The Road to the Rim - A. Bertram Chandler [45]
He had started off correctly enough—and then, not only had he helped install the purloined armament but had used it. (And used it well, he told himself with a brief resurgence of pride.) Furthermore, the disguise of Epsilon Sextans had been his idea.
Oh, he was in it, all right. He was in up to his neck. What the final outcome of it all would be he did not care to contemplate.
But it would soon be over. He had no fears as to the outcome of the battle. The element of surprise would be worth at least a dozen missile launchers. Adler would never have the chance to use her laser.
ADLER, REPORTED SUMMERS, had shut down her Mannschenn Drive and emerged briefly into normal spacetime to make her final course adjustment. She was now headed not for the Dartura Sun but for the planet itself—or where the planet would be at the time of her final—and fatal— reemergence into the continuum. The last ETA was sent, together with the coordinates of her planetfall. Epsilon Sextans made her own course adjustment—simultaneity in time and a half kilometer's divergence in space being Craven's objective. It was finicky work, even with the use of the ship's computer, but the Captain seemed satisfied.
The race—the race that would culminate in a dead heat—continued. Aboard the frigate there was, reported Summers, a lessening of tension, the loosening up that comes when a voyage is almost over. Aboard the merchantman the tension increased. The interstellar drive engineers, Grimes knew, were no happier about it all than he was—but they could no more back out than he could. Craven was calm and confident, and Baxter was beginning to gloat. Jane Pentecost assumed the air of dedication that in women can be so infuriating. Grimes glumly checked and rechecked his weaponry. It passed the time.
Dartura itself was visible now—not as tiny disk of light but as a glowing annulus about its distorted primary. The thin ring of luminescence broadened, broadened. The time to go dwindled to a week, to days, to a day, and then to hours . . .
To minutes . . .
To seconds . . . .
Craven and Grimes were in the Control Room; the others were at their various stations. From the intercom came the telepath's voice, "He's cutting the Drive—"
"Cut the Drive!" ordered the Captain.
In the Mannschenn Drive room the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed, slowed, ceased their endless tumbling, assumed the solidity that they exhibited only when at rest. For perhaps two seconds there was temporal confusion in the minds of all on board as the precession field died, and past, present and future inextricably mingled. Then there was a sun glaring through the viewports, bright in spite of the polarization—a sun, and, directly ahead, a great, green-orange planet. There was a ship . . . .
There were ships—ahead of them, astern, on all sides.
There were ships—and, booming from the intership transceiver, the transceiver that was neither tuned nor switched on (but navies could afford induction transmitters with their fantastic power consumption), came the authorative voice: "Inflexible to Adler! Heave to for search and seizure ! Do not attempt to escape—our massed fields will hold you!"
The effect was rather spoiled when the same voice added, in bewilderment, "Must be seeing double . . . there's two of the bastards." The bewilderment did not last long. "Inflexible to Adler and to unidentified vessel. Heave to for search and seizure!"
"Hold your fire, Mr. Grimes," ordered Craven, quietly and bitterly. "It's the Survey Service."
"I know," replied Grimes—and pressed the button.
XXII
HE NEVER KNEW just why he had done so.
Talking it over afterward, thinking about it, he was able to evolve a theory that fitted the facts. During the brief period immediately after the shutting down of the Drive, during the short session of temporal disorientation, there had been prescience, of a sort. He had