The Ceres Solution

Chapter Nineteen

Hargate realised there were two courses he could follow—he could brood on what he had learned about Warden Vekrynn and quietly burn up with hatred; or he could avoid the self-punishment by concentrating his thoughts on the recent wonders that had entered his life. And, in spite of a history of indulgent bouts of negative thinking, he chose the latter option. He wheeled himself across the aircraft to where Lorrest was sitting at a side window, broodily watching the changing landscapes below. Hargate took the Mollanian travel trainer from its storage place between his right hip and the back of the chair.

“Look, I know you don’t think there’s much chance of my ever being able to skord,” he said, “but what if we forget the big stuff for the time being? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to try jumping between two minor nodes? Two that aren’t very far apart?”

Lorrest, whose face was still drawn and had a bruised look around the eyes, gave a half-smile. “You’re not going to give up on this thing, are you?”

“So I’m a stubborn little bastard. How about it?”

“Denny, I’m surprised that you even want to speak to me.”

Hargate sighed with exasperation. “Who’s got the one-track mind now? I’ve told you a dozen times—you can’t shoulder the blame for something Vekrynn did long before you were born. For God’s sake snap out of it and do something useful.”

Lorrest grimaced and pushed his hair up off his forehead. “I’ll call out made-up addresses, and you practise visualising them and setting them up. Okay?”

“Fire away, teach,” Hargate said. In the hours that followed he gave all his attention to the task of adapting his mind to Mollanian concepts of formalist maths. He found the work absorbing, and only rarely did his concentration waver enough to let him take note of the shrill and gleefully malicious voice which seemed to heterodyne with the sounds of flight. And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years…and all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years…and Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years…

It was Lorrest who tired first and asked Hargate if he wanted to break off.

“Not yet, but I think I’ve done enough on these fake addresses,” Hargate replied. “Suppose I was at home, at the Cotter’s Edge node, and I wanted to skord up to your node on the Moon. Exactly where is it?”

“I don’t think I should .

“What difference does it make? Who could I tell?”

Lorrest stared at him closely for a moment, then shrugged. “Do you know the geography of the Moon all that well?”

“Like the back of my hand.”

“All right. Try to visualise a spot about one-fifty kilometres north-east—inverted compass, by the way—of the Mayer crater.” Lorrest went on to specify a precise set of grid coordinates, and waited with a look of humorous scepticism while Hargate struggled, using his newly ingested Mollanian maths, to throw a conceptual bridge between Earth and Moon. Scowling ferociously, Hargate picked up the travel trainer and slowly—with some help from the computer in his watch—shaped its working surface into a complex curve. He was gratified to see Lorrest’s expression change.

“You did it!” the Mollanian exclaimed. “You actually got it right!”

“Do you have to sound so surprised?” Concealing his pleasure, Hargate collapsed the trainer and started the same calculation afresh, determined to improve his speed. He worked on it single-mindedly for more than thirty minutes, oblivious to his surroundings, and was taken by surprise when Lorrest suddenly gave a theatrical groan of misery.

“Denny, how long are you going to keep it up?” Lorrest said, gently pounding his own forehead. “Give me a break, will you?”

“What’s the matter? I’m being quiet.”

“You’re being quiet, but you’re creating a kind of third-order whirlpool all round yourself, and it’s driving me crazy. If you ever manage to direct that energy properly you may actually be able to skord by yourself some day.”

The words came as a revelation to Hargate. “You mean you can feel what I’m doing?”

“Feel it! This is one of the reasons we encourage Mollanian children to discard trainers as soon as they can. Anybody who’s using one tends to act like a giant radio station that’s drowning out its neighbours. Kids sometimes use the effect to play tricks on adults—shunting them off to places they didn’t want to visit.”

“This is great,” Hargate said. “I really feel as if I’m getting somewhere.” Ignoring Lorrest’s complaints, he returned to his mental exercises with the trainer and continued until when, near the end of the flight, Lorrest raised the question of his immediate future.

“In one hour and three minutes,” Lorrest said, looking at his watch, “your Moon’s going to get zapped into smithers, and I’d like to be on Earth to see it happen. The view will be just as good from Carsewell or from Valparaiso—which would you prefer? Valparaiso should be warmer, but you’ll have the problem of being an illegal immigrant.”

“Won’t you be there to get me out?”

