The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 4

  “Well, what? Am I a mind reader? Gibberish. Vagueness. Perhaps outright lies. I ask you, Peter, would Jacob ben Ezra travel fifty light-years after someone engaged in ‘a complicated mathematical exercise?’ Would Earth give a damn?”

  “Of course not,” said the captain.

  “Then why in space didn’t you tell him that you knew ben Ezra was after him?” snapped Olivera.

  Peter Reed smiled thinly. “Time enough for that between now and Deep Sleep. That’s a whole week. I think the strategic time to spring it is just before he goes into Deep Sleep. Impending Deep Sleep makes a man realize just how dependent he can be.”

  “You’d better loosen him up by then,” said Olivera, “because it’s just possible that when we wake up, we’ll find ben Ezra right on our tails.”

  A three minute burst on the huge reaction rockets kicked the Outward Bound out of orbit.

  As she drifted slowly outward, the huge triangular photon sails were reeled out onto the mile-long spars, blotting out whole sectors of stars.

  The pale, almost invisible, blue stream of the ion drive shot noiselessly, vibrationlessly out of the nozzles.

  The Outward Bound was on her way to Nuova Italia.

  During the next week, the ship would be secured, the automatic systems checked, re-checked, and finally given command of the ship. There would be a final course correction, and then the thousand men, women and children who made up the crew of the Outward Bound would go into Deep Sleep.

  Deep Sleep was the technique that had given Man that insignificant portion of the Galaxy which he possessed. A starship could accelerate to nearly three-quarters the speed of light, but this took over a year, and, although it had been proven true that subjective time on a fast-moving starship did contract, as Einstein had predicted, the factor was still far too short. The spaces between the suns would still eat up lifespans.

  Deep Sleep had been developed to deal with this dilemma. Partly it was a technique developed from yoga, partly it was simply a careful, controlled lowering of the body temperature, till life slowed down to the barest crawl. The elements of the technique had been known even before rudimentary spaceflight. But it took the technical integration of all the factors to make Deep Sleep an effective and relatively safe form of suspended animation, and to give Man the stars.

  Peter Reed was getting disgusted. It was now time to go into Deep Sleep, and still no one had been able to get anything out of Ching. Clearly, the man was scared silly.

  Well, thought Reed, maybe I can shock him out of it now.

  He was standing in one of the Deep Sleep chambers. The walls were lined with transparent plastic cubicles, coffin-sized, honeycombed with passages, through which liquid oxygen was passed.

  Another of the ship’s economies, thought the captain. The same oxygen that served as the ship’s air supply was cooled by the cold of space, and used to freeze the Deep Sleep chambers. It took a lot of liquid oxygen, in fact, the entire ship’s supply, but since no one would be needing it while the crew was in Deep Sleep, and since it was re-usable, it made a neat saving.

  Most of the crew were already in Deep Sleep. The cubicles were filled with frozen crewmembers, the Environment Masks snugly fitted over their faces. Only the skeleton Deep Sleep detail, the captain and Dr. Ching remained unfrozen. Now, the captain and the passenger would take their places, and then the automatics would handle the Deep Sleep detail.

  A crewman was escorting Ching to his cubicle. The mathematician’s face was pasty and pale. His eyes flickered furiously over the frozen figures in the plastic coffins.

  Reed smiled, half in sympathy, half in satisfaction. He had spent a total time of nearly seven hundred years in those cubicles. Still, it always made him shudder a bit. But Ching had only experienced Deep Sleep once, and somehow, the second time was always the hardest.

  “Well, Dr. Ching,” he called out, “how do you feel?”

  “A bit foolish, captain. I must admit that I am afraid, and yet there is really nothing to be afraid of.”

  For a moment, Reed’s distaste for Ching was washed away. The Grand Admiral of Earth’s fleet had hounded him across fifty light-years, and now he was facing what must to him be a great irrational fear. And yet, he’s so calm.

  “I don’t see why a man like you should be afraid,” said the captain deliberately, hating what he was doing.

  “Captain?”

  “Well, it seems to me that a man who’s being chased across the Galaxy by Jacob ben Ezra, and still refuses to tell me why, must have a surplus of guts.”

