Troubled Star
Copyright© 2026 by George O. Smith
Chapter 13
Of course Dusty had expected there would be quite a difference between his handling of Marandanian spacecraft and the professional. But he did not realize how great this difference was. In a larger ship than Scyth Radnor’s, spearheading a conical flight of twelve more ships, he rode behind the pilot and admired the smoothness of the man’s operation.
The color of the plate was high in the blue-violet and the stars leaped out of their background to whip past with hardly a flick. Beacons fairly buzzed and they grew into flaming balls and were gone behind as the pilot moved the ‘Tee’ bar with a deft motion of one hand and used the other hand to flick back and forth across the controls, changing the viewpanel co-ordinates and adjusting the various factors for flight. He skirted gas fields dangerously close and zipped between the cluster by the double zigzag with a swaying motion, then humped the spacer down tight and made a dead run for it.
And behind him in a cone came the rest, in tight formation, conically arranged below the leader in tiers, three, four, five.
They soared around another beacon, its flashing fire bright blue and the coronal glow reaching out for them, and then the pilot was calling out numbers and a man at the computer was punching keys. On the viewpanel before them lay another beacon, winking ... winking ... winking.
Behind them, a continuous tape was running through the recording machine, playing its words on the phanoband communication channels: “Calling Transgalactic. Government Priority and Emergency! Calling Transgalactic! You are to disable your barytrine generator, you are to discontinue all operations at once! By Order of the Bureau Of Galactic Affairs!”
A man sat tense in his chair peering at a greenish screen that had a halo-spot in the middle. The halo was growing larger, but so slow as to be almost steady. The man held a micrometer thimble between his thumb and forefinger and was turning it slowly, keeping a pair of dark lines tangent to the bright edge of the halo. From time to time he would call out a figure which another man would pluck out on a keyboard.
“Why don’t they answer?” breathed Barbara.
Gant smiled sourly. “Because they are going to go through with it if they can.”
“But—?”
“They have every legal right to maintain communication silence, even though at the present time there is small point in maintaining secrecy about this rift. Their legal position is one of fair safety; one cannot be convicted of disobeying orders that one does not hear.”
Dusty eyed Gant angrily. “You mean to say they can’t hear that signal?”
“Of course they hear it. But can you prove that they hear it?”
“On Terra we have a maxim that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is to keep people from shooting people and then claiming that they didn’t know that shooting people was forbidden by law.”
“Very sensible. We have the same laws and the same interpretation,” smiled Gant. “But in this case we have a different situation. As of the last acknowledged contact with Transgalactic, and specifically that part which is dealing with Sol and Terra, they had every right to proceed. The law has been changed. Now it is up to the law to see that the change in law has been properly delivered to the interested parties and that the change is acknowledged. Follow?”
Dusty nodded. “Ex post facto sort of thing. If you pass a law forbidding neckties on Tuesday, you cannot arrest a man for having appeared on Monday without one.”
“Right.”
“But this is already Tuesday.”
“But to be effective, newly-passed laws must be properly posted. Then must be acknowledged from the farthest point in space. And Transgalactic is playing communication-silence.”
Dusty grunted angrily. “And that was the character that yelped about our vengeful nature? Isn’t he guilty of the same?”
Gant Nerley nodded. “Of course! Aren’t we all of the same cut of human?”
The phanoband signal went on:
“Calling Transgalactic! Discontinue all operations by Order of—” and so forth.
The squawk box on the wall said, “Calling Gant Nerley with report.”
“Report!”
“Report slight increase in phanoradiation high in the subnuclear region. Cross semi-collateral traces indicating an increase in lower-level nuclear activity.”
The squawk box clicked off and Dusty looked with puzzlement at Gant Nerley. “What was all that?” he pleaded.
“He means that Transgalactic is hard at work. The lower level of nuclear reactions has increased in intensity, meaning in simple prediction that the business of making a variable star out of Sol is under way.”
