"Relax," I told her. "He's a friend"—quite untruthfully, of course, but all I wanted was for her to shut up and stay out of the way. Then I told the Kugel about Wan's armaments and intentions, finishing, "So we need to keep him from causing trouble. We could request help from the authorities—"
"Hell we could," Harry interrupted. "Nobody would get here for days and by then he could launch all those ships, armed and on their way, and—"
"So," I finished for him, "that's not a viable option. We'll have to take action ourselves. Neither Harry nor I have that capability. Do you?"
The figure's components stirred. "It is known that we have," it pointed out. "We have already sterilized this object once, can do so again: A simple flip of its magnetic field, thus canceling its radiation-opaque atmospheric layer and thus allowing lethal radiation to reach the organisms on the object—"
Allison had been listening, her mouth hanging open. Now she used it to yell at the Kugel. "Hold it right there, buster! You're not doing any of that! You're talking about murdering Rose and Liz and Jilly and Jean, not even counting the Old Ones and—"
I gave her the kind of semi-lethal stare that I had learned for my deputy war-wager role. It worked. She shut up, and I told the Kugeclass="underline" "That is unacceptable. We are not authorized to destroy living persons."
It hung silent for a moment, as though trying to come to terms with this unexpected new concept. Then it said, "There is another difficulty with our first proposal. Our numbers in the present locale are not sufficient for that task. Summoning others would require time of same order as requesting reinforcements."
I nodded. "So let's go back to your first idea. Can you volatilize all Wan's weapons without causing any loss of life?"
"And hurry up about it," Harry put in. "He's still got those guns trying to line up on us, so we don't have all the time in the world to make up our minds."
Well, really we did. The Owner would be just about getting warnings from his guardminds—having just noticed that our simulations had broken up and disappeared. But I was impatient to get things settled. I addressed the Kugel again. "Can you do this?"
Another pause. Then, grudgingly, "There is no question. Can do so quite accurately."
"Then do so," I requested. "Destroy his weaponry. And while you're at it, better take out his spacecraft, too."
That was all it took. Kugel didn't answer in words, just shimmered, dissipated and was gone, back inside his pressure-cooker. We never saw him again.
We did see what he did.
I had not really formed any picture of what the Kugel's "volatilizing" would look like. So I wasn't quite ready when the process began.
You understand that I have no physical ears. So I heard nothing directly, but I felt the shocks, even at the very limits of the planet's atmosphere, when my acoustic sensors picked up fifty or sixty quick, stinging blasts of great magnitude. Harry felt the same shocks. He clapped his simulated hands to his simulated ears, quite uselessly, of course. "Hey, Markie!" he begged. "Make it stop!"
I couldn't do that. It didn't matter. The blasts had stopped already. What was left, I saw, was a blistered patch of infinitesimal liquid-metal bubbles on Kugel's containment shell. Another, similar pattern had erupted on the wall of our spacecraft, and I recognized them as the femto-scale emissions Kugel had promised. It occurred to me to be grateful that my hardware, and Harry's, hadn't been in the line of sight to Wan's palace; I doubt that Kugel would have bothered to miss them.
What was happening on the surface of Arabella was not femto-scale at all. Little white puffs began to appear here and there around the castle, then a couple of larger ones, then the mother of all blasts, not just smoke but pieces of structure, billowing flame. A big part of Wan's castle was in ruins, though not, I was pretty sure, the part I had left him in. I think one of Kugel's rounds had set off Wan's main ammunition dump. Its magnitude made me feel for the Old Ones, but Harry zeroed the optical sensors in on them and reported that they were cowering under the trees, but physically unharmed.
So that was that.
Then we began our vigil as we waited for other ships to come.
The thing was, we couldn't afford to let Wan's castle out of our sight. We didn't know what he might have hidden in some other tunnels. Maybe nothing, but we didn't want to take the chance. So we couldn't leave our spacecraft in a normal planetary orbit, because anything could happen when we were on Arabella's far side.
So we did it the hard way.
We allowed our ship to fall along its orbital trajectory until Wan's place was just about to drop below the horizon, then zapped ourselves, super-lightspeed, to where it had just come up on the other horizon....
And repeated that, over and over, until the other ships arrived. Which was 3.813 days later.
Would you like to know how many of those partial orbits make up 3.813 days? 83 of them. Totaling those 3.813 organic-time days. And would you like to know how long that is for a couple of people like Harry and me, used to operating on AI time?
Don't ask. You don't want to know. Just call it interminable.
But even the seemingly interminable does, sooner or later, terminate. Reinforcements arrived. We were relieved. We faced the equally interminable voyage home to the Wheel. But for that time we could at least turn ourselves off.
IX
When we got back to the Wheel, Thor Hammerhurler was fairly glad to see me, Marcus 2 wasn't and nobody else seemed to care much one way or the other. They were thrilled about what we'd done on Arabella, of course. They had Harry's organic-time simulation appearing on the p-vid over and over to be interviewed as the hero of the event, and Allison almost as often, playing the part as the escaped captive of the monster, Wan, who was planning to kill thousands of innocent organics until we superheroes arrived to thwart him.
I was not disturbed by this. Harry was a former organic, with vanity accordingly, and I was just a machine-made AI. You don't congratulate AIs if they do something that needs to be done. All you do is scrap them if they don't.
Marcus 2 showed no signs of wanting to share his work with me, in fact showed every sign of wishing I would go away—jealous that I had had all the adventures, I think. It was a very queer sensation. For the first time in my existence, I had nothing to do.
Except, of course, to see Thor Hammerhurler, so I went there.
I caught him at a bad time. He was in the middle of the daily check of all the weaponry on the Wheel, and, although all the checks were always go, he didn't like to be distracted. "Try me a little later," he said testily. "Maybe three or four seconds; I should have the results in by then."
"Sure, Thor," I said. "Sorry to bother you."
Which left me with all those seconds to fill and nothing much to fill them with. I didn't even want to practice cooking up some particularly tough dish, because I didn't want Marcus 2 to think I was competing with him. I didn't have Harry to feed, because Allison was more interesting to him than food just then. I wandered back to our ship where it was plugged into its dock—why, I'm not sure; I guess I thought maybe Kugel would be in a talkative mood. He wasn't, though. He wasn't there at all. Buck in the blitz, I supposed, because the pressure container that had held him was now open and empty.
The seconds did pass, and not just three or four of them; I didn't want Thor to think I was rushing him, so I waited a full six before I returned to his eigenspace.
The flashing lights were dark, the bells and klaxons were silent, and Thor was busy debriefing his Heechee advisor.
I knew that one. His name was Thermocline, a steady customer of mine—couscous, Greek lamb dishes and halvah at first, but then he became more daring, when his digestion would allow. That is to say, Thermocline was organic. That meant that when I said Thor was busy debriefing him I had overstated again. Thor had plenty of time to do other things as well.