  For a moment, Ching trembled. Then he smiled slowly. “I thought you knew,” he said. “Why else would you be so interested in me?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Ching? What are you on to? Why is Earth so concerned? I don’t expect you to believe that we’re your friends but surely you must realize that it’s in our interest as traders to protect you if you’re working on something important.”

  Ching sighed heavily. “Captain Reed,” he said, “Earth is not after me because they want what I’m working on. I’m really not working on anything practical at all. Just a mathematical and physical concept.”

  “And yet, they’re chasing farther than they’ve ever chased a fugitive before.”

  “Yes,” said Ching. “Captain, some day you may know why I must keep my secret. If Jacob ben Ezra catches up to us, you will be glad that I’ve remained silent.”

  “Why, man, why?”

  “Because,” said Ching, “I’m fairly certain that ben Ezra has orders to kill anyone who knows what I know.”

  The captain frowned. “Perhaps you will change your mind when we come out of Deep Sleep at Nuova Italia.”

  “Perhaps, captain, you will change yours.”

  Peter Reed shrugged irritably. “Let’s get on with it,” he said to the attendant.

  He climbed into his cubicle, and settled himself on the foam-rubber mattress. The attendant secured him with clamps. The ship’s spin would stop when the crew was in Deep Sleep. There would be no gravity.

  The soft, lined mask was fitted over his face. He inhaled the soothing tranquilizer vapor. He was comfortable, content. He vaguely felt the prick of a needle, then his senses began to dull, first sight, then sound, then feel, then smell. The last sensation was a dry taste in his mouth, and then that was gone, and he was an entity within himself, in his own private universe… a mote swimming in the sea of himself… and then, even the sense of mind began to dull… to fade… to softly melt away, like a mouthful of cotton candy.

  A blinding redness which pervaded the universe… a pins-and-needles feeling… then warmth, overwhelming, welcome warmth, motion, smell, sound.

  Jacob ben Ezra sat up in his Deep Sleep cubicle, slowly, patiently teaching his old eyes to focus.

  You never get really used to it, he thought. What year is this?

  Let’s see… Maxwell to Nuova Italia means fourteen years in Deep Sleep, and when we left Maxwell, it was 3297 A.D., or ’98? On Earth…

  Ben Ezra gave a dry little laugh. Time! What is time? Does it matter? I am eighty years old, I am eight hundred years old, or maybe a thousand.

  This life means giving up many things. A firm sense of time is one of them. The people who’ve sent me after Ching, back on Earth, are all dead. I’m a ghost, a shade, the expression of the will of a group of men, all of whom are dead—in a sense.

  Man was not meant for this kind of life, thought Jacob ben Ezra sourly. This is a poor way to command the stars, a poor and pitiful way.

  He laughed bitterly. This is a life fit only for Gypsies and Jews. Come to think of it, Gypsies don’t have a sufficient sense of history, in the long run.

  Maybe that’s why so many in the Fleet are Jews. To a Jew, a thousand years is supposed to be a reasonable length of time. Or so the legends say. So they say.

  But what is a Jew? There is no such thing as Judaism, anymore. There is hardly such a thing as race.

  A Jew, thought Jaco
b ben Ezra, nowadays is anyone who thinks of himself as one. Homo interstellarus.

  Ben Ezra leaned on the shoulders of a waiting attendant, and climbed down from the cubicle. His legs were a bit rubbery, but he was used to it.

  Homo interstellarus, he thought, as he made his way slowly to the conning globe; lousy Latin, but very good sense.

  It was as if Jews had been training to man the Great Fleet for five thousand years. How long had they been a self-contained culture, independent of geography, living, even, in their own time stream? In the pre-stellar past, they had been feared for it, damned for it, but now, it had a purpose. Who else could isolate themselves on the twenty ships of the Great Fleet, but Jews? Knowing no planet, no time to call home?

  “They, they,” mumbled the admiral. Why not we, he thought. Heh! Peter Reed is as much a Jew as I am. What does it mean now? It means the exiles, the planetless ones, the timeless ones, defying the Universe, spitting in the face of Einstein himself.

