Lorrest glanced at the sun. “You’ve been here more than a day, chum. An Earth day, I mean—this planet must turn a lot slower.”
“I never thought of that.” Hargate looked around him, freshly reminded that he was far from home, and his gaze fastened on the crouching form of the bealf, which had advanced to within twenty paces. “Say, are you carrying any weapons?”
“No.” Lorrest swivelled his head, taking in the panorama of mountain ranges. “Why?”
“I’m nearly certain that thing wants to eat me.” Hargate pointed at the bealf. “I’d like to put a hole through it.”
Lorrest snorted with amusement. “Gretana said you were a rough-cornered type, and I’m beginning to see what she meant.” He tore off part of a sandwich, squeezed it into a ball and lobbed it towards the attentive animal. The bealf seized the morsel in its jaws, then backed away until it was lost to view in the grass.
“It’s nice having so much food you can afford to throw it away,” Hargate grumbled. “Don’t forget I was dumped here to starve.”
“Okay—let’s talk about that.” Lorrest handed Hargate a can of beer and a sandwich. “Better still, let’s talk about everything.”
The hour that followed was one of the most singular of Hargate’s life. On a personal level, he found he could relax and communicate freely with the Mollanian, in spite of the vast dissimilarities in their backgrounds. Their conversational styles meshed so perfectly that Hargate soon felt a rapport, even though he guessed that Lorrest was using some rehearsed diplomacies, and the feeling was good. Right from the start he was able to drink beer without embarrassment, although its fizziness increased the regurgitation through his nose, quickly soaking his handkerchief. During each bout of Hargate’s coughing Lorrest, neither staring nor pretending to be completely unaware, waited patiently until the talk could continue. And the story he unfolded was a seething white wave in Hargate’s mind, obliterating old concepts, strewing others in startling new patterns.
“I can’t quite take this in,” he said at one stage. “The Moon is another world—I can’t imagine it being destroyed.”
“It’s as good as done,” Lorrest assured him. “Less than two Earth days left toil.”
Hargate considered the incredible statement. “And is there nothing Vekrynn and the Bureau can do to save it?”
“Not a thing, though they won’t realise it until it’s too late.”
“I don’t get you.”
“We have allowed for the fact that they’ll locate Ceres and hit it with enough thruster rays to deflect it,” Lorrest said. “What Vekrynn doesn’t know is that we were lucky enough to find a major node on the surface of the Moon, in the Ocean of Storms. We have aimed Ceres exactly at the node, and we have put a special kind of machine there—a cone field generator—and it will activate itself about five minutes before the impact is due. When that happens Ceres will be snapped back on to its scheduled path, and…bingo!”
Hargate tried to visualise the colossal energies involved in flicking a minor planet around like a marble. “This machine, this cone field generator, is it something like a powerful magnet?”
“Yes, except that it works by locally modifying a few geometries. I don’t know if I could explain it to you.”
“That’s all right—I’ve crammed enough new stuff into my brain already. But if that sort of machine is so good, why doesn’t Vekrynn use one to pull Ceres really off course?”
Lorrest gestured with a beer can. “No anchorage. Any ship the machine was mounted in would simply be drawn towards Ceres—not the other way round.”
“I see.” Hargate’s thoughts returned to the basic issue, the one he found hardest to incorporate into his world picture. “But will pulverising the Moon really make any difference? Gretana told me something about how these second-and third-order forces of yours affect living matter, but…Our bodies are two-thirds water, so I can visualise a slight tidal effect, perhaps, but what else?”
Lorrest’s manner became didactic. “Don’t dismiss water so quickly, my friend. Mollanian science is a long way ahead of Earth’s—and we’re still arguing about the structure of water. The hydrogen-to-oxygen bond is so weak that a glass of water, no matter how simple and stable it may look, is like a single giant molecule constantly reforming and rebuilding itself. Even in warm water there are short-lived regions of ice crystals that form and melt millions of times every second. Water is uniquely flexible and fragile, which makes it the perfect trigger substance for biological processes, and—believe me—both the structure of water and the chemical reactions taking place in it are affected by cosmic influences.”
“I suppose forces that you, as an adult, can actually feel must be able to affect us,” Hargate conceded. “What’s it like, being able to sense skord lines and the movements of planets and such?”
“I hate using cliches, but how do you explain sight to the…?” Lorrest paused to stare at Hargate. “But that’s not exactly the case, is it? As a boy you found the Bureau’s Carsewell nodal point by yourself, and you knew the place was special. How did that feel?”
Hargate considered the impossibility of describing in full the emotional experience of a childhood visit to Cotter’s Edge. “I didn’t feel any planets tugging at me.”
“It isn’t like that. It’s…Look, the world we’re on now has no moons and there are no other planets in the system. Do you feel any difference?”
Hargate tried to turn his senses inwards, to locate a special reservoir of tranquillity. “Perhaps,” he said, unwilling to acknowledge his failure. “Do you think I could learn to skord?”
“That’s something I’d dearly love to know.” Lorrest’s face, in one of its rapid changes of expression, showed a hint of anger. “We on Mollan are the only one of the known human cultures who use sympathetic congruency for interstellar travel. The ability is almost certain to be present or latent in all the others, but a cornerstone of our Government’s policy is that we don’t make contact, don’t spread the knowledge. It would result in outsiders arriving on Mollan, you see, bringing new ideas and attitudes, disturbing the peace of the long Sunday afternoon. A man like Vekrynn would rather die than face up to change and growth and uncertainty.”
“I don’t think he’d rather die.” Hargate went on to talk about his intuitive belief that Warden Vekrynn had a pathological fear of death.
“I know he wants to be immortal, but that leaves a lot still to be explained.” Lorrest made a sweeping gesture which took in the surrounding vistas of plains and mountains, lakes and seas. “For instance, what are we doing here, two hundred light years inside a non-human sector? Nobody else on Mollan even knows about this world, and I wouldn’t have found out if Gretana hadn’t backtracked on herself and seen Vekrynn’s mnemo-curve. Why does he come here?”
“Perhaps he just keeps the place in reserve, for losing troublemakers.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt it.” Lorrest stood up, signalling an end to the strange picnic, and looked around with sky-mirrored eyes. “Have a look at that stream over there.”
Hargate concentrated his gaze on a ribbon of silvered water about a hundred metres from the hummock upon which they had eaten. “What about it?”
“Do those stones in it look like stepping stones to you?”
Hargate swore as he realised that in all his hours of surveying the same scene he had overlooked the clear evidence of human interference with the environment. “Stepping stones to what?”
“There’s only one way to find out. Come on.” Without hesitation, Lorrest grasped the back of Hargate’s chair with his right hand and began to push. Hargate fully expected Lorrest to leave him at the side of the stream and cross it alone, but on reaching the bank the tall Mollanian moved to his side, threw his right arm across the chair and lifted it clear of the ground. Four long steps took the two men and the machine to the other side of the stream in as many seconds.