“Hardly! The Bureau keeps a continuous watch on the few nodes discovered by 2H. I’ll be arrested as soon as I arrive.”

Hargate frowned. “In that case it isn’t worth going.”

“At that stage I’ll want to be taken back to Mollan.” Lorrest’s eyes became unfocused as he was drawn into his inner world. “With the Moon destroyed, I’ll be too famous—notorious, I should say—for Vekrynn to have me quietly put away somewhere. And people will listen to what I have to say about him. I’m looking forward to that part.”

“I see.” The realisation that his association with the tall Mollanian was soon to end, that he had to return to the circumscribed realities of life on Earth, caused Hargate an unexpectedly fierce pang of regret. “I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have to go back to Earth—this star-hopping game suits me fine.”

“I know it does, Denny. You’ve got the imagination and the spirit for it, and if there was any kind of justice in this universe you’d be…you’d be…” Lorrest turned away and stared out through the window, blinking rapidly.

“Christ, he’s off again,” Hargate said disgustedly, horrified to find that his own vision was dissolving in a painful blur. “How old are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Old enough to vote.”

“Then stop acting like a big nancy—it’s bloody embarrassing.”

“I’ll do my best, sire.” Lorrest looked owlishly at Hargate for a moment, then his shoulders came up, his face darkened and he had embarked on one of his excruciating whole-body laughs. Hargate felt his own chest give a sympathetic squeeze and within a few seconds he had lost control and was honking and snorting through his nose as an ungovernable tide of laughter went through him, relieving the stresses that had been building since the previous evening. The sight of Lorrest’s contorted, plum-coloured features defeated his every attempt to calm down, and he knew that his own nasal bleatings were having a similar effect on the Mollanian. On the verge of panic over the idea that his lung function might cease altogether, Hargate wheeled himself to another part of the long cabin, shaking his head and cackling, and waited for the return of sanity. It was the first time in his adult life that he had experienced that kind of laughter—nobody on Earth had ever created the necessary climate of camaraderie—and the incident, trivial though it was, magnified his regret at losing Lorrest. He tried to locate a source of hope.

“If things are going to be different on Earth when you have forced Mollan into open contact,” he said, “maybe you’ll go back there.”

“I’d like to—I intend to—but there’ll be a lot of court procedure on Mollan.” Lorrest looked uncomfortable. “It could be quite a few years.”

“Enough said.” Refusing to yield to self-pity, Hargate went to the front of the cabin with the intention of sating his hunger for strange horizons while he still had the opportunity. Almost as if his movement had affected the aircraft’s balance, the nose of the machine dipped under automatic control and it began boring down into lower layers of the atmosphere. Within five minutes they were on the ground at the point from which they had departed on the previous day and Lorrest, who was rapidly regaining the use of his left arm, had unloaded Hargate and his chair. They left the wooded area, crossed the stream and proceeded up the gentle rise in the direction of the invisible node.

“Have you made up your mind?” Lorrest said, effortlessly propelling the chair on the incline.

“It had better be Cotter’s Edge—that’s where it all started.” Hargate suddenly realised he felt something akin to claustrophobia at the prospect of returning to his former existence. “Besides, from Valparaiso the Moon would be upside down. It wouldn’t look right.”

Lorrest halted the chair a few paces from the node, came round to the front and extended his hand. “We’d better take the chance to say goodbye. There’ll be Bureau men waiting for me at the other end, and things may be a little difficult.”

“Sure.” Hargate was in the act of reaching for the offered hand when—with a silent, mind-numbing shock—his reality changed.

Standing behind Lorrest, where a second earlier there had been emptiness, was a towering figure in a gold-belted tunic of silver brocade. His head was leonine and massive, with the unmodified Mollanian cranium, and in one hand he held what appeared to be a radiation weapon. Hargate recognised Warden Vekrynn on the instant and his mind was invaded by darkness.

Lorrest spun on his heel and froze as Vekrynn made a stabbing gesture with the pistol.

“That’s the way—both of you stay perfectly still,” Vekrynn ordered, using English for Hargate’s benefit. “These paralysis weapons are basically harmless, but I’m told it’s quite painful when the effects begin to wear off.”