  The steps of Jacob ben Ezra became firm and sprightly. He lit a cigarette.

  “Feels good!” he said to no one in particular.

  Several men were already in the conning globe—Chief Navigator Richard Jacoby, several minor crewmen, and his aide, David Steen.

  “They’re there, sir,” said Steen. “We’ve got a fix on ’em.”

  The admiral frowned. This job was getting more odious to him every minute.

  “How far behind are we?” he asked.

  “About six days.”

  “Then they haven’t made orbit yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. That means we can keep an eye on them. Jacoby, is it possible for them to get away?”

  The tall, thin navigator frowned. “Depends on what you mean, admiral. Wherever they go, of course, we can track them. Do you mean will we catch up to them before they leave orbit? Then, I’d have to say no, not if they’re trying to get away.”

  “Can we stop them?” said the admiral.

  “You mean destroy them, sir?”

  “I don’t mean make love to ’em, Jacoby! I know we can destroy them, but can we get close enough to disable ’em, carefully, without killing?”

  “Hard to say, at six days’ distance.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Well, tomorrow, we’ll radio ’em to heave-to and wait for us.”

  “Do you think they will, sir?” asked Steen.

  “That depends, David, that depends. If they know why we’re after Ching, they’ll do anything to keep him. But, then, they may not know. In which case, they won’t take any silly chances.”

  “And if they try to get away?”

  Grand Admiral ben Ezra frowned. “If they try to get away, we have two choices. We can blast ’em, or we can plot their next course, and be waiting for ’em. Six days, we can easily make up on the next hop. The thing is, if we do blast ’em, and can’t confirm that Ching was aboard, then we’ll have to backtrack to Maxwell, maybe even back to Earth, and we’ll never really know”

  “But, sir,” said Steen, “do you really think Reed would risk his ship for Ching, even if he found out?”

  Jacob ben Ezra laughed, and shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I am sure that Captain Reed is as clever as I am. Which means, if he does find out, he’ll know that we can’t blast him without knowing that Ching is aboard. If he finds out, he’ll run all right. And you know something, David?”

  “What, sir?”

  The admiral lit another cigarette. “I’d do the same thing myself,” he said.

  Captain Peter Reed cursed loudly. “Just great, just wonderful! Six days away! Six days away, and that bloody sphinx of a Ching hasn’t—I’ve a good mind to call it a business loss and turn him over to ben Ezra.”

  “Sir,” said the radioman fearfully, “Admiral ben Ezra is still calling—”

  “Put it through to this ’visor, but don’t answer. And stop all communications with Nuova Italia. I want it to look like our radio’s dead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Roger!” said Reed into the communicator. “Prepare to break orbit immediately, and stand by. And get Ching up to the conning globe on the double!”

  “But, sir, Ching has never been in zero gravity before, he—”

  “Drag him up here by the hair, if you have to!”

  It was only three minutes later when Roger Reed hauled a greenlooking Ching into the conning globe.

  “Captain,” said Ching, “is this really necessary? I—”

  “I want you to hear something, my tight-lipped friend,” said the scowling Peter Reed. “I want you to hear it directly.”

  He turned on the televisor. The tired, wizened face of Jacob ben Ezra filled the screen. Ching paled, even through his nausea.

  “… Calling the Outward Bound… Calling the Outward Bound. Calling Captain Peter Reed…”

  The pale visage on the televisor paused to light a cigarette.

  “Really, Peter,” said Jacob ben Ezra, “this is ridiculous. I know you’re reading me.”

  Peter Reed could not help smiling.

  “Very well, Peter,” said the voice of ben Ezra, “we’ll play it your way. So don’t answer me. I’ll do the talking. You probably have a Dr. Ching pen Yee aboard. I want him. I’ve come all the way from Earth for him, and, by space, I’ll have him, or I’ll blow you to bits. You have five minutes, plus the time lag, to answer. If you don’t answer then, I will take appropriate action.”

  Captain Reed turned the televisor off.

  “Well, Dr. Ching,” he said, “do I turn you over to ben Ezra, or do you talk?”

