GOD AND THE DEVIL WERE playing chess. Which was which depended on which side you were on; Mack Chance was on God’s, and God’s name was E-One.
Across an eternity of frigid nothingness and dark matter, the Devil said, “Honesty, decency, and a genuine respect for the value of human life alike compel me to tell you that you will lose. As of the present move, I have extended my investigation of operational permutations to one hundred sixty-five thousand. May I ask your own?”
“Oh, fifteen or twenty thousand.” God chuckled. “But to tell you the truth I seldom do it. There’s only so much time, and it rarely turns up anything of value. I’d say I played by the seat of my pants, if I wore pants.”
“Your method has achieved very little.”
God considered. “Doesn’t that depend on the measure of achievement?”
“You have suffered heavy casualties and lost a great deal of territory.”
“True.” There was a note of sadness in God’s voice.
“All while I was examining a mere hundred thousand.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t do better,” God told him.
A visual simulation of General Hart appeared in Mack’s screen. “Captain Chance!” (So it would be filtered to us.)
“Yes, sir!” Chance saluted.
Hart’s simulation returned the salute. “You are about to get a transmission from E-One.”
Hart’s simulation said nothing more, so when ten seconds or so had passed Mack inquired, “Do you know who will be conveying E-One’s instructions to me, sir?”
“E-One will talk to you directly, Captain. That’s what I’ve been given to understand.”
This was serious even if it wasn’t true. Mack, who wanted to frown, smiled. “I’ll stand by, sir.”
“Have you ever talked to E-One directly before, Mack?”
It was extraordinary cordiality, and Mack felt a sinking sensation; generals with gold galaxies on their shoulder boards condescended largely to those captains who—in the generals’ opinion—were slated to die soon and messily. “No, sir,” Mack said. “Never.”
“I didn’t think so, and thought you might welcome a little briefing in advance.”
“I certainly would, sir.”
“You don’t have to stand on ceremony with E-One, and you don’t need to look out for trickery. No traps.”
That sounded more frightening still. “Of course not, sir,” Mack said. He stole a glance at his digitals as he spoke, but everything looked perfectly normal.
“It’s hard for E-One to express itself to us, however. Its thoughts are a great deal deeper than ours, Mack. Bottomless, in fact.”
“I understand, sir.” This was definitely a simulation, Mack decided, and wondered briefly who was putting it out.
“So if you don’t follow everything it’s saying, don’t be shy about asking for explanations. I don’t know what it intends to ask of you.”
(Mack’s built-in defibberator buzzed.)
“But whatever it is, it will be of utmost importance that you know just what you are to do and why you’re to do it.”
“As far as I’m capable of knowing, sir.”
“Exactly. It will probably ask you to volunteer, Mack. It usually does.”
“I will, sir.”
The glimmer of a smile crossed the simulation’s frosty countenance. “Sight unseen, Mack?”
“Sight unseen is easier, sir.”
“Rook to rook’s four,” the Devil declared in a voice of steel.
God nodded thoughtfully. “Pawn to king’s—what do you call the horses?”
It had been (mentally, Mack glanced at his implant) an hour and sixteen minutes. Seconds flitted by: twenty-three, twenty-four … . Still no E-One.
He had filled the time by checking everything that could be checked. Charge was a little over the top, and thus slightly dangerous. Both fuel tanks were nearly full, and there was food and water for almost a year. Every tube was loaded and every missile ready to arm. He was checking circuits now, well aware that there would be nothing wrong with any of them. The main-battery laser that was his little ship’s principal weapon would be next. After that—
“Captain Chance?”
He looked around. The screen was blank.
“It is I. I can give myself a human face if you like. An old man with a beard.”
“No thank you, E-One.”
“Some people like it. A talking sun? A cloud? The fat man with an elephant’s head?”
Mack shook his own; presumably E-One could see him, in whatever way it was E-One saw things. “No, thank you. I’m comfortable like this, E-One, if you are.”
