Hel did not belong. It was a Pluto-sized twerp of a straggler
planet which, like an orphaned puppy, had taken up with the first
warm body it had come across. When it did so, it set up for
business too far from the unstable Cepheid it adopted. Even at
perihelion in its lazy, eggy orbit it did not receive enough warmth
to melt carbon dioxide.
Hel was a black eight ball of a world silver-chased by ice lying
in the canyons of its wrinkled carcass. Its sun was but the
brightest of the stars in its sky. No one would expect such a
planet to exist, and no one would want to visit it if a suspicion
of its existence arose.
Those were the reasons Confederation’s Navy Bureau of
Research and Development considered Hel the perfect site for a
bizarre, dangerous, and ultra-secret research project.
Hel Station lay buried in a mountain like a clam in sand. Its
appendages reached the surface at just two points.
The Station was not meant to be found.
“Ion?”
Marescu was a sight. His waistcoat was soiled, ragged, and
wrinkled. His hose was bagged and falling. His wig was askew. His
facial makeup was caked and streaked.
“Ion?” Neidermeyer said a second time, catching his
friend’s elbow. “You hear the news? Von Drachau is
coming here.”
Marescu yanked his arm away. “Who?” At the moment he
did not give a damn about anything, Paul’s news included. The
agony was too much for mortal man to bear. He yanked a grimy silk
handkerchief from a pocket, cleared the water from his eyes. Paul
should not see his tears.
“Von Drachau. Jupp von Drachau. The guy who pulled off
that raid in the Hell Stars a couple of years back. You remember.
The commentators called him High Command’s fair-haired boy.
They talked like he’d be Chief of Staff Navy
someday.”
“Oh. Another one of your militarist heroes.” Marescu
could set in abeyance the worst blues for a good fight about the
Services. “Fascist lackey.”
Paul grinned, refused the bait. “Not me, Ion. I know you
too well.”
No fight? Marescu faded off into his internal reality.
Damn her eyes! How could she have done it? And with that.. .
that blackamoor!
“Hey. Ion? Is something wrong?”
More than normal? Ion Marescu was Hel Station’s resident
crank and grouch, its leading Mr. Blues and Vinegar. Most people
shunned him unless work forced contact. He had one real friend,
astrophysicist Paul Neidermeyer, a lady love named Melanie Bounds,
and managed a certain strained formality with his boss, Kathe the
Eagle. Everybody else was fair game for his vituperation.
“Von Drachau? He’s Line, isn’t he? Why would
they tell a Line officer about this place? They planning on locking
him up?”
“Ion. Man, what’s wrong? You look bad. Why
don’t we take you down and get you a shower and a clean
jumper?”
One of the curiosities of Ion Marescu was that he appeared to
change personalities with his clothing. When he wore standard Navy
work clothing he was almost tolerable. When he donned his
Archaicist costume he became arrogant, argumentative,
viper-tongued, and abnormally misty, as if half the time half of
him truly did exist in eighteenth-century England.
Marescu paused before a mirror inset in the passage wall,
ignoring the people trying to pass. “I do look a little
ragged, don’t I?” he muttered. He adjusted his wig,
straightened the ruffles at his throat, thought, I wish this
were Georgian England. I could call the bastard out.
Settle this crap with steel.
But you would not have done that with a Negro, would you?
You’d have gotten some friends together and played dangle the
darky from a tree limb. If you could have stood the shame of
confessing to your friends.
Marescu was not one of Hel Station’s more polished
Archaicists. The others had brought their costumes and research
materials with them. He had taken up the hobby only after the
isolation had begun to grind him down. He had sewn his own costume,
with Melanie’s help.
He was more devoted than most Station Archaicists. He prided
himself on that, as he prided himself on his contrariness, his
crotchets, and the perfection of his work with the test programs.
He liked to think that he was the best at whatever he
did—including at making himself obnoxious. He seldom noticed
the compensatory sloppiness he expressed in his personal habits
and hobby.
He had not researched his period thoroughly. He winged most of
it. His hobby-era values and beliefs were based on hearsay.
There were those who thought the dichotomy between a
perfectionist work life and slovenly play life, taken far too
seriously, was indicative of deep disturbance. Admiral Adler
disagreed. She felt Marescu was all showoff.
Marescu started walking. He had forgotten Paul. Neidermeyer
seized his arm again. “Ion, if I can’t help, who can?
We’ve been friends for years.”
“It’s not something anybody can help with, Paul.
It’s Melanie. I got off shift early. The quark tube was
acting up. The strange positives and bottom negs were coming off
almost a milli-degree out of track. They couldn’t inject them
into their orbital shells . . . They shut down.
She had Mitchell with her.”
Neidermeyer murmured an insincere, “I’m
sorry.” He thought, so what? and wondered if Marescu was not
getting a little too far out of touch. Maybe the staff
psychologists should hear about this.
A man who started confusing the mores of now with those of his
hobby period was more than a little unstable.
Ion always had been neurotic. Now he seemed to have become
marginally psychotic.
“How could she do it, Paul?”
“Calm down. You’re shaking. Follow me, my son. What
you need is a little firewater to settle the old nerves. Eh! None
of that, now. Doctor’s orders. Drink up, then tell me about
it and we’ll scope something out.”
“Yeah. A drink. Okay.” Marescu decided to get
blotted. “Tell me about this von Dago.”
“Von Drachau. Rhymes with Cracow, like in
Poland.”
“Poland? Where the hell is Poland?”
“Where they raise the Chinese pigs.” Neidermeyer
grinned.
Marescu stopped walking. His thin little face puckered into a
baffled squint. Seconds passed before the intuition that made him
one of Confederation’s better test programers clicked.
“The non sequitur game? We haven’t played in ages, have
we? Poland. Chinese pigs. Poland China
hogs . . . Isn’t that the strain they
were talking about on that ag show the other day? They want to
breed back to something extinct?”
“I don’t know what they smell like.”
“Okay, Paul. I’m all right now. Ease up. That was a
weak one, anyway. Just give me the story on your mercenary
hero.”
Neidermeyer refused the challenge. “I don’t know
much. It’s just something I overheard at Security. They were
chasing their tails getting ready. Guess it took them by surprise.
