The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Part 8

In that brief time lay the destinies of Astrarchy and Earth--and Tony Grimm's and Elora's and his own.

"Minus one--" The sodium screens made little puffs and trails of silver in the great black cube. The six Earth s.h.i.+ps were visible behind them, through the magic of the achronic field pick-ups, now s.p.a.ced in a close ring, ready for action.

Brek Veronar looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist-a gift from the Astrarch. Listening to the rising hum of the achron-integrators, he caught his breath, tensed instinctively.

"Zero!"

The Warrior Queen began quivering to her great guns, a salvo of four firing every half-second. Brek breathed again, watching the chronometer. That was all he had to do. And in two minutes The vessel shuddered, and the lights went out. Sirens wailed, and air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. And abruptly the cube of the stereo screen was dark. The achron-integrators clattered and stopped.

The guns ceased to thud.

'Power!" Brek gasped into a telephone. "Give me power! Emergency!

The autosight has stopped and--" But the telephone was dead.

There were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent. After an etemal time, feeble emergency lights came on. Brek looked again at his chronometer, and knew that the battle was ended.

But who the victor?

He tried to hope that the battle had been won before some last chance broadside crippled the flags.h.i.+p--until the Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.

"Crushed," he muttered. "You failed me, Veronar."

"What are the losses?" whispered Brek.

"Everything." The shaken ruler dropped wearily at the control table.

"Your achronic beams are dead. Five s.h.i.+ps remain able to report defeat by radio.

Two of them hope to make repairs.

"The Queen is disabled. Reaction batteries shot away, and main power plant dead. Repair is hopeless. And our present orbit will carry us far too close to the Sun. None of our s.h.i.+ps able to undertake rescue.

We'll be baked alive."

His perfumed dark head sank hopelessly. "In those two minutes, the Astrarchy was destroyed." His hollow, smoldering eyes lifted resentfully to Brek. "Just two minutes!" He crushed a soft white fist against the table.

"If time could be recaptured--"

"How were we beaten?" demanded Brek.

"I can't understand!"

"Marksmans.h.i.+p," said the tired Astrarch. "Tony Grimm has something better than your autosight. He shot us to pieces before we could find the range."

His face was a pale mask of bitterness. "If my agents had employed him, twenty years ago, instead of you--" He bit blood from his lip.

"But the past cannot be changed."

Brek was staring at the huge, silent bulk of the autosight. "Perhaps" --he whispered--"it can be!"

Trembling, the Astrarch rose to clutch his arm. "You spoke of that before," gasped the agitated ruler. "Then I wouldn't listen. But now-try anything you can, Veronar. To save us from roasting alive, at perihelion. Do you really think--" The Astrarch shook his pale head.

"I'm the madman," he whispered. "To speak of changing even two minutes of the past!" His hollow eyes clung to Brek.

"Though you have done amazing things, Veronar."

The Earthman continued to stare at his huge creation. "The autosight itself brought me one clue, before the battle," he breathed slowly.

"The detector fields caught a beam of Tony Grimm's, and a.n.a.lyzed the frequencies. He's using achronic radiation a whole octave higher than anything I've tried.

That must be the way to the sensitivity and penetration I have hoped for."

Hope flickered in the Astrarch's eyes. "You believe you can save us?

How?"

"If the high-frequency beam can search out the determiner factors," Brek told him, "it might be possible to alter them, with a sufficiently powerful field. Remember that we deal with probabilities, not with absolutes. And that small factors can determine vast results.

"The pick-ups will have to be rebuilt. And we'll have to have power.

Power to project the tracer fields. And a river of power--if we can trace out a decisive factor and attempt to change it. But the power plants are dead.

"Rebuild your pick-ups," the Astrarch told him. "And you'll have power --if I have to march every man aboard into the conversion furnaces, for fuel."

Calm again, and confident, the short man surveyed the tall, gaunt Earthman with wondering eyes.

"You're a strange individual, Veronar," he said. "Fighting time and destiny to crush the planet of your birth! It isn't strange that men call , you the Renegade."

Silent for a moment, Brek shook his haggard head. "I don't want to be baked alive," he said at last. "Give me power--and we'll fight that battle again."

The wreck dropped Sunward. A score of expert technicians toiled, under Brek's expert direction, to reconstruct the achronic pick-ups. And a hundred men labored, beneath the ruthless eye of the Astrarch himself, to repair the damaged atomic converters.

They had crossed the orbit of Venus, when the autosight came back to humming life. The Astrarch was standing beside Brek, at the curved control table. The shadow of doubt had returned to his reddened, sleepless eyes.

"Now," he demanded, "what can you do about the battle?"

"Nothing, directly," Brek admitted. "First we must search the past.

We must find the factor that caused Tony Grimm to invent a better autosight than mine. With the high-frequency field--and the full power of the s.h.i.+p's converters, if need be--we must reverse that factor.

Then the battle should have a different outcome."

The achron-integrators whirred, as Brek manipulated the controls, and the huge black cube began to flicker with the pa.s.sage of ghostly images.

Symbols of colored fire flashed and vanished within it.

"Well" anxiously rasped the Astrarch.

"It works!" Brek a.s.sured him. "The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The a.n.a.lyzers will isolate the smallest--and hence most easily altered--essential factor."

The Astrarch gripped his shoulder. "There--in the cube--yourself!"

- The ghostly shape of the Earthman flickered out, and came again. A hundred times, Brek Veronar glimpsed himself in the cube. Usually the scene was the great a.r.s.enal laboratory, at Astrophon. Always he was differently garbed, always younger.

Then the background s.h.i.+fted. Brek caught his breath as he recognized glimpses of barren, stony, ocher-colored hills, and low, yellow adobe buildings. He gasped to see a freckled, red-haired youth and a slim, tanned, dark-eyed girl.