Still trying to adjust to the startling change in the situation, Hargate glanced up at Lorrest. Their eyes locked briefly and Lorrest gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. Ambiguous though the signal could have been, Hargate fully understood the message. If he finds out we’veseen the sixth copy of his Notes, he’ll kill us on the spot.

“And you couldn’t bear to inflict pain, could you?” Lorrest’s tone was relaxed, almost amiable.

“I can bear it when I have to,” Vekrynn said comfortably. “Especially when I’m dealing with a man who has recently committed murder.”

“Did Gretana tell you that?” For the first time Lorrest began to show concern. “Didn’t she mention that the Terran was on the point of killing her?”

“Perhaps it slipped her mind. Her memory has been at fault several times recently.”

“I wasn’t able to subvert Gretana, if that’s what you’re implying,” Lorrest said. “You’ve got nothing against her.”

Vekrynn shrugged, sunlight rippling on his bright tunic. “I’m more interested in you right now, Lorrest tye Thralen. What are you doing here?”

“I came to find Denny, and since then we’ve been sleeping and eating mostly.” Lorrest nodded towards the remains of the previous day’s meal, visible a short distance down the slope. “It seemed quite a good place to hide out until…until a certain astronomical event had taken place.”

“Really?” Vekrynn’s eyes narrowed as he studied Lorrest’s face, then he began to smile. “You have a knack for getting things wrong—especially about Ceres and the Moon. There isn’t going to be any collision.”

Lorrest shifted uneasily. “That’s what you think.”

“Did you really believe I wouldn’t be able to find Ceres?” Vekrynn’s smile broadened into a jubilant grin. “I’ll admit it was a costly operation, but not all that difficult. It was simply a matter of pouring in men and equipment, saturating a smallish volume of space. I’m pleased to inform you—in fact, I’m delighted to inform you—that I have knocked out every screen placed on Ceres by 2H and have made it clearly visible. We’re already using thruster rays against it. There is a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to overcome there, but Ceres is being deflected enough to miss the Moon. The Terrans are going to wonder what’s been going on, of course, but that’s a…”

“You’re a liar,” Lorrest shouted, his lean face hardening with anger.

“Why should I lie?” A tremor of excitement was now evident in Vekrynn’s voice. “Face up to the fact that you have failed, Lorrest tye Thralen. All I have to do now to tidy up this little matter is dispose of you and that.” On the final word Vekrynn’s pistol pointed at Hargate and swung back to cover Lorrest.

From the lowly vantage point of his wheelchair, Hargate had been viewing the exchange as a confrontation between two Olympian giants, but Vekrynn’s gesture with the weapon was a reminder that he too was vitally concerned. He had no way of knowing if the Warden had psychologically prepared himself for a straightforward act of murder, but even if the plan was to paralyse them and dump them in a remote desert or snowfield, his immediate personal prospects were bleak. The weapon Vekrynn was holding may have been classed as harmless, but Hargate suspected that only held good for targets in normal health. In recent months he had been experiencing growing difficulty in breathing and coughing, and he was almost certain that any serious interference with his nerve functions would be lethal.

He gazed up at the two Mollanians, seeing them with preternatural clarity, while the fear that his life had ended pulsed behind his eyes. Lorrest, in spite of the terrible setback in his schemes, was playing his part with great skill. He looked sullen, disconsolate and beaten—perfectly concealing his knowledge that in a short time the machine his organisation had planted in the Ocean of Storms would activate itself, and that Ceres would be drawn back on to its collision course. Hargate suddenly became aware that something in Lorrest’s physical appearance had changed. He had not seen the Mollanian make any kind of movement with his hands, but now a rectangle of white card was projecting from his breast pocket.

Wondering if Vekrynn might sense any significance in the card, Hargate examined the Warden’s resplendent figure and saw with some surprise that he was perspiring and that the close-waved blond hair was slightly in disarray.

Why, he’s just a man, after all, he thought. A man who invented a new kind of crime. Abnormally keyed-up though he was, Hargate was unprepared for the firestorm of sheer hatred that blazed through his mind, robbing him of both his humanity and the power of sequential thought. A dozen voices seemed to yammer inside him at once, shrieking, advising, threatening, cajoling…Enemy of my people, I need you to die…and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty nine years…Lorrest is too much the idealist to do what should be done…and Lantech lived after he begat Noah five hundred and ninety-five years…not only do I need you to die, enemy of my people, I personally need to smear your brain into the shit of your gut…

“I don’t think there is any point in prolonging this,” Vekrynn announced, a new note of finality entering his voice. He raised his pistol with obvious intent.