We’re here. What’re you drinking?”
They stepped off the escalator into soft luminescence just
bright enough to prevent stumbling over furniture.
The lounge had been designed to give an impression of being open
to Hel’s surface. Its protective dome was undetectable. The
lighting was too diffuse to glare off the glassteel. The dome
itself pimpled from the flank of a mountain, overlooking dark peaks
and cruel gorges. The Milky Way burned above, a billion-jeweled
expanse of glory.
“Ever notice how it seems colder up here?” Marescu
asked, for at least the hundredth time in their acquaintance. He
stared out at the poorly illuminated skin of the dead world. The
inconstant Cepheid sun hung behind a peak, limning it with a trace
of gold. In its off moments that sun was little more noticeable
than the brighter neighboring stars. “You pick it, Paul.
I’m not particular today. But build it big.”
Neidermeyer collected brandy and glasses from behind the bar.
“Francis must have gone down for the Security
festival,” he said. A Marine with an unpronounceable Old
Earther name, dubbed Francis Bacon by the research staff, usually
tended bar. Security had very little to do most of the time, so
filled time by trying to make the Station more endurable for
everyone.
People came to Hel on a one-way ticket. Only the Director of
Research and Chief of Security ever ventured off world. For
security reasons there was no instel comm system available.
Isolation was absolute.
“Brandy?” Marescu asked, startled. Paul was a whisky
man.
“Old Earth’s best, Ion. Almost makes being here
worthwhile.”
Marescu downed half a snifter at a gulp. “They ought to
turn us loose now, Paul. We built their damned bombs. All
we’re doing now is piddling around with make-work.”
“They won’t, though. Security. Won’t be any
leaks as long as they keep us here.”
“Paul, how could she?”
“You knew she was . . . ”
“When I got involved? I know. I keep telling myself. But
that doesn’t make it hurt any less, Paul.”
“What can I tell you?”
Marescu stared into his empty snifter.
“Ion . . . Maybe you ought to ease up
on the Archaicist thing. Try to get your perspective
back.”
“The modern perspective sucks, Paul. You know that?
There’s no humanity in it. You probably laugh at me because
of this outfit. It’s a symbol, Paul. It’s a symbol of
times when people did have real feelings. When they
cared.”
“I’ve got feelings, Ion. I care about you.
You’re my friend.”
“You don’t. Not really. You’re just here
because having feelings bothers you.”
Neidermeyer glared. There were times when being Ion’s
friend was work. Marescu refused to apologize. Paul took his brandy
to the side of the dome. He stared at the indistinct hide of Hel.
The critical question glared back from the serpent eyes of his own
weak reflection.
Should Marescu be reported? Was he that far gone?
Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock
him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a
blue-chip growth industry.
The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the
unbalanced.
But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure,
delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he
would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if
it jarred him back to reality.
Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who
had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies
flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those
eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.
Something rattled the foundations of the universe.
The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded
quickly.
Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face,
caressed it with shaking fingers.
“Paul . . . That was damned close. They
could have destabilized one of the test cores. We’d have been
blown into the next universe.”
Fear had drained Neidermeyer’s face too. He mumbled,
“But nothing happened.”
“I’m complaining anyway. They ought to have better
sense.” Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had
snapped his streak of self-pity.
He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun
etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid
across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.
“They’re coming in fast.”
Hel’s surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white
light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to
the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an
iridescence like that of oil on water.
“Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a
moment.”
They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the
escalator’s head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man
who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical.
He was the quintessential Marine.
“Bet he wakes up looking like that,” Marescu
muttered.
“What is it, Major?” Neidermeyer asked.
“We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two
devices for shipboard installation.”
Marescu’s stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned
Alpine boots and started dancing.
“Major . . . ”
“Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen.
Thank you.”
Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.
“So,” Marescu snapped. “They’ll never
use it, eh? You’re a fool, Paul.”
“Maybe they won’t. You don’t
know . . . Maybe it’s a field test of
some kind.”
“Don’t lie to yourself. No more than you already
are.
The damned bomb doesn’t need testing. I already tested it.
They’re going to blow up a sun, Paul!” Ion’s
mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak.
“Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody’s sun. The
goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar
system.”
“Calm down, Ion.”
“Calm down? I can’t. I won’t! How many lives,
Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those
firecrackers we’ve given them? They’ve made bloody
fools of us, haven’t they? They suckered us. Smug little
purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would
never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They
always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is.”
Paul did not respond. Marescu was reacting without all the
facts. And saying things everyone else thought but did not say.
For the research staff, service at Hel Station had been a deal
with the devil. Each scientist had traded physical freedom and
talent for unlimited funding and support for a pet line of
research. The Station was ultra-secret, but the knowledge it
produced was reshaping modern science. The place seethed with new
discoveries.
All Navy had asked for its money was a weapon capable of making
a sun go nova.
Navy had its weapon now. The scientists had scrounged around and
found a few Hawking Holes left over from the Big Bang, had pulled a
few mega-trillion quarks out of a linear accelerator which
circumscribed Hel itself, had sorted them, had stacked them in
orbital shells around the mini-singularities, and had installed
these “cores” in a delivery system. The carrier missile
would perish in the fires of a star, but the core itself would sink
to the star’s heart before the quark shells collapsed, mixing
positives and negatives in a tremendous energy yield which would
ignite a swift and savage helium fusion process.
Navy had its weapon. And now, apparently, a target for it.
“What have you done, Paul?”
“I don’t know, Ion. God help me if you’re
right.”
The passageways were a-crawl with Marines, Marescu swore.
“I didn’t realize there were so many of the bastards.
They been breeding on us? Where’s everybody else?” The
usual back and forth of technical and scientific staffs had ceased.
Civilians were scarce.
At Final Process they were told to report to the arsenal
instead.
They found three civilians waiting outside the scarlet door. The
Director, though, was an R & D admiral in civilian
disguise.
“This’s a farce,” Marescu growled at her.
“Two hundred comic opera soldiers . . . ”
“Can it, Ion,” Paul whispered.
