Renard looked at the others, anxious to change the subject. “What about them?” he asked, looking at the seven other girls.
Wooley undid her straps and walked to him. She was taller than he and her tail trailed like a bird’s plume.
“We’ve explained to them that they have all lost their memories for good,” she whispered to him, “because of the machine. They’ll be okay.”
That relieved him, and his body reminded him of a different need. “We’ve got at least a couple of days on this tub,” he pointed out, “and very little to eat.”
She shrugged. “We can hold out if we have to. Actually, there’s enough organic stuff in the padding and old packs. We can all have something, I think. You’re the one that will probably have the most problem.”
He chuckled and looked at his passengers. “Live on love, huh?” he cracked.
By the time contact was made two and a half days out, they had all practiced what was to be said—and what was not to be said—and their courses of action.
“This is the Com police,” a stern male voice came over the radio. “Identify yourself by number and destination.”
Renard sighed. “This is a refugee ship from New Pompeii, a planetoid formerly owned by New Harmony,” he replied. “I am not a pilot and there is not one aboard.”
That seemed to disturb the police a bit. There was some anxious checking against police computer files.
“Stand by, we will match you and board,” the police ship stated.
“It’s in your hands,” he responded. “However, first I think I better warn you about a few things.”
He proceeded to tell them of Antor Trelig’s party, of Obie, the Well World, everything. The only details omitted concerned how to reach the Well World.
The police didn’t believe, of course, but they recorded the information anyway; then they matched the ships, locked, and two armored cops boarded.
One look at the passengers and they had less reason to doubt.
Com police were an odd group: the wild ones, the undomesticated, the lovers of freedom and the restless. They were carefully recruited in midlife, usually after having been caught red-handed at something nasty.
In exchange for voluntarily undergoing some loyalty conditioning, they were paroled—to police the rest, to protect the Com and the frontier from others just like them.
They generally knew a hot potato when they grabbed it. The taped conversations were coded, sealed, and sent directly to the eleven-member Council Presidium, which made decisions when the full Council could not be summoned—or when it shouldn’t be.
Three Council members were out to the ship in less than fourteen additional hours. They were Com, all right, yet each maintained his own strong character. One, a woman apparently approaching middle age, had an especially regal bearing.
“Some twenty-two years ago,” Councillor Alaina said, “before I had this last rejuve, I hired Mavra Chang to attend Antor Trelig’s little party as my agent. I never heard from her again, of course—but, since New Pompeii disappeared, taking dear Antor with it, I was satisfied.” She looked around at the odd little group of human women and aliens. “And now I see she succeeded after all.”
They all had tears in their eyes, and even the Bozog quivered a bit. Only the Ghiskind, as usual, was impassive.
“When I heard the police report, I didn’t believe it—but here you all are, even Nikki Zinder!” She turned to Vistaru. “And you—an unexpected pleasure, Star Tonge. One of your sons is an invaluable Chief Counselor.”
“The kids,” Wooley murmured to herself. “It’d be interesting to see the kids again.”
“And now we must decide what is to be done,” Councillor Alaina continued. “We owe you all a great deal.”
Renard slapped himself. “The sponge cure!” he blurted.
The refugees looked startled, and he nodded. “Obie—the computer—gave it to Mavra. She recorded it in the ship’s log.”
Alaina nodded to a Com policeman. “Get it,” she ordered. “Secure it.” She looked preoccupied, as if watching new vistas unfold. “If that cure holds up,” she continued, “It’ll break the back of the syndicate. The changes will be revolutionary.”
“It’ll work,” the Agitar assured her. “Mavra said it would.”
A grim expression marred the Councillor’s normally impassive features. “Mavra Chang. Yes. So sad. You’re sure we can’t go back for her?”
“Studies show most power has failed,” a policeman put in. “The plasma shield itself is weakening. If anybody’s still there, they’re dead now for sure.”
She nodded. “I thought as much. But her name shall live on in our histories. She shall be celebrated among the greats. We will not forget her.”
“None of us will,” Renard replied sincerely.
They sat about half a light-hour off New Pompeii. On the screens the planetoid showed clearly as a small ball.
“Everyone thinks that you need the weapons locker to destroy a planet,” Alaina noted. “But you don’t. That takes a vote of all the Council, and we can’t put this to the Council until we’ve substantially laundered it. No use informing the universe that such a thing as Obie is possible. Somebody else would surely build one.”
All agreed.
Four ships showed on the screens, Com police cruisers towing huge objects with tractor beams.
“What are they?” Wooley asked, fascinated.
“Antimatter, my dear,” Alaina replied. “It’s all over the place, you know. Always has been. Calculate the mass of the object you want to destroy, grab some antimatter of equal mass, bring the two together, and they cancel each other out. Took a century even to create a tractor beam that wouldn’t react with the stuff. The police craft will follow a trajectory that will have the antimatter asteroids strike New Pompeii at the same time. Should be quite a flash, and that will be that.”
They watched as the ships moved by, curved, swung the asteroids around and let them fly.
And then scrammed like hell.
While they waited for the missiles to reach their target, Alaina discussed other things.
“Makes you wonder,” she said, looking at Renard, the Bozog, and the Ghiskind. “If you three can exist, how many others might? Maybe just over the next solar system, so to speak. Perhaps within our lifetime two of our cultures will meet. How I’d love to see that!”
“If you’d been on the Well World you’d have your fill of alien races pretty quickly,” Vistaru responded.
She shrugged. “I’ve always wondered. Perhaps such a clash will be the ultimate problem. Perhaps the other beings will be antimatter?
“Have you thought about your own futures?” she asked them.
“We—the Bozog, the Ghiskind, and I—can return to the Well World,” Renard replied. “We’ve told you that. Just get us to a Markovian world. That’s what we have to do, of course. There’s no place for us in this part of the universe.”
She nodded, and turned to the others. “What about you, Tonges?”
Wooley smiled. “Nikki Zinder has never had a chance to be a real person, live a real life. Her daughter even less so—and the others, well, they can learn to be people. It will be interesting to see how the family’s come along. And, well, Star and I really did love each other, you know. It’ll be fun being together again after twenty-two long years.”
“And we owe Mavra something,” Vistaru put in. “Both of us keep thinking, if only we had stayed a little longer, if only we’d made sure that Vash’s children all got out. If only we hadn’t left them. She had such a horrible life—maybe we can help these other women, instead of letting them wind up in a hole, like Mavra. I think we owe that much to her, to them, and to ourselves.”
