Captive of the Centaurianess (7 page)

"Done, I hope, I hope," he crooned. "My friends, we've opened a way to the universe."

Dyann nuzzled him. "You are too clever, my little darlin," she breathed. That rather spoiled the occasion for him. He'd grown fond of her—if nothing else, she was a magnificent companion, once she'd learned that there were limits to his strength as well as his available time—but she could not simper very successfully.

"I fear," said Urushkidan, "tat tis minor achiebement of mine will eclipse my true significance in te popular mind. Oh, well." He shrugged with his whole panoply of tentacles. "I can always use te money."

"Um-m-m, yeah, I haven't had a chance to think about that angle," Ray realized. "I'm safe enough from Vanbrugh—you don't bring a man to court who's prevented a war and given Earth the galaxy—but by gosh, there's also a fortune in this gadget."

"Yes, I will pay you a reasonable fee for helping me patent it," Urushkidan said.

Ray started. "Huh?"

"I would also like your opinion on wheter to charge an exorbitant royalty or rely on a high bolume of sales at a lower price. You are better fitted to deal wit such crass matters."

"Wait one flinkin' minute," Ray snarled. "I had a share in this development too, you know."

Urushkidan uttered a nasty laugh. "Ah, but can you describe te specifications?"

"Uh—uh—" Ray stared at the jungle of apparatus and gulped. He'd had no time to keep systematic notes, and he lacked the Martian's photographic memory. By Einstein, he'd built the damned thing but he had no proper idea whatsoever of how!

"You couldn't have done it without me," he argued.

"Nor could an ancient farmer on Eart habe done witout his mules. Did he consider paying tem a salary on tat account?"

"But . . . you've already got more money than you know what to do with, you bloated capitalist. I happen to know you invested both your Nobel Prizes in mortgages and then foreclosed."

"And why not? Genius is neber properly rewarded unless it rewards itself. Speaking of tat, I habe had no fresh tobacco for an obscene stretch of days. Take us to te nearest cigar store."

"Yes," Dyann said with unwonted timidity, "it might be a good idea if ve tested vether this enyine vorks, no?"

"All right!" Ray shouted in fury. "Sit down. Secure yourselves." He did likewise in the pilot's chair. His fingers moved across the breadboarded control panel of the star drive. "Here goes nothing."

"Nothin," said Dyann after a silence, "is correct."

"Judas on a stick," Ray groaned. "What's the matter now?" He unharnessed and went to stare at the layout. Meters registered, indicators glowed, electrorotors hummed, exactly as they were supposed to; but the boat sat stolidly where she was.

"I told you not to use tose approximations." Urushkidan said.

Ray began to fiddle with settings. "I might have known this," he muttered bitterly. "I'll bet the first piece of flint that the first ape-man chipped didn't work right either."

Urushkidan shredded a piece of paper into the bowl of his pipe, to see if he could smoke it.

"
Iukh-ia-ua!
" Dyann called. "Is that a rocket flare?"

"Oh, no!" Ray hastened forward and stared. Against the night sky arced a long trail of flame. And another, and another—

"They've found us," he choked.

"Well," said Dyann, not uncheerfully, "ve tried hard, and ve vill go down fightin, and that vill get us admission to the Hall of Skulls." She reached out her arms. "Have ve got time first to make love?"

Urushkidan stroked his nose musingly. "Tallantyre," he said, "I habe an idea tat te trouble lies in te square-wabe generator. If we doubled te boltage across it—"

High in dusky heaven, the Jovian craft braked with a fury of jet-fires, swung about, and started their descent. Beneath them, vegetation crumbled to ash and ice exploded into vapor. An earthquake shudder grew and grew.

The boat's comset chimed. She was being signalled. Numbly, Ray switched on the transceiver. The lean hard features of Colonel Roshevsky-Feldkamp sprang into the screen.

"Uh . . . hello," Ray said.

"You will surrender yourselves immediately," the Jovian told him.