The Director did not bat an eye. “They’re watching
you, Ion. They don’t like your mouth.”
Marescu was startled. Ordinarily, even the Eagle did not bite
back.
“What’s going on, Kathe?” Neidermeyer
asked.
Marescu grinned. Kathe Adler. Kathe the Eagle. It was one of
those nasty little jokes that drift around behind an unpopular
superior’s back. Admiral Adler had a thin wedge of a face, an
all-time beak of a nose, and a receding hairline. Never had a
birthname fit its bearer so well.
“They’re taking delivery on the product, Paul. I
want you to work with their science officers. Ion, you’ll
prepare a test program for their shipboard computers.”
“They’re going to use it, aren’t they?”
Marescu demanded.
“I hope not. We all hope not, Ion.”
“Shit. I believe that like I believe in the Tooth
Fairy.” He glanced at Paul. Neidermeyer was trying to
believe. He was like all the science staff. Keeping himself fed on
lies.
“Ship’s down, Major,” a Marine Lieutenant
announced.
“Very well,” Feuchtmayer replied.
“We’d better get lined out,” the Director
said. “Paul, pick whomever you want to help. Ion,
you’ll have to visit the ship to see what you’ll be
working with. I want your preliminary brief as soon as you can
write it. Josip, get with their Weapons officers and draw up the
preparatory specs for carrying mounts and launch systems. Have the
people in the shops drop everything else.”
Josip asked, “We have to build it all here?”
“From scratch. Orders.”
“But . . . ”
“Gentlemen, they’re in a hurry. I suggest you get
started.”
“They brought the whole ship down?” Paul asked.
Ships seldom made planetary landings.
“That’s right. They don’t want to waste time
working from orbit. That would take an extra month.”
“But . . . ” That was dangerous
business. The ship’s crew would stay crazy-busy balancing her
gravity fields with the planet’s. If they made one mistake
the vessel would be torn apart.
“It shouldn’t take more than twelve days this
way,” Admiral Adler speculated. “Assuming we hit no
snags. Let’s go.” She pushed through the red door.
The completed weapons had a sharkish, deadly look, looking
nothing like bombs. The four devices were spaced around the arsenal
floor. Each was a lean needle of black a hundred meters long and
ten in diameter. They were longer than the shuttle craft intended
to lift them to orbit. Antennae and the snouts of nasty defensive
weapons sprouted from their dark skins like scrub brush from an
old, burned slope.
They were fully automated little warships. The essentials of the
nova bomb occupied space that would have been given over to crew in
manned vessels. They were fast and shielded heavily enough to punch
through a powerful defense.
The weapon remained largely theoretical. But the men who had
created it were confident it would function.
Neidemeyer whispered to Marescu as they donned working suits,
trying to convince his friend, and himself, that they were just
gearing up for a field test. “I’m sure the money people
just want to see if they’re getting any return on their
investment,” he insisted. “You can’t blame them
for wanting to try their new toy.”
“Yeah. Our hero von Drachau is going to take potshots at a
couple of insignificant stars. Right?”
“Right.”
“You’re a fool, Paul.”
A band of strangers entered the arsenal. They stared at the four
dark needles, clearly awed and a little frightened.
“That’s von Drachau on the right,” Paul
whispered. “I recognize him from the holo. Only he looks a
lot older.”
“Looks a little grey around the gills, I’d
say.”
Von Drachau did look depressed. He spoke with the Major and
Kathe Adler. Kathe led his party around one of the missiles. Von
Drachau became more impressed.
There was something about the big, terrible ones that excited a
resonance in the soul. It was almost a siren call. Marescu felt it
himself each time he touched one of the monsters. He was ashamed of
himself when he did.
“Little boys play with firecrackers, and big boys play
with bombs,” he muttered.
“Ease up. Kathe meant it when she said they’re
watching you. Feuchtmayer isn’t one of your big fans,
Ion.”
“I’ll stay out of his way.”
The days whipped past. Technicians swarmed over the pair of
weapons von Drachau selected. Marescu tested systems and supervised
the installation of special shipping aids. Josip brought the
missiles’ computation systems into communion with the battle
computers aboard von Drachau’s ship. Technicians designed and
installed adapters and links that would fit the securing rings and
launch vanes going onto the belly of the warship.
Neidermeyer prepared a manual for the science officers
responsible for arming the sunkiller and monitoring its gluon pulse
in passage, watching for that tiny anomaly that might forecast the
expansion of a quark shell into disaster.
Marescu could not believe there was so much to do. His shifts
were long and demanding. He felt a lot of sympathy for Paul, whose
personal research project seemed threatened with death by
inattention.
Neidermeyer watched his friend more closely than he did the
gluon pulse, hunting some telltale psychological anomaly. Marescu
seemed almost too much in control, and had thrown himself into his
work with a near-fanaticism that bespoke a very fragile stability
fighting its last stand. Yet there were positive signs. Ion had
shed the filthy Archaicist outfit. He had begun devoting more time
to his personal appearance . . .
Then it was over.
Kathe Adler joined them in the lounge. “Let the firewater
flow,” she proclaimed. “It’s time to say the hell
with it and turn loose of the brass ring for a while.”
Marescu gave her an odd look.
The celebration became a premature New Year’s bash.
The pressure was off. The antagonisms went on the shelf for the
day. Guilts got tucked away. Scientists and technicians made shows
of comradeship with the Marines. A handful of von Drachau’s
officers joined in, drinking lightly, listening to the jokes but
seldom laughing.
“For them it’s just begun,” Ion murmured. He
glanced around. No one had heard him.
Von Drachau was a focus of brooding gloom. He seemed to have
sunk two-thirds into another universe. Ion watched him glare at
Paul as if Neidermeyer were some small, venomous insect when Paul
tried to strike up a conversation about the raid in the
Hell Stars. Von Drachau disappeared only minutes later.
“Don’t think you made an impression, my
friend,” Ion said.
Kathe agreed. “He’s sensitive about it, Paul.
He’s a strange one. You should have heard the row he and Ion
had.”
Marescu met Paul’s gaze. “It wasn’t any big
thing. I came on a little too strong, that’s all.”
