"Wait a minute," Ion said. "Wait a minute. There's something wrong. It's not supposed to do that. Paul? Where did you go, Paul?" Paud did not answer.
The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light, lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned its nose toward the target.
"What's happening?" Marescu asked plaintively. "Paul?
What went wrong?"
The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel's sun. It accelerated at 100 g.
And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would automatically lock out the others.
"We have influence, Commander," Lieutenant Callaway reported.
"Take hyper," von Drachau replied. "And destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we've never heard of this place. We don't know anything about it and we've never been here."
He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was, what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take, then blanked.
Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few hours the nova chain would begin.
There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their fate.
And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had been a Security-decreed precaution.
Nine: 3049 AD
The Main Sequence
Mouse drove down to the same departure station that had witnessed the Sangaree failsafer's suicide. A half dozen bewildered former landsmen were there already. He and benRabi were last to arrive. All but one of the others were women.
"They haven't shown yet, Ellen?" Mouse asked.
"No. Did you hear anything? You know what it's about?"
"Not really."
BenRabi tuned them out. He walked through those last few minutes before Kindervoort's men had come to disarm Mouse and he had walked into the failsafer's line of fire. He went to the spot where he had been standing, turned slowly.
"Jarl was here. Mouse was there. Bunch of people were there... They brought Marya's intensive care unit down that way, before Jarl showed, and took her right into the service ship."
He walked through it three times. He could not recall anything new. He had been distracted at the time. He had believed that Mouse was shanghaiing him, and had not wanted to leave. Then Jarl had distracted him...
"Hey, Mouse. Walk through this with me. Maybe you can think of something."
A scooter rolled into the bay. A pair of unfamiliar Starfishers dismounted. "You the citizenship class?" the woman asked.
"Hello there," Mouse said, like a man who had just crossed a ridgeline and spied all seven cities of Cibola.
The woman stepped back, her eyes widening.
"Must be Storm," the man said. "My wife, Mister Storm."
"Well... You win some, lose some. You don't know till you try."
"I suppose not. All right. Let's check the roll, then get started. Looks like we're good. We've got the right number of heads. All right. What we're going to do is leave the ship through the personnel lock and line over to one of the work bays on one of the mooring stays. There's zero gravity in the work area so you don't have to worry about falling. Follow me."
He went to a hatchway, opened it, stepped through. The future Seiner citizens followed.
Mouse tried hanging back, to get nearer to the woman.
BenRabi gouged his ribs. "Come on. Let her alone."
"Moyshe, she's driving me crazy."
"She's prime. Yes. And married, and we don't need any more enemies."
"Hey. It isn't sex. I mean, she's fine. Like you say, prime stuff. What I'm saying, though, is this is our shot at somebody from outside."
"What're you talking about?"
"She's not from Danion."
"How the hell do you know that?" BenRabi ducked through the third of the lock doors. "You've maybe been around the world here, but I don't think you've gotten to them all. Not yet. We haven't run into a hundredth of Danion's people."
"But the ones we have all came from the same mold. Oh, Christ!"
BenRabi slithered out of the ship. He stood on her skin, offering Mouse a hand. In both directions, as far as he could see, were tubes, cubes, spars, bars... Hectare on hectare of abused metal. Overhead, the laser-polished stone of the asteroid arched in an almost indiscernible bow. Danion's outermost extremities cleared it by a scant hundred meters.
Those hundred meters had Mouse petrified.
Mouse was scared to death of falling. The phobia usually manifested itself during a liftoff or landing, when up and down had a more definite meaning.
"You all right?"
Storm was shaking. Sweat beaded his face. He shoved a hand out the hatch, twice, like a drowning man clawing for a lifeline.
The others were hand-over-handing it along a cable spanning the gap between ship and asteroid.
"Come on, Mouse. It won't be that bad." How the hell had he gotten through all the e.v.a. exercises and small boat drills they had had to endure in Academy?
Mouse's phobia perpetually astonished benRabi. Nothing else fazed the man. Whining bullets and crackling lasers simply created the background noises of his work...
His work!
"Assassin's mind, Mouse. Go into assassin's mind." The state approximated a meditational trance, except that while he was in it Mouse was one of the most deadly men who ever lived.
Was he too much out of practice?
Mouse's shaking slowly subsided. His eyes became glassy.
"All right," benRabi said. "Come on. Slow. Take the handholds and work your way over to the line. That's good. Good. Now across to the balcony."
Moyshe spoke softly, without inflection. In this state Mouse had to be handled gently. Anything could set him off. Anyone not programed in as Friendly could get broken up pretty bad.
The woman instructor overtook benRabi on the line. "What's wrong with your friend?"
"He's an acrophobe."
"A Navy man?"
"I know. Be real careful for a few minutes. Keep the group away. He's not very stable right now."
He got Mouse onto the balcony, with his back to the vast mass of the ship, and talked him down. In five minutes Storm was asking, "You ever meet anyone on Danion who wasn't blond with blue eyes?"
"Some. Not many."
"Anybody with black blood?"
"No."
"I rest my case." Mouse surveyed the harvestship. "Damn, she took a beating."
"Huh?"
"Different perspective, Moyshe. It's not up and down from here."
BenRabi scanned the battered ship. "Mouse, I think we've been set up."
"What?"
"I thought it was a little weird, coming out the way we did. I was going to ask the lady why they didn't have something better." He pointed with his chin.
A half kilometer away a telescoping tubeway connected the ship with the rock face. BenRabi soon indicated a half dozen more connections. Each was large enough to use to drive heavy equipment onto and off the harvest-ship.