Back in the days of Ross’s early teens he had seen a good many situations like this in the tri-dis, and the hero had never failed to extricate himself by a simple exercise of superhuman strength, intellect, and ingenuity. That, Ross told himself, was just what he needed now. The trouble was, he didn’t have them.
All he had was the secret of faster-than-light travel. And, here on Azor as on the planet of the graybeards, it had laid a king-sized egg. Women, Ross thought bitterly, women were basically inward-directed and self-seeking; trust them with the secret of F.T.L.; make them, like the Cavallos, custodians of a universe-racking truth; and see the secret lost or embalmed in sterile custom. What, he silently demanded of himself, did the greatest of scientific discoveries mean to a biological baby-foundry? How could any female—no single member of which class had ever painted a great picture, written a great book, composed a great sonata, or discovered a great scientific truth—appreciate the ultimate importance of the F.T.L. drive? It was like entrusting a first-folio Shakespeare to a broody hen; the shredded scraps would be made into a nest. For the egg came first. Motherhood was all.
That explained it, of course. That, Ross told himself moodily, explained everything except why the F.T.L. secret had fallen into apparently equal or worse desuetude on such planets as Gemsel, Clyde, Cyrnus One, Ragansworld, Tau Ceti II, Capella’s family of eight, and perhaps a hundred others.
Ragansworld was gone entirely, drowned in a planetary nebula.
The planet of the graybeard had gone to seed; nothing new, nothing not hallowed by tradition had a chance in its decrepit social order.
His home, Halsey’s Planet, was rapidly, calmly, inevitably depopulating itself.
And Azor had fallen into a rigid, self-centered matriarchal order that only an act of God could break.
Was there a pattern? Were there any similarities?
Ross searched desperately in his mind; but without result. The image of Helena kept intruding itself between him and his thoughts. Was he getting sentimental about that sweet little chucklehead? Who, he hastily added, had come near to criminally assaulting him, who had climbed the …
He turned to the little waiter and demanded: “Will she—Helena—be on the orbital station with us if we’re all convicted?”
“Hmm—no, I should think not. As a responsible person, she gets the supreme penalty.”
Ross numbly asked after a long pause, “How? Nothing—painful?” It was hard to think of Helena dangling grotesquely at a rope’s end or jolting as she sat strapped in a large, ugly chair. But there were things he had heard of which were horribly worse.
Bernie had been watching him. “I’m sorry,” the little man said soberly. “It’s up to the judge. She’s a foreigner, so they may consider that an extenuating circumstance and place some quick-acting poison aboard for her to take. Otherwise it’s slow starvation.”
A faint, irrational hope had begun to dawn in Ross’s mind. “Aboard what? Exactly how does it work?”
“They’ll put her aboard some hulk with the rockets disabled, fire it off into space—and that’s that. I suppose they’ll use the ship she came in—”
Ross was frantically searching his pockets. He had a stylus. “Got any paper?” he briskly demanded of Bernie.
“Yes, but—?” The waiter blankly passed over an order book. Ross sprawled on the floor and began to scribble: “Never mind how or why this works. Do it. You saw me work the big fan-shaped computer in the center room and you can do it too. Find the master star maps in the chart room. Look up the coordinates of Halsey’s System. Set these coordinates on the twenty-seven dials marked Proximate Mass. Take the readings on the windows above the dials and set them on the cursors of the computer—” He scribbled furiously, from time to time forcing himself deliberately to slow down as the writing became an unreadable scrawl. He filled the ruled fronts of the order pages and then the backs—perhaps ten thousand closely-written words, and not one of them wasted. Haarland’s precise instructions, mercilessly drilled into him, flowed out again.
He flung the stylus down at last and read through the book again, ignoring the gaping Bernie. It was all there, as far as he could tell. Grant her a lot of luck and more brains than he privately credited her with, and she had a fighting chance of winding up within radar range of Halsey’s Planet. G.C.A. could take her down from there; an annoying ship-like object hanging on the radarscopes would provoke a reconnaissance.
She knew absolutely nothing about F.T.L. or the Wesley drive, but then—neither did he. That fact itself was no handicap.
He might rot on Minerva, but some word might get back to Haarland. And so would the ship. And Helena would not perish miserably in a drifting hulk.
Bernie saw the mysterious job was ended and dared to ask, “A letter?”
“No,” Ross said jubilantly. “By God, if things break right they won’t get her. It’s like this—”
He happily began to explain that his F.T.L. ship’s rockets were only auxiliaries for fine maneuvering, but he counted on the court not knowing that. If he and Helena could persuade …
As he went on the look on Bernie’s face changed very slowly from hope to pity to politely-simulated interest. Correspondingly Ross’s accounting became labored and faulty. The pauses became longer and at last he broke off, filled with self-contempt at his folly. He said bitterly, “You don’t think it’ll work.”
“Oh, no!” Bernie protested with too much heartiness. “I could see she’s awfully mechanically-minded for a woman, even if it wouldn’t be polite to say so. Sure it’ll work, Ross. Sure!”
The hell it would.
At least he had disposed of a few hours. And—perhaps some bungling setting would explode the ship, or end a Wesley Jump in the heart of a white dwarf star—sudden annihilation, whiffing Helena out of existence before her body could realize that it had died, before the beginning of apprehension could darken