“What was it?” Neidermeyer asked.
“About the morality of using the weapon,”
Kathe said. “Von Drachau is damned near a pacifist.
Ion was pretty shook when he found out the man could adapt his
convictions enough to let him use the weapon.”
“Ion’s problem is that he’s an absolutist.
He’s got to have everything black or white. And he’s
getting worse. Is there any way we can get him into therapy without
having him committed?”
“You think there’s a reason to worry? His profiles
keep coming up off-center, but they never show any
danger.”
“Sometimes. Lately . . . He’s
got a creepy feeling to him. Except for that argument with von
Drachau, he’s swung too far away from what he was. I’m
nervous about the backswing. Like I can hear the timer clicking. He
might break loose going the other way.”
They had begun talking about Marescu as if he were not around
for the very good reason that he was not, though neither of them
had consciously marked his departure.
Kathe Adler had called von Drachau a crypto-pacifist, and
Marescu had seen red. Literally. The dome and people went raggedly,
liquid, and red. Then it was all clear. All perfectly clear. He had
to go see Melanie and explain.
He was walking down a passageway. Time seemed to have passed. He
had the distinct feeling that his head was on sideways. That
mercenary von Drachau . . . The man had kicked
the foundations out from under him. A flexible morality? How could
there be such a thing? A thing was either right, or it
wasn’t. The nova bomb was the most evil thing yet conceived
by the military mind. And he had helped midwife that evil into this
universe. He had allowed himself to be
seduced . . . He had whored
himself . . .
There had to be a way to show them what they were doing.
He shook his head violently. Things were foggy. A band seemed to
be tightening around his temples. There was something wrong. He
could not force his thoughts into a straight line.
For an instant he considered finding a Psych officer.
Von Drachau seemed to laugh at him again.
“You fascist bastard!”
Christ! Some Torquemada had taken another turn on the strap. His
skull was creaking with the pressure.
“Where am I?” he blurted. His feet had been moving
without conscious direction. He tried to concentrate on his
surroundings. “What am I doing here?”
He wanted to turn and go back. His feet kept going in the
direction he was headed. His hand pushed on Melanie’s
door.
He was an alien, a passenger aboard a body under another’s
control. He was a slightly panicky observer of actions being
carried out by another creature.
The little gasps and grunts lashed that devil, punishing it like
a wizard’s curse. He stared at the eight-limbed, twenty-toed
beast. It heaved and lunged. Its four blind eyes rolled swiftly.
Its three uncontrolled mouths made wet, hungry sounds.
The Ion of him silently screamed and turned inward, refusing to
see any more. A darkness closed round it.
A clumsy puppeteer jerked him around, dragged him out the door
and down the passageway with jerky, meandering, drunken steps. When
next the Ion rider surfaced it found its steed in the arsenal, clad
in its Georgian, bent over the computer board in the heavily
shielded test control kiosk. The clock claimed that hours had
vanished from his life. His hands and fingers were flying, a pair
of pale white dancing spiders.
They were doing something dreadful. He did not know what, and
they would not stop when he commanded them. He watched them like a
baffled child watching slow death.
An image here, an image there, surged into his mind, playing
back fragments of the missing hours. Ion Marescu crawled over a
long black needle. Ion Marescu crouched beneath the needle,
connecting the heavy cables that ran to the test station. Ion
Marescu squeezed through the cramped interior of the black ship,
removing safety chips . . .
“Ion?”
Paul’s voice barely penetrated the thick stressglass of
the booth’s walls. He was screaming. Ion realized the yelling
had been going on for a while. He glanced at Paul puzzledly, barely
recognizing him. He did not stop working. This was the most
important test he had ever run. For the first time in his life he
was doing something of real worth. He had found himself a holy
mission.
What was it? He shook his head, tried to clear the mists. They
would not go.
His hands danced.
Kathe Adler joined Paul. They pounded the unbreakable glass with
their fists. Then the woman fled. Paul grabbed a fire axe and swung
away.
When Ion next glanced up, the vast arsenal floor was acrawl with
Marines. Major Feuchtmayer had his pale face pressed against the
glass directly in front of him. His lips writhed obscenely. He was
screaming something. Ion had no time to listen. He had to
hurry.
What the hell was going on out there? the observer part of him
wondered.
He finished programing the test sequences.
Each weapon had to be run through a simulated plunge into
Hel’s own sun. Ion usually performed the test series on a
system-by-system basis, with the drive never operational and the
safety chips preventing the weapon from going active. “How do
we know the drive will work?” Marescu muttered. “We
just take their word for it?”
Paul and the Marines stopped trying to break the glass with hand
tools. Ion saw the Major laying a sticky grey rope of something
round the door frame.
“Plastic explosives? My God! What are those madmen trying
to do?”
His right hand depressed the big black palm switch that opened
the arsenal’s huge exit doors. It was through those very
doors that that hired assassin von Drachau had moved his two
missiles to his ship.
People flung in all directions as the arsenal air burst into
Hel’s eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken
doll figures tumble and bloat.
His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The arsenal
drowned in intense light. The stressglass of the booth polarized,
but could not block it all. The sabotaged holding blocks fell away
from the number four weapon. It dragged itself forward, off its
dolly. It flung off clouds of sparks and gouged its spoor deep into
the concrete floor.
“Wait a minute,” Ion said. “Wait a minute.
There’s something wrong. It’s not supposed to do that.
Paul? Where did you go, Paul?” Paud did not answer.
The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light,
lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it
drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned
its nose toward the target.
“What’s happening?” Marescu asked plaintively.
“Paul?
What went wrong?”
The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel’s sun. It
accelerated at 100 g.
And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to
fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a
shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began
composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be
cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would
automatically lock out the others.
“We have influence, Commander,” Lieutenant Callaway
reported.
“Take hyper,” von Drachau replied. “And
destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in
the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we’ve never heard
of this place. We don’t know anything about it and
we’ve never been here.”
He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was,
what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole
truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take,
then blanked.
Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the
world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The
little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few
hours the nova chain would begin.
There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain
on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their
fate.
And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the
magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had
been a Security-decreed precaution.
