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'I don't know. For all I know, it might work too well. But their metabolism is
mostly like ours or we couldn't use the same food. Shut up before you betray
us.'
The prone giant lifted his head, but at the same instant, Dr Langer stabbed
the Syrette through his clothing at the hip and broke it. The Malan tried to
lunge to his hands and knees, but the movement was never completed. He buckled
and fell, and within less than a minute, he was in coma. Dr Langer knelt
beside him and felt for his pulse.
'Perfect. He'll be out for hours, but the drug isn't toxic to him. All right,
gentlemen, stuff him in the gig, and shoot him off towards the emptiest star
field you can find. By the time he comes to, he'll have all he can manage to
do, just figuring out where he is.'
'He's going to be a handful,' Sandbag said. 'But he doesn't really look as big
as he did, now that he's snoozing so nicely.'
'He stopped looking so big to me,' Jack said, 'when you scared him with a
fountain pen. And he knew what it was all the time. Why did it scare him?'
'Because it isn't a fountain pen,' Dr Langer said, with a sudden chuckle.
'It's a pen-light I'd been using to read the labels on the cases down in the
cargo hold, mostly while it was my turn to cook. When he saw me make a spot of
light with it, he had to assume that it was a radiation weapon of some kind.
And when he saw Jerry handle it with so much confidence, he was convinced. A
lot of diplomacy consists in knowing what the other man thinks he knows that's
actually dead wrong. Now shovel him out of here, fast, before the Malans send
up someone smarter. We don't dare make our last ferry trip - we've got to go.'
A few moments later, the
Argo had got away clean and without further incident. There was, of course,
the inevitable tectonic shock on Malis, and Jack would have given a good deal
to have been able to see just how well those grim rock piles of the rulers of
the Heart Stars had withstood it. But that was impossible in the very nature
of the situation.
Then they were off and running on full emergency drive. They were as aware as
ever that this was not very much better than a crawl compared to the speed
possible to even the smallest ships of the Heart
Stars' immeasurable armada, but they tried - not very successfully - not to
think about it.
They spent four days settling back into ship's routine, expecting every minute
to be overhauled and
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plucked off the Standing Wave as effortlessly as a man might take a floating
bottle into a rowboat. But nothing happened. Even Dr Langer could not prevent
himself from expressing amaze-ment, and then worry lest the shock wave of
their departure might actually have done sufficient damage, after all, to be
taken by Malans as a hostile act. Surely it would not have taken them this
long to recover from minor damage? Their hopes and their fears gradually
became more intense, until Jack surprised himself by wishing momentarily that
the Heart Stars would snatch them to get it over with. It was only a flash of
irresolution, but it left its mark. Luckily, he had not spoken it aloud.
To distract themselves, they still had the ship's library, but it did riot now
seem to be of much help. Even tapes and books that had fascinated Jack on the
way in, works of so much substance that he knew he could not exhaust their
rewards in three lifetimes, now seemed at worst meaningless and at best simply
irrelevant. Sandbag could not settle down at all, and in obvious desperation
set himself to trying to write down from memory, word for word and line for
line, the entire text of the
Aeneid, and was doing sur-prisingly well at it until the moment when he
suddenly put down his stylus, glared at the manuscript before him, and said,
'You know what? I hate Virgil. The stuff is jingly -that's what it is.'
Dr Langer rose to the argument like a fish striking at a bait, a feeling both
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cadets recognized, surprised though they were to find their leader sharing it.
'That's too strong a word, I think, Jerry,' he said. 'It's mannered, of
course, but all decadent poetry is, and it's always seemed to me that Virgil
was the master of every possible poetic device that Latin could offer. What's
the line that set off this explosion?'
'
"Quadrupedante ..." '
'Ah, yes, that must be the second most quoted line in the whole poem. But
what's wrong with it?'
'It's all of a piece with the rest of it. These doggone alliter-ations make my
teeth itch.'
'But here it's not alliteration. It's onomatopoeia. He's using the language to
imitate the sound of the galloping horses at the same time that he's advancing
the story. He overdoes it, of course, very much like
Swinburne, but he didn't do it just to show off.'
'Well, all honour to him and all that, but right at the moment he gives me the
snits.'
As the days of the
Argo's flight lengthened into weeks without the faintest sign of any action
from the
Hegemony, their uncertainties gradually grew into nightmares. If the Heart
Stars were not, after all, pursuing the
Argo, then what were they doing? Did they perhaps have some way of strew-ing
the equivalent of mines in Haertel space in advance of the
Argo?
Or were they playing a cat-and-mouse game? Or had they already launched their
police action against the Earth? These and scores of other questions thronged
in their minds, but there were no answers to any of them.
'The dolphins!' Jack said suddenly.
'Hmmm?' Dr Langer said.
'I've just thought of another way that they belong in this problem. Maybe it's
what you were thinking of, sir. I don't know.'
'Shoot.'
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'Well, Dr Langer, it just occurred to me that the whole dolphin culture - the
whole whale culture except for the killers - is stable in just the ways that
the Heart Stars want a culture to be stable. But all the same, I don't think
it'd be possible for the Hegemony to have a race like the dolphins inside it.
With all the sea to swim in, the whales are too free for the Hegemony. It's
that same unlimited freedom that's made them as stable as they are; they've
never had any need to fight among themselves - again with the exception of the
killers. And that's not warfare. It's just that some creatures eat other
creatures, and the sea's no exception. It's - what did you call it? - it's
another kind of equilibrium. And the Hegemony could never tolerate that,
either. If the dolphins came to own the water planet, the way Sandbag
proposed, the
Hegemony would have to exterminate them. They wouldn't be controlled - and
couldn't be.'
'Good for you, Jack,' Dr Langer said sombrely. 'That's indeed exactly what I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]