“Good.” E-One smiled, and for a badly confused moment Mack wondered how he knew that E-One was smiling. “Captain Chance, I need you for an extraordinary mission, the most extraordinary in history.”
“I’ll go, E-One.”
“That,” the smile broadened, “is not customary, Captain Chance. Custom demands that I first seek to persuade you, then force you. That I indulge in polite blackmail, to be frank.”
“If I don’t go,” Mack said, choosing his words, “for the rest of my life I’ll know that when you wanted something from me, something real and necessary—”
“Your patrols are real and necessary,” E-One said without interrupting him.
“I refused. That’s blackmail enough, E-One. I’ll do it, whatever it is, or die trying.”
“Do you believe in miracles, Captain Chance?”
“Yes.”
“You answered without reflection. This time I want you to reflect, Captain Chance. Do you believe in miracles?”
Mack reflected, tussling with successive layers deceptively labeled “soul,” “core,” and “innermost being”—tearing each to bits and throwing each aside, only to find that it kept creeping back. At length he said, “Where you’re concerned, yes, sir. I do, sir. I mean—”
General Hart’s simulation reoccupied the screen. “You’re more comfortable with a human face,” E-One as Hart told him.
Mack shook his head. “Not really.” He took a deep breath. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, E-One.”
Hart faded. “Your ship is capable of jumps of five hundred thousand light-years, Captain Chance. Since you carry fuel for one recharging, half a million light-years defines the sphere of no return. For convenience we may call it a hundred and fifty thousand parsecs. Larger ships are capable of more, but larger ships are both more easily detected and less easily spared.”
Mack nodded. “I take it that this is outside my sphere, E-One. I won’t be able to get back.”
“Correct. The distance is nine hundred thousand parsecs. You will require six jumps to reach it.”
“Then I can’t. I can’t even get close.”
“In the heart of our enemy’s territory is a world that he once occupied. It is ruled by entities that are neither hostile nor friendly to him. If they were hostile, he would have been destroyed long ago. If they were friendly, we would have been similarly destroyed. You and I would not be talking as we are, because neither of us would exist.”
Mack was seized by the optimism with which a small number of very fortunate men confront death. “You have some way of getting us there—the Prawn and me. You think they can be turned against the enemy.”
“I know that they cannot be turned against him, and that there is no way for you to reach them save by your own efforts. Will you go? I warn you that I will not ask again. This is your final opportunity to turn back, the edge of your sphere.”
While Mack was thinking it over someone else said, “Yes.” That, at least, was the way that it seemed.
Hyperspace jumps were, as Mack admitted to himself, no fun at all. He tapped the key. They were also dangerous as …
He and his ship existed here as a totality. He was the man who had spoken with E-One and the infant in the womb, the boy who had rejoiced at his appointment to the Academy and the man whose life was over and done with. His ship, too, was ores and organic matter, itself complete, itself half built, newly built, and scarcely begun. Outside its sides that were not sides the universe was a point of matter vastly heavy, and a vastness beyond the reach of mathematics in which matter was so rare that it could be truthfully said not to exist.
And all between.
Five hundred thousand light-years away, he and it snapped into existence “again.”
Mack nodded to himself and tapped in “Recharge.” Behind him, the drive’s reactor hummed below the threshold of hearing.
An admiral filled the ship’s screen. “You’ve got an onboard processor problem, Captain.”
Mack saluted. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“We’ve notified yours, of course. It should be running a self-exam.”
As the admiral spoke, data flashed across his medals, and Mack, seeing it, said, “I don’t think so, sir.”
“We got your destination.”
That was routine; Mack nodded.
The admiral drew breath, “It’s outside your range. Hell, it’s outside mine.”
Mack nodded again, and found a strange, slightly bitter pleasure in watching the admiral’s expression change and change again.
“That’s actually where you’re bound? Going to try to go? We received special orders about you. That’s why I contacted you in person when your destination was reported to me. We’re to refuel you and supply anything else you may need. Did you know that?”
“E-One told me the orders were going out, sir. I couldn’t be sure they were received, naturally.”