Hel did not belong. It was a Pluto-sized twerp of a straggler
planet which, like an orphaned puppy, had taken up with the first
warm body it had come across. When it did so, it set up for
business too far from the unstable Cepheid it adopted. Even at
perihelion in its lazy, eggy orbit it did not receive enough warmth
to melt carbon dioxide.
Hel was a black eight ball of a world silver-chased by ice lying
in the canyons of its wrinkled carcass. Its sun was but the
brightest of the stars in its sky. No one would expect such a
planet to exist, and no one would want to visit it if a suspicion
of its existence arose.
Those were the reasons Confederation’s Navy Bureau of
Research and Development considered Hel the perfect site for a
bizarre, dangerous, and ultra-secret research project.
Hel Station lay buried in a mountain like a clam in sand. Its
appendages reached the surface at just two points.
The Station was not meant to be found.
“Ion?”
Marescu was a sight. His waistcoat was soiled, ragged, and
wrinkled. His hose was bagged and falling. His wig was askew. His
facial makeup was caked and streaked.
“Ion?” Neidermeyer said a second time, catching his
friend’s elbow. “You hear the news? Von Drachau is
coming here.”
Marescu yanked his arm away. “Who?” At the moment he
did not give a damn about anything, Paul’s news included. The
agony was too much for mortal man to bear. He yanked a grimy silk
handkerchief from a pocket, cleared the water from his eyes. Paul
should not see his tears.
“Von Drachau. Jupp von Drachau. The guy who pulled off
that raid in the Hell Stars a couple of years back. You remember.
The commentators called him High Command’s fair-haired boy.
They talked like he’d be Chief of Staff Navy
someday.”
“Oh. Another one of your militarist heroes.” Marescu
could set in abeyance the worst blues for a good fight about the
Services. “Fascist lackey.”
Paul grinned, refused the bait. “Not me, Ion. I know you
too well.”
No fight? Marescu faded off into his internal reality.
Damn her eyes! How could she have done it? And with that.. .
that blackamoor!
“Hey. Ion? Is something wrong?”
More than normal? Ion Marescu was Hel Station’s resident
crank and grouch, its leading Mr. Blues and Vinegar. Most people
shunned him unless work forced contact. He had one real friend,
astrophysicist Paul Neidermeyer, a lady love named Melanie Bounds,
and managed a certain strained formality with his boss, Kathe the
Eagle. Everybody else was fair game for his vituperation.
“Von Drachau? He’s Line, isn’t he? Why would
they tell a Line officer about this place? They planning on locking
him up?”
“Ion. Man, what’s wrong? You look bad. Why
don’t we take you down and get you a shower and a clean
jumper?”
One of the curiosities of Ion Marescu was that he appeared to
change personalities with his clothing. When he wore standard Navy
work clothing he was almost tolerable. When he donned his
Archaicist costume he became arrogant, argumentative,
viper-tongued, and abnormally misty, as if half the time half of
him truly did exist in eighteenth-century England.
Marescu paused before a mirror inset in the passage wall,
ignoring the people trying to pass. “I do look a little
ragged, don’t I?” he muttered. He adjusted his wig,
straightened the ruffles at his throat, thought, I wish this
were Georgian England. I could call the bastard out.
Settle this crap with steel.
But you would not have done that with a Negro, would you?
You’d have gotten some friends together and played dangle the
darky from a tree limb. If you could have stood the shame of
confessing to your friends.
Marescu was not one of Hel Station’s more polished
Archaicists. The others had brought their costumes and research
materials with them. He had taken up the hobby only after the
isolation had begun to grind him down. He had sewn his own costume,
with Melanie’s help.
He was more devoted than most Station Archaicists. He prided
himself on that, as he prided himself on his contrariness, his
crotchets, and the perfection of his work with the test programs.
He liked to think that he was the best at whatever he
did—including at making himself obnoxious. He seldom noticed
the compensatory sloppiness he expressed in his personal habits
and hobby.
He had not researched his period thoroughly. He winged most of
it. His hobby-era values and beliefs were based on hearsay.
There were those who thought the dichotomy between a
perfectionist work life and slovenly play life, taken far too
seriously, was indicative of deep disturbance. Admiral Adler
disagreed. She felt Marescu was all showoff.
Marescu started walking. He had forgotten Paul. Neidermeyer
seized his arm again. “Ion, if I can’t help, who can?
We’ve been friends for years.”
“It’s not something anybody can help with, Paul.
It’s Melanie. I got off shift early. The quark tube was
acting up. The strange positives and bottom negs were coming off
almost a milli-degree out of track. They couldn’t inject them
into their orbital shells . . . They shut down.
She had Mitchell with her.”
Neidermeyer murmured an insincere, “I’m
sorry.” He thought, so what? and wondered if Marescu was not
getting a little too far out of touch. Maybe the staff
psychologists should hear about this.
A man who started confusing the mores of now with those of his
hobby period was more than a little unstable.
Ion always had been neurotic. Now he seemed to have become
marginally psychotic.
“How could she do it, Paul?”
“Calm down. You’re shaking. Follow me, my son. What
you need is a little firewater to settle the old nerves. Eh! None
of that, now. Doctor’s orders. Drink up, then tell me about
it and we’ll scope something out.”
“Yeah. A drink. Okay.” Marescu decided to get
blotted. “Tell me about this von Dago.”
“Von Drachau. Rhymes with Cracow, like in
Poland.”
“Poland? Where the hell is Poland?”
“Where they raise the Chinese pigs.” Neidermeyer
grinned.
Marescu stopped walking. His thin little face puckered into a
baffled squint. Seconds passed before the intuition that made him
one of Confederation’s better test programers clicked.
“The non sequitur game? We haven’t played in ages, have
we? Poland. Chinese pigs. Poland China
hogs . . . Isn’t that the strain they
were talking about on that ag show the other day? They want to
breed back to something extinct?”
“I don’t know what they smell like.”
“Okay, Paul. I’m all right now. Ease up. That was a
weak one, anyway. Just give me the story on your mercenary
hero.”
Neidermeyer refused the challenge. “I don’t know
much. It’s just something I overheard at Security. They were
chasing their tails getting ready. Guess it took them by surprise.
