C c macapp, p.9
C C MacApp, page 9
It occurred to him to wonder why—the ship being so ancient—that steel wasn't already rusted away. Maybe it had been protected, in its great underground chamber, by utter dryness of the air (and why air?) or by some chemical means.
But there, was one advantage in those hatch covers of lesser metal: they could be torch-cut, and welded onto, much more readily. And to install orthodox weapons (missile launchers, laser clusters, rupters) in the great bays, he'd have to cut ports in the big hatch covers. So that was all right.
He pondered that question of installation. There were engineers among his men, of course, and a gunnery officer who could plan the mounting and wiring. But the volume of work would be tremendous.
Would the Omniarch let it be done on Akiel? No, surely not. All the work would have to be done in space, by human hands. Well, work was only work.
And that left one other question: where to get the weapons? He decided to talk over his idea about that with Bart Lange.
"We had some chance," he said, "of capturing Bizh ships in salvageable condition when we started the raids. That chance is gone now. They're too thoroughly alerted. And we can't ask Hohd for more weapons—they'd prick up their ears like foxes. And we can't buy them anywhere, even a few at a time, because we have nothing to pay for them with."
Bart shrugged agreement and waited for him to continue.
John said, "I've been thinking that the Vuls probably never bothered to salvage much, if anything, from Earth. There was a tremendous production going on, that just stopped dead at the Destruction." Dead indeed, he thought. "There was a lot of stuff they could have used—but it would have been a real project to go down and salvage it, working in suits, and decontaminate it."
Bart sat up straighter. "You don't think, do you, that just lying around for eight years has cleaned it up to any extent?"
"To some extent, surely. Not enough; but by working in shifts, well suited up, we could get cargoes off-planet. Rain will have washed a lot of the dirtiest stuff out of the atmosphere. And munitions lying in warehouses and factories won't have been badly contaminated, anyway. Once in space, we can decontaminate things—including men in suits." He watched Bart's face. "Say we pick up a hundred missile launchers, and fifty laser clusters, and fifty heavy rupters…"
Bart squirmed forward in his chair. "I imagine the lasers were probably ruined immediately."
"Maybe so; we can find out. But if we haul everything to some place with no atmosphere, and wash it down repeatedly with lots of water containing boron compounds or something…"
Bart grinned. "What would we haul it in? You're talking about a big load, and a lot of radioactivity."
"True—but we've got a big ship. We can sacrifice a thousand feet of it, if need be." He smiled at Bart's expression. "I don't mean chop it off—I'd hate to try to cut around this hull, anyway—I mean, just stow the stuff in one end, and cut off air circulation from that end, and only enter it in suits to do the work. Later, we might be able to sweep out that end well enough. If we can't—so what? There aren't enough of us to fill a thousandth of the ship anyway!"
Bart jumped to his feet. "Damn! It's worth a try! And I'll bet there are a lot of things we never heard of that'll speed up decontamination!"
John told him, "I fully intend to blackmail the Omniarch for any knowledge he or his technician-gender descendants have along those lines. But even at worst, what if a missile launcher did give off a few R's? Once it's installed, we can stay away from it most of the time. In this ship, we can detour a good comfortable way around things."
"We damned well can," Bart agreed abstractedly. He was excited now, and thinking hard. "How much of a crew will we take?"
"More," John told him, "than we can rustle up suits for. There'll be a lot of work to do. In fact, I thought we'd take nearly everybody, except for skeleton crews aboard Luna and a couple of the smaller ships. Morale's been sagging a little lately. A look at Earth might bolster it. Most of the men never saw her, after…"
Bart pondered, then nodded slowly. "I think you're right. For that matter, I don't think I could resist the chance, now. It's a ghoulish thing, maybe, but… Well, I want to see how she looks after being dead for eight years."
Chapter Twelve
THE ANCIENT, immense ship had been in null for almost four hours—nearly enough for the trip to Sol. John restlessly paced the big Control Room. Instincts were nagging at him.
After eight years, unless there were some immediate stimulus, there should be no logical reason for the Vuls to be maintaining a watch on the Solar System. True, mining operations could be carried out in the presence of lingering radioactivity, but why should a rich, powerful empire bother? Anything that could be found on, in, or around Sol's planets could be found on thousands of planetary bodies without radioactivity. And, so far as Earth's stocks of completed and semi-completed weapons were concerned well, these wouldn't interest Vulmot for a similar reason: it would be easier to manufacture the same items elsewhere than to reclaim and decontaminate anything from Earth. John's only reason for undertaking that labor was that he had no other place to get the things.
But still, he was nervous. After all, he might have already given the Vuls reason to think again of Earth. If they were astute enough, or lucky enough, to guess that men were involved in the hit-and-run attacks against forward outposts of the Bizh Empire, they might follow the same chain of logic he had.
He glanced at a chronometer. Less than a quarter-hour now to the planned breakout—no farther from the sun than Pluto, but, to avoid planetoids, well outside the plane of the ecliptic.