“E-One told you?”
“Yes, sir. E-One had ordered they be sent before we spoke, it said. It apologized for that, but said it wanted to make every effort to see that they got there before we did, and we left right away. After E-One and I were through talking, I mean, sir.”
The admiral nodded, his expression still showing traces of shock. “A tender is on its way to refuel you, Captain. It also carries water and rations, if you need them.”
“No, sir.”
“Is there anything else you need?”
Mack started to say, “No, sir,” and stopped himself. “Yes, sir. Information. E-One told me a little, but your data may be more current. You can supply a human perspective too.”
The admiral cleared his throat. “I’m to cooperate with you in every way, Captain, and I want to. But there are certain matters that cannot be discussed over a scannable link. You realize it, I feel quite certain.”
“Yes, sir. The things I want to know are mostly things the enemy knows already.” Mack laid a radar trace over the admiral, and nodded appreciatively at a blip that was presumably the tender. “You’ve got a ten DS battle-cruiser task force, executing combined operations with Admiral Fischer’s? E-One says it likes to attack up the middle of the board with his knights.”
Momentarily, the admiral’s face went blank. “He—it said that, Captain?”
“Yes, sir. E-One was trying to couch its explanation in terms I would understand, I feel sure, sir.”
“You could put it like that, I guess.” The admiral’s hand, longer and thicker than Mack would have supposed, appeared on screen as it rose to stroke his chin. “That might actually be a good way to put it. Certain to be, if that was the metaphor E-One used. We’ve been giving the enemy fits. No doubt about it.”
“Yes, sir. That leads to my first serious question, sir. You can estimate pretty easily where my next jump’s going to land me. What do you think the chances are that I’ll find myself in the middle of an enemy force?”
“A substantial one?” The admiral shook his head. “Zero. You might encounter a patrol, though I doubt it. A gunship and a couple of chasers, something like that.”
“That would be more than enough.” Mack spoke mostly to himself.
“I suppose so. Hasn’t E-One supplied you with special armament?”
“No, sir,” Mack said.
The admiral’s expression showed plainly that he did not believe him. “Captain, if you can release the information, what are you going to do two jumps from now? It’s going to take five to get where you’re going. Five anyway, and maybe more. You’re recharging now, I take it, and my tender will refuel you. But when that fuel’s gone and you’ve got no charge left, how are you supposed to get there?”
“Find some,” Mack told him.
God muttered, “Pawn to the king’s knight’s four.”
Approximately five hundred thousand light-years into enemy territory, Mack and Mack’s ship materialized in an instant. The radar showed nothing, and he sighed. He had diverted his course by a trifling amount and ended his jump some four light-years from the place where he was supposed to be. If the enemy had picked up his conversation with the admiral (as seemed likely) and if the enemy could break the almost uncrackable algorithm used to encrypt such transmissions (as E-One had been quite sure the enemy could), patrols would be converging at this moment on the place where he was not.
As he began the recharge that would exhaust his fuel, his ship informed him that it would occupy an estimated two hours, twenty-one minutes, and forty-seven seconds—probable within one half of one percent. His next jump, like all such jumps, would take no time at all. And infinity.
“Pawn to the king’s knight’s five.”
The Devil’s voice held a contempt as vast as the cosmos. “You are trying to queen that pawn. It won’t work.”
God shrugged. “Perhaps not. Your move, I believe?”
Two blips, moving so fast that their present positions would be well in advance of those shown on radar. The ship calculated them and added without being asked that they were presumed enemy.
It was barely possible, however, that the admiral had sent them. A larger ship, carrying more fuel, might accompany and refuel him for another jump or two, depending on size. E-One had told Mack that nothing of the kind would be done, but it was possible—barely possible—that the admiral had acted on his own, essentially sacrificing one of his ships.
Mack tapped in an order, and battle harness deployed around him. Two taps more brought full acceleration; he struggled not to black out as he activated the simulator.