We’re here. What’re you drinking?”
They stepped off the escalator into soft luminescence just
bright enough to prevent stumbling over furniture.
The lounge had been designed to give an impression of being open
to Hel’s surface. Its protective dome was undetectable. The
lighting was too diffuse to glare off the glassteel. The dome
itself pimpled from the flank of a mountain, overlooking dark peaks
and cruel gorges. The Milky Way burned above, a billion-jeweled
expanse of glory.
“Ever notice how it seems colder up here?” Marescu
asked, for at least the hundredth time in their acquaintance. He
stared out at the poorly illuminated skin of the dead world. The
inconstant Cepheid sun hung behind a peak, limning it with a trace
of gold. In its off moments that sun was little more noticeable
than the brighter neighboring stars. “You pick it, Paul.
I’m not particular today. But build it big.”
Neidermeyer collected brandy and glasses from behind the bar.
“Francis must have gone down for the Security
festival,” he said. A Marine with an unpronounceable Old
Earther name, dubbed Francis Bacon by the research staff, usually
tended bar. Security had very little to do most of the time, so
filled time by trying to make the Station more endurable for
everyone.
People came to Hel on a one-way ticket. Only the Director of
Research and Chief of Security ever ventured off world. For
security reasons there was no instel comm system available.
Isolation was absolute.
“Brandy?” Marescu asked, startled. Paul was a whisky
man.
“Old Earth’s best, Ion. Almost makes being here
worthwhile.”
Marescu downed half a snifter at a gulp. “They ought to
turn us loose now, Paul. We built their damned bombs. All
we’re doing now is piddling around with make-work.”
“They won’t, though. Security. Won’t be any
leaks as long as they keep us here.”
“Paul, how could she?”
“You knew she was . . . ”
“When I got involved? I know. I keep telling myself. But
that doesn’t make it hurt any less, Paul.”
“What can I tell you?”
Marescu stared into his empty snifter.
“Ion . . . Maybe you ought to ease up
on the Archaicist thing. Try to get your perspective
back.”
“The modern perspective sucks, Paul. You know that?
There’s no humanity in it. You probably laugh at me because
of this outfit. It’s a symbol, Paul. It’s a symbol of
times when people did have real feelings. When they
cared.”
“I’ve got feelings, Ion. I care about you.
You’re my friend.”
“You don’t. Not really. You’re just here
because having feelings bothers you.”
Neidermeyer glared. There were times when being Ion’s
friend was work. Marescu refused to apologize. Paul took his brandy
to the side of the dome. He stared at the indistinct hide of Hel.
The critical question glared back from the serpent eyes of his own
weak reflection.
Should Marescu be reported? Was he that far gone?
Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock
him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a
blue-chip growth industry.
The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the
unbalanced.
But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure,
delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he
would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if
it jarred him back to reality.
Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who
had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies
flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those
eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.
Something rattled the foundations of the universe.
The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded
quickly.
Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face,
caressed it with shaking fingers.
“Paul . . . That was damned close. They
could have destabilized one of the test cores. We’d have been
blown into the next universe.”
Fear had drained Neidermeyer’s face too. He mumbled,
“But nothing happened.”
“I’m complaining anyway. They ought to have better
sense.” Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had
snapped his streak of self-pity.
He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun
etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid
across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.
“They’re coming in fast.”
Hel’s surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white
light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to
the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an
iridescence like that of oil on water.
“Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a
moment.”
They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the
escalator’s head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man
who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical.
He was the quintessential Marine.
“Bet he wakes up looking like that,” Marescu
muttered.
“What is it, Major?” Neidermeyer asked.
“We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two
devices for shipboard installation.”
Marescu’s stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned
Alpine boots and started dancing.
“Major . . . ”
“Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen.
Thank you.”
Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.
“So,” Marescu snapped. “They’ll never
use it, eh? You’re a fool, Paul.”
“Maybe they won’t. You don’t
know . . . Maybe it’s a field test of
some kind.”
“Don’t lie to yourself. No more than you already
are.
The damned bomb doesn’t need testing. I already tested it.
They’re going to blow up a sun, Paul!” Ion’s
mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak.
“Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody’s sun. The
goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar
system.”
“Calm down, Ion.”
“Calm down? I can’t. I won’t! How many lives,
Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those
firecrackers we’ve given them? They’ve made bloody
fools of us, haven’t they? They suckered us. Smug little
purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would
never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They
always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is.”
Paul did not respond. Marescu was reacting without all the
facts. And saying things everyone else thought but did not say.
For the research staff, service at Hel Station had been a deal
with the devil. Each scientist had traded physical freedom and
talent for unlimited funding and support for a pet line of
research. The Station was ultra-secret, but the knowledge it
produced was reshaping modern science. The place seethed with new
discoveries.
All Navy had asked for its money was a weapon capable of making
a sun go nova.
Navy had its weapon now. The scientists had scrounged around and
found a few Hawking Holes left over from the Big Bang, had pulled a
few mega-trillion quarks out of a linear accelerator which
circumscribed Hel itself, had sorted them, had stacked them in
orbital shells around the mini-singularities, and had installed
these “cores” in a delivery system. The carrier missile
would perish in the fires of a star, but the core itself would sink
to the star’s heart before the quark shells collapsed, mixing
positives and negatives in a tremendous energy yield which would
ignite a swift and savage helium fusion process.
Navy had its weapon. And now, apparently, a target for it.
“What have you done, Paul?”
“I don’t know, Ion. God help me if you’re
right.”
The passageways were a-crawl with Marines, Marescu swore.
“I didn’t realize there were so many of the bastards.
They been breeding on us? Where’s everybody else?” The
usual back and forth of technical and scientific staffs had ceased.
Civilians were scarce.
At Final Process they were told to report to the arsenal
instead.
They found three civilians waiting outside the scarlet door. The
Director, though, was an R & D admiral in civilian
disguise.
“This’s a farce,” Marescu growled at her.
“Two hundred comic opera soldiers . . . ”
“Can it, Ion,” Paul whispered.
