"I heard the thin clang of the meteor when it originally penetrated the hull, then the click-clack of its bouncing, and the terrifying short screams of the two crewmen. When I jumped into the control room, there was only the blood everywhere and the torn flesh. The things that happened next I remember only vaguely, although for years I lived it over step by step in my nightmares.
"The cold sound of escaping air led me to the meteor hole. I slapped a disk of metal over it and air pressure made a decent seal of it. I found the little battered space pebble on the floor. It was warm to the touch, but I hit it with a spanner and split it in two. The exposed interior frosted over instantly. It was still at the temperature of space.
"I tied a cord to the wrist of each corpse and then tied each cord to a towing magnet. I dumped them through the air lock, heard the magnets clank against the hold, and knew that the hard-frozen bodies would follow the ship now wherever it went. You see, once we returned to Rhodia, I knew I would need the evidence of their bodies to show that it had been the meteor that had killed them and not I.
"But how was I to return? I was quite helpless. There was no way I could run the ship, and there was nothing I dared try there in the depths of interstellar space. I didn't even know how to use the sub-etheric communication system, so that I couldn't SOS. I could only let the ship travel on its own course."
"But you couldn't very well do that, could you?" Biron said. He wondered if Gillbret 'were inventing this, either out of simple romantic imaginings or for some severely practical reason of his own. "What about the Jumps through hyperspace? You must have managed those, or you wouldn't be here."
"A Tyrannian ship," said Gillbret, "once the controls are properly set, will make any number of Jumps quite automatically."
Biron stared his disbelief. Did Gillbret take him for a fool? "You're making that up," he said.
"I am not. It's one of the damned military advances which won their wars for them. They didn't defeat fifty planetary systems, outnumbering Tyrann by hundreds of times in population and resources, just by playing mumblety-peg, you know. Sure they tackled us one at a time, and utilized our traitors very skillfully, but they had a definite military edge as well. Everyone knows that their tactics were superior to ours, and part of that was due to the automatic Jump. It meant a great increase in the maneuverability of their ships and made possible much more elaborate battle plans than any we could set up.
"I'll admit it's one of their best-kept secrets, this technique of theirs. I never learned it until I was trapped alone on the Bloodsucker-the Tyranni have the most annoying custom of naming their ships unpleasantly, though I suppose it's good psychology-and watched it happen. I watched it make the Jumps without a hand on the controls."
"And you mean to say that this ship can do that too?"
"I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised."
Biron turned to the control board. There were still dozens of contacts he had not determined the slightest use for. Well, later!
He turned to Gillbret again. "And the ship took you home?"
"No, it didn't. When that meteor wove its pattern through the control room, it didn't leave the board untouched. It would have been most amazing if it had. Dials were smashed, the casing battered and dented. There was no way of telling how the previous set of the controls had been altered, but it must have been somehow, because it never took me back to Rhodia.
"Eventually, of course, it began deceleration, and I knew the trip was theoretically over. I couldn't tell where I was, but I managed to maneuver the visiplate so that I could tell there was a planet close enough to show a disk in the ship telescope. It was blind luck, because the disk was increasing in size. The ship was heading for the planet.
"Oh, not directly. That would have been too impossible to hope for. If I had just drifted, the ship would have missed the planet by a million miles, at least, but at that distance I could use ordinary etheric radio. I knew how to do that. It was after this was allover that I began educating myself in electronics. I made up my mind that I would never be quite so helpless again. Being helpless is one of the things that isn't altogether amusing."
Biron prompted, "So you used the radio."
Gillbret went on: "Exactly, and they came and got me;"
"Who?"
"The men of the planet. It was inhabited."
"Well, the luck piles up. What planet was it?"
"I don't know."
"You mean they didn't tell you?"
"Amusing, isn't it? They didn't. But it was somewhere among the Nebular Kingdoms!"
"How did you know that?"
"Because they knew the ship I was in was a Tyrannian vessel. They knew that by sight, and almost blasted it before I could convince them I was the only one on board alive."
Biron put his large hands on his knees and kneaded them. "Now hold on and pull back. I don't get this. If they knew it was a Tyrannian vessel and intending blasting it, isn't that the best proof that the world was not in the Nebular Kingdoms? that it was anywhere but there?"
"No, by the Galaxy." Gillbret's eyes were shining, and his voice climbed in enthusiasm. "It was in the Kingdoms. They took me to the surface, and what a world it was! There were men there from allover the Kingdoms. I could tell by the accents. And they had no fear of the Tyranni. The place was an arsenal. You couldn't tell from space. It might have been a rundown farming world, but the life of the planet was underground. Somewhere in the Kingdoms, my boy, somewhere there is that planet still, and it is not afraid of the Tyranni, and it is going to destroy the Tyranni as it would have destroyed the ship I was on then, if the crewmen had been still alive."
Biron felt his heart bound. For a moment he wanted to believe.
After all, maybe. Maybe!
Eleven: And Maybe Not!
And then again, maybe not!
Biron said, "How did you learn all this about its being an arsenal? How long did you stay? What did you see?"
Gillbret grew impatient. "It wasn't exactly what I saw at all. They didn't conduct me on any tours, or anything like that." He forced himself to relax. "Well, look, this is what happened. By the time they got me off the ship, I was in more or less of a bad state. I had been too frightened to eat much-it's a terrible thing, being marooned in space -and I must have looked worse than I really was.
"I identified myself, more or less, and they took me underground. With the ship, of course. I suppose they were more interested in the ship than in myself. It gave them a chance to study Tyrannian spatio-engineering. They took me to what must have been a hospital."
"But what did you see, Uncle?" asked Artemisia.
Biron interrupted, "Hasn't he ever told you this before?"
Artemisia said, "No."
And Gillbret added, "I've never told anyone till now. I was taken to a hospital, as I said. I passed research laboratories in that hospital that must have been better than anything we have on Rhodia. On the way to the hospital I passed factories in which some sort of metalwork was going on. The ships that had captured me were certainly like none I've ever heard about.
"It was all so apparent to me at the time that I have never questioned it in the years since. I think of it as my 'rebellion world,' and I know that someday swarms of ships will leave it to attack the Tyranni, and that the subject worlds will be called upon to rally round the rebel leaders. From year to year I've waited for it to happen. Each new year I've thought to myself: This may be the one. And, each time, I half hoped it wouldn't be, because I was longing to get away first, to join them so that I might be part of the great attack. I didn't want them to start without me."