John Rackham (17 page)

"And what good will that achieve?"

"You're not trying.
That shock last night—never mind. Believe me, any land of advance warning is a
benefit. And I know how the Zorgan mind will work. Exactly the way we did. They
will steal in, and hide behind the glow-clouds just as we did. And take some
time to study the layout, assess the likely opposition, and work out plans.
Just like we did. They will think you don't know they are there. But you
will
know. Get it? You'll know. And there's a whole string of things you can
do. Clamp down a radio-silence, for one thing, so as not to give away any
clues. Hide your aircraft. Put on a show of being even more bucolic than you
are, and all the time you're getting ready, in force, to hit them when they do
decide to come down. See?"

"Now you frighten me again," she
said, "just like when you fought Yarrow and Belven. So cold and
calculating, and eager to destroy. You are not a man, after all. I was wrong.
You are a killing machinel"

"Think so? Well, that was only a pipe
dream anyway, because you don't have the technology to push out your radar that
far. And you are going to see killing machines for real when the big boys
do
come, believe mel"

She ate in silence for a while, her inner
struggle plain on her face. Bragan watched her, hiding his sympathy. He knew
the conflict, the agony of choosing between two devils, either bad enough to
chill the blood, and to be mixed up with personal emotions at the same time.
Hate is akin to love— who had said that?

Before he could dredge up the reference, she
said, "And that was all your big idea, an early warning?"

"No. That was just a little tickle. The
big one—will really get you scared. You see, your biggest handicap, and the
major power that Zorgan uses, is just this. All the time there are ships up
there—or, as in our case, collector-dishes—serving out energy to the men
below, you can't do a thing. No matter how hard you hit back, or how many units
you knock out, there's always more. We have the entire power of your sun to
pull on. You could never have stopped my invasion if you hadn't wrecked those
ships,
all
of them. That was either pure genius or
uncanny luck. If you had left just one ship functioning, it would have been
enough to smash anything and everything you could put up against us. Do you see
that?"

"But we
did
break your ships!"

"Right!
Because we had them all on the ground. My fault, and I admit it freely. But you
won't do that to the big one. Ryth, they have ships that are ten—a
hundred—times as big as anything I had. And they won't come down. They aren't
designed to do it, even if they wanted to. They will hold orbit up there and
monitor the show. And they will beam down power a thousand times more than we
had. Even if you could wipe out every ship they drop, and that's highly
incredible, they would still have the heavy weapons up there. And those ships,
if need be, can spit heat-beams, laser-Learns, energy-beams, to carve this
planet into slices. Or hell-bombs that could split it in half." He watched
her cringe back across the table as he hammered home his point.

"You
have no chance at all, except to die valiantly, unless you can hit that back-up
force, up there. And, if only you had the know-how, you'd be able to do just
that. What a thought] The Zorgan Major Fleet, wiped out by a natural
fluke!"

"Explain!" she
whispered. "What is there to do?"

"It's
really very simple, when you know how. I don't, but I know it can be done, and
a technologist would understand at once. Like this. Your sun is a large
self-sustaining nuclear reactor, a ball of fire. In nature such things happen
according to certain laws, like any fire. A lump of wood will bum, but not of
itself. You have to ignite it first. And there are ways of doing that. Ways of
initiating the reaction in anything, if you know how."

She stared at him in wide-eyed wonder.
"You are mad! You mean we should reach up and change the sky-lights into
small suns!"

"Sounds
crazy, doesn't it? But it can be done. And the gear is all there for it.
Remember the sun-power collector-dishes? Still up there where we left them,
still collecting power, storing it, leaking it off because we aren't pulling on
it. Power! With a suitable microwave array, and some know-how to trap and
bounce that power right back—you have it! Three new bright little suns. Those
rock-balls are all of five hundred miles through. Plenty of material there. And
the resulting fire-balls should really \be a sight to seel Only the ships that
were using them as
cover
won't see that. They will be—annihilated
instantly!"

She
had nothing to say. The gray horror on her face said it plainly enough without
words. He waited a moment then took the gleam off his face and became grim.

"Just
a dream, Ryth. It can be done, but you'll never do it. You don't know how, and
even if you did, you haven't the time. Time is the one thing you have least to
spare."

"How much time?" she whispered.
"You know, don't you? How much?"

"Yes.
I know. Ill tell you. It works like this. Zorgan believes in organization.
When a squadron is in action, every ship is linked to all the others. If one is
knocked out, the others know, at once. If a whole squadron is knocked out, that
knowledge goes immediately to the next and nearest squadron—and so on. When you
wrecked our ships, that automatically sent a signal to the nearest Zorgan
squadron. An alarm. They will follow it up. I calculate, knowing where and how
long it will take for them to get organized, that you had just one year, your
time, from the moment you burst us until the moment the punitive fleet shows up
on your radar. One year, and there isn't much of that left, is there?"

This
was his greatest gamble of all, and he watched her with held breath to see how
she would react. The story he had just told was entirely a fiction, but the
end-fact was true, and he had practiced the yam long enough to make it sound
glib. Time
was
running out, and he knew it. His worry now
was, had he pushed too hard? So far as he could see, the Scartanni had almost
limitless resistance to despair. No matter what the odds, they would go on
struggling. But perhaps there was a limit. Perhaps he had just hit it. Perhaps
they would now throw up the effort as hopeless. He watched her, saw her sag,
and shake her head. And then she stared at him in loathing.

