Captive of the Centaurianess (6 page)

"Dyann, Dyann," Ray warbled, "we're going home."

Her eyes filled with tears. "Do you vant to leave me already?" she asked. "Do you not like me?"

"No, no, no, I want to save our lives, our freedom, that's all. Come on, let's go aft and take inventory. I'll need you to move the heavy stuff around."

Dyann shook her head. "No," she pouted. "If you don't care for me, vy should I help you?"

"Judas priest," Ray groaned. "Look, I love you, I adore you, I worship at your feet. Now will you give me a hand?"

Dyann brightened but insisted, "Prove it."

Ray kissed her. She seized him and responded enthusiastically.

"Yeow!" he screamed. "You're about to break my ribs! Leggo!" As she did: "Uh, we'll discuss this some other time, when we've less urgent business."

"Love," said Dyann, "has gotten to be very urgent business for me. Come here."

After a while Urushkidan opened the door. "If you two don't stop tose noises—" he began indignantly. His gaze went to the aisle. "Oh," he said. "Oh." He closed the door again.

Later, an aroma of coffee
drew him back to the forward cabin. A disheveled Ray Tallantyre was busy at the little food preparation unit while Dyann sat polishing her sword and humming to herself.

"Well, hi," said the man with evident relief. "I guess we can get started. First, suppose I ask a few questions, to refresh and expand my knowledge of how this drive of yours works."

"It is not a dribe and it does not work," Urushkidan replied. "What I habe created is a structure of pure matematics. Besides, it is beyond te full comprehension of anybody but myself. Gibe me some coffee."

"You must have followed the experiments, though, and learned a good bit more along those lines from the Jovians who've been trying to build a usable device."

"Oh, yes, no doubt I could design someting if I wanted to. I don't want to. My current interests are too cosmic." Urushkidan accepted a cup and slurped.

"Look," Ray argued, "if the Jovians catch us, they'll force you to do it for them. And afterward they'll overrun Mars along with the other planets. Logistics will no longer be a problem for them, you see, nor will there be any defense against their missiles."

"Tat would be unfortunate, I admit. Neberteless, it would be downright tragic if my present train of tought were interrupted, as it would be if I gabe your project my full attention, which I would habe to do if it were to habe any chance of success. Te Jobians can afford to employ me on a part-time basis. Let tem conquer te Solar System. In a tousand years tey will be a footnote in te history books. My accomplishments will be remembered while te uniberse endures."

Dyann hefted her sword. "You will do vat he says," she growled.

"You dare not harm me," Urushkidan gibed; "it would leabe you stranded for te Jobians to take rebenge upon."

He finished his coffee. "Where is te tobacco?" he asked. "I habe used my own up."

"Jovians don't smoke," Ray informed him with savage satisfaction. "They consider it a degenerate habit."

"What?" The Martian's howl rattled the pot on the hotplate. "No tobacco aboard?"

"None. And I daresay your supply back in Wotanopolis has been confiscated and destroyed. That puts the nearest cigar store somewhere in the Asteroid Belt."

"Oh, no! How can I tink without my pipe? Te new cosmology ruined by tobacco shortage—" Urushkidan needed bare seconds to reach his decision. "Bery well. Tere is no help for it. If te nearest tobacco is millions of kilometers away, we must build te faster-tan-light engine at once.

"Also," he added thoughtfully, "if te Jobians did conquer te Solar System, tey might well prohibit tobacco on ebery world. Yes, you habe conbinced me, yours is a bital cause."

Ray made no attempt
to use the Martian's equations in detail or to find elegant solutions of any. He merely wanted to compute the parameters of something that would work, and he proceeded with slashing approximations that brought screams of almost physical anguish from the other being.

He did, however, recognize the basic nature of Urushkidan's achievement, a final correlation of general relativity and wave mechanics whose formulation had certain surprising consequences.

Relativity deals with matter and energy, including potentials, which move at definite velocities that cannot exceed that of light. In contrast, wave mechanics treats the particle as a psi function which is only probably where it is. In the latter theory, point-to-point transitions are not speeds but shifts in the node of a complex wave. Urushkidan had abolished the contradiction by bringing in his own immensely generalized and refined concept of information as a condition of the plenum rather than as a physical quantity subject to physical limitations. It then turned out that the phase velocity of matter waves—which, unlike the group velocity, can move at any speed—could actually carry information, so that the most probable position of a particle went from region to region with no restrictions on the time derivatives.

The trick was to establish such conditions in reality that the theoretical possibility was realized.

"As I understand it," Ray had said, early on, "the proper configuration of quark interchanges will set up a field of space-strain. A spacecraft will react against the entire mass of the universe, won't even need rockets. In fact, we have here the key to a lot of other things as well, like gravity control. Right?"

"Wrong," answered Urushkidan.

"Well, we'll build it anyhow," Ray said.

His ambition was not as crazy as it might seem—not quite. The theory was in existence and considerable laboratory work had been done. Despite his scorn for empirical science, Urushkidan's mind had stored away the data about these and was perfectly capable of seeing what direction research should take next. Moreover, he was in fact the sole person with a complete grasp of his concepts; no physicist had, as yet, comprehended every aspect of them. Given motivation, he flung the full power of his intellect against the problem of practical application. Ray Tallantyre was actually quite a good engineer where it came to producing hardware. That hardware was not really complex, either, any more than a transistor or a tunnel diode is complex; the subtlety lies in the physical principles employed. In the present case, what was required was, basically, power, which the spacecraft had, and circuits with certain resonances, which could be constructed out of available materials. The result would not be neat, but in a slapdash fashion it ought to work.

Just the same, no R & D undertaking ever went smoothly, and this one labored under special difficulties. On a typical occasion—

"We'll want our secondary generator over here, I think, attached to this bench," Ray said. "Tote it for me, will you, Dyann?"

