The Contact Episode Four Read online

  “OK,” said Shelby, nodding. Recently he had not been able to rid himself of the feeling that the picture of what was going on with the incomer would not come together as a whole, because one important element of the puzzle was missing. Something told him that this element was just about to come out of the shadows at last.

  “You see, the data from that base are the readings from the trackers tracking interplanetary traffic. And Clive noticed a small discrepancy in these readings. Namely, the values from the radars differed from the calculated positions of the ships.”

  “What exactly doesn’t coincide?”

  Clive put his tablet on the table and showed Shelby a visualisation of the traffic, just as he had shown it to Steve while they were still on board the Falcon. The professor quickly grasped the nature of the problem.

  “A really interesting phenomenon. Have you compared this with data from other bases?”

  “We would have been glad to, but we don’t have any other data,” replied Clive.

  Shelby picked up his own tablet and selected someone’s number.

  “All space traffic data is now top secret. But I’ll get them for you,” he said, waiting for the call to go through. “I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, you can carry on working.”

  Steve and Clive got up from the table and returned to their seats. They had only just got there when Shelby came up to them.

  “You will be given access to the data you need, but you will have to work in a special room on the military’s own computers,” he warned them. “Leave your tablets, you are not allowed to take them with you. Officers are on their way to escort you to where you have to go. And here they are,” said the professor, nodding in the direction of the approaching officers.

  Steve turned to see two officers of the guard were marching towards them very quickly, almost at the double.

  “You certainly know how to solve problems in a hurry,” said Steve.

  “It’s not me, it’s MacQueen’s department running like clockwork,” replied Shelby.

  “Good evening, sir!” said one of the newcomers in a loud voice. “I have orders to escort two people from your team.”

  “Hello. Yes, it’s these two lads here,” replied the professor, pointing to Clive and Steve.

  “Gentlemen, please place your hands on the scanner for identification. You first, sir,” said the other one, taking a small tablet from his pocket and passing it to Steve. Steve obeyed, putting his palm against the scanning surface.

  Previously, before all this business with the incomer, he had had a poor opinion of the military, considering them a bit slow, and incapable of acting on their own initiative. But having worked with them and seen with his own eyes their capacity for organisation, Steve’s opinion had changed considerably. He had not often seen such astuteness, motivation and endurance among civilians.

  After Clive and Steve had had their DNA compared with the database, all four entered the elevator. The officer who was apparently the senior of the two pressed the button, and the cabin let out a light hiss and took them seven floors down underground. Steve looked in surprise at Clive. He hadn’t had any idea that the building’s roots went down so far below the surface. But Clive did not appear at all surprised. It was generally difficult to surprise Clive with anything not connected with science.

  The elevator took them to a small hall, from which several tunnels branched off in different directions. The guards took them to the right. There were combat defence robots literally on every corner. The situation was so serious that they were subconsciously induced to pull themselves together and concentrate only on the task in hand. From where they were, the outside world seemed like a toy, unreal, not serious, existing more in the imagination than in actual fact.

  Eventually they reached the right door. Passing into a room protected even against the protected zone itself, Steve and Clive were instructed by the guards on correct behaviour in the green zone. After that, the two officers left them in the room allocated to them.

  Once the door had clanged shut behind them, silence reigned within.

  “Well, let’s get on with it, shall we?” suggested Clive. He sat in one of the seats and activated the desktop monitors. Steve sat next to him.

  Illusion

  For eight hours now, the empty THP 11600 had been moving at full thrust as far as possible away from its jettisoned cargo. Give it a little longer, and the distance between them would become so great that their pursuers could forget about their easy prey.

  Kimble permitted himself to lie down for half an hour. Twenty years ago, when he was still in the SSS, adrenalin would have kept him going, but now he just felt tired. Perhaps he was getting old, or perhaps his relatively quiet life had left its mark on him.

  He ordered the ship’s AI to wake him in two hours, and without undressing, apart from taking his shoes off, he lay down on the bed and fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. The two hours passed unnoticed, just as if he had only closed his eyes for a minute, the only difference being that he felt much better and his head had cleared, as if someone had blown away the clouds of all the problems that had filled it in recent days.

  The next minute, he returned to full consciousness and remembered the events of the past few hours. Then he stretched his arm out to the night table, on which there was a small display screen, and called the pilot.

  “Skip?” replied the pilot on duty, almost immediately.

  “Status?”

  “Everything’s fine. One-three-seven is still chasing after the ore, but we are flying the other way. The radar link is good too.”

  Kimble turned away from the screen and, feeling relieved, lay his head back on the pillow.

  “Good. Anything else?” he asked as he closed his eyes.

  “I don’t think so...” answered the pilot musingly. “Well, probably not...”

  The Captain opened his eyes at once. He did not like vague answers, they always seemed to presage bad news. Particularly when you are playing cat and mouse with an enemy.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t yet understand it myself. The navigation seems to be on the blink.”