"It was a bad day for Scarta when you came," she mut-
tered. "You have made me think thoughts and desire things
I would not have thought possible. You have changed my
life—the whole life of Scarta. I think it would be better if
we did yield, and let Zorgan destroy us. We are destroyed,
anyway."
                                              
^

"So you quit, eh? And now you know how
I've felt all along. From the moment you destroyed my ship I was a dead man,
living on borrowed time. And you're the same, only you can live, as a
slave."

"Never!" She got up from the table
violently. "You may think like that, but I don't. Only six weeks—but a lot
can be done in that time. While I live, I choose!" and she strode off out
of the living room and into her own quarters, swishing the curtain across
pointedly.

Bragan
got up and went out into the sun. And there, where she couldn't see, he could
relax and let the cold shakes get him. The whole fantastic gamble, from start
to finish, had been balanced on a knife-edge. Now it looked—hopefully—as if it
might come off, after all. Six weeks. Could he hold the pose that long?

Ryth got through to her contacts in Stopa
with some difficulty, as it was the wrong time of day for her message. But
Mordin and Karsh excused her that much when they heard the tension in her
voice, and the message itself. She dealt with the radar-watch first,
uncomfortably, and Karsh, hearing it, -swore violentiy and glared across the
desk at Mordin.

"Why
the hell," he demanded, "didn't you mention this earlier? All that
stuff about sky-godsl"

"We do not discuss such things,"
the old man growled. "In any case, why should we have to tell you? You
come from the sky!"

"Oh
no!" Karsh sagged into his seat as the truth got to him. "All this
time you've been believing that we are the personification of your gods? You
didn't believe that—all we told you about Zorgan? Well, start believing it now!
Because it's true. And I can show you, and get men to help with your
alarm-watch, so that you'll be able to see the big ships coming a long time
before they get into your meteorite-zone. Bragan is right; we should have seen
this right from the start. No wonder you people are quick on the draw."

But
when Ryth went on to relate Bragan's hypothesis about the stellar reaction, the
technologist-chief shook his head. Mordin eyed him keenly.

"It won't work?"

"It's not that, old man. It would be no
trick at all to trigger those rock-piles into nuclear fractions and fusion.
And it would wipe out any ships that were using them as cover. That part's all
right. But what happens after that? Which way do they move? Does the fire blow
off into space—or does it spiral in and down, on us?"

Mordin's craggy face set into hard resolve.
"Can it be calculated?"

"We can try, but there are so many
random factors we could only hope for a guesstimate. It's one of those
things."

"Calculate!" the old man ordered.
"J£
there is a chance in our favor, we will take it."

"Right! Well set up the program right
away. Incidentally, I told you, didn't I, what a useful head Bragan has? He's
as good as a fleet by himself. I'd like it fine if we could figure some way of
getting him along here to the control-center when the big show starts."

"He
also told me when." Ryth's voice came wearily from the speaker, and her
father demanded, "What did he say on that? How long?"

"From the time the ships were destroyed,
one year. Or, as I make it, six weeks from now."

Karsh snorted and glowered at Mordin.
"There you are! What did I tell you? Now do you believe? I told you it was
a trigger-effect of some kind, and I estimated the time for the round trip. I
told you!" He turned to the radio and said, "It's all right, Miss
Ryth. We already had guessed it would be pretty soon, and we have planned for
it. You've done very well."

"What more do you want
of Bragan?"

"You
take good care of him. He's valuable." Karsh shot a query-look to Mordin,
and then added, "We want him here when the fun starts. Well send and have
him picked up."

"For all I care," she said,
"you can have him now!" and she cut off the connection, leaving Karsh
and Mordin locked in argument.

"I will not have that man here to give
orders," Mordin stated. "It is enough that we of Scarta have laid
aside our traditional free ways and made an organization such that one man
orders and others obey. That is bad enough." He spoke with feeling because
the major part of the ordering had fallen on his shoulders and ha was beginning
to feel the strain of being an executive.

"You don't like giving orders,"
Karsh pointed out. "I would think you'd be glad to hand that chore over to
somebody else, to a man who's trained for it, and good at itl"

"A man who believes we
cannot possibly win?"

"That's
from a long-range viewpoint. And he may be right. But once you're in a battle
and the show is on, you don't think about things like that. You concentrate on
doing your damndest to smash the other guy. I tell you, we
need
him
I"

"I will think rbout it," Mordin
admitted grudgingly. "Now, about how to make a stone burst into
fire—"

Ryth came out of the front door of the
farmhouse with her feet dragging. Bragan thought he had never seen her so
thoroughly quelled. And, by the way he had to fight his impulse to go over and
put an arm around her and comfort her, he knew his time here was almost ended.
He couldn't stand much more of it.

"What's
the plan for today?" he asked, and she lifted her eyes to look at the
ruined hillside, and shrugged.

"There
is nothing we can do with that. We will gather bilbys."

So
they gathered bilbys, and scythed grain, and collected panniers of gleebs, and
then it was time to fleece the mereens again, and the days slid by, but not as
before. There was no more talk of an evening, very little at any time except
what was absolutely necessary. And she didn't laugh anymore as she worked.
Bragan tried to regain something of the old friendship, but she withdrew from
all his efforts. He sensed a break had to come, and it did.