"We will? I mean ... if we do, can we have safe conduct back to Earth?"

"Certainly not. But perhaps you will be allowed to live."

"About tat square-wabe generator—" Urushkidan saw that Ray wasn't listening, sighed, unstrapped himself, and crawled aft.

The first of the newcomer craft sizzled to a landing. She was long and dark; guns reached from turrets like serpent heads. In the screen, Roshevsky-Feldkamp's image thrust forward till Ray had an idiotic desire to punch it. "You will surrender without resistance," the colonel said. "If not, you will suffer corporal punishment after your capture. Prolonged corporal punishment."

"Urushkidan vill die before he gives up," Dyann vowed.

"I will do noting of te sort," said the Martian. He had come to the machine he wanted. Experimentally, he twisted a knob.

The boat lifted off the ground.

"Well, well," Urushkidan murmured. "My intuition was correct."

"Stop!" Roshevsky-Feldkamp roared. "You must not do that!"

The boat rose higher. His lips tightened. "Missile them," he ordered.

Ray scrambled back to the pilot's seat, flung himself down, and slammed the main drive switch hard over.

He felt no acceleration. Instead, he drifted weightless while Jupiter whizzed past the viewports.

The engine throbbed, the hull shivered— wasted energy, but what could you expect from an experimental model? Stars blazed in his sight. Struck by a thought, he cast a terrified glance at certain meters. Relief left him weak. Even surface flyers in the Jovian System were, necessarily, equipped with superb magnetohydrodynamic radiation screens. Those of this boat were operating well. Whatever else happened, he wouldn't fry.

The stars began to change color, going blue forward and red aft. Was he traveling so fast already?

"Vat planet is that?" Dyann pointed at a pale gray globe.

"I think—" Ray stared behind him. "I think it was Neptune."

The stars appeared to be changing position. They crawled away from bow and stern till they formed a kind of rainbow around the waist of the boat. Elsewhere was an utter black.
Optical aberration
, he understood.
And I'm seeing by Dopplered radio waves and X-rays. What happens when we pass the speed of light itself? No, we must have already—is this what it feels like, then?
The starbow of science fiction song and story pinched out into invisibility; he flew through total blindness.
If only we'd figured out some kind of speedometer
.

"Glorious, glorious!" chortled Urushkidan, rubbing his tentacles together as if he were foreclosing on yet another mortgage. "My teory is confirmed. Not tat it needs confirmation, but now eben te Eartlings must needs admit tat I  am always right. And how tey will habe to pay!"

Dyann's laughter rolled Homeric through the hull. "Ha, ve are free!" she bawled. "All the vorlds are ours to raid. Oh, vat fun it is to ride in a vun-force boat and slay!"

Ray reassembled his wits. They'd better slow down and turn around while they could still identify Sol. He made himself secure in his seat, studied the gauges, calculated what was necessary, set the controls, and pushed the master switch.

Nothing happened. The vessel kept on going.

"Hey!" the man wailed. "Who"! . . . Urushkidan, what's wrong? I can't stop accelerating!"

"Of course not," the Martian told him. "You must apply an exact counterfunction. Use te omega-wabe generator."

"Omega wave? What the hell is that?"

"Why, I told you—"

"You did not."

Ray and Urushkidan stared at each other. "It seems," the Martian said at length, "tat tere has been a certain failure of communication between us."

Weightlessness complicated everything
. By the time that a braking system had been improvised, nobody knew where the boat had gotten to.

This was after a rather grim week. The travelers floated in the cabin and stared out at skies which, no matter how splendid, seemed totally foreign. Silence pressed inward with a might that would have been more impressive were it not contending against odors of old cooking and unwashed bodies.

"The trouble is my fault," Dyann said contritely. "If I had brought Ormun, she vould have looked after us."

"Let's hope she takes care of the Solar System," Ray said. "The Jovians aren't fools. When we left Ganymede, jetless, it must've been obvious we'd built the drive. They'll want to take action before we can give it to Earth."

