sleep mode, only to be told by a calm voice to lie down and go back to sleep. Herb had taken one look at the flexible black object hanging like shiny satin from Robert’s hands and quickly obeyed. Robert frightened him.
Apart from that incident, there was nothing to unsettle him. Nothing, of course, except Robert himself.
Herb spent one afternoon sitting on the white leather sofa gazing at the open hole in the floor where the trapdoor lay. A son et lumiиre played out around him. He ignored it, increasingly wondering about sneaking down through the trapdoor and into Robert’s ship. What did it actually look like? He had had his ship’s computer retune and recalibrate its senses time after time in an attempt to get a look at it, but with a spectacular lack of success. Whatever Johnston had done to his own ship had rendered it invisible to Herb’s senses. In desperation, Herb had even toyed with the idea of climbing out onto the hull of his own craft in an attempt to get a visual on it, but so far had failed to muster the courage. What if he slipped and fell down onto the writhing planet below? If the drop didn’t kill him, his silver creations certainly would.
So why had Robert hidden his ship from view?
Herb suspected it was probably just because he could. Johnston seemed to take a delight in demonstrating his superiority at every occasion. Still, maybe there was another reason…
The thought of escape had been growing slowly in Herb’s mind. If he could cut the link to Robert’s ship and activate the warp drive…
There were only two problems, as far as he could see.
First, how could he be sure that the link was actually broken? How would he know he wasn’t jumping through space with Robert still attached? Maybe that was why Johnston kept his ship hidden. Anyway, there was a second consideration.
Where would he go? Actually, the second point wasn’t so much of a problem. He knew where he would go: straight home to his father’s estate. Back home to Earth and four square kilometers of smooth, green lawn. His father was rich. In the middle of a tiny country with skyscrapers shoulder to shoulder, all jostling for position among farmland and public recreation grounds, his great-great-grandmother had leveled a patch of land in the middle of the Welsh hills and built nothing on it but a low, tasteful mansion. The rest of the land had been converted to a condition that his father liked to refer to laughingly as “unspoiled”: Gentle slopes and pleasant woodlands studded with lakes, a picture of an idyll that would have seemed entirely out of context with the original surrounding countryside. The whole estate was a grandiose gesture of understatement that inflamed envy and resentment in equal measures: Herb’s father was so rich he could leave valuable land untouched. Of course, the space beneath the land did not go unused.
Herb’s father was a rich and powerful man. But, thought Herb, was he powerful enough? Could he stand up to the EA? A second thought caught Herb’s attention.
So, he decided firmly, he had a place to escape to. Possibly. But first, could he break the link between the two ships? To achieve that he would have to get a look at Robert Johnston’s ship.
The answer finally occurred to him, and he gave a slow smile. So Robert didn’t think that he was that bright?
Maybe he could prove otherwise.
Herb was listening to Beethoven: the late string quartets, opus 127 to be precise. He had read somewhere that these were considered amongst Beethoven’s greatest pieces, if not some of the greatest pieces ever written, and Herb was damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy them as much as the so-called experts.
He had set the sound picture so that the string quartet appeared to be playing just over the trapdoor where Robert would emerge into the room. Maybe it would surprise him, but probably not.
In his head, Herb was rehearsing his plan to get a picture of Robert’s ship. He just had a few words to say, but they had to seem nonchalant. He could not give away the fact that he was plotting something. The idea was actually quite simple. Johnston controlled what was picked up by the senses on Herb’s ship, but those weren’t the only senses Herb had at his disposal. Had Robert forgotten the billions of VNMs swarming below? Each a descendant of a machine built to Herb’s design, and each one sporting a rudimentary set of senses? The question was, how to do it without Robert noticing? And the solution was simplicity itself. Herb spoke.
“Hey, Ship. I would like a chocolate malt and a hot salt-beef sandwich. And would you do a full scan out to point one light year? Include sensory information from all other public sources. I want to gather as much data as possible for the records. The state of this planet may be germane to any future legal action brought against me.”
As he spoke, Robert Johnston strode out of the secret passageway. The sight always turned Herb’s stomach slightly. Robert walked up the side of the passageway, perpendicular to the floor of Herb’s ship. As he stepped from the passage to the floor, his body swung through ninety degrees. That last step was dramatic. Robert straightened his hat and smiled at Herb.
“Full system scan, eh? That reminds me. Now that there is no need for them, I must disable the software blocks I placed on your ship’s senses to prevent them seeing my ship. They must be really putting a hole in the middle of your world picture.”
Herb smiled sarcastically. Robert pretended not to notice.
“I see you were about to have a snack. Good idea; I think I’ll join you. You made a good choice. Ship, I’ll have the same as Herb. Chocolate malt and a salt-beef sandwich, hold the meat.”
He gave Herb an apologetic smile. “I’m a vegetarian, didn’t I tell you?”
“Are you really?”
Herb didn’t care. All around him the ship was sucking up its impressions of the immediate surroundings in a bubble point two light years in diameter. Buried somewhere in that set of data would be the images sensed by the VNMs just below him.
Some of those images would reveal Robert’s ship.
Herb was beating Robert at chess. He had arranged his opponent’s captured pieces in a circle around the foam-flecked glass that had held his spiced lager. He grinned across the board as Robert frowned while thinking of his next move.
“Do you want to concede? Again?”
“Not yet. I feel I learn something just by playing through to the end.”
“Please yourself.”
Herb sat back in his seat and began to hum. Robert sighed and moved a piece.
“You don’t want to do that,” Herb warned. “Mate in three moves.”
Robert sighed again. Just for the moment, the arrogant air had left him.
“Herb,” he said, “don’t you ever think that there are more important things than winning? Haven’t you heard the saying ‘It’s far more important to be nice than to be clever’?”
Herb rolled his eyes. “The call of the loser. Okay, have that as your move.”
“That’s all right. I concede.” Robert knocked over his king and stood up. He placed his hat on his head.
“Don’t you want another game?” asked Herb.
“No, thank you. I think I’ll go back to my ship and have a nap.”
Herb shrugged. “Suit yourself. You know, we’ve been hanging over this planet for ten days now. I thought we were supposed to be going off to war. When are we actually going to do something?”
Looking a little sad, Johnston gave a barely perceptible shrug.
“Soon. The first reconnaissance reports are coming back already. We’ll give it another couple of days to see what else we get.”
“What reports?”
“You’ll see. Good night.”
Robert waved good-bye as he stepped into the secret passageway, his body jerking forward through ninety degrees as the new gravity caught hold. He marched away down to his ship.
Herb watched him go, a feeling of frustration burning inside. Even when he won, Robert had a way of making him feel he had lost. Everything he did seemed intended to highlight Herb’s inferiority. Worse, no matter how Herb tried to fight back, he always seemed to end up losing. Herb wasn’t used to that; the few friends he had made had always been chosen as being just slightly less clever than he was.