If the Vuls had set up a watch on the Solar System, they'd undoubtedly be aground on planets or planetoids, safely camouflaged from mass detectors. And they'd be already charged for null, while this big ship would not be. He and Bart had established that her time for recharging was faster than that of ordinary ships (three minutes and twenty seconds instead of four minutes), but that was still a long time, in terms of space combat.
He could not be sure that the great hull of unknown metal could resist the armaments of capital ships or even heavy cruisers.
He went to stand beside the mass-detector sphere at one end of the big console. Bart came to stand at his elbow. "I wish," Bart said, "we had this thing calibrated better. When we break out, it'll be full of blips—Sol and the planets—but I don't know whether any of the planetoids and satellites will show. And if it happens that we have to run, I'd like to know exactly where we are!"
John nodded. All the blips should lie in a plane four or five inches below the center of the sphere, which of course represented the ship's position. Sol would show as a green-blue intense blip, but the rest of the system might be confused—especially as, after more than eight years, he didn't have an accurate plot of the planets positions in orbit. He started another turn about the room.
And suddenly he had a hunch. He stopped and looked fixedly at the spring-mounted panel with the weirdly incomprehensible illusionary sphere. The script on that panel said something about null…
He strode to the thing and flipped on the switch below the semitranslucent dark disk. The optical illusion of a sphere leaped into apparent being—and it was cluttered with multicolored blips of light!
He gaped for a few moments. "Bart! Come here!"
Bart Lange came, running the last few steps. Then he stopped and stared. "But—what the hell! We're in null!"
John was grinning now and shaking with excitement "We are that. And this thing sees from null! Look—that's got to be Sol; and those are the planets. Green! Cute, eh? Green for planets? Blue-green for the star. And—Bart—look—every one of those amber blips is the same distance from a green blip! Five or six millimeters." He stared at the arrangement for a minute. "Some of those green blips are planetoids, though. I guess the gadget doesn't differentiate."
Suddenly he looked up at Bart "Do you know what I think those amber blips are?"
Bart Lange blinked at him for a moment, then gasped. He drew a deep breath. "I think I do, John. Those are—are ships, alive and powered. A task force—thirty ships or more—all on the surface of some planet or big asteroid. Now, don't ask me if I know how this wizard ship can register an enemy fleet—at this distance, and from null. I won't even listen to that question!" Suddenly he grinned. "I'll bet you ten feet of fuel wire to one that there are other tricks in this gadget." He leaned forward, selected a knob, and turned it slowly. The pattern of blips in the nonmaterial sphere shrank toward the center, without altering relative positions. The knob stopped turning. "That," Bart chuckled, "is the setting for extreme range." He turned the knob the other way. It kept turning in this direction—clockwise—until the pattern of blips had expanded to more than the diameter of the sphere. "There goes Pluto. There goes Uranus, and Neptune!"
The knob reached its other extreme. By then the whole Solar System had vanished—range had been reduced too much as the scale increased. Bart pointed to a small white blip. "What do you suppose that is? A wandering chunk of rock?"
John shrugged. "I'd guess, a comet—frozen gases, or ice. The Klee went in for symbolism, obviously."
"Yes." Bart made a face. "You know—this isn't going to be all peaches and cream! We'll be able to see any chunk of debris within a hundred light-years. It won't be comfortable, knowing how much junk we might null right through."
John told him, "On the contrary—if we ever find ourselves about to break out inside something, we can avoid it This practically eliminates zeroing in!"
Bart looked startled, then grinned sheepishly. "I guess that's right. Say, why didn't we discover this—this magician's gadget before? We've been in null with this ship a dozen times!"
John tried to recall each hop, and precisely what they'd done in the way of experimentation. "I guess we simply didn't have this panel activated when we were near enough to anything to see it." He looked up at the dials above the illusionary sphere. "There's a lot of data being shown right now. Will you add this to your studies?"
"What do you think?" He turned and looked at the breakout chronometer. "Are we going on in as far as we intended?"
John had already made that decision. "No. We're going to stop out of mass-detector range—which will be quite a distance, with this big lummox. Then we're going to pinpoint Earth's position very exactly and null practically into atmosphere. Unless, of course, we find an amber blip alongside Earth."
Bart said, "There wasn't one. They were scattered around the system farther out. Of course, they could move, but I'm betting they won't. This has the smell of an ambush."
John nodded. "And we might still fall into it. I expect they make a pass over Earth now and then, just in case something has sneaked by them." He turned and walked toward his seat. He turned on the shipwide intercom. "All hands stand by for breakout. And, incidentally—battle stations aboard all Armed Scouts! It seems there are visitors in the Solar System. We're going to try to dodge them, but if it happens that they see us and come running to stare at an impossibly big ship, we just might spit you out like a bunch of aroused hornets. If we do, hit them hard until you can null. I'm going to program battle plans and a null rendezvous right now."
He was aware of Bart grinning and muttering and shaking his head dazedly.
The great ship hung over what had once been eastern Sumatra. Wherever they could, men sat or stood silently staring at viewscreens. John (who'd seen Earth, as most of the others had not, in her early death) was as shaken as anybody.
Somehow he'd expected a bare planet by now: rocks broiling in the sun, brown soil scored into corduroy by unhindered rain. When he'd been here, leaves still hung from trees—brown and shriveled, but mostly not yet fallen. He expected to see all that gone.