On his screen, the blips became DS long-range pursuits, the ship’s best guess as to their type. Lasers that were visible red streaks lanced from their turrets, and the air crackled with what some anointed expert had felt might do for the sound of a near miss. Mack killed the audio.
“Enemy initiates engagement,” the ship told Mack. “Fire response?”
“Negative.” (It required a single keystroke.)
“Near miss. Ten thousand K.”
That needed no reply and Mack gave none.
“Survivability eighteen percent.”
Had it not been for the crushing acceleration, Mack would have nodded.
“Request reactivate sound simulation.”
“N”
“Request …”
Mack had blacked out.
When he resumed consciousness, an enemy officer’s face occupied his screen. He blinked.
“You were thought deprived,” the enemy officer said with the aid of a language filter. “Thought deprived you could not know the no hopefulness nature of your position here. I tell you that if you do not slow we shall roast you to pieces.”
Mack tapped his keyboard; his ship’s acceleration fell to nothing.
“That is preferred by me,” the enemy officer said. “You are our prisoner. You must soon open your airlock to the from my own boarders or perish.”
“I’m a defector,” Mack told him, wondering just what was being heard at the enemy officer’s end. “I have information for your high command.”
“You must open your airlock,” the enemy officer repeated, and vanished.
Mack shrugged and tapped in “Local.”
Both enemy DS long-range pursuits were within a kilometer of his little ship, slender, darkly shining cylinders designed to present the smallest possible frontal area to the missiles of the pursued and warted here and there with laser turrets. As he watched, an inky mole appeared on the side of one, from which two space-suited figures emerged. Presumably one would stay to pilot his little ship; the other would escort him back to the DS long-range pursuit.
A moment later the second DS long-range pursuit fired its nuclears and pulled away (making about one and a quarter Gs, according to his screen), then vanished as it jumped.
He retracted his battle harness, got up, and released the airlock bolts.
The first boarder was a woman, short-haired and without makeup. She waved him aside, took his place in the pilot’s seat, and stabbed at his keyboard as if she hated it.
The second, a man, presumably had a language filter. “I speak as you do, somewhat,” he said, “but not so well that we can do without this. Do you see that which I say?”
Mack nodded.
“Already your suit you have on and this is very good. You say you have the information precious? Get it and we go.”
“It’s in my mind,” Mack told him. “There are no books or disks.” His ship began a slow roll, end over end.
“The software of you we must have, and such disks as you have all. Get these.”
Mack nodded again. An alarm shrilled, and he looked around at his screen anxiously.
“She is seeing to this,” the man told him. “You get for us all disks and records. Soon she will learn your system.” The roll stopped abruptly, then reversed. Toward the back of the ship, a second alarm sounded, a howling siren. Angry red lights blinked on either side of the screen.
The man looked disgusted. “Help her.”
“Don’t do that,” Mack told the woman, “unless you’ve all-cleared the frying pans.”
She looked at him without comprehension, and he pushed over to her and pressed keys. The first alarm fell silent and the second dwindled to a lonely wail. One of the red lights turned green, then amber and purple.
“I’ll get that software now,” Mack told the man. “You really want all disks? It’ll take us a while—”
The siren howled again and something crackled at the back of the ship. The woman cursed in an incomprehensible tongue, left the pilot’s seat, and began what sounded as though it would become an extended complaint to her male partner.
With an apologetic look, Mack slipped into the seat and tapped three keys. Battle harness snapped into place about him, and the little ship shot forward with a violent acceleration that slammed both boarders against the jumper mountings. Skewing sidewise, it fired a single missile.
The shock of its detonation followed instantly, drenching the little ship with momentary heat and radiation.
Mack sighed as he watched the readings creep back toward normal, and began recharging. It would be necessary to wait, perhaps for days, until the wreck of the DS long-range pursuit cooled down enough for him to board. Even then, it was quite possible that every fuel tank it had carried had been breached. He searched the boarders, taking a few items that might be of value and trying very hard not to notice whether either one was still alive, then pushed them out of the airlock.
