There was too much truth in it, and he could feel the blood rush to his face. She stood studying his reaction clinically, as if using it to gauge the progress of the anti-depressant. Then suddenly she laughed easily and dropped to the opposite chair. “Maybe you should try sometime, Derek—but not now. I’m having my hands full with the men’s rumors. Look, why not tell me the truth about this expedition? After all, we’re almost ready to cut speed.”
The drug was beginning to work now, killing some of his gloom. He was still convinced of his jinx, but he could think of other things. Now he considered her question, surprised that she hadn’t already been briefed. “How much of the background and history of the war do they teach on Terra?” he asked. Some of the distant worlds had queer legends that would make explanation difficult.
She frowned impatiently for a second. Then she apparently decided to humor him and began sketching her knowledge in. Aside from her provincial belief that men had originated on Terra, it was accurate enough. Wherever men had started, the race had seemingly discovered space travel two thousand years before and somehow had almost immediately stumbled onto some form of faster-than-light travel. They had spread over the cosmos at a fantastic rate, using up vast quantities of some power element known as uranium.
Thirteen hundred years ago, dwindling supplies of that had split them into two competing empires. An unthinkably violent war had blasted systems of suns to novas, had used the last of the uranium, and had left their culture in ruins. Except for misleading hints that it had involved negation of time, the superdrive had been lost. It had taken centuries to find new power in the fusion of boron. It had taken longer to discover how to eliminate space around the ship, leaving only a subfractional connection with the universe and using the “suction” resulting from imbalance to drive them. Then men began spreading again.
Fifty years ago, they had run into the other empire—an empire technically ahead of them and filled with hate that had been nursed for thirteen centuries. The enemy gave no quarter and began savagely wiping them out, planet by planet. For a time, the Federation had seemingly been doomed. But lately, under the drive of necessity, they had begun to match the enemy science. In a few more years…
“In a few years—or months—there won’t be a Federation, unless this mission succeeds,” he cut into her routine optimism. He fished around in a drawer to locate one of the mission briefing sheets he’d helped prepare. For a second, his lips twisted as he saw the dull, official words.
The
Something had thrown them more than two hundred thousand light-years instantaneously! And unless they could wipe out the enemy base or find the secret and its countersecret, that something could as easily throw boron bombs into every Federation sun! With that threat, even such harebrained schemes as this mission had to be tried.
The
Siryl had glanced over the paper. Now she crumpled it in sudden disgust. “They gave us this guff back on Terra! Derek, you don’t expect me or the men to believe such nonsense? Instantaneous teleportation! Could
He stared at her, his first thrust of anger giving place to bitterness that drove away the last physical effects of the drug. “I should be able to,” he told her. “I was captain of the
It had been his first command of a battleship—and his last chance at promotion; the loss of plans he had been carrying had cost the Federation a major defeat, even though it had been no fault of his. Such miracles weren’t beyond the power of his jinx.
She snorted incredulously. “Captain, even I know that a single photon would have infinite energy against a ship at infinite speed! You couldn’t keep it out without a perfect space-denial—which means ceasing to exist. This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan’s we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!”
Legends indicated that people had once had such abilities to some extent, but there was obviously no use in reminding her of that. He swore hotly. “I tell you, I was there!”
“Hypnotic implantation! Propaganda based on old superstition! You’d better look in your safe for sealed orders, Captain Der—”
Red lights erupted on the control board. The alarm system went wild, with every gong clamoring. A blare of light struck in through the viewing panel and the big radar let out a whine, with a picture and coordinates forming to show a body of planetary size less than ten thousand miles below. Needlessly, the green letters on the board blazed out the fact that the superdrive was off.
Derek silenced the gongs and began hitting his switches, trying to get information. Nobody answered. Crews were normally lax during superspeed cruising, but at least one man should have been on watch near the space-denial generators; the others should be reporting to their stations on the double. He cut into the intercom and began yelling for immediate reports.
The door of the cabin jerked open, but it was only the chubby figure of Ferad, scared white. Then another figure burst through the door, and Derek recognized the physicist, Kayel. The little man’s weak chin seemed buried in his throat and his huge Adam’s apple was bobbing horribly. He jerked one hand up, clutched around a crooked pipe he affected, and motioned tautly backward. “Gone!” he screamed. “All gone!”
Derek cursed, shoved him aside, and headed through the door. He leaped across the precabin, yanked another door open—and stopped.
Five feet ahead, the deck ended. Where the cabins, storage hatches, rec rooms, galleys, and parts of the machine shops and engine rooms had been, there was nothing! Or rather, there was only an empty hull with a single keri-bird from Sirius, squawking and beating its wings wildly in air that held the warm, wet scent of growing Sirian flowers!
Beside him, Derek heard a sharp gasp from Siryl and felt her fingers bite into his arm. Ferad stood frozen and Kayel was gasping for breath, trying to light his pipe against chattering teeth. He met Derek’s gaze, glanced at Siryl, and somehow steadied himself.
“It—it just went! I was back there—” His finger pointed toward the remains of the engine room and the beginning of the rocket chambers. “Gone! Without cutting the hull! Completely impossible!”
Derek could appreciate their shock, but after years of living with his jinx, he was practically immune. There were advantages to everything, even to regular bad luck. “What about the denial drive? Can we fix it?”
“No.” Kayel had hesitated, but his negative was definite. “Most of it’s all right, but we’d need tools we don’t have now.”
Derek nodded. “All right, see what our remaining instruments show; if we<-get back, the Federation will need those readings; Ferad, get back to the rockets. Somehow, we’ve got to make a landing on that planet under us. And Siryl, if you’re done shouting superstition at me…”
Then he grinned thinly. She was staring at the yawning emptiness with unbelieving eyes, slowly crossing herself.
Eighty men and tons of ship were gone, with only a Sirian bird and the perfume of flowers in their place. Among the missing were the pilot, navigator, and engineer. Derek hadn’t handled a rocket landing for twenty years, and he didn’t even have figures on the atmosphere and gravity of the world below. His grin vanished and he groaned to himself as he headed back to the control cabin.
2