  “The navigation?” asked Kimble in surprise, trying to remember how it was arranged. “How, exactly?”

  The ‘navigation’ was a complex system consisting of a large number of independent units. Apart from the radar, it included telescopes for observing pulsars and stars, special receivers lined up on beacons, acceleration sensors, gyroscopes and much else. Each of these components operating on its own was able to determine the position of the ship in space with sufficient precision. Therefore, even if several units became unserviceable, this would not leave the ship without navigation capability. For the navigation to pack up altogether, they would at the very least have to fall into a meteorite shower, or be under severe fire. The navigation could not fail without a very good reason.

  “That’s the trouble, I can’t understand how.”

  Kimble sat on the bed and started pulling his boots on.

  “OK, I’ll come along right away.”

  The pilot was sitting in his seat looking worried. The Captain knew his crew very well, and could read the mood of its members in one brief glance. The expression on the pilot’s face did not look too serious. Kimble looked briefly at the long-distance radar readings, showing the course they had been following, and that of the pirates. Having made sure that their plan was succeeding, he could turn his attention to less important problems.

  “So, tell me what you’ve got,” he said.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter, but something’s not right.”

  “Stop beating about the bush, give me the details.”

  The pilot turned to the console and made a few manipulations. On the big screen in front of them there appeared a visualisation of the trajectory of THP 11600 backed by a grid of distances from the central star.

  “Look, now we ought to be here, but we are behind schedule. Our true pos
ition is here,” said the pilot, pointing at the chart. “But by the calculations, we should have passed this point about ten minutes ago.”

  Kimble looked at the chart and saw what the pilot meant.

  “So are we flying slower than we should be, or what?” he asked.

  The pilot shrugged his shoulders uncertainly.

  “No, that’s the point, we’re not. We are flying just as we should be, on the basis of the readings from the gyroscopes and acceleration sensors. And yet we are lagging behind the calculated trajectory.”

  “Hmm... Any suggestions?”

  “Well, the instruments might be on the blink.”

  “But you’ve checked them, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. The computer calculates the speed on the basis of the engine thrust readings and checks the calculations against the red shift of the transport beacons. We are not using the services of the trackers at present, for obvious reasons. We are under cover...”

  “Quite so,” nodded Kimble.

  “The values of the two calculations coincide.”

  “Is it possible that there could be a fault in the system that distorts the readings in both measurements at the same time?”

  “No, they’re independent systems. Not only that, they work on different principles. It’s not possible.”

  “Put me through to the engine room,” said Kimble to the ship’s computer.

  “Technician here.”

  “Since we jettisoned the cargo, have you noticed any anomalies in your department?”

  “No, the reactors are running like clockwork. The temperature is as it should be, so is the power. What’s up then? Problems?”

  “Some of the calculations we have here don’t fit. You’d better send me the readings from the reactor and the engines. I need the data direct from the sensors.”

  He could see on the screen the technician getting up from his table and going to a big cupboard at the other end of the engine room. Inside, the cupboard was filled from floor to ceiling with different-coloured winking diodes, electrical circuits, wires, displays and other electronics.

  He spent several seconds looking at the inside of the cupboard, seeking for something, then got some nondescript object out of his pocket and inserted it into one of the numerous sockets. Then he returned.

  “I’m sending the data from the reactor and the engines,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  The technician gave a casual salute and silently switched off. The screen went dead. The pilot opened the file and became engrossed in reading it.

  “The data coincide,” he said after a few seconds of silence.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. There’s no error here. These are the same data that the ship’s computer has. Here’s the reactor output power, here’s the consumed engine power...”

  “What about the acceleration sensor readings?”

  “The same. The acceleration is just what it should be on the basis of the consumed engine power. Everything coincides.”

  “And from the Doppler shift of the beacons?”

  “The same. The readings coincide with the calculations. By the way, Skip, our lag behind the schedule is increasing.”

  “You mean it’s a cumulative error?”

  “No. It’s the rate of accumulation of error that’s increasing.”

  Kimble swore.

  “What sort of illusion have we got here?”

  The pilot silently shrugged his shoulders. Silence reigned. The Captain sat in his chair, deep in thought.

  “So we know the speed more or less reliably, but not the position. Is that it? Then we measure the parallax to the sun and a few stars,” said Kimble.

  “No problem,” replied the pilot, and made to stretch out to the console to deploy the telescopes.

  “No, no.” The Captain stopped him. “There’s no sense in that. We’ll have to take the spare telescope. We know the data from these already.”

  “Then we’ll have to wake the engineer. That’s his department,” commented the pilot.

  “I’ll go. Don’t bother him, let him sleep. He’s done enough already.”

  The pilot shrugged his shoulders.

  “As you like.”