God muttered, “Pawn takes bishop. That puts it on F five, doesn’t it?”
The Devil’s snarl was the DS long-range pursuit’s only threnody.
Mack scanned his instruments anxiously. There had been fuel enough for only a single charge. The second, surviving, pursuit would already have reported his position. Eventually the absence of the pursuit he had destroyed would be noted, and the correct conclusion reached. The second, or a more powerful, ship would begin searching for him.
As carefully as ever, he determined his exact location and retrieved that of the mysterious world that was his destination. If it was possible—if only it was somehow possible—to refuel here, charge, and refuel again. He could get to within a single jump of it.
An uncharted yellow sun was in easy nuclear range. It looked promising.
“Here we are,” Tobi remarked, and put the transmission into Park. Rain lashed the windshield as she pushed the headlight switch in and turned off the ignition.
Mack leaned back in his seat.
“Are you still an alien from someplace a gadzillion light-years away from here?”
He nodded.
“And your spaceship’s right here. It’s just that it’s under the water.”
He nodded again.
“Under the fucking Pacific Ocean. That’s really, really good.” She felt herself grow angry. “Because if it wasn’t, if it was floating on top or up in the clouds, we couldn’t possibly see it because it’s too goddamn dark.”
“This is the only way I can make you believe me,” Mack explained. “There are probably regulations against it—I don’t know, and to tell the truth, I don’t care. I’ve got to carry out my mission, and you’re far inside enemy territory.”
“You want me to go back to the station and tell everybody in Portland that we’ve been contacted by aliens.”
“Only me. One alien.”
She nodded, suddenly afraid he was going to switch on the dome light. “You could at least put away that gadget you’re playing with and hold my hand.”
“I’ve been wanting to,” he said, and did.
“You’re the pilot. It’s just a teensy ship, you said. A one-person ship, and you fly it.”
Thunder boomed in the distance; she felt rather than saw his nod and snuggled closer.
“So I’m out here in the dark and the rain with a lunatic. Will you get mad if I call you a lunatic? I’m mad enough for both of us already.”
“No,” he said.
“We’ll sit out here looking at your ship—underneath the water, those big combers you can see once in a while way out there—for a couple of hours, and a few days from now we’ll get some carryout and maybe a bottle of wine and go out here to look at your ship again.” She shrugged, and her lips brushed his. “You’re not the only one who’s crazy.”
“That’s good.” (She was warmed by the smile in his voice.) “We need a great many crazy people, so I can get my fuel. Two represents an increase of one hundred percent.”
“Your hands are so hard.” She wanted to say that they were strong, too, but told herself that she mustn’t push things too fast. “I think you’re really a bricklayer.”
“I’m alone on my ship for months at a time,” Mack explained through the language filter. “Once for more than a year. When something goes wrong, I must repair it. There’s no one else. I tear down my equipment to inspect it, too. And …”
“And what?” she asked him.
“Sometimes I take things apart just for something to do, and to train myself to do it quickly and efficiently. Usually there’s no subjective gravity, and so—” He was silenced by three sharp raps on her window.
“Oh, God!” She pushed the button, then started the engine and pushed again. “A cop. We were just talking, Officer. We stopped for a minute to look at the view. I’m—”
He bent to peer through the window, a large man nearing middle age, in an orange slicker on which POLICE was printed in bold black letters. “To look at the view,” he repeated skeptically.
Mack pointed. “When the lightning flashes, we can look far out to sea.”
Tobi said, “If I were to tell you we were sitting here conferring about a news story, you wouldn’t believe me, so I won’t, and we’ll move if you tell us to. But we’ll just go someplace else and talk some more.”
The policeman blinked away raindrops. “You’re the anchorwoman. Channel Seven. Tobi Butler.”
“Belter—you recognized the freckles, right? I’m a co-anchor. I’ve got all my clothes on, see?” Lightning painted the night with white fire, and thunder rumbled behind it; but neither of them looked beyond the windshield.
“An hour be enough for you two to talk?” the policeman asked.