But Earth had not been favored with even a decent burial.
The trees, most of them, still stood. A few miles to one side of the ship, a blackened area marked the passage of a forest fire, but even there blackened stumps thrust accusingly toward the sky. And even some of the leaves had not fallen. What remained hung in a shriveled travesty of life. There'd been very little decay, of course—decay was a form of life, and it had stopped along with the rest when the radioactivity began to seep through bark and heartwood. And roots were still intact, to a considerable extent holding together the dead soil against the erosion even of this heavy-rainfall area. Oh, there was bare earth, especially in the burned-over region, but in most places some sort of litter still existed.
And the wooden buildings were even more eerie. Was it not a kind of blasphemy that weathered boards, in this wet climate, should show no fungus rot? No termite action, no gnawed ratholes? And, under a peak of eaves, should a bird's nest of twigs still cling, with eggs still waiting there as if they needed only the love of a feathered breast to hatch them?
There were, of course, carcasses and corpses. Withered bodies of men and women and children and water buffalo lying about, the humans mostly curled into balls, the beasts with their heads outstretched, their limbs stiffly straight. John saw one dog huddled beside the corpse of a young boy. Which had died first? Which had crawled to the other for whatever comfort of spirit, if not body, company might offer?
He began to hear mutterings from the intercom as sickness and rage broke the silent staring of the men.
To the west loomed mountains, the highest peaks bare and rocky. The glimmer of a lake showed in the foothills as the immense ship lifted to cross the summit. It was odd, somehow, to see a lake—John tended, he mused, to feel subconsciously that a lake was a living thing. And what of the seacoast the ship was about to cross? Wasn't it wrong for the surf to crawl and bunch up and boom with life?
He bent forward to flip a switch. "Doctor?"
"Yes, sir."
"How soon will you have a report on the atmosphere?"
"Another hour for a complete report, Commodore. But I can say right now that there's still enough Strontium 90 to be deadly. And traces of Cobalt 60—that's surprising, isn't it? You don't think of cobalt as a metal that can be divided into small enough particles to stay in the atmosphere very long. Probably there's enough picked up by the wind from somewhere to be detectable."
John frowned. "Cobalt 60? How would that happen?"
The physicist grunted. "Maybe a warhead made a direct hit on a warehouse where ordinary cobalt metal was stored. That's all it would take, I think."
"I suppose so." John pondered for a moment. "How about things in general? Would you say there's enough residual radioactivity, in the ground and in buildings and whatnot, to get through to a man in a suit?"
"I'm afraid so, if he stayed around very long and touched too many things. Maybe with special mittens that had layers of absorptive compounds…"
"We have those," John told him. "What about just walking around in the open air? Would too much get through the suit?"
"I think not, unless he walked around in the rain. I can only guess about that."
John sighed. "All right. Thanks." He got slowly from his seat and walked over to Bart Lange. "I think we'll try the Balkans first. There was a lot of heavy production there just before the Destruction. And it's a dry season there right now." He eyed Bart for a minute. "I'm leaving you in command aboard."
Lange stared, then scowled. "You don't mean you are going aground, do you? That's ridiculous! You're not expendable!"
John felt a rush of annoyance. "Damn it, do you think I can keep the respect of the men if I stay aboard and send them down into that? It's no ordinary thing down there, Bart, that a man's instincts can cope with, such as a tiger or a pack of wolves. Radioactivity's too stealthy. You can't see it or feel it, but you know how deadly it is. It works on your mind, whether instruments tell you it's too weak to hurt you or not. And a man would get to thinking about his commander sitting safe in a sealed ship. Anyway, we'll be carrying detectors. If any of us begins to pick up too much, we'll come back aboard in a hurry."
Lange looked convinced but disgusted. "What if the Vuls show up? Do you expect me to go off and leave you?"
"I certainly do. Look—we have to play the Omniarch's game. If we lose any considerable number here, he'll be forced to guard the rest of you like babies. In other words, whether it's expedient for his damned plan or not, he'd have to consider you unexpendable breeding stock. So I'm as expendable here as anyone else. The respect of the men isn't expendable, if we're going to go on as a group. Besides, I have to be on the ground to make the decisions as to what we take and how we handle it. And you're the only one I can depend on to know enough about this ship and have the right judgment if things go wrong."
Lange muttered disgustedly, sat silent for a minute, and finally shrugged. "All right; you're the commodore. What do you intend to do about power for cranes and whatnot?"
"The first thing we'll do on the ground is look for power sources still operable. If we don't find any, we'll have to run power lines from the ship. We can do that without leaving any pathways for radioactivity to get aboard."
"I guess so. How long do you expect to stay down, the first shift?"
"Ten hours, including the time to suit up and the time to decontaminate us afterward and get us out of the suits. I can't ask men to work any longer, or even to stay in the suits under a planet's gravity, without rest or a decent meal. I'll take about twenty with me the first shift. If everything goes all right, a bigger crew can go down for the second shift. It's going to be a hectic time for everyone, aground or aboard, what with the job of decontamination and whatever else we run into. I don't expect we'll foresee all the problems."
