The Broken Cycle - A. Bertram Chandler [23]
Still the battle continued. The flare of exploding missiles glowed fitfully through the clouds of smoke that were dissipating slowly in the nothingness. Slashing beams, heating gas molecules to brief incandescence, were visible now. Oddly, the englobed vessels made no move to escape. They could have actuated their own interstellar drives to do so, but they did not. Perhaps they could not. Perhaps, Grimes realized, the spheres, between them, had set up some sort of inhibiting field.
"Isn't it time that we were getting out of here?" shouted Una.
"Too right it is," agreed Grimes, but reluctantly. It had occurred to him that the inhibiting field might affect the boat's mini-Mannschenn. He cursed himself for not having left it running, precessionless. Valuable seconds would be wasted while he restarted it. But, especially with the miniaturized drives with their overly delicate controls, the precessionless state could be maintained only by constant attention.
He switched on the boat's interstellar drive. The pilot lights on the console came alive. There was nothing further that he could do until the requisite RPS had built up. He looked out of the viewports again. The battle was still going on, although with diminished fury. The rocket salvos were coming at longer and longer intervals, the smoke was thinning fast. From the skeleton spheres long, long tentacles of metallic rope were extending, reaching out for the trapped ships.
Then it happened.
One of the conical vessels suddenly burgeoned into a great flower of dreadful, blinding incandescence, expanding (it seemed) slowly (but the field of the mini-Mannschenn was building up, distorting the time perception of Grimes and Una), dissolving the other ship into her component atoms, engulfing the nearer of the surrounding spheres.
The scene faded, slowly at first, then faster.
It flickered out.
The boat fell through the warped continuum, alone again.
Chapter 13
"So now what do we do?" asked Una.
They were sitting over one of the nutritious but unappetizing meals. After this last escape they had not broken out a bottle of brandy, had not celebrated in any other way. They were, both of them, far too frightened. They were alone, utterly alone. Each of them, in the past, had derived strength from the big organizations of which they were members. Each of them—and especially Grimes—had known racial pride, had felt, deep down, the superiority of humans over all other breeds. But now, so far as they knew, now and here, they were the sole representatives of humanity, just the two of them in a little, unarmed boat.
"You tell me," he retorted glumly.
"We can, at least, try to sort things out, John," she said. "If we know what we're up against we might, just possibly, be able to deal with it. You're the spaceman. You're the Survey Service officer. You've been around much more than I have. What do you make of it all?"
"To begin with," he said, "there has been a war. It certainly seems that there still is a war. As far as the planet we landed on is concerned, the war finished a long time ago. But it's still going on, nonetheless. A war between two different geometrical forms. Between the cones and the geodesic spheres. The people who build conical ships against those who build spherical ones. Which side is in the right? We don't know. Which side is in the wrong? We don't know that, either."
She remarked quietly, "In human history, quite a few wars have been fought with neither side in the right—and quite a few have been fought over causes as absurd as the distinction between geometrical shapes. Even so, I still stick to my assertion that the people in the conical ships are—were, rather—our kind of people . . ."
"I don't suppose we'll ever find out now," he told her.
"Of course we shall. There are other worlds, other ships. We're still picking up signals on the Carlotti, from all over."
"Mphm. Yes. So we pick up something promising, again, and home on it."
"That's the general idea."
He spooned