Hargate glanced at the oncoming asteroid and was positive he could now discern an increase in its brightness. “How?”
“That region of space is filled with Bureau engineers and equipment. I can contact my men from here and in less than a minute have this site vaporised to a depth of a thousand metres. That will take care of any number of cone field generators.”
“I daresay.” Hargate frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose it will also take care of us if we don’t transfer out of here.”
“Your grasp of the situation is excellent,” Vekrynn said, beginning to smile. “The Ceres operation is being directed from a small space habitat centred on a drifting node little more than a light second from here. That will be my vantage point for the final minutes of this affair.”
“Suits me fine—Let’s go.”
“I’m afraid your understanding of the situation isn’t quite as good as I thought.” Vekrynn turned and began to shuffle towards the point at which they had arrived, exercising great care with his balance. “I’m not taking you with me.”
“You can’t leave me here,” Hargate said in a kind of startled whinny, going after the retreating figure. “The stuff they pour in here is bound to kill me.”
“Wrong again!” Vekrynn did not look back, but his voice carried clearly. “When I transfer away from this dismal spot my dome field and the air it contains will go with me. No, I don’t think you need worry about being vaporised.”
Hargate swore loudly and increased his speed. “Let’s drop all the phoney Agatha Christie politeness, Vekrynn. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”
The Mollanian continued his ungainly progress, still without looking back.
“Listen to me, Vekrynn, you great bag of dung,” Hargate shouted, acutely aware that Ceres was no longer a star-like point of light. Within a very short time it had begun to exhibit a visible disc—testimony to its frightening speed.
Vekrynn kept on lurching forward, seemingly oblivious to everything in his determination to reach the nodal point.
“Lorrest put one over on you,” Hargate said gently. “We found the sixth copy of your Notebook. We know you, Vekrynn.”
The Warden stopped abruptly, a huge clockwork figure whose mechanism had jammed. Hargate steered to the right and went in a semi-circle which enabled him to halt directly in front of the Mollanian. In the relentless vertical light Vekrynn’s face was no longer human, the eye sockets reduced to blind black cavities. He remained motionless for a few seconds, then started forward with increased urgency.
“I told you I wasn’t letting you go anywhere.” Hargate reached down behind his right hip, brought out his most treasured possession—the complex, glittering shape of the Mollanian travel trainer—and held it aloft like a talisman.
“Look at this, Vekrynn,” he gloated. “Look at the curve, Vekrynn—it’s the one you just used to get to this place. I’ve got you.”
Vekrynn uttered a single word in Mollanian and swayed directly towards Hargate. Remembering the effect on Lorrest of one brief contact with the Warden’s tunic, Hargate hastily selected maximum speed and swung the chair out of Vekrynn’s path. Vekrynn changed direction and came after him.
There followed a nightmarish sequence in which the Mollanian, in spite of repeated falls, pursued him in a snaking course throughout the vicinity of the nodal point. A minute and then another minute went by, and Hargate made two unnerving discoveries—that his batteries were growing perceptibly weaker, and that Vekrynn was learning to cope better with the lunar gravity. Instead of simply trying to overtake the wheelchair, he began launching himself at Hargate in a series of sprawling dives which carried him several metres through the air and which at times brought him dangerously close. Hargate had to assist the chair’s slowly fading drive with his hands in order to evade the hurtling giant, and he began to panic as he realised that were he to topple over Vekrynn would be upon him before he could hope to move again.
He was profoundly relieved therefore when the bizarre hunt came to an unexpected end. Vekrynn, his face and clothing caked with grey dust, struggled into a crouching position, but instead of turning towards Hargate he remained doubled over, staring at the sky. Hargate followed the direction of his gaze and quailed as he saw that Ceres, closer now to the horizon, had become an irregular patch of brilliance whose intensity changed every few seconds. The asteroid was tumbling in its course, bearing down on them, winking like a malign eye. As he watched in frozen fascination, a bluish glow sprang into existence off to his left at the site of the buried machine, and he knew that the awesome rendezvous had become inevitable.
Vekrynn gave a tremulous sob, straightened up and—turning his back on Hargate—floundered towards the nodal point with the dragging gait of a man wading in deep water. Hargate rolled after him, getting as close as he dared. On reaching the node Vekrynn stumbled to a halt and raised his right hand. Circling round to the front, Hargate saw that the Mollanian’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving silently.
“It’s no use, Vekrynn!” Hargate grasped the bright shape of the training device in one hand and began running his fingers along its curvatures. “You can’t concentrate. You can’t get away from me. You’re in the middle of a third-order whirlpool and you’re going to stay in it.”
He began to chant the terms of the equation which had brought him to the Ocean of Storms, using them like an incantation which gave him power over Vekrynn’s mind and body. The new phase of the duel between the two men lasted more than a minute, then Vekrynn sagged on to his knees, and covered his face with his hands.
“Why are you doing this?” he breathed, his voice barely audible. “I can’t die, I can’t die, I can’t die.”
“You’re not about to,” Hargate said peacefully. “Provided you do exactly as I say.”
Vekrynn was silent for a moment. “I can’t die.”
“Right. I want you to switch on your communicator—the one you were going to use to call your engineers—and I want you to put it on the ground where it can see and hear us.”
Vekrynn removed a bracelet from his wrist with unsteady fingers and set it in the dust in front of him.
“I want proof it’s working,” Hargate snapped. “I want a response.”
Vekrynn mumbled a few words in Mollanian. There was a brief silence and three or four voices answered simultaneously. By a technology that Hargate could not even visualise, the fidelity of the reproduction was almost perfect.
“That seems good enough,” he said. “I’m sure you know what to do next.”
Vekrynn remained silent, head bowed, face again hidden in his hands.
Hargate numbered off sixty seconds before saying, “Vekrynn, you must tell us what is in the preface to the sixth copy of your book. And I want it in English.”
When there was no response he counted a further sixty seconds and said, “Vekrynn, I think you ought to take another look at Ceres—it’s becoming quite a spectacle.”
He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke and was appalled by the gross changes in the asteroid’s appearance. It had swollen sufficiently for its rotation to be visible as a continual alteration of its shape. It appeared to be alive, quivering and bristling with menace, and the knowledge that the colossal energy it contained would atomise the plain on which he was sitting for hundreds of kilometres in every direction filled Hargate with a near-superstitious dread. The amount of overkill was irrelevant—but the sheer magnitude of the impending destruction had a desolating effect on his soul. We’re not much, he thought. We don’t amount to…