Jon stopped his mad dash as the full import of her words struck him. The others, suddenly aware that their progress had halted, turned around in puzzlement.
She looked him full in the eye, blue-grey almost on the same level as brown.
‘Jon, it would be like they had taken one step on Earth and the next on an alien world. And if they could do it once, they could do it again and again. Jon, this gang of horrors could live as long as the universe!’
Jon stood stock still, staring at Shana; the others gathered around him, anxious to discover what new problem was now facing them. He detailed Shana’s revelation to them.
‘We must destroy them,’ he said slowly, ‘even at the cost of our own lives.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Jorl said, ‘I’m here to save my life – not throw it away on a theory.’
Jon stared at the cold grey floor, held motionless by indecision. Then he straightened.
‘The systems must be programmed to begin regeneration when the ship arrives – at wherever it’s going. So we have until then. If we can’t control the ship, then they will never come out of those tanks. If we can, then we turn our attention to them after we have made the ship safe.’
The others, even Jorl, nodded in acceptance.
And their journey was resumed.
They noticed that the corridor was becoming wider and the quality of the light was changing, becoming harder, bluer. Arachnoids scurried away from them in all directions.
And then they were there. A great door sensed their approach and slid obediently open.
They came out on a balcony below which stretched banks of humming, buzzing machinery; softly glowing viewer screens; shining, gleaming surfaces everywhere. Here was the home of the arachnoids, for during five hundred long years they had kept the brain of the Fatal Scimitar working as well as their programming and dexterity had allowed. The system had been designed as perfectly as human ingenuity could have made it; no possible problem had been unforeseen, uncatered for.
But it had not been enough: the insidious fingers of entropy and a random high-energy event had brought all that brilliant planning to catastrophic failure.
They descended to the main level; slowly, moving like stunned barbarians entering a splendid cathedral of the High Renaissance. They rapidly pooled the knowledge that the Educator had given to them and then Jon approached the largest of the viewer screens, a screen which was wider than the entire astonished group and twice Jon’s height.
Instantly it sprang into life. And the image it showed was strangely familiar.
It was of a perfectly black background, but not totally black for it was dusted with little lights; little hard, unblinking lights, some noticeably brighter than the others.
Shana grasped his arm. ‘Jon – it’s my dream. And you saw it too – remember!’
‘Yes,’ he said, wonderingly, ‘when I tried the Hill version of the Educator. I saw this. But now I know what it is.’
‘And it is…’ Jarm enquired.
For an answer, Shev strode up to the display and, acting on a hunch, held her palm against the screen and flicked it to the right.
The lights in the viewer display suddenly shifted to the right; some disappeared, some came into view.
But something else came into view – a small, painfully bright disc of harsh radiance.
Jon studied the words and numbers that had suddenly flashed across the bottom of the screen.
‘G8 main sequence,’ he said, apparently to himself. He turned to the others: ‘Our destination!’
The others burst into a clamour of excitement, slapping each other on the back and with broad smiles almost splitting their faces. His Shana made as if to kiss him.
But he ignored her and bent down to get a closer look at the numbers and mathematical symbols which were being displayed in a repeating sequence at the bottom of the huge screen. His strong fingers flew back and forth over its lambent surface and he spent quite some time there, staring with slowly narrowing eyes at what they revealed.
Finally he stood upright and turned to look at the group. Jorl took in his expression and snapped: ‘Alright – let’s have it!’
Jon stared back at his group of comrades, reflecting how they had been flung into an apparently endless maelstrom of danger and trial and how they risen to those challenges with seemingly inexhaustible resources of fortitude.
‘We have entered this planetary system, just as the Protectorate planned, half a millennium ago. But as Shev told us not long ago, the guidance systems are compromised. We should have begun braking about thirty years ago.
‘We did not. We are travelling too fast to be captured by our destination planet. We will describe a hyperbolic arc around this star and then head back out into interstellar space.’
Eight
‘Back into interstellar space?’ whispered Jarm, ‘Then it’s all over. We’re finished.’
The looks of the faces of his companions told Jon that the opinion was unanimous.
He turned away from them and stared at the glowing instruments. They held the key to controlling the Fatal Scimitar; Jon knew that all the technical understanding required to master the vessel was already in his brain – he had just to turn theory into practice and extremely soon.
‘All of you!’ he shouted in a stentorian roar, ‘look at these machines! Find some way of controlling them, operating them! Now!’
For a few moments they just stared at him as if he had suddenly demanded that they learn how to fly but then they realised that he was offering them their only hope of avoiding a slow, cold death between the stars. They all immediately crossed to the machine nearest to them and began examining it; but even in this dreadful emergency Jon kept an eye on the location of Shana36, watching to see if she crossed over ‘his” Shana’s path. He knew it was irrational, a complete dereliction of duty; a perfect example of failing to get his priorities right.
But he couldn’t help it.
It was Shev who found the answer. She pointed at a palm-sized blank pad on the portion of her machine that jutted out to form a kind of shelf or working surface. Tentatively, not daring to hope, she had put her palm on it and a portion of the front of her machine above the working surface had slid upwards and a pair of scalp contacts similar to the Educator pads had slid out.
Jon did the same with his machine with the same result. He pulled the pads out of their recess and stared at them for a few fast-flowing moments. Their resemblance to the Educator pads could not be a coincidence. They must have a similar function, but maybe in reverse – with knowledge flowing from a flesh and blood brain to a machine!
There was a moulded chair in front of every machine and, sitting down, he placed the pads on his scalp.
Instantly a cold mechanical thought that was not his formed in his mind.
Instructions? it said.
Show me all the command instructions.
A great bank of computer commands appeared in his inner vision, rolling inexorably, endlessly upwards to disappear from his purview.
He slowed the display to a more manageable rate and memorised the ten most important ones. The others he could return to later.
He looked over his shoulder to find that his companions had not copied him but stood in an expectant semicircle around him, waiting for something to happen.
No matter. They could learn later, in the meantime…
Activate breaking rockets he commanded into the heart of the great Command Computer.
Activated.
Fire.