  A new emotion crossed Ching’s face. It did not seem to be fear, it was more of a manic defiance.

  “You don’t understand. I do not care about death, captain,” he said. “I have not fled to save my life. Had I remained on Earth, my life would not have been endangered. But—”

  “But what? You heard the admiral. You have five minutes to make up your mind.”

  Ching sighed. “It is my work that must go on. That’s what they want to stop. Very well, captain, I must take the chance.”

  “So?”

  “There is no simple way of explaining it. I have told you that I am working on a corollary to the Special Theory of Relativity. It is the Special Theory of Relativity, as you must know, which limits all speed to the speed of light. Essentially, it means that at the speed of light, mass is infinite, therefore it would take an infinite thrust to accelerate to that limit, and exceeding it would be impossible. But, as I have said, I am working on transfinite substitutions. I hope to evolve an equation—”

  “Come to the point, man, come to the point!”

  “There is no simple point, captain. I am engaged in the preliminaries of a work that some day may lead to a theoretical means of exceeding the speed of light within the Einsteinian Universe—”

  “An Overdrive!” shouted Captain Reed.

  “Not for a long time,” said Ching pedantically. “It—”

  But the captain was no longer listening. An Overdrive! Countless others had tried before, but Earth thought that this man was close enough to send ben Ezra sixty light-years to…

  Reed’s trader’s brain analyzed the situation with the speed born of commercial instinct. An Overdrive would be the most valuable commodity any trader ever had to sell. The Outward Bound could sell it again and again, on each of the sixty-seven planets inhabited by Man, each time commanding a price undreamed of in all history!

  And ben Ezra would not take the chance that Ching wasn’t on the Outward Bound. He would have to know. He couldn’t…

  “Hang on to something,” shouted Peter Reed.

  He yelled into the communicator: “Break orbit! Do it now!”

  “What course, sir?” came the tinny voice.

  “Who cares?” roared Reed. “Just get us away from here. Raise the sails, activate the ion drive. Maximum thrust on the reaction rockets! Do it now! Now! Now! NOW!”

  Jacob ben Ezra shook
his head, with a Gallic shrug. Reed was running. What else could he do? But that means he knows. It must!

  Ben Ezra lit a cigarette. “Change course,” he said to his navigator. “Accelerate. Follow them.”

  “Are we going to attack?” asked Commander Dayan, floating alongside the admiral in the conning globe. His dark, mustachioed face was alight with an eagerness that ben Ezra found distasteful. But then, one could not really blame Dayan. Gunnery officers usually have nothing to do but sit around.

  “Not now, at any rate,” said the admiral. “Better strap in. Acceleration coming up.”

  Ben Ezra stared out the viewpoint at the stars.

  My stars, he thought. Our stars. Mine and Peter Reed’s. No wonder my stomach isn’t in this. Reed and I have been in space longer than anyone else. In eight hundred years, we’ve met just five times, and yet…

  And yet, I feel closer to him than to all the politicians on Earth. What do they know about the stars? All they’re interested in is preserving their petty little planet’s rule over Man. They wouldn’t know what an Overdrive would mean. It would mean that Man would have the Galaxy, it would mean that one wouldn’t have to be a pariah, a man without a planet or a time, to be a starman.

  But is that what they think of? Huh! All they see is the end of Earth’s control. Of course, they’re right. The only thing that makes Earth undisputed master is time. Earth is always generations ahead of the planets. Its head start in technology will hold up forever—

  But not if there should be an Overdrive—not if Man could go from Earth to the outer ring in months, not centuries.

  He glanced at David Steen, strapped in beside him. Young but intelligent. Some day—

  “It’s a dirty business, David,” he said, almost involuntarily.

  “Sir?”

  “I said it’s a dirty business. I never thought I’d be a hired murderer.”

  “But, sir, we have orders. It’s a military mission. You have no reason to blame—”

  “Orders! The orders of men who are all dead by now. The orders of an Earth that doesn’t even give a damn about the possibility of Man really having the stars. Orders to destroy, orders of a willful, selfish… ah!”