness of the Grade One robot. If it would not accept Maran’s orders, they all faced Lientand’s ships.
“With what object, sir?” the machine at last asked.
“Investigating a theory.”
“Sir?”
Buchanan could almost hear the self-questioning of the robots.
Maran snapped: “Isn’t that the object of the Jansky Singularity Station?”
“The object of the station is observation and recording, sir,” the flat voice answered at once, quite certain now. “Those are the primary functions, sir.”
“Then observe the temporal discontinuity!”
“Which cannot exist, sir!”
Liz Deffant saw the big man’s utter concentration. His large, deep eyes were pinpoints as he stared at the pedestal which housed the Grade One robot.
“Observe the Quasi-discontinuity!”
“Sir?”
There was a long pause. Buchanan had seen the myriads of circuits, the endless tiny sheaves of memory-cells, which were the core of the ship’s computers. There was more factual knowledge in them than a man could store in a million lifetimes. And it was all ready for instant recall. There were generative systems which could produce strategies to cope with any eventuality the machines could understand. They had said they could not scan the impossible.
The discontinuity—the time-tunnel—was impossible.
Therefore, they reasoned, they could not cope with it. They could not admit its existence. And Maran was telling them to scan for a time-tunnel which might exist—a hypothetical discontinuity.
Buchanan knew he would return to the Altair Star in that moment. It was a confirmation of Maran’s prescience. Maran had ordered the impossible. And the machines accepted the order.
“Very good, sir,” came the metal-edged voice.
They watched as the marvelous, haunting time-tunnel began to take shape. Bathed in a coruscating white-gold sea of strange, eddying forces, the ships appeared on the screen. Liz Deffant sighed. She forgot the burly figure at the console. All the experiences of the bitter hours drifted from her memory. She saw what Al Buchanan had seen, and she entered into his knowledge, shared his wonder and grief, understood his compulsive obsession as never before. The eerie resting-place of so many ships was dreamily peaceful, utterly beyond anything she had thought to see. Al was right. It was alien but beckoning, terrifying but compelling. The mystery lay before her in its bizarre majesty. A freak scanning showed the whole length of the Altair Star. Washed by ripples of white-gold translucence, it gleamed like some magnificent, somber tomb.
“We shouldn’t disturb it,” breathed Liz. “No, Al!”
“Please, Liz,” said Buchanan.
Maran brought the scanners close to the ship. He knew ships. “The bridge has gone. But that doesn’t mean she’s a wreck.”
“It was blasted clear. Against my orders.”
“Yes,” said Maran. “It was under robotic direction?”
“Infragalactic policy. I tried to take over.”
Buchanan thought of the frenzied, despairing, harsh orders, the gouging shocks as his engineers ripped out decision-making systems.
“And?”
“I took too long to make the decision to take over.”
Maran frowned. “Power potential when you blasted clear?”
“About eight percent.”
“Low.”
“The robots let the screens down.”
“Yes,” said Maran.
“Leave the ship alone, Al! Please!” Liz said, turning to Maran.
“I’m sorry, Miss Deffant,” Maran said.
Buchanan waited, bile in his mouth. The years of searing anguish, interrupted by Liz Deffant’s tenderness, had led to this moment.
“Well?” he asked.
“We go, Buchanan.”
“All of us?”
“Not Miss Deffant.”
“Stay here,” said Buchanan to Liz.
“We both have our reasons for going,” Maran said to her. “Buchanan’s you know. You may or may not have guessed mine. But you know this, Miss Deffant,” and his great eyes were luminously intent. “You know that Maran must not fail!”
Liz shrank back, afraid for Al Buchanan, convulsively afraid that Maran might work some shocking legerdemain aboard the ghost-ship.
“Project a Quasi-warp,” ordered Maran.
The robotic controller still hedged. “Where to, sir?”
“To the Altair Star!”
“We’ll take deep-space armor,” Buchanan added.
“Why?” asked Maran.
“Life-support. Aboard the Altair Star. Its systems should have run out.” He said in a low voice: “I hope they have.”
“I must state, for the purposes of record that the station commander is grossly exceeding the instructions of the Board,” the Grade One robot announced.
Buchanan followed Maran to the hold.
Liz Deffant watched the ghostly fleet, picking out here a bulbous ion-fission hulk that had not roared across the dimensions for half a millenium; there an elegant scout that had drifted into the tunnel not more than sixty or seventy years before. She could hardly bare to look at the huge, infragalactic liner that had been Al Buchanan’s command.
CHAPTER 19
The eerie journey brought a proximity desired by neither man, yet each derived a measure of comfort from the knowledge that another human being was in the cramped cabin. Pinpoints of white-gold iridescence spangled the interior. Its tiny engines groaned as shields were forced inward by the blossoming Quasi-warp. Coiling shards of black light began to build up as the glittering tunnel formed around the raft. The Singularity’s fields jerked and pushed, and the raft spun crazily as it left the station. Buchanan gave no thought to Maran. Half-forgotten scenes tumbled with appalling clarity through his mind: a child’s toy; the stunned face of a dignified old man; Preston’s refusal to believe that the machines would condemn them, his shout of protest…. The last moments of the Altair Star haunted him afresh. He could see the lost faces, the dawning horror, the slow realization that the final moment had come.