"All ve've done is vork, vork, vork," she sulked. "I vant to hunt monsters."

"Bring it, you lummox!"

Dyann glared but stooped above the massive machine and, between Ganymedean weight and Varannian muscles, staggered across the deck with it. Meanwhile Ray was checking electrical properties on an oscilloscope. Urushkidan was solving a differential equation while grumbling about heat and humidity and fanning himself with his ears. Elsewhere lay strewn a chaos of parts and tools.

"Damn!" the man exclaimed. "I hoped—but no, this piece of copper tube isn't right either. I need a resistance with so-and-so many ohms and such-and-such a capacitance, and nothing around seems to be modifiable for it."

"Specify your values," Urushkidan said.

Ray pawed through the litter around him, selected another object, and put it in his test circuit. "No, this won't do." He cast it across the room; it clanged against a bulkhead. "Look, if we can't find something, this project is stopped cold."

Having put down the generator, Dyann went forward. She returned with the boat's one and only frying pan. "Vill this maybe be right?" she asked innocently.

"Huh? Get out of my way!" Ray screamed.

"Okay," she answered, offended. "I go hunt monsters."

You know
—passed through the man's head; and:
What's to lose?
He clipped the pan into the circuit. Its properties registered as nearly what he required.
If I cut the handle off
—Excited, he began to do that.

"Are you mad?" protested Urushkidan.

"Well, I don't like the idea of living off cold beans any better than you do," Ray retorted, "but consider the alternative." He rechecked the emasculated frying pan. "Ye-e-s, given a few adjustments elsewhere, this'll serve." Viciously: "Starward the course of human empire."

"Martian empire," Urushkidan corrected, "unless we decide it is beneat our dignity."

"It'll be Jovian empire if we don't escape. Okay, bulgebrain, what comes next?"

"How should I know? I habe not finished here. How do you expect me to tink in tis foul, tick air, wit no tobacco?"

Dyann clumped in from the forward cabin, attired in a spacesuit whose adjustability she strained to the limit. Its faceplate was still open. Her right hand clutched the rifle she had taken, her left her sword. "I saw monsters out there," she announced happily. "I am goin to hunt them."

"Oh, sure, sure," muttered Ray without really hearing. His attention was on a calculator. "Urushkidan, could you hurry it up a bit with that equation of yours? I really do need to know the exact resonant wave form before I can proceed." He glanced up. The Martian was trying to fill his pipe from the shreds and dottle in an ashtray. "Hey! Get busy!"

"Won't," said Urushkidan.

"By Heaven, you animated bagpipe, if you don't give me some decent cooperation for a change, I'll—I'll—"

"Up your rectifier."

The sound of an airlock valve closing snatched Ray out of his preoccupation. "Dyann?" he called. "Dyann. . . . Hey, she really is going outside."

"Apparently tere are monsters indeed," Urushkidan said.

Ray sprang into the forward cabin and peered through the nearest of its viewports. His heart stumbled. "Yes, a pair of gannydragons," he exclaimed. "Must've sensed our heat output—they could crack this hull wide open—"

"I will proceed wit te calculation," Urushkidan said uneasily.

—Dyann leaped from lock to ground. In the weird light and thin shriek of wind, the beasts seemed unreal. An Earthling would have compared them to long-legged crocodiles, ten meters from spiky tailtip to shovel jaws. "Thank you. Ormun." she said in her native language, aimed the rifle, and fired.

A dragon bellowed. In this atmosphere, the sound reached her as a squeak. The beast charged. She stood her ground and kept shooting.

A blow knocked her asprawl and sent the firearm from her grasp. She had forgotten the second dragon. Its tail whacked anew, and Dyann tumbled skyward. As she hit the rocks, both animals rushed her.

"
Haa-hai!
" she yelled, bounced, to her feet, and sprang. She still had her sword, secured to her wrist by a loop of leather. Up she went, over the nearest head, and struck downward. Green ichor spurted forth. It froze immediately.

Dyann landed, got her back against a huge meteorite, and braced herself. The unhurt monster arrived, mouth agape. She hewed with a force that sang through her whole body. The terrible head flew off its neck. She barely jumped free of its still clashing teeth. The decapitated carcass staggered about, blundered against the companion animal, and started fighting.

Dyann circled warily around. The headless dragon collapsed after a while. The other turned about, noticed once more the heat-radiant boat, and lumbered in that direction. It had to be diverted. Dyann scrambled up on top of the meteorite, poised, and sprang. She landed astride the beast's neck.

It hooted and bucked. She tried to cut its head off also, but couldn't get a proper swing to her blade where she was. The injuries she indicted must have done something to what passed for a nervous system, because the monster started galloping around in a wide circle. The violence of the motion was such that she dared not try to jump off, she could merely hang on.

Well-nigh an hour passed before the creature stopped, exhausted. Dyann slid to the ground, whirled her sword on high, and did away with this beast also. "Ho-ha!" she yelled joyously, retrieved her rifle, and skipped back to the boat.

—"Oh, Dyann, Dyann," Ray half sobbed when she was inside and her spacesuit off. "I thought sure you'd be killed—"

"It vas grand fun," she laughed. "Now let's make love."

"Huh?"

She felt of her backside and winced. "Me on top."

Ray retreated nervously. Urushkidan, standing in the entrance to the lab section, snickered and shut the door.

V

The Ganymedean day drew to a close. Stars brightened in a darkened sky, save where Jupiter stood at half phase low to the south, mighty in its Joseph's coat of belts and zones. Weary, begrimed, and triumphant, Ray stepped back from his last job of adjustment. His gaze traveled fondly over the haywired mess that filled much of the forward cabin, all of the after cabin, and, via electrical conduits through the rad wall, most of the engine room.