Liz felt, for the first time, the authoritative strength of Jack Rosario. He was a member of a service which carried out with a ruthless efficiency the judgments and penalties of the Galactic courts. Enforcement meant just that. Find offenders, bring them to the courts, and ferry those expelled out to the Rim. Rosario was the commander of an expellee-transport. He was offering to show her the human cargo of the ES
110: the prisoners.
“I don’t know,” said Liz honestly.
“Think about it.”
He called a low-grade robot servitor to show her to a guest cabin. She noticed that the robot was constructed along heavier lines than the usual run of servitors. Its antennas scanned her, and she was sure that a complete rundown of her physical characteristics was already on its way to the Enforcement Service vessel’s memory-banks. There was a hint of menace in its squat, armored bulk. She wondered if she had made a mistake.
A few more days at Center would have been tolerable.
Buchanan waited until the mad corybantics of warped force-bands settled to a comprehensible pattern as the tug drilled through the continuums on its vast, looping voyage toward the bizarre Singularity. It seemed that small metallic hands clawed at the fabric of his brain, such was the shock of the first moments of thrust. The station had not the stability of an infragalactic liner. It was small. A small blip containing the life-support systems for one man, but a blip that would soon ride on three enormous storehouses of energy. The sheer brute power was needed if the ship was to hold in the unreal dimensions.
Buchanan gloated in the latent power of those three great pods. Strange configurations existed within the Singularity. Ordinary ships would be swamped by one blind spasm. The station was built to withstand the unknown.
Would it?
When the ship was riding more easily, Buchanan pushed aside the clinging limpet-like tendrils that held him. He stood up and shook his head. Black light flashed before his eyes, but the worst was over.
“Give me an estimate of the duration of the voyage,” he ordered the robot controller.
“We’re holding onto a subgalactic surge,” said the robotic controller. “It’s a large wave, sir. Present estimates put the ship’s arrival at the Singularity in seventeen hours, sir. That is, of course, approximately. It could be a little less.”
“It could?” Buchanan said, without interest. At one time he would have checked the projections for the weird path among the starways of the continuums. It would have pleased him to see what interstellar gales they could have ridden among, what freak quakings of expiring supernovas they could have caught onto to add impetus to the great surge of the engines. Not now. Let the robots do the easy work. The routine duties.
“What’s happening at the Singularity?”
“No measurable changes since the last batch of reports, sir. It maintains a regular rotating shape, giving the readings of a gaseous fluid bound by its own gravitational attraction. No profound seismological disturbances of the kind associated with starquake, sir.”
It was reassuring. No sign yet of the monstrous Singularity ripping space apart. No starquake. The thing within the Singularity could set up a time-space event that shattered the continuums around it with a colossal flurry of unknown forces. And if a ship should chance to be nearby, then that ship was lost. But now the Singularity was quiescent.
At the moment it was a bland, eerie, alien beast: an event in the Galaxy like no other. An inexplicable thing, unguessable, atone, singular, as the old-time physicists had it, a Singularity! At present, inactive.
“A drink,” said Buchanan.
“Yes, sir.”
Ice tinkled in the glass. Buchanan followed the single drink with a request for a modest meal. “I’ll eat,” he said.
It was forthcoming within two minutes.
Buchanan looked at the well-done steak and the salad. Then at the glass of wine, deep-red, full-bodied, delicious. He smiled. An endless recycling. All of it back through his own system into the tanks, then out to the culture-frames, then to the preparation-units; and so onto a silver tray brought by a deferential servitor. There was an excellent catering service. The Board had gone to some trouble to provide for his particular tastes. He laughed.
This meal could be the last of its kind.
He savored it, just as he savored the memory of the girl with the golden-brown eyes who had reached in pity to wipe the deep lines from his forehead. It had been such a near thing too. He had almost returned to a normal life, almost cast off the load of guilt and grief that rode him like some great foul wen. Another man, much older, took over the bridge when Rosario said it was time to eat. He was introduced as Poole. Liz had the feeling he resented her presence aboard the ES 110. She understood, she thought. Few women would serve on such ships. It was one area of public service which was almost entirely a male preserve.
The crew she met at dinner were equally impressed by Liz Deffant. Two were Security men, another, like Jack Rosario, a crewman. They were introduced one by one.
Liz remembered their names carefully. The Security men were large and alike in physical appearance: tough, hard-looking men in their thirties. There was a Dieter and a Mack. Rosario explained that a third was on duty. He ate later. A young fair-haired man who followed Liz’s every movement with an unbelieving wide-eyed stare was called Tup.
The conversation was general, mostly questions about Liz’s experiences with the New Settlements Bureau. She told them about the last project she had worked on, the experiments with Terran-type plant-life on a fairly hostile planet in the Ophiuchi Complex. It had absorbed her, and the men recognized that she spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm. They had enough technical knowledge to grasp the central problem—the planet had an aberrant gravitational core, so plants didn’t grow with the same kind of cell-structure as on Terran-type worlds; rejigging the planet’s heavy metal core was possible, but that involved the possibility of disturbing several other ecological features. The Bureau regarded major reconstruction as a last resort.
She explained how they had been baffled until someone came up with the idea of making a slight molecular realignment of new root formation to give the newly-introduced plants a firmer base; and that had done the trick. When she finished she realized that she had not thought of Buchanan for an hour. It seemed like a betrayal She could not be glad about it She was silent for minutes. Rosario worried, Liz could see. He stared at her when he thought she was not watching him, and he frowned when the meal was over. The others left, except for Tup. Liz was aware that they sensed her misery.
“Does it worry you—the fact that we are a transport for expellees?” asked Rosario.
“No,” said Liz. It did, though. Subtly, there was a sense of tired and defeated evil aboard the Enforcement Service vessel.
“Would you like to see the cells?” said Tup eagerly.
“You could,” agreed Rosario. They were both making a strong effort to please her; but Liz had no special desire to see the condemned men and women.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not against the idea of transporting the expellees out to the Rim, are you, Liz?” asked Rosario.
“Is that what’s troubling you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Liz, hesitantly. “But don’t worry about me. I’m sorry if I seem to be out of sorts—please don’t worry about me.”
Rosario grinned.
“All right. Now I have to go to the bridge. It’s Poole’s turn to eat.” To Tup he said, “If you can get Miss Deffant to change her mind, show her around the ship.”
The youth could hardly believe his luck. “Me, Jack—sir?”