Protector

Roy remembered what he had come for. “You’re two days past di

“Not hungry. My prism’s in the oven, and I’ve got to wait for it to cool.”

“I could bring—”

“No thanks.”

“Any significance?”

“Didn’t I tell you I was predictable? If there aren’t any Pak scouts in the vicinity, you could just as well go on to Wunderland alone. Most of what I know about the Pak is stored in the computer. When a protector feels not needed, he doesn’t eat.”

“So you’re kind of hoping we find Pak scouts.”

Bre

On the evening of the same day he came out towing three hundred pounds of machinery, of which a big, solid crystal prism was a prominent part. He wouldn’t let Roy help tow it, but they set it up together at the focus of the Flying Dutchman’s telescope. Roy brought him a sandwich then, and made him eat it. The Jewish mother role irritated him, but so did the thought of going on to Wunderland alone.

Bre

The prism threw a rainbow spectrum across a white surface. Bre

“Blue-shifted.” Any school child knew what that meant. “He’s coming down our throats.”

“Maybe not. He’s coming toward us, but maybe not dead on. We’re only a couple of light-weeks out from Sol, and he’s a light-year away, and I think he’s decelerating. I’ll have to check to see if we’re getting his exhaust. But I think he’s headed for Sol.”

“Bre

“It’s just as bad as it can get. We’ll know in a month. He’ll have moved by then. We’ll have some paralax on him.”

“A month! But—”

“Just a minute. Calm down. How far can be go in a month? He’s way below lightspeed; we’re probably going faster than he is. A month won’t cost us much — and I’ve got to know how many there are, and where they are, and where they’re going. And I’ve got to build something.”

“What?”

“A widget. Something I dreamed up after we found the Pak fleet, when I saw that there might be Pak scouts around. The designs are in the computer.”

Roy did not fear loneliness. He feared its opposite. Bre

Once he suggested another dry run. Bre

“Hell, yes.”

“Glad to bear it.”

One day Bre

He finally asked himself, “How would Bre

Right. Vacuum, and access to the surface.

The tree, the grass, the mud of the pond bottom were all freeze-dried and dead. The stars were bright and eerie, and more real than they had seemed on a vision screen. Roy could see them as a battlefield: the unseen worlds as territories to be fought over, the gas shells around stars as death traps for an unwary warrior.

He spotted Bre

Bre

“Don’t come too close,” Bre

“What are you making?”

“Something that should collapse a polarized gravity generator at a distance. If generated gravity is what they’re using to hold their ships in tandem, they’ll have to polarize it to make it work over those distances. We know they know how to do it. They’ll put the generator on the trailing ship, because that’s the ship that’s producing enough excess power to maintain the field.”

“Suppose they’re using something else?”

“So I waste a month. But I won’t believe they’re using cables. In deceleration mode even a Pak cable won’t stand up to the exhaust from the trailing ship. I might believe they loaded everything on the trailing ship and used the lead ship purely as a stripped Bussard ramjet compressor. But they’d lose power and maneuverability.

“I’ve been trying to design a Pak scout ship myself. It isn’t easy, because I don’t know what they’ve got. The worst thing I can think of from our viewpoint is two independent ships with heavy, versatile ram field generators. That way if you lost a couple of lead ships in a battle, you could link the trailing ships, and vice versa.”

“Yah.”

“But I don’t believe it. The more widgetry they put into each ship, the fewer ships they wind up with. I think they’d compromise. The lead ship is a Bussard ramjet, built to fight, but not too different from ours. It’s the trailing ship that’s versatile, with the oversized adjustable ram field generator. You could link two trailing ships, but not two lead ships. The lead ships are more vulnerable anyway. You saw that.”

“Then these scouts are tougher than what I fought.”

“And there are three of them.”

“Three.”

“They’re coming in a cone, through — you remember that map of the space around Sol? There’s a region that’s almost all red dwarfs, and they’re coming through that. I think the idea is to map an escape route for the fleet, in case something goes wrong at Sol. Otherwise they’ll see to it that Sol is clean, then go on to other yellow dwarf stars. At the moment they’re all about a light year from Sol and about eight light-months apart.”

Roy looked up. Where within the battlefield — ? He found Sol easily, but he couldn’t remember the direction of the first scout. He shivered in his suit, though it was far more comfortable than it had ever been. Bre

“There could be more.”

“I doubt it,” said Bre

“Suppose they came in ones instead of twos. They’d show as ordinary Bussard ships.”

“I don’t believe it. Look, they need to be able to see each other. If a scout disappears, the others want to know it.”

“All right. Now we’ve got to keep them away from Sol. How about using ourselves as a decoy?”

“Right.”

That absent-minded monosyllable was disconcerting. It happened every so often, this implication that Bre

“No. I’ve got to finish this. Improve your mind. Brush up on local astronomy; it’s our battle map. Look up Home. We’re not going to Wunderland now. We’re going to Home, if we get the choice.”