'We will continue to build to the end,' Rei said. 'There is hope.'
'Build with what?' Argun demanded. 'Dirt and straw?' He rose. 'Our miners are working in heat which kills. We’ve burrowed so deeply into five planets that we’re near the heated magma. We’ve lost ten thousand men on that damned sun planet. And we’re not producing enough metal per six months to build one star ship.'
'We’re putting more ships on the Seberian run,' Miaree said.
The others were quiet, faces moving to follow the three way dialog.
'The Artonuee female lays six or more eggs,' Argun said. 'On a fertile planet the transplanted juplee trees carried by the fleet are capable of doubling themselves in fifteen years. By cutting the juplee fleet in half we do not threaten the race. When we find new planets, the iffling population can be replenished within two years.'
'It is a matter of age-old belief,' Miaree said, looking toward Rei for help.
'Beliefs change,' Argun said harshly. 'I have issued orders to convert fifty juplee ships to carry people. People. Living, intelligent beings.'
'You have ordered,' Miaree gasped, standing to face the tall Delanian. 'How dare you?'
'I dare because there is necessity,' Argun said. 'I dare because I have seen enough of my people die.'
'Your orders will be rescinded,' Miaree said, her eyes purple with anger.
'Other instructions went out with that order.' Argun said. 'Delanians, stand.'
Around the table the aliens rose, Rei among them. And as they stood, the eyes of the Artonuee present were drawn to evil-looking hand weapons, revealed when the Delanians opened their ceremonial cloaks.
'You have diverted resources to the making of weapons?' Miaree asked, unbelieving.
'They came with us,' Argun said. 'They occupied little space, added little weight. Not one Delanian was left behind because of the weapons. And because of the weapons, not one Delanian will be left behind when the fleet abandons the Artonuee system.'
'Rei,' Miaree whispered, looking at him. He could not meet her eye. 'Oh, Rei.'
Chapter Twenty-Three
Five was a world in the grip of organized chaos. With all but official roller vehicles long since consigned to the smelters to reclaim their metals, the artificially heated landscape flowered with the brilliance of Artonuee females moving toward central points. For some, there had been tearful farewells. For others, fortune had not even allowed that much. With them now were the stolid males of the race, grey, serious, silent. Already the shuttles were lifting, burning the atmosphere and gliding out of sight toward dark space, where the star fleet orbited. From the loading points, ranks of the huge ships were grouped in squadrons, closely packed. The laden ships hummed with life. There, inside the metal wombs which would carry the race through endles space, the sorrow of leave-taking was eased somewhat by the excitement of discovery, by carefully trained wardens who ordered and begged and yelled and coaxed the incomers into their proper compartments.
Dress rehearsal for the great adventure.
There in space, where the Fires of God gleamed in deadly nearness, the Artonuee tasted destiny.
Below, a heavy, aged male crouched over a workbench, ignoring the
sounds from the outside world. Bertt had been notified. Already his section of the planet had been evacuated of Artonuee. In the dwelling around him Delanians prowled, seeking useful objects discarded by the departing Artonuee. A mile away, a section of the dwelling area burned, and there were none to halt the spread of the flames. Indeed, there was little need, for the fires were small in relation to the flames of doom which flickered in the sky, strong enough now to be visible, dwarfing the distant sun.
Bertt worked on.
'I am Bertt, once Overlord of the Fleet,' he had told them when they stood, armed, on his portal and demanded that he join the others in the long line toward the shuttle pads.
'You are Artonuee, and you will leave with the others.' he was told.
But rank had its privileges. A quick call to planet headquarters, and he was left in peace. Even the Delanians remembered that it was Bertt who had wedded the convertors to the fusion engine, making possible the giant ships which sparkled in near space, visible to the naked eye now that loading was underway.
Once before he had been given a deadline. Then he had failed.
There was the possibility of failure now, he admitted, as his shaking fingers made the last cold connection. What he planned was risky. The work of a lifetime depended on the function of a tiny loop added to the altered mires expander before him. That insignificant looking bit, encased in cold plastics, would have strained Bertt’s ability to communicate, had he been asked to explain. It was the result of months of work, years of thought, and its simplicity, when added to Bertt’s theory, wrought a tremendous change in the actions of the circuits. Basically, the loop fed electrons back onto themselves in a uni-field, a closed area which was physically no bigger than the ball of Bertt’s spatulatey fourth finger, but which had shown infinite capacity in his tests.
Bertt, himself, did not understand. But it was not necessary to understand. It was necessary only to make the final test.
Finished, he called, absently left his communicator on as he waited. There would be no one there, once he had gone, to use the instrument.
There was more difficulty as he joined the Artonuee packed into orderly lines at the shuttle pads, but once again, although he felt guilty to pass up the staring eyes of his fellows, rank allowed privilege, and he was escorted by two armed Delanian men to the work shuttle, allowed to carry his small case containing a few tools and the expander.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his personal powered flyer was still in its dock. Then he was inside, moving under control direction past the shuttles, the waiting star ships with air locks connected to other shuttles which disgorged Artonuee into the five-mile-long hulls.
His flight plan had listed Nirrar as his destination, but once free of Fivegate control, he executed a smooth turn and pointed the rounded nose of his flyer toward deep space. Once there, he allowed the flyer to drift powerless as he made the substitution, his altered expander replacing the mires expander in the flyer’s power system.
Once his fingers would have flown over the work and the change would have been done in minutes. Now his hands shook with age and the task was irksome. When it was completed, he rested, his eyes closed, his heart laboring. When his pulse had slowed, he refreshed himself, then punched test circuits into play and watched with squinted lids, the results. They were satisfactory. He breathed deeply, ran the convertor to full power, the fusion engine giving headway toward deep space. His course had been planned years previously, a course which punched a straight-line hole through space for a distance of ten parsecs. The line ended outside the bounds of the galaxy, near a small, isolated cluster. The distance was incredibly far, roughly equivalent to the distance which separated the Artonuee system from the dead worlds of the Delanians, worlds now consumed in a huge ball of stellar fire which filled that sector of the galaxy. It was a distance which would take a light twenty ship over a year and a half to travel.
Bertt covered the distance in the time it took him to exhale after activating the drive. He rode, inertialess, on the force of the electrons in two 0.1-inch cubes of red metal. Against such force even God’s Constant was insignificant. With the activation of the altered mires expander, changed beyond dreams by Bertt’s theory and a small, plastic-enclosed loop which became a hole in space, Bertt the builder unleashed a new force into the universe and rode it like a thought down a line ten parsecs long, and then, waiting for something to happen, not realizing that it had, he looked out to see a sky unlike any he’d ever known. Ahead and to his left was the cluster, huge now, individual stars distinct, the nearer ones disced. Behind him was his galaxy. With the viewer on magnification, he could see the collisions as the two galaxies edged into each other, the point of star impact a mass of fire.
The man who had made infinite star travel possible, the male who, upon his return, would relieve two races of the necessity of decades, perhaps centuries of travel in the star ships, that male, Bertt, feeling joy in his heart, knelt before his flyer’s controls and made a prayer to God.
His prayer of thanks still in his mind, he returned in a wink to the original position just outside the orbit of
