Страница 23 из 51
Artemisia ignored him and addressed Gillbret exclusively. "Why don't we get out of the Nebular area altogether?"
"I don't know about you," said Biron at once, "but I've got to get my Ranch back and do a little something about my father's murder. I'll stay in the Kingdoms."
"I did not mean," said Artemisia, "that we were to leave forever; only till the worst of the search was over. I don't see what you intend doing about your Ranch, anyway. You can't get it back unless the Tyra
"You never mind what I intend doing. It's my business."
"Might I make a suggestion?" asked Gillbret mildly.
He took silence for consent, and went on, "Then suppose I tell you where we ought to go, and exactly what we ought to do to help break the Empire to pieces, just as Arta said."
"Oh? How do you propose doing that?" said Biron.
Gillbret smiled. "My dear boy, you're taking a very amusing attitude. Don't you trust me? You look at me as though you think that any enterprise I might be interested in was bound to be a foolish one. I got you out of the Palace."
"I know that. I'm perfectly willing to listen to you."
"Do so, then. I've been waiting for over twenty years for my chance to get away from them. If I had been a private citizen, I could have done it long since; but through the curse of birth, I've been in the public eye. And yet. if it hadn't been for the fact that I was born a Hinriad, I would not have attended the coronation of the present Khan of Tyra
"Go on," said Biron.
"The trip from Rhodia to Tyra
"What?"
Gillbret held up a hand. "I know quite well it's an unlikely accident. The incidence of meteors in space-especially in interstellar space-is low enough to make the chances of collision with a ship completely insignificant, but it does happen, as you know. And it did happen in this case. Of course any meteor that does hit, even when it is the size of a pinhead, as most of them are, can penetrate the hull of any but the most heavily armored ship."
"I know," said Biron. "It's a question of their momentum, which is a product of their mass and velocity. The velocity more than makes up for their lack of mass." He recited it glumly, like a school lesson, and caught himself watching Artemisia furtively.
She had seated herself to listen to Gillbret, and she was so close to him that they were almost touching. It occurred to Biron that her profile was beautiful as she sat there, even if her hair was becoming a little bedraggled. She wasn't wearing her little jacket, and the fluffy whiteness of her blouse was still smooth and unwrinkled after forty-eight hours. He wondered how she managed that.
The trip, he decided, could be quite wonderful if she would only learn to behave herself. The trouble was that no one had ever controlled her properly, that was all. Certainly not her father. She'd become too used to having her own way. If she'd been born a commoner, she would be a very lovely creature.
He was just begi
"I haven't the slightest idea why the ship's screen had failed. It was just one of those things to which no one will ever know the answer, but it had failed. Anyway, the meteor struck amidships. It was pebble-sized and piercing the hull slowed it just sufficiently so that it couldn't blaze its way out again through the other side. If it had done that, there would have been little harm to it, since the hull could have been temporarily patched in no time.
"As it was, however, it plunged into the control room, ricocheted off the far wall and slammed back and forth till it came to a halt. It couldn't have taken more than a fraction of a minute to come to a halt, but at an original velocity of a hundred miles a minute, it must have crisscrossed the room a hundred times. Both crewmen were cut to pieces, and I escaped only because I was in the cabin at the time.
"I heard the thin clang of the meteor when it originally penetrated the hull, then the click-clack of its bouncing, and the terrifying short screams of the two crewmen. When I jumped into the control room, there was only the blood everywhere and the torn flesh. The things that happened next I remember only vaguely, although for years I lived it over step by step in my nightmares.
"The cold sound of escaping air led me to the meteor hole. I slapped a disk of metal over it and air pressure made a decent seal of it. I found the little battered space pebble on the floor. It was warm to the touch, but I hit it with a spa
"I tied a cord to the wrist of each corpse and then tied each cord to a towing magnet. I dumped them through the air lock, heard the magnets clank against the hold, and knew that the hard-frozen bodies would follow the ship now wherever it went. You see, once we returned to Rhodia, I knew I would need the evidence of their bodies to show that it had been the meteor that had killed them and not I.
"But how was I to return? I was quite helpless. There was no way I could run the ship, and there was nothing I dared try there in the depths of interstellar space. I didn't even know how to use the sub-etheric communication system, so that I couldn't SOS. I could only let the ship travel on its own course."
"But you couldn't very well do that, could you?" Biron said. He wondered if Gillbret 'were inventing this, either out of simple romantic imaginings or for some severely practical reason of his own. "What about the Jumps through hyperspace? You must have managed those, or you wouldn't be here."
"A Tyra
Biron stared his disbelief. Did Gillbret take him for a fool? "You're making that up," he said.
"I am not. It's one of the damned military advances which won their wars for them. They didn't defeat fifty planetary systems, outnumbering Tyra
"I'll admit it's one of their best-kept secrets, this technique of theirs. I never learned it until I was trapped alone on the Bloodsucker-the Tyra
"And you mean to say that this ship can do that too?"
"I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised."
Biron turned to the control board. There were still dozens of contacts he had not determined the slightest use for. Well, later!
He turned to Gillbret again. "And the ship took you home?"
"No, it didn't. When that meteor wove its pattern through the control room, it didn't leave the board untouched. It would have been most amazing if it had. Dials were smashed, the casing battered and dented. There was no way of telling how the previous set of the controls had been altered, but it must have been somehow, because it never took me back to Rhodia.