"That's on Mars!" he whispered. "At Toran. He's Tony Grimm. And she's Elora Ronee--the Martian girl we loved."

The racing flicker abruptly stopped, upon one frozen tableau. A bench on the dusty campus, against a low adobe wall. Elora Ronee, with a pile of books propped on her knees to support pen and paper. Her dark eyes were staring away across the campus, and her sun-brown face looked tense and troubled.

In the huge dim room aboard the wrecked wars.h.i.+p, a gong throbbed softly. A red arrow flamed in the cube, pointing down at the note on the girl's knee.

Cryptic symbols flashed above it. And Brek realized that the humming of the achron-integrators had stopped.

"What's this?" rasped the anxious Astrarch. "A schoolgirl writing a note--what has she to do with a s.p.a.ce battle?"

Brek scanned the fiery symbols. "She was deciding the battle--that day twenty years ago!" His voice rang with elation. "You see, she had a date to go dancing in Toran with Tony Grimm that night. But her father was giving a special lecture on the new theories of achronic force.

Tony broke the date, to attend the lecture."

As Brek watched the motionless image in the cube, his voice turned a little husky. "Elora was angry--that was before she knew Tony very well. I had asked her for a date. And, at the moment you see, she has just written a note, to say that she would go dancing with me."

Brek gulped. "But she is undecided, you see. Because she loves Tony.

A very little would make her tear up the note to me, and write another to Tony, to say that she would go to the lecture with him."

The Astrarch stared cadaverously. "But how could that decide the battle?"

"In the past that we have lived," Brek told him, "Elora sent the note to me. I went dancing with her, and missed the lecture. Tony attended it--and got the germ idea that finally caused his autosight to be better than mine.

"But, if she had written to Tony instead, he would have offered, out of contrition, to cut the lecture--so the a.n.a.lyzers indicate.

I should have attended the lecture in Tony's place, and my autosight would have been superior in the end."

The Astrarch's waxen head nodded slowly. "But--can you really change the past?"

Brek paused for a moment, solemnly. "We have all the power of the s.h.i.+p's converters," he said at last. "We have the high-frequency achronic field, as a lever through which to apply it. Surely, with the millions of kilowatts to spend, we can stimulate a few cells in a schoolgirl's brain.

We shall see."

His long, pale fingers moved swiftly over the control keys. At last, deliberately, he touched a green b.u.t.ton. The converters whispered again through the silent s.h.i.+p. The achron-integrators whirred again.

Beyond, giant transformers began to whine.

And that still tableau came to sudden life.

Elora Ronee tore up the note that began, "Dear Bill--" Brek and the Astrarch leaned forward, as her trembling fingers swiftly wrote: "Dear Tony--I'm so sorry that I was angry. May I come with you to father's lecture? Tonight--" The image faded. "Minus four--" The metallic rasp of the speaker brought Brek Veronar to himself with a start. Could he have been dozing--with contact just four minutes away? He shook himself. He had a queer, unpleasant feeling--as if he had forgotten a nightmare dream in which the battle was fought and lost.

He rubbed his eyes, scanned the control board. The autosight was set, the pick-ups were tuned, the director relays tested. His part was done. He tried to relax the puzzling tension in him.

"Minus three--" Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers.

Staring into the black cube of the screen, Brek found once more the six tiny black motes of Tony Grimm's s.h.i.+ps. He couldn't help an uneasy shake of his head.

Was Tony mad? Why didn't he veer aside, delay the contact? Scattered in s.p.a.ce, his s.h.i.+ps could harry the Astrarchy's commerce, and interrupt bombardment of the Earth. But, in a head-on battle, they were doomed.

Brek listened to the quiet hum of the achron-integrators. Under these conditions, the new autosight gave an accuracy of fire of forty percent.

Even if Tony's gunnery was perfect, the odds were still two to one against him.

"Minus two--" Two minutes! Brek looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist. For a moment he had an odd feeling that the design was unfamiliar. Strange, when he had worn it for twenty years.

The dial blurred a little. He remembered the day that Tony and Elora gave it to him--the day he left the university to come to Astrophon.

It was too nice a gift. Neither of them had much money.

He wondered if Tony had ever guessed his love for Elora. Probably it was better that she had always declined his attentions. No shadow of jealousy had ever come over their friends.h.i.+p.

"Minus one--" This wouldn't do! Half angrily, Brek jerked his eyes back to the screen.

Still, however, in the silvery sodium clouds, he saw the faces of Tony and Elora. Still he couldn't forget the oddly unfamiliar pressure of the chronometer on his wrist--it was like the soft touch of Elora's fingers, when she had fastened it there.

Suddenly the black flecks in the screen were not targets any more.

Brek caught a long gasping breath. After all, he was an Earthman.

After twenty years in the Astrarch's generous pay, this timepiece was still his most precious possession.

His gray eyes narrowed grimly. Without the autosight, the Astrarch's fleet would be utterly blind in the sodium clouds. Given any sort of achronic range finder, Tony Grimm could wipe it out.

Brek's gaunt body trembled. Death, he knew, would be the sure penalty.

In the battle or afterward--it didn't matter. He knew that he would accept it without regret.

"Zero!"

The achron-integrators were whirring busily, and the warrior Queen quivered to the first salvo of her guns. Then Brek's clenched fists came down on the carefully set keyboard. The autosight stopped humming. The guns ceased to fire.

Brek picked up the Astrarch's telephone. "I've stopped the autosight."

His voice was quiet and low. "It is quite impossible to set it again in two minutes."

The telephone clicked and was dead.

The vessel shuddered and the lights went out. Sirens wailed. Air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. Presently, there were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent.

The tiny racing tick of the chronometer was the only sound.