The Director did not bat an eye. “They’re watching
you, Ion. They don’t like your mouth.”
Marescu was startled. Ordinarily, even the Eagle did not bite
back.
“What’s going on, Kathe?” Neidermeyer
asked.
Marescu grinned. Kathe Adler. Kathe the Eagle. It was one of
those nasty little jokes that drift around behind an unpopular
superior’s back. Admiral Adler had a thin wedge of a face, an
all-time beak of a nose, and a receding hairline. Never had a
birthname fit its bearer so well.
“They’re taking delivery on the product, Paul. I
want you to work with their science officers. Ion, you’ll
prepare a test program for their shipboard computers.”
“They’re going to use it, aren’t they?”
Marescu demanded.
“I hope not. We all hope not, Ion.”
“Shit. I believe that like I believe in the Tooth
Fairy.” He glanced at Paul. Neidermeyer was trying to
believe. He was like all the science staff. Keeping himself fed on
lies.
“Ship’s down, Major,” a Marine Lieutenant
announced.
“Very well,” Feuchtmayer replied.
“We’d better get lined out,” the Director
said. “Paul, pick whomever you want to help. Ion,
you’ll have to visit the ship to see what you’ll be
working with. I want your preliminary brief as soon as you can
write it. Josip, get with their Weapons officers and draw up the
preparatory specs for carrying mounts and launch systems. Have the
people in the shops drop everything else.”
Josip asked, “We have to build it all here?”
“From scratch. Orders.”
“But . . . ”
“Gentlemen, they’re in a hurry. I suggest you get
started.”
“They brought the whole ship down?” Paul asked.
Ships seldom made planetary landings.
“That’s right. They don’t want to waste time
working from orbit. That would take an extra month.”
“But . . . ” That was dangerous
business. The ship’s crew would stay crazy-busy balancing her
gravity fields with the planet’s. If they made one mistake
the vessel would be torn apart.
“It shouldn’t take more than twelve days this
way,” Admiral Adler speculated. “Assuming we hit no
snags. Let’s go.” She pushed through the red door.
The completed weapons had a sharkish, deadly look, looking
nothing like bombs. The four devices were spaced around the arsenal
floor. Each was a lean needle of black a hundred meters long and
ten in diameter. They were longer than the shuttle craft intended
to lift them to orbit. Antennae and the snouts of nasty defensive
weapons sprouted from their dark skins like scrub brush from an
old, burned slope.
They were fully automated little warships. The essentials of the
nova bomb occupied space that would have been given over to crew in
manned vessels. They were fast and shielded heavily enough to punch
through a powerful defense.
The weapon remained largely theoretical. But the men who had
created it were confident it would function.
Neidemeyer whispered to Marescu as they donned working suits,
trying to convince his friend, and himself, that they were just
gearing up for a field test. “I’m sure the money people
just want to see if they’re getting any return on their
investment,” he insisted. “You can’t blame them
for wanting to try their new toy.”
“Yeah. Our hero von Drachau is going to take potshots at a
couple of insignificant stars. Right?”
“Right.”
“You’re a fool, Paul.”
A band of strangers entered the arsenal. They stared at the four
dark needles, clearly awed and a little frightened.
“That’s von Drachau on the right,” Paul
whispered. “I recognize him from the holo. Only he looks a
lot older.”
“Looks a little grey around the gills, I’d
say.”
Von Drachau did look depressed. He spoke with the Major and
Kathe Adler. Kathe led his party around one of the missiles. Von
Drachau became more impressed.
There was something about the big, terrible ones that excited a
resonance in the soul. It was almost a siren call. Marescu felt it
himself each time he touched one of the monsters. He was ashamed of
himself when he did.
“Little boys play with firecrackers, and big boys play
with bombs,” he muttered.
“Ease up. Kathe meant it when she said they’re
watching you. Feuchtmayer isn’t one of your big fans,
Ion.”
“I’ll stay out of his way.”
The days whipped past. Technicians swarmed over the pair of
weapons von Drachau selected. Marescu tested systems and supervised
the installation of special shipping aids. Josip brought the
missiles’ computation systems into communion with the battle
computers aboard von Drachau’s ship. Technicians designed and
installed adapters and links that would fit the securing rings and
launch vanes going onto the belly of the warship.
Neidermeyer prepared a manual for the science officers
responsible for arming the sunkiller and monitoring its gluon pulse
in passage, watching for that tiny anomaly that might forecast the
expansion of a quark shell into disaster.
Marescu could not believe there was so much to do. His shifts
were long and demanding. He felt a lot of sympathy for Paul, whose
personal research project seemed threatened with death by
inattention.
Neidermeyer watched his friend more closely than he did the
gluon pulse, hunting some telltale psychological anomaly. Marescu
seemed almost too much in control, and had thrown himself into his
work with a near-fanaticism that bespoke a very fragile stability
fighting its last stand. Yet there were positive signs. Ion had
shed the filthy Archaicist outfit. He had begun devoting more time
to his personal appearance . . .
Then it was over.
Kathe Adler joined them in the lounge. “Let the firewater
flow,” she proclaimed. “It’s time to say the hell
with it and turn loose of the brass ring for a while.”
Marescu gave her an odd look.
The celebration became a premature New Year’s bash.
The pressure was off. The antagonisms went on the shelf for the
day. Guilts got tucked away. Scientists and technicians made shows
of comradeship with the Marines. A handful of von Drachau’s
officers joined in, drinking lightly, listening to the jokes but
seldom laughing.
“For them it’s just begun,” Ion murmured. He
glanced around. No one had heard him.
Von Drachau was a focus of brooding gloom. He seemed to have
sunk two-thirds into another universe. Ion watched him glare at
Paul as if Neidermeyer were some small, venomous insect when Paul
tried to strike up a conversation about the raid in the
Hell Stars. Von Drachau disappeared only minutes later.
“Don’t think you made an impression, my
friend,” Ion said.
Kathe agreed. “He’s sensitive about it, Paul.
He’s a strange one. You should have heard the row he and Ion
had.”
Marescu met Paul’s gaze. “It wasn’t any big
thing. I came on a little too strong, that’s all.”