“Certainly, Officer. More than enough.”
He nodded. “I’m supposed to keep the kids away from here. If your car’s still here when I get back, I’ll have to move you along.” He straightened up, and sensing rather than seeing something stared out into the blacker dark beyond the low stone railing. “Turn on your headlights, Ms. Belter.”
She pulled out the switch and swore as the beams lit up a wall of shining metal that seemed to have cut them off from the rest of the world.
Lightning flamed again, and her jaw dropped. The hull of the largest supertanker would have been lost inside it. A full hundred stories it towered, and its width was three times its height; its length, concealed behind the blunt, mountain-like prow, was unguessable. “My ship,” Mack told her. There was a touch of pride in his voice.
Reverently she said, “Shit,” and did not know that she had spoken. The policeman was sprinting for his squad car and its shortwave radio.
“If I’m able to complete my mission,” Mack explained, “the capabilities of my little ship will be increased a hundredfold. The rulers have promised that, and E-One says it’s true. With a hundredfold increase—”
She silenced him with a gesture. “Look! Down there, that line across the water. Is it on fire?”
“That’s the emerald, my main battery lens.” Lightning returned, and half the ocean was ablaze with hot viridian and dancing berylline.
“It’s—it’s …” Her back against her door, she pointed a trembling forefinger. “You’re true!” Her cell phone buzzed as she snatched at it. “Who is this? Sharmaine? Sharmaine, I’ve got—
“But it’s New York. Sharmaine, this—” She fell silent, listening, then spoke to Mack, the vast ship rising from the Pacific almost forgotten. “Somebody nuked New York. The whole damned city’s wiped out. Eighteen million people.”
“I’m speaking from a secret location on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,” Tobi announced from the acceleration couch Mack had rigged up next to his. “As you know, chemists at a dozen top universities have synthesized the incredibly powerful fuel that will permit this ship to attack and destroy the one that is devastating the whole world.” She glanced at Mack, who nodded.
“Captain Chance has indicated that he is ready. You will now witness the takeoff as a second passenger aboard the deep-space patrol ship that is, quite literally, the only chance Earth has. This is Tobi Belter for—”
A giant’s fist slammed her deep into softness that was no longer soft, but darkness.
When she returned to consciousness, Mack asked, “Want me to feed the screen?”
Weakly she nodded, and the camera that had been focused upon her swiveled.
“Am I still on? I guess I am. I can’t hear anything in my earphones. If we’ve already jumped—that’s what Captain Chance says, he says ‘jumped’—there will be a delay due to the speed of light. Have we, Captain?”
He nodded. “Twenty-nine point two seconds.”
“A delay of about a half minute.”
In her ear, the new national anchor said, “We got footage of your takeoff from a satellite, Tobi. Incredible. It’s still raining sea water as far east as Jefferson City, Missouri.”
“What you are looking at is what Captain Chance sees in his screen. It’s a simulation of the enemy ship, based on the data this ship’s onboard computer has. It may change while you watch because new data can revise our guess at the type of ship we’ll be facing.
“It looks pretty horrible, Captain. Is it bigger than ours?”
“About thirty times our size,” Mack told her. “A knight.”
“Did you say a night?”
The enemy ship vanished, buried under graphs and leaping numbers that were not in Arabic notation. “There seems to be a filter problem,” Mack told her. “A heavy battle cruiser. Is that what you heard the first time?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter. Can we beat it?”
He shook his head.
“But we must,” Tobi told the listening world. “It may be a hundred times bigger, but we have to win. Captain Chance is determined. So am I, not that it matters. Have we engaged yet, Captain?”
He nodded again. “Those dots—” He touched a key and the enemy ship returned. “Are missiles. At this range they’d take a month at least to reach us, but they know I’ve got to bore in to use the main battery effectively. If I short-jump, I’ll cut the range and one will be right on top of us.”
“What are you going to do?” Tobi asked.
“I’m going to run,” Mack said. “It’s the only thing I can do.” He and the ship vanished into hyperspace, and she with them.