"First," Urushkidan pointed out, "we habe to find Eart."

"It should be possible," Ray said. His tone lacked conviction. "We can't have gone completely out of our general part of the galaxy. Could those foggy patches yonder be the Magellanic Clouds? If they are, and if we can relate several bright stars to them—Rigel, for instance—We should be able to estimate roughly where we've come to."

"Bery well," Urushkidan replied, "which is Rigel?"

Ray held his peace.

"Maybe ve can find somevun who knows," Dyann suggested.

Ray imagined landing on a planet and asking a three-headed citizen, "Pardon me, could you tell me the way to Sol?" Whereupon the alien would answer, "Sorry, I'm a stranger here myself."

Never being intended for proper space trips, the boat carried no navigational or astronomical tables. Since she had passed close to Neptune, or whatever globe that was, she had presumably been more or less in the ecliptic plane. Therefore some of the zodiacal constellations, those from which she had moved away, ought to be recognizable, though doubtless distorted. Ordinarily an untrained eye might have been unable to identify any pattern, so numerous are the stars visible in space. However, after a week without cleaning, the ports here were greasy and grimy enough to dim the light as much as Earth's atmosphere does.

Nevertheless Ray was baffled. "If I'd been a Boy Scout," he lamented, "I might know the skies. As is, all I can pick out are Orion and the Big Dipper, and I've no idea how they lie with respect to the zodiac or anything else." He gave Urushkidan an accusing glance. "You're the great astrophysicist. Can't you tell one star from another?"

"Certainly not," replied the Martian. "No astrophysicist eber looks at te stars if he can help it."

"Oh, you vant to find the con—con—star-pictures?" Dyann asked.

"Yes, we have to," Ray explained. "Familiar ones that we can steer by. You're quite a girl in your way, honey, but I do wish you were more of an intellectual."

"Vy, of course I know the heavens," she assured him. "How vould I ever find my vay around, huntin or raidin, othervise? And they are not very different in the Solar System. I learned your pictures for fun, vile I vas on Earth." She floated around the chamber from port to port, peering and muttering. "
Haa-ai
, yes, yonder are Kunatha the Qveen and Skalk the Consort . . . not much chanyed except—" she chuckled coarsely— "it is even more clear to see here than at home that they are begettin the Heir. You Earthlins take a section right out of the middle betveen those two and make a figure you call . . . m-m-m . . . ah, yes, Virgo."

"And you can tell us how the rest are arranged, and steer us till they have the right configurations?" Ray exclaimed. "Dyann, I love you!"

"Then let's get home fast," she beamed. "I vant to be on a planet." During the outward flight she had been discomfited at discovering the erotic importance of gravity.

"Control your optimism, Tallantyre," Urushkidan said dourly. "Trying to nabigate by eyeball alone, wit only a barbarian's information to go on, we may perhaps find te general galactic region we want, but tereafter we could cast about at random until our food is gone and we starbe to deat."

"Oh, I know the constellations close," Dyann said, "and I know how to take stellar measurements. It vill not be hard to make a few simple instruments, like for measurin angles accurately, that I can use."

"
You?
" the Martian screeched. "How in Nebukadashtabu can you have learned such tings?"

"Every noble in Kathantuma does, for to practice the—vat do you call it?—astroloyee. It is needful for plannin battles and ven to sow grain and marriage dates and everythin."

"Do you mean to say you are an . . . an ... an astrologer?"

"Of course. I thought you vere too, but it seems you Solarians are more backvard than I supposed. Vould you like me to cast your horoscope?"

"Well," said Ray helplessly, "I guess it's up to you to pilot us back, Dyann."

"Sure," she laughed. "Anchors aveigh!"

Urushkidan retched. "Brought home by an astrologer. Te ignominy of it all."

Somehow Ray got
his shipmates herded into seats, the vessel aimed according to Dyann's instructions, and the drive started. Given the modifications they had made, they could accelerate the whole distance and then stop almost instantly. The passage should not be long.