“What was it?” Neidermeyer asked.
“About the morality of using the weapon,”
Kathe said. “Von Drachau is damned near a pacifist.
Ion was pretty shook when he found out the man could adapt his
convictions enough to let him use the weapon.”
“Ion’s problem is that he’s an absolutist.
He’s got to have everything black or white. And he’s
getting worse. Is there any way we can get him into therapy without
having him committed?”
“You think there’s a reason to worry? His profiles
keep coming up off-center, but they never show any
danger.”
“Sometimes. Lately . . . He’s
got a creepy feeling to him. Except for that argument with von
Drachau, he’s swung too far away from what he was. I’m
nervous about the backswing. Like I can hear the timer clicking. He
might break loose going the other way.”
They had begun talking about Marescu as if he were not around
for the very good reason that he was not, though neither of them
had consciously marked his departure.
Kathe Adler had called von Drachau a crypto-pacifist, and
Marescu had seen red. Literally. The dome and people went raggedly,
liquid, and red. Then it was all clear. All perfectly clear. He had
to go see Melanie and explain.
He was walking down a passageway. Time seemed to have passed. He
had the distinct feeling that his head was on sideways. That
mercenary von Drachau . . . The man had kicked
the foundations out from under him. A flexible morality? How could
there be such a thing? A thing was either right, or it
wasn’t. The nova bomb was the most evil thing yet conceived
by the military mind. And he had helped midwife that evil into this
universe. He had allowed himself to be
seduced . . . He had whored
himself . . .
There had to be a way to show them what they were doing.
He shook his head violently. Things were foggy. A band seemed to
be tightening around his temples. There was something wrong. He
could not force his thoughts into a straight line.
For an instant he considered finding a Psych officer.
Von Drachau seemed to laugh at him again.
“You fascist bastard!”
Christ! Some Torquemada had taken another turn on the strap. His
skull was creaking with the pressure.
“Where am I?” he blurted. His feet had been moving
without conscious direction. He tried to concentrate on his
surroundings. “What am I doing here?”
He wanted to turn and go back. His feet kept going in the
direction he was headed. His hand pushed on Melanie’s
door.
He was an alien, a passenger aboard a body under another’s
control. He was a slightly panicky observer of actions being
carried out by another creature.
The little gasps and grunts lashed that devil, punishing it like
a wizard’s curse. He stared at the eight-limbed, twenty-toed
beast. It heaved and lunged. Its four blind eyes rolled swiftly.
Its three uncontrolled mouths made wet, hungry sounds.
The Ion of him silently screamed and turned inward, refusing to
see any more. A darkness closed round it.
A clumsy puppeteer jerked him around, dragged him out the door
and down the passageway with jerky, meandering, drunken steps. When
next the Ion rider surfaced it found its steed in the arsenal, clad
in its Georgian, bent over the computer board in the heavily
shielded test control kiosk. The clock claimed that hours had
vanished from his life. His hands and fingers were flying, a pair
of pale white dancing spiders.
They were doing something dreadful. He did not know what, and
they would not stop when he commanded them. He watched them like a
baffled child watching slow death.
An image here, an image there, surged into his mind, playing
back fragments of the missing hours. Ion Marescu crawled over a
long black needle. Ion Marescu crouched beneath the needle,
connecting the heavy cables that ran to the test station. Ion
Marescu squeezed through the cramped interior of the black ship,
removing safety chips . . .
“Ion?”
Paul’s voice barely penetrated the thick stressglass of
the booth’s walls. He was screaming. Ion realized the yelling
had been going on for a while. He glanced at Paul puzzledly, barely
recognizing him. He did not stop working. This was the most
important test he had ever run. For the first time in his life he
was doing something of real worth. He had found himself a holy
mission.
What was it? He shook his head, tried to clear the mists. They
would not go.
His hands danced.
Kathe Adler joined Paul. They pounded the unbreakable glass with
their fists. Then the woman fled. Paul grabbed a fire axe and swung
away.
When Ion next glanced up, the vast arsenal floor was acrawl with
Marines. Major Feuchtmayer had his pale face pressed against the
glass directly in front of him. His lips writhed obscenely. He was
screaming something. Ion had no time to listen. He had to
hurry.
What the hell was going on out there? the observer part of him
wondered.
He finished programing the test sequences.
Each weapon had to be run through a simulated plunge into
Hel’s own sun. Ion usually performed the test series on a
system-by-system basis, with the drive never operational and the
safety chips preventing the weapon from going active. “How do
we know the drive will work?” Marescu muttered. “We
just take their word for it?”
Paul and the Marines stopped trying to break the glass with hand
tools. Ion saw the Major laying a sticky grey rope of something
round the door frame.
“Plastic explosives? My God! What are those madmen trying
to do?”
His right hand depressed the big black palm switch that opened
the arsenal’s huge exit doors. It was through those very
doors that that hired assassin von Drachau had moved his two
missiles to his ship.
People flung in all directions as the arsenal air burst into
Hel’s eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken
doll figures tumble and bloat.
His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The arsenal
drowned in intense light. The stressglass of the booth polarized,
but could not block it all. The sabotaged holding blocks fell away
from the number four weapon. It dragged itself forward, off its
dolly. It flung off clouds of sparks and gouged its spoor deep into
the concrete floor.
“Wait a minute,” Ion said. “Wait a minute.
There’s something wrong. It’s not supposed to do that.
Paul? Where did you go, Paul?” Paud did not answer.
The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light,
lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it
drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned
its nose toward the target.
“What’s happening?” Marescu asked plaintively.
“Paul?
What went wrong?”
The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel’s sun. It
accelerated at 100 g.
And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to
fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a
shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began
composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be
cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would
automatically lock out the others.
“We have influence, Commander,” Lieutenant Callaway
reported.
“Take hyper,” von Drachau replied. “And
destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in
the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we’ve never heard
of this place. We don’t know anything about it and
we’ve never been here.”
He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was,
what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole
truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take,
then blanked.
Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the
world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The
little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few
hours the nova chain would begin.
There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain
on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their
fate.
And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the
magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had
been a Security-decreed precaution.