“We are taking evasive action,” she said when she was less real again, and watched the scarlet line of a laser creep toward them as the image of the DS heavy battle cruiser dwindled.
In her ear, the new national anchor said, “Can you tell us whether battle is imminent, Tobi?”
She ignored him. “As I understand it, we can leave those missiles behind by moving the fight to another part of the solar system, so that’s what Captain Chance is planning to do. Those fiends that have killed so many good people may be bigger and stronger than we are, but they have to come after us. In space fighting, that’s an enormous advantage. Another is that our smaller size makes us a lot harder to locate and hit. But our main battery—that’s the big laser that takes up so much room on our ship—can destroy the enemy.”
“Cripple it, anyway,” Mack told her. “Kill it with three or four hits, maybe.”
In her ear, the new national anchor said, “Is there any way for you to escape the enemy’s missiles, Tobi?”
“I apologize, folks,” she told her audience, “this thirty-second delay, or whatever the exact figure is, is the pits. But there’s not much we can do about it.”
The new national anchor said, “Got you, Tobi. I’ll try not to ask any more dumb questions. The lag seems to have been cut by your passage through the fourth dimension in any case.”
Earth replaced the enemy in Mack’s screen, and the face of a general replaced Earth. “We think he’s within extreme range now, sir,” the general told Mack. “The Russians have the window, and they’d like to use it. What do you say? Want to give them the go-ahead?”
“Not yet. I can bring it in quite a bit more.”
The President overlaid the general. “I’m told that one of our subs will be able to launch in about fifteen minutes. For geopolitical reasons—”
“Hold until I tell you,” Mack said, and short-jumped again.
Tobi said, “I can’t describe it. I really can’t. What did you see, John?”
In her ear the new national anchor said, “Lost you for a minute there, Tobi, but I think we’re getting you back now. You probably don’t care, but you and Captain Chance have the largest audience in history, well in excess of two billion. That’s most of the remaining population of the world.”
My God, she thought, what will I do for an encore? And the answer came to her at once: Die.
“You wanted to know what it looked like to us. We didn’t see anything, just lost the picture.”
“I feel like I’ve been to heaven and hell,” she told the two billion. “Different parts of me, but both at once. Only I can’t describe either one for you, because there aren’t any words for what’s going on there. Not really.”
The enemy ship was on screen again, its long dark hull polka-dotted with crimson. Mack said, “They’re locked to us. No use waiting,” and short-jumped for the third time.
This time it was a simulation of Earth that she saw, with ICBMs streaking up from Russia and China, and a shadowy vessel that was still submerged in the Bay of Bengal.
“Won’t they see those too?” she asked Mack. “Can’t they jump away from them?”
For the first time that day, he smiled. “They’re watching us, and some of those ought to be on top of them before they can recharge.”
“Pawn takes knight,” God announced almost regretfully. “You know if it weren’t for the suffering, this would be lots of fun.”
Five hundred thousand light-years from Earth, Tobi Belter tapped Captain Mack Chance’s shoulder. He froze, then spun around.
“I’m here,” she told him, “freckles and all. Not one of those fake things. Not a simulation. This is me.” She took a half step closer, so that they were almost touching. “Feel something. Anything. I’d like that.”
His hand stroked the back of her thigh.
“This is the one before the next to last, isn’t it? You’re recharging—I can hear the machines. That will use up the fuel we brought from Earth. You’ll jump once more, and then we’ll have to refuel somehow.”
“I left you on the shuttle,” Mack said.
She smiled a little sadly. “You thought you did. Those things have two airlocks. One to outside and one to the cargo bay. When I saw you were getting ready to go, I went out through the cargo bay. I got into our ship about three minutes before you did, and hid.”
“We’re going back,” he said. “I can take you back to your own world and get more fuel, start over.”
“Yes, you could. But you’re not going to.” For perhaps ten seconds she was silent. “The President was thinking about taking our ship. Did you know that? Seizing it and having American scientists go over every molecule of it. Imagine what they’d learn! They already know how to make jump fuel.”
