As the canoes drew closer to the Valkyrie, keeping spread out to minimize the effects of cannon fire if the ship opened up on them, there seemed to be no resistance from the ship. Then a sharp, bright beam of coherent light lanced out from the bow of the Valkyrie and hit one of the canoes. A second later, it was followed by a blast of white hot plasma as the auto-pulser, locked in by the laser-tracking circuit, systematically began to pick off the pirogues. One boat became awash in searing light, then it was gone, leaving nothing but smoke and some residual flaming plasma burning out upon the surface of the water. The screams of Gambi’s men echoed across the bay; the remaining pirogues turned and pulled for their lives, but nothing could save them.
“If Gambi’s lucky, he died out there,” said Martingale. “Quicker and cleaner than what Lafitte will do to him if he survived. Guess he saw an opportunity to seize a ship and a nice cargo of slaves, to boot. Too bad he picked the wrong ship.”
“That bullet’s going to have to come out,” said Lucas, examining Martingale’s shoulder. “I can’t do it here.”
“We’ll go out to the ship,” said Martingale. “There are medical supplies aboard. Besides, someone’s got to go out and get that boatload of blacks. It’s drifting.”
One of the other boats containing slaves had been hit by the auto-pulser from the ship. The remaining boat was slowly being carried away by the current, the blacks aboard howling in fear, not knowing what to do.
They helped Martingale into a boat and rowed out after the slaves. Martingale cursed. “We lost several men. Maybe von Kampf, too. Drakov’s going to be furious. Our own fault. We should have been more careful, knowing Gambi was around.”
“What are the slaves for?” Finn said. “Damn it, Martingale, you’d better start leveling with us right now.”
“Same thing slaves have always been for,” Martingale said. “Cheap labor. Drakov needs them at the base.”
“Where is the base?” said Lucas.
“Small island off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in the early 19th century,” said Martingale. “Visitors are discouraged by the slaves Drakov buys from Lafitte. The area is known for having cannibals and even though Drakov’s slaves aren’t, they play the part real well.”
“If you’ve known where it is all along, why haven’t you done anything?” said Finn. “Why hasn’t the Underground reported it to us?”
“It’s not that simple,” Martingale said. “The timing must be right. The Doctor will explain it all.”
“That’s another thing,” said Lucas. “Who is the doctor?”
“His name is Dr. Robert Darkness,” Martingale said. “He’s the inventor of the warp grenade.”
Martingale sat on the edge of the table while Lucas bandaged him. Two men stood guard on the deck of the Valkyrie while Count Grigori von Kampf, who had been slightly wounded in the battle of the boats, led the others in a search for the slaves who had escaped during the fight. Martingale had been wounded in several places. Two bullets had been lodged in his body and he had sustained several sword cuts, but he carried on as though such injuries were a part of his daily routine. While Lucas worked, only an occasional grimace or grunt from Martingale gave evidence of his feeling any pain.
“So the mysterious inventor of the warp grenade joined the Underground,” said Finn. “Christ, no wonder they’ve classified everything about him, including his name.”
Martingale shook his head. “You’ve got that wrong,” he said. “Darkness isn’t part of the Underground. He isn’t part of anything. Years ago, he just split the scene. Took off for some remote corner of the galaxy. He’s real strange, Delaney. All he ever wanted was to get as far away from people as it was possible to get, but he wanted it both ways. He wanted to be able to deal with people when he felt like it, only on his own terms.”
“Sounds like what a lot of people want,” said Andre.
“True,” said Martingale, “only Darkness did it. He was working on temporal translocation around the same time Mensinger was, only he was going at it from another angle. He started out working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission.”
“That isn’t possible,” said Finn.
“Hey, don’t tell me, I’m no scientist,” said Martingale. “Tell the Doctor. He’s been doing it for years. What he came up with was a means of communication at a speed six hundred times faster than the speed of light. That still meant a delay in transmission, though. A five-second time lag over thirty-six hundred light seconds or a one-year delay in messages at a distance of six hundred light years. He wanted it to be instant. He got involved in some very obscure mathematics, working from the Georg Cantor theory of transfinite numbers. He discovered a solution. He found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Instantaneous transmission. Going from Point A to Point B without having to cover the distance in between. Only he wasn’t satisfied with just having achieved instant tachyon TV communication. He wanted to travel.”
“Wait a minute,” Lucas said, pausing in his ministrations. “You’re telling us he did all this before Mensinger invented the chronoplate?”
“I don’t know if it was before or about the same time,” said Martingale. “It was certainly before the chronoplate was perfected.”
“And no one knew about this?”
“How would anyone know unless Darkness told them?” Martingale said. “He didn’t give a damn. He just took off for deep space like some Flying Dutchman and started living life according to his own rules. But he still wanted to be able to keep in touch, so he started working on a process by which the human body could be turned into tachyons which would depart at 60 °C along the direction of the tachyon beam through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. His chief concern was that conversion to tachyons would violate the law of uncertainty.”
“How do you mean?” said Finn.
“Well, the way he explained it to me was that if you take one hundred eighty pounds of human being and one hundred eighty pounds of bacteria and put them into a genetic blender, the result would be indistinguishable. His main concern was whether the RNA and DNA would reassemble themselves in the appropriate order at the appropriate time and place.”
“Same thing Mensinger was worried about in terms of chronoplate transition,” Finn said.
“Exactly. Because if they didn’t, what might materialize would be a blob. He was also worried about the reassembly process itself, since there wouldn’t be a receiver. He solved this by incorporating a timing mechanism into the tachyon conversion, which reassembled him at the moment of arrival based on time coordinates of transition. He focused the beam by means of gravitational lenses scattered throughout the galaxy. But while the uncertainty principle didn’t trip the Doctor up, it didn’t turn out as he imagined, that he had invented the ultimate form of transportation. Mensinger did that. Darkness discovered instead that the taching process was ultimately restrained by a little known law of physics, called the law of baryon conservation. While he arrived “in corpus,” he was unable to move. He appeared much like a holographic projection or a distant ghost seen underwater. A figure frozen in time and trapped by the laws of the universe.”
“You mean he’s insubstantial?” Andre said.
“Well, no, though he can be, if he wants to. He can project an image of himself or actually tach himself, but he can’t move from one spot. He’s trying to work on a way to do more than talk and wave his arms and stare at people, but he hasn’t got that one licked yet.”
“Why can’t he simply use a warp disc or even a chronoplate?” said Andre.
“Because his body has been tachyonized,” said Martingale. “Something about the way the process has altered his subatomic structure won’t let him clock. He can transmit objects, but he can’t clock himself. It makes him angry as hell. Mensinger perfected the device that would allow him to do exactly what he wanted all along, only he can’t use it. He said once that after twenty years of scientific research, consulting thousands of libraries on hundreds of worlds, he still can’t duplicate the beaming process envisioned over one thousand years ago by some television writer. He hates that writer.”
“Now let me get this straight,” said Finn. “He can teleport, much the same way we can, only he does it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge via tachyon beam and he can’t move once he gets there?”
“He can move some, but he can’t leave the spot he materializes on,” said Martingale. “Sort of like a hologram with substance. I wouldn’t get too close to him if I were you. He may be a genius, but he’s unbalanced, sort of. He just might grab you.”