  Kimble got a bottle of water from his table and took several deep gulps. Work in space is always tiring, and dehydrates the organism. The first astronauts to walk in space in the dawn of the space age, still in first-generation space suits, were up to their knees in their own sweat after a few hours’ work.

  “I’ll take one robot, and you can assist me from here,” he said to the pilot.

  “Yes, sir.”

  As an officer in the Special Space Service, Kimble had quite often had to go out into open space, mainly on exercises, but he also had combat operations outside in his record. Now, as captain of the THP 11600, spacewalks were quite a rarity.

  Passing through the egress lock, getting outside and finding himself alone with the bright stars against a background of black infinity, Kimble’s head at once filled with memories of earlier times. The nuances of being out in space had been forgotten, but his muscle memory remembered all the important control movements of the space-suit jets.

  While no-one could see, as a joke he turned to face the robot he had taken with him and made the gesture signifying “Do as I do.” In this regime, the robot simply repeated all his body movements, faithfully copying his human master.

  The engineer had often done that to amuse the crew. After a successful loading, he sometimes put several robots in “Do as I do” mode, put a sentimental song by some boy group on the loudspeakers and began to dance. He was no great shakes as a dancer, to put it mildly, but the spectacle of several huge robots going through agonising dancing pirouettes in perfect synchrony in imitation of the engineer was one of the funniest things Kimble had ever seen. You really couldn’t stand more than a minute of such a performance. The facial muscles and stomach began to ache, and your eyes filled with the tears of hearty laughter.

  The robot’s optical feedback light blinked in acknowledgement, and it at once adopted Kimble’s pose exactly, or as far as was allowed by its design, which had only a remote resemblance to human anatomy. The Captain stood in a classic Western gunfight pose. The robot instantly took up the challenge, bending slightly at the waist and with one of its feelers hovering over the place where a gun holster was customarily worn in the Wild West, ready to draw its invisible Colt. The Captain made a sharp movement, as if drawing his pistol and aiming it at the robot. The robot did the same. If this had been a real gunfight, a man’s chances against an Iron Man would have been absolutely zero. Electronic reflexes are several times as fast as human ones.

  The captain, contented, gave the robot the thumbs up, showing it his approval. The robot did the same in reply. The Captain’s mood at once improved.

  But enough fooling about. Still smiling, the captain switched on the camera on the forehead of his helmet, so that the pilot could observe his actions. He brought the robot out of “Do as I do” mode and ordered it to set up the spare telescope he had brought on the hull plating.

  “I am in position. Wait for the telescope to be ready,” he said to the pilot.

  “Roger.”

  The robot connected the strut carrying compasses and gyroscopes to the hull. These would enable it to be connected with microscopic precision to the celestial coordinate system. Then it set up the telescope itself on the strut and switched it on. The telescope made several movements in a circle, as if peering all round itself with its lens. When the internal system had been loaded and calibrated, the remote control system was activated.

  As soon as the pilot gained access to the telescope control, he set to work measuring the precise position of several celestial bodies in the part of the firmament visible to him. The ship he was piloting was rushing at tremendous speed through space, so the position of the celestial bodies changed very slightly over time. By measuring this change, the distance to the observed o
bject could be calculated, and then, by comparing with star charts, their own position in space could be worked out. The greater the distance between measurements, the greater the accuracy in determining their own position.

  “It’s looking good, Skip. I’ve made the first measurement. Second measurement in 400 seconds,” reported the pilot.

  “Roger. Waiting,” replied Kimble.

  But before the appointed time had elapsed, the headphones in his space suit came to life again.

  “Damn, Skip, our friends have woken up!” the pilot reported in an excited voice.

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’ve begun searching for us. Pings are being heard every 20 seconds.”

  “Switch it on so that I can hear it too.”

  Kimble could hear the slight hissing that always accompanies a switched-on microphone.

  “PING!”

  “There’s another one,” commented the pilot.

  “How close are they to the cargo?”

  “PING!”

  “About four hundred thousand kilometres. Roughly the distance from Earth to the Moon,” replied the pilot after a few seconds. Apparently he was checking the radar readings.

  “From that distance they can’t see that we’ve undocked,” said Kimble.

  “No, I don’t think they can. Unless they have very good optics. But that’s not likely,” replied the pilot.

  “PING!”

  “Then what are they getting so alarmed about?”

  “Maybe a meteorite hit the film and it rolled up. They would notice that,” suggested the pilot.

  “OK, it’s not important.”

  “Shall I connect you to the crew, Skip?” asked the pilot.

  “PING!”

  “Wait a bit. Let’s see what they’re going to do,” replied Kimble.

  But no more radar pulses were heard. It became silent.

  “Good - work, - Cap - tain - Kim - ble!” a hoarse throaty voice was heard saying in the headphones. The owner of the voice was speaking slowly, one syllable at a time, carefully pronouncing each letter. It was a rather high and unpleasant tone, with some sort of fusty, sepulchral intonation.