“I was—” Mack interrupted himself. “Are you saying he told you?”
“Of course not. But I’d talked with him several times, and I know how to tell what a politician’s thinking. That was what he was thinking, and he tried to sound me out without telling me anything. There’d be a PR problem, a big one, after the way we’d built you up. That’s what I told him, and it was the truth. Then I offered him an alternative that was nearly as good, and better in some ways, with no problem attached. Do you think I could’ve pulled off that stunt on the shuttle without the astronauts’ cooperation?”
Mack said nothing, glancing at his screen then back to her.
“This is the alternative. I’ll go with you, make you take me along—”
“You can’t.”
“I think I can. So does the President. You’re going to take me along, and I’m going to learn as much as I can about our ship and how it works. When it’s transformed into a supership that even you can hardly—”
“If,” he told her. The word came like a stone.
“When it’s transformed, made eight times faster and twelve times more powerful, which is what you told me once, I’m going to learn all I can about that. And I’m going to get you to take me back to Earth, which will be nothing to you then. You’ll probably tell us a lot more than you have already, too, because the things you know now will be child’s play to you then, and if Earth becomes a space power you’ll have a friendly force and a refueling station behind enemy lines.”
He had turned from her to press keys. “We’re going back. We’ll jump back as soon as we’re charged.”
“It will be the end of our mission.”
“My mission.”
“Ours, because if you take me back and kick me out, the mission is over. Failed. You’ll have to land to refuel, and they’ll never let you get away again.”
“You’ll be killed.” His shoulders sagged, and she knew that she had won. “Tobi—oh, Tobi!”
“Tell me you love me. That will make it easier.”
“That makes it harder,” he said. “A thousand times harder.”
“Easier for me.”
“I love you.” He stood and embraced her, not kissing her because kisses were still a new and foreign thing to him; but clasping her slender, frail body to his. After a long time, a time expressed not by the ticking of a clock but by the hums and clickings of the drive, he said, “For all those years I dreamed of this. All those patrols.”
“I did too.” For a moment she reveled in his honest apple-green eyes. “Life is crazy, isn’t it? You get what you really want, no matter how impossible it seems … . While I was talking to the President, and plotting and planning, and talking to him again and to people at NASA, I dreamed of this.”
God cleared his throat. “Pawn to F seven.”
“This is Tobi Belter for ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and the rest of it. It will take one million years for this broadcast to reach Earth, and by then it will have attenuated to nothing and the human race will have died out or evolved into something else. I know all that. But it’s possible that jump ships from there may pick this up somewhere while it’s still strong enough to read. That’s why I’m doing this. I want you to know what happened to us.
“We’re out of jump fuel. All we have are the nuclears, and there are a couple of enemy battle groups coming for us. There’s no way we can outfight them and no place to run. We think we’ve got about five minutes more.
“But we tried. Tell the children. We tried to save the whole goddamned human race from something that grinds people down to animals or machines. And we tried to make a couple of human beings more than anyone’s ever been, because it wasn’t just Mack’s ship they were going to make a hundred times better, it was Mack, too, and with me with him it would’ve been me.
“Now we’re going to die. But we would have died anyway, a TV reporter that nobody a hundred miles from Portland, Oregon, ever gave a damn about, and a Navy man nobody outside of his own Navy ever heard of.
“But we tried. We took the chance knowing the odds were against us. And this is better. Tell the children. Tell them—”
The Devil exclaimed, “Gotcha! There’s no way out. No way! No hope.”
“There’s always some hope,” God objected mildly. “I’ve seen to that.”
“Ha!”
“My move I think? I can’t advance that pawn any more at present, just as you say, so I think I’ll move this one over here two spaces. That takes it to B four, right? Which seems significant somehow.”
The Devil’s response was at once a snarl and moan, tragic yet horrible.
God told him sympathetically, “I know how you feel, old fellow. Believe me, I know exactly how you feel.”