Macroscope

Groton stood before the silent screen, amazed at the audacity of it, “He’s losing — so he offers his enemy a commission!”

“Felks are adroit,” the officer agreed indifferently. “That’s how we lost my predecessor.”

“He defected?”

“He tried to. But the Queen overheard and cut off his head. The mission was successful.”

Groton gained respect for the Queen. She, at least, had unquestioned loyalty to her side. Of course, she was her side, largely…

Still, the notion of blatantly buying off the opposition… “Well, beam back a picture of me,” he said hotly. “Nothing else. We’ll see if the Felks figure to bribe away the Queen’s Drone.”

He had his answer in two minutes. “As it happens,” the Felk commander whistled, “we hold captive a Queen of your species, obtained as the result of a singularly fortunate maneuver. Unfortunately her Drone died. She has been very lonely for a year, though we permit her a reasonable retinue of her neuters, hatched from the few remaining eggs she has in storage. I suspect she would not tire of a serviceable mate for a very long time, knowing she could not obtain another. As you know, the favor extended to individual Drones is normally of short duration — two or three years. I can arrange to send you to her.”

Again Groton was astonished. Would this creature stop at nothing? The Drone’s memory verified that the Felks had overrun an outpost some time ago — one staffed by a Queen — and that a Queen could not raise her own Drone from an egg. Incest did not exist, in this culture.

The Drone-mind clamored for attention. The offer, it developed was attractive, particularly to one who faced the prospect of early retirement by his present Queen. A Drone could live as long as a Queen could — if permitted. That amounted to decades. Felks did not lie; the offer was valid.

Sorry, Groton said to the Drone. Then, to the officer: “Tell the Felk to look to his defenses. This commander is not about to be bought off by the boudoir.”

In the interval between messages, the officer fidgeted, then spoke. “Request permission to voice an opinion.” The third eye was now lidded.

“Granted, provided it is brief.”

“I had thought it was an insult to serve under Drone command. I was mistaken.”

“We all make mistakes,” Groton said, touched but not forgetting that it would be a mistake to betray any personal softness. The mission was not yet over. More and more he appreciated the lessons of that hectic school-teaching session of his earlier life. Then it had been merely his pride and self-confidence that took beatings; now the lives of thousands were at stake.

The third message showed that the Felk had not given up. “You evince a handsome loyalty to your Queen. But have you properly considered the nature of your loyalty to your species, and to other technological species? Surely you are intelligent enough to perceive that this station and the others in your program will hurt all of us. All we ask is the right to travel — yet only one species in a thousand is to be permitted this, if the stations function. Neither your species nor mine is among the select. Why cooperate as the tool of the destroyer?”

The destroyer! Suddenly the meaning of all this settled into focus. He was participating in the origin of the destroyer station — perhaps the very one that had blanked out Earth’s finest minds. Would blank, for what he experienced now had to be history at least fifteen thousand years past. His mystic journey had finished on target; there could be no more significant event.

And he was on the wrong side.

Or was he? He had learned, in his human existence, to consider things carefully. Surely the Queen had not gone to the immense trouble and danger of setting up an interference that would prevent her own kind from using the spaceways, without very good reason. He should understand that reason, before making his own decision.

Meanwhile there was the practical problem of the enemy fleet. If he did not destroy it, it would destroy him, making his personal decision less relevant than his indecision. Unless he defected… but that would doom the station, and might be a mistake.

“Send this reply,” he said. “MESSAGE RECEIVED. SUGGEST YOU WITHDRAW.”

The officer obeyed, then came back to question the directive. “Do you expect the Felk to retreat merely because you ask him to?”

“We’ll see.”

In due course they saw. The Felk ships decelerated, looped about, and drew in toward their base. As time passed they docked within their moon in orderly fashion.

“A ruse!” the officer said.

“Yet you told me the Felk were honorable.”

The officer looked confused.

More time passed. The last enemy ship docked while Groton held his own fleet back, suspending fire. For three hours they globed the moon at a safe distance. Then it vanished.

The release of its gravitational influence jolted the Queen’s fleet, sending ships tumbling outward. Space had been drawn into a knot and rent, and had healed itself. There was no doubt the Felk force had withdrawn.

“He will pop back on the opposite side, close to the destroyer station,” the officer predicted. “He didn’t say he wouldn’t, anyway.”

But the Felk did not return. In the course of the following twelve hours the workships finished laying their mines and activating the mines’ perceptors and trackers. The area was impregnable. A mine could not travel, but it was supreme in its area of space. Anything that approached, even an entire fleet, would be blasted, unless it carried the nullifying code-signal. The Queen’s fleet possessed this, of course — but its nature was a secure secret known only to the Queen.

The Queen’s moon detached the destroyer station and let the ships adjust its position. As it warmed up, its tremendous field of gravity took hold, hauling the moon into orbit around it, though it was two miles in diameter compared to the moon’s two thousand. Child’s-play, for this technology; gravity could be turned on and off as though it were a magnetic field. Probably the station had reclined in null-G aboard the moon, so as not to be crushed in storage. To think that the entire fabulous layout that was the destroyer-complex was no more than an installation problem to the Queen…!

Then the destroyer signal was cut in, and Groton knew that it was spreading out in a sphere whose radius expanded at lightspeed. Any battlemoon that transferred in would not transfer out again — and the six mines would finish whatever stayed.

“Request permission to ask a question.”

Groton understood the hive signals now. This was something important to the officer. “Granted.”

“By what reasoning did you determine that the Felk would leave upon request? I saw nothing in your conversation to indicate such a response.” It paused. “I wish to learn, for I note that you accomplished the mission without loss of ships, when I surely would have failed.”

This was not a question Groton particularly wanted to answer, but he felt an obligation to give a serious response to a serious query. “Put yourself in the place of the Felk commander, he said, seeing a discreet way to handle the matter.

“Defect to the Felk?”

Oops! “No — I mean to imagine that your situation was his. You emerge from spacefold to set up your attack, and instead you find the enemy, whose force is inferior to yours, attacking you. What would you do?”

The officer concentrated, adjusting to this unfamiliar mode of thinking. “I would wait for further developments,” it said at last. “I would want to ascertain what advantage the enemy had that made him so bold.”

“Precisely. And if he maneuvers with such facility and confidence that you find yourself at a disadvantage in spite of your superior resources?”

It thought some more. “I would attempt to subvert its commander.” Then its center arm lifted in the gesture of sudden illumination, and its center eye blinked. “That is what the Felk did!”