The Marandanian with the filar micrometer on the barytrine detector grumbled. “It’s going to be a bit rough.”
“Why?” asked the pilot. “If it weren’t for that barytrine we’d never find Sol out of that mess dead ahead. We’d be canvassing the stellar region around there for weeks if we didn’t have a focal point—”
“I know,” grunted the detector operator. “First you need a barytrine field large enough to make a homing run on, but then once you’re home you’ll want a tiny one so you can locate the generator precisely. Well, you can’t have ‘em both, Jann.”
Jann Wilkor shook his head. “I wish I’d made this run before. I could make it faster.”
Gant pointed at the screen and nudged Dusty. The color-scale was still high in the blue-violet and there were a couple of places on the viewpanel that were a dead black, tiny spots that did not move as Jann Wilkor’s delicate touch corrected the course. Spots burned out of the substance of the panel like over-exposed film burned through.
“It takes a master pilot to make a run this fast. Even so, we’re taking a rather high risk. But if the channel was free and open from Marandis to Spiral Cluster, with only a big phanobeacon at either end, we could make it with the screen burning black-violet. We may even have to develop a new supraradiant material for ultra-high velocities.”
“How fast can you go?”
Jann Wilkor soared around a beacon and centered on the next before the flicking wave of heat was gone. He did it easily and with the negligent reflex of the master pilot. “Fitt Mazorn took one of the high speed jobs into intergalactic space for a speed run a year ago and claims to have made it from Laranonne to Ultimane in slightly less than an hour. Or,” corrected the pilot, “an equivalent distance, out in deep-deep space. Some of this is probably guff; I doubt that he could do it. That’s a hundred thousand light-years per hour and just a bit fantastic. Trouble is that the phanobands propagate at a finite speed, according to Hahn Tratter, and therefore the true velocity is difficult to check, since no one has been able to measure phanoband velocity.”
“At any rate, it’s fast,” said Dusty, who did not understand half of what the pilot said.
Gant nodded. “It’s fast. It’s what we’ll be doing in your clear channels, Dusty. That will make you rich and famous, that idea of yours.”
“Iffing and providing we can get there in time.”
“No matter. If Terra is lost to you, you’ll still—”
“Look,” said Dusty, “if that bunch wins out, I’ll—”
“And I won’t blame you,” replied Gant.
There came a double report. The man on the barytrine detector said, “Barytrine field just went into the second phase,” at the same time that the pilot said, “Last lap!” and turned his point of aim around the beacon to center the hairs on a small star that did not wink.
“Our next problem is to scour Terra inch by inch to find their barytrine generator,” said Gant worriedly.
Dusty groaned. He thought of the trackless wastes of the planet; the Upper Amazon jungles, the tundra of Alaska and Siberia, the hidden reaches of Africa, high Tibet, and for that matter the cornfields of Iowa and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. The fathomless, staggering area of the sea bottoms was too vast a hopeless search-problem to contemplate.
Gant looked at Dusty. “It’s bad, Dusty. I’ll not fool you, but it’s bad. We have perhaps a day or two, perhaps three. We’re late. By the time we arrive, the phase-two growth will be heavy enough to cause leakage-reaction in our detector and render the detector completely ambiguous.”
“Meaning what?”
“What I said. That we must scour Terra inch by inch. And here is where you must help.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You must issue orders to your Space Patrol to comb the landscape. You must find that barytrine generator.”
Dusty looked at Gant Nerley blankly. “You realize what you’re asking? That within a matter of hours we must set up a land-scouring search and completely cover the entire earth? I haven’t even got the foggiest notion of how many million square miles of earth there are, let alone the ocean-bottom which we couldn’t even touch, lacking the equipment.”
“They wouldn’t plant it on a sea bottom.”
“No? Look, Gant, remember that they’re planning on keeping this thing running for a thousand years. They’ll have to hide it good.”