John Brunner by The World Swappers

Author:The World Swappers
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-26T22:06:59+00:00

CHAPTER XI

THE COURSE was a true geodesic of the continuum—a straight line in the sense of being the actual shortest distance between two points—and that was suspicious in itself. For it implied the ship's crew knew what they were going to find.

Usually, a long voyage of exploration took the form of a series of dog-legs, from system to system; this one had bypassed half a dozen ostensibly promising stars, arrowing direct for Ymir's own sun.

The Others knew something.

Because of the lapse of time involved in the propagation of the betraying "wake" of a hyperphotonic vessel, the watchers on Regis did not know what was happening until the alien craft had already been to Ymir. It had spent a few days in the neighborhood—by a convenient miracle, at a time when no human-built spaceships were scheduled to call. It was a bare outside chance, then, that the Others might have the impression they had chanced across an indigenous life-form, rather than a colony planted from elsewhere. If they had observed reasonably closely during their brief stay, however, the chance would have diminished to vanishing point. It was not worth banking on.

Like it or not, they had to recognize that the human race's one advantage over the Others—that they knew of their competitors' existence—had been canceled out.

The news was broached by Katya Ivanovna, on duty in the ever-watchful detector room, where by turns every individual on Regis calculated, identified, and plotted the course of ships in space, both human and alien. Katya was that much faster than most of the group at reducing the pattern of the vibrations in the cosmos to a line on a three-dimensional graph. This time, she wasted the small advantage in checking her calculations for error, hoping against hope she might be wrong.

But the figures she gave to Wu left no room for doubt. For a long time the director of the expedition sat silent at his desk, contemplating the neat handwritten

symbols before him. At length he pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Well, were on the downgrade now," he said. "So far as I can see at the moment, there's not a thing we can do. But we'll scrape the barrel for ideas just in case. Pass this news to everybody. Tell them to drop what they're doing and come here at once. Maybe someone will think of something."

"And if they don't?" Katya sounded as though she knew the answer to that; Wu gave it to her regardless.

"Then I guess we just have to blow them to bits."

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