At least that’s what Rod told himself. He could trust Whitbread and the communications people; Lermontov’s signals wouldn’t be in the log.
Three and a half days. Two minutes of 1.5 gee every four hours to change the watch, grab forgotten articles, shift positions; then the warning horns sounded, the jolt meters swung over, and too much weight returned.
At first MacArthur’s bow had pointed sixty degrees askew of Cal. They had to line up with the intruder’s course. With that accomplished, MacArthur turned again. Her bow pointed at the brightest star in the heavens.
Cal began to grow. He also changed color, but minutely. No one would notice that blue shift with the naked eye. What the men did see in the screens was that the brightest star had become a disc and was growing hourly.
It didn’t grow brighter because the screens kept it constant; but the tiny sun disc grew ominously larger, and it lay directly ahead. Behind them was another disc of the same color, the white of an F8 star. It, too, grew hourly larger. MacArthur was sandwiched between two colliding suns.
On the second day Staley brought a new midshipman up to the bridge, both moving in traveling acceleration chairs. Except for a brief interview on Brigit, Rod hadn’t met him: Gavin Potter, a sixteen-year-old boy from New Scotland. Potter was tall for his age; he seemed to hunch in upon himself, as if afraid to be noticed.
Blaine thought Potter was merely being shown about the ship; a good idea, since if the intruder turned out hostile, the boy might have to move about MacArthur with total familiarity—possibly in darkness and variable gravity.
Staley obviously had more in mind. Blaine realized they were trying to get his attention. “Yes, Mr. Staley?”
“This is Midshipman Gavin Potter, sir,” Staley said. “He’s told me something I think you ought to hear.”
“All right, go ahead.” Any diversion from high gravity was welcome.
“There was a church in our street, sir. In a farm town on New Scotland.” Potter’s voice was soft and low, and he spoke carefully so that he blotted out all but a ghostly remnant of the brogue that made Sinclair’s speech so distinctive.
“A church,” Blaine said encouragingly. “Not an orthodox church, I take it—”
“No, sir. A Church of Him. There aren’t many members. A friend and I snuck inside once, for a joke.”
“Did you get caught?”
“I know I’m telling this badly, sir. The thing is— There was a big blowup of an old holo of Murcheson’s Eye against the Coal Sack. The Face of God, just like on postcards. Only, only it was different in this picture. The Eye was very much brighter than now, and it was blue green, not red. With a red dot at one edge.”
“It could have been a portrait,” Blaine suggested. He took out his pocket computer and scrawled “Church of Him” across its face, then punched for information. The box Linked with the ship’s library, and information began to roll across its face. “It says the Church of Him believes that the Coal Sack, with that one red eye showing, really is the Face of God. Couldn’t they have retouched it to make the eye more impressive?” Rod continued to sound interested; time enough to say something about wasting his time when the middies were through. If they were wasting time…
“But—” said Potter.
“Sir—” said Staley, leaning too far forward in his chair.
“One at a time. Mr. Staley?”
“I didn’t just ask Potter, sir. I checked with Commander Sinclair. He says his grandfather told him the Mote was once brighter than Murcheson’s Eye, and bright green. And the way Gavin’s describing that holo—well, sir, stars don’t radiate all one color. So—”
“All the more reason to think the holo was retouched. But it is funny, with that intruder coming straight out of the Mote…”
“Light,” Potter said firmly.
“Light sail!” Rod shouted in sudden realization. “Good thinking.” The whole bridge crew turned to look at the Captain. “Renner! Did you say the intruder is moving faster than it ought to be?”
“Yes, sir,” Renner answered from his station across the bridge. “If it was launched from a habitable world circling the Mote.”
“Could it have used a battery of laser cannon?”
“Sure, why not?” Renner wheeled over. “In fact, you could launch with a small battery, then add more cannon as the vehicle got farther and farther away. You get a terrific advantage that way. If one of the cannon breaks down you’ve got it right there in your system to repair it.”
“Like leaving your motor home,” Potter cried, “and you still able to use it.”
“Well, there are efficiency problems. Depending on how tight the beam can be held,” Renner answered. “Pity you couldn’t use it for braking, too. Have you any reason to believe—”
Rod left them telling the Sailing Master about the variations in the Mote. For himself, he didn’t particularly care. His problem was, what would the intruder do now?
It was twenty hours to rendezvous when Renner came to Blaine’s post and asked to use the Captain’s screens. The man apparently could not talk without a view screen connected to a computer. He would be mute with only his voice.
“Captain, look,” he said, and threw a plot of the local stellar region on the screen. “The intruder came from here. Whoever launched it fired a laser cannon, or a set of laser cannon—probably a whole mess of them on asteroids, with mirrors to focus them—for about forty-five years, so the intruder would have a beam to travel on. The beam and the intruder both came straight in from the Mote.”
“But there’d be records,” Blaine said. “Somebody would have seen that the Mote was putting out coherent light.”
Renner shrugged. “How good are New Scotland’s records?”
“Let’s just see.” It took only moments to learn that astronomical data from New Scotland were suspect, and no such records were carried in MacArthur’s library because of that. “Oh, well. Let’s assume you’re right.”
“But that’s the point: it’s not right, Captain,” Renner protested. “You see, it is possible to turn in interstellar space. What they should have done—”
The new path left the Mote at a slight angle to the first. “Again they coast most of the way. At this point”—where the intruder would have been well past New Cal—”we charge the ship up to ten million volts. The background magnetic field of the Galaxy gives the ship a half turn, and it’s coming toward the New Caledonia system from behind. Meanwhile, whoever is operating the beam has turned it off for a hundred and fifty years. Now he turns it on again. The probe uses the beam for braking.
“You sure that magnetic effect would work?”
“It’s high school physics! And the interstellar magnetic fields have been well mapped, Captain.”
“Well, then, why didn’t they use it?”
“I don’t know,” Renner cried in frustration. “Maybe they just didn’t think of it. Maybe they were afraid the lasers wouldn’t last. Maybe they didn’t trust whoever they left behind to run them. Captain, we just don’t know enough about them.”
“I know that, Renner. Why get in such a sweat about it? If our luck holds, we’ll just damn well ask them.”
A slow, reluctant smile broke across Renner’s face. “But that’s cheating.”
“Oh, go get some sleep.”
Rod woke to the sound of the speakers: “GRAVITY SHIFT IN TEN MINUTES. STAND BY FOR CHANGE TO ONE STANDARD GRAVITY IN TEN MINUTES.”
Blaine smiled—one gravity!—and felt the smile tighten. One hour to match velocities with the intruder. He activated his watch screens, to see a blaze of light fore and aft. MacArthur was sandwiched between two suns. Now Cal was as large as Sol seen from Venus, but brighter.