[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
rushed her toward Aster's Hope, she shouted into the radio, "Aster!" And on that code, her ship
simultaneously raised its c-vector shields and triggered the black box. She was inside the shield
for the last brief instants while the alien was still able to fire at her.
Later, she and Gracias saw that the end of their attacker bad been singularly unspectacular. Still
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20Berserker%20Base.txt (22 of 107) [11/1/2004 12:00:27 AM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Fred%20Saberhagen%20-%20Berserker%20Base.txt
somewhat groggy from his imposed nap, he met her in the locker room to help her take off her suit;
but when she demanded urgently, "What happened? Did it work?" he couldn't answer because he hadn't
checked: he'd come straight to the locker from his capsule when the comp had awakened him.. So
they ran together to the nearest auxcompcom to find out if they were safe.
They were. The alien ship was nowhere within scanner range. And wherever it had gone, it left no
trace or trail.
So he replayed the visual and scanner records, and they saw what happened to a vessel when a c-
vector field was projected onto it.
It simply winked out of existence.
After that, she felt like celebrating. In fact, there was a particular kind of celebration she had
in mind and neither of them was wearing any clothes. But when she let him know what she was
thinking, he pushed her gently away. "In a few minutes," he said. "Got work to do."
"What work?" she protested. "We just saved the world and they don't even know it. We deserve a
vacation for the rest of the trip."
He nodded, but didn't move away from the comp console.
"What work?" she repeated.
"Course change," he said. He looked like he was trying not to grin. "Going back to Aster."
"What?" He surprised her so much that she shouted at him without meaning to. "You're aborting the
mission? Just like that? What the hell do you think you're doing?"
For a moment, he did his best to scowl thunderously. Then the grin took over. "Now we know faster-
than-light is possible," he said. "Just need more research. So why spend a thousand, years
sleeping across the Galaxy? Why not go home, do the research start again when we can do what that
ship did."
He looked at her. "Make sense?"
She was grinning herself. "Makes sense."
When he was done with the comp, he got even with her for spilling ice cream on him.
FRIENDS TOGETHER
"Thousands of years?" Lars, as he asked the question, was still lying helplessly flat on his back,
still attached to the mind-probing machine. He was staring at the rocky ceiling close above him,
but he hardly saw the ceiling. The vision he had just experienced was still tremendously real.
Neither his Carmpan partner nor the berserker answered him.
Lars repeated the question aloud, in a weary and shaky voice: "Thousands of years? Their colony
was that old, really?"
The two people whose minds he had recently been in contact with, Temple and Gracias, had been
conscious of such a length of history. For Lars, the feeling of their conviction was unmistakably
authentic. Those folk aboard the Aster's Hope were members of some colony older than Lars had
thought any Earth-descended colony could be.
Just as the last threads of mental contact were about to break, Lars felt his Carmpan partner
touch his mind and for a moment longer hold it gently. One more thought came through: The path of
the colonizing ship from Earth to Aster, deviating from flightspace, may have undergone
relativistic distortion, sending the ship into the Galactic past. But the contact we have just
experienced was in our present, "Carmpan, what are we to do?"
Try to keep secret from the berserker the existence of the at-right-angles weapon. Do not think of
it. "How am I to keep from thinking ?"
But no answer came. The mental contact had been broken. And a moment later it was obvious to Lars
that there was also no hope of achieving what the Carmpan had just suggested. Lars could feel the
cold probe of berserker circuitry sending exploratory impulses into his mind again. It was not a
material probe, but a trickle of energy producing a mental sensation hideous and indescribable.
The entire episode from the lives of Gracias and Temple was suddenly forced through his mind again
at high speed, like a film, and Lars felt sure that it had now been retrieved in some way by the
berserker computer conducting the experiment. For an instant only Lars could feel his thought in
direct contact with that receptacle fashioned of metal and electricity and mathematics. And in
that instant the man knew by direct experience that the machine received the news of a defeat
imperturbably, as it would have accepted any other news.
The berserker had ransacked and and robbed his mind, and& but wait. Its probing presence was now
gone from his mind, and it had missed something. Two things, actually. Because he, Lars, had not
been thinking of those two things when the probe came. And for the berserker to read his memory
more thoroughly was, he prayed beyond its capability.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]