Hargate, all his attention concentrated on Vekrynn, received only a blurred impression of Lorrest diving towards the Warden, hands outstretched. Vekrynn fired the pistol in the same instant and the card projecting from Lorrest’s pocket pulsed once with a fierce blue aura. An intangible something hit Hargate, like the beating of rubber hammers over his entire body, stopping his breath. He heard Vekrynn give a startled grunt. Lorrest snatched the pistol from his hand and with a powerful twist of his wrists snapped it into two pieces. Vekrynn swayed like a teetering statue, but otherwise appeared unable to move.

Lorrest stared at him, his eyes baleful as he flung the ruined weapon to the ground. “What’s the classic line at this point, Vekrynn? It looks like the tables are turned?”

Hargate scarcely heard the words over the tumultuous pounding of his heart. The reflected backlash from Vekrynn’s paralysis gun had been devastating in its effect. He was breathing rapidly, yet was in real danger of asphyxiating due to the fact that his lungs were unable to expand. His attempt to attract Lorrest’s attention produced only harsh clicking sounds as the air he so desperately craved refused to penetrate any further than his throat.

“I’m warning you,” Vekrynn whispered, his voice hoarse and distorted with the strain of speaking. “What you have done to me is…”

“What I’ve done to you is nothing to what I ought to do,” Lorrest interrupted savagely, advancing on the immobile figure of the Warden. “I should kill you, Vekrynn. The only thing stopping me is that I don’t want to be like you.”

“An animal can never be like a man.” Vekrynn, his face pale with strain, took a halting step towards Lorrest.

“Lie down before you fall.” As he spoke Lorrest put out his right hand, seemingly with the intention of pushing Vekrynn off his feet, but the thrust was never completed. As his fingers touched the material of Vekrynn’s tunic there was a splat of unleashed energy and Lorrest dropped exactly where he had been standing, like a puppet whose strings had been released. Vekrynn reeled grotesquely in a circle while he fought to remain upright.

Hargate, still waging his own inner battle, saw that Lorrest was fully conscious, but apparently unable to move. He was emitting regular groaning sounds with each breath.

“Another fool,” Vekrynn commented, beginning a slow flexing of his fingers. “What do they think I am?”

I know what you are, enemy of my people, Hargate thought, his brain stirring into action as air finally began to make its way into his lungs, removing the immediate threat of death. It occurred to him that he had been lucky to receive only a fraction of the reflected discharge—anything like the amount stopped by Vekrynn would have shut down his nervous system for ever. He moved his arms, satisfying himself that they were sufficiently functional for what he had to do, and—scarcely able to believe what was happening to him—came to a terrible decision.

Grasping the wheels of his chair, he rolled himself closer to Vekrynn. Smiling his lop-sided smile, deliberately relaxing his eyes into a squint, he looked up at the Mollanian and extended one hand.

“Please listen to me, sir,” he said. “This isn’t my fight. None of this has anything to do with me. Please take me back to Earth and I’ll make it worth your while.”

Vekrynn managed a small step back, his mouth working with revulsion. “What do you think you’re talking about?”

“I’m talking about the Moon.” Hargate glanced at the crumpled figure of Lorrest and gave a nasal snigger. “There’s a machine there, in the Oceanus Procellarum. I believe Lorrest called it a cone field generator. It will activate itself a few minutes before Ceres is due to go by—and you know what that means, don’t you?”

“Don’t believe him,” Lorrest ground out, his neck corded with the effort of speaking. “It’s a trick.”

“Trick? Trick?” The Warden shuffled slightly, almost losing his balance, and looked down at Hargate. “If what you are saying is true, there isn’t any time for me to…”

“It is true and there is time,” Hargate cut in. “They located a node there—that’s why the spot was chosen—and I can tell you exactly where it is. You’ve got time to go there and…”

“Denny!” Lorrest twitched convulsively. “You can’t do this!”

“Keep it shut,” Hargate said with a contemptuous wave. “Why should I get done in over you? I want to go home.”

“That can easily be arranged,” Vekrynn said urgently. “You claim you know the position of the machine and the node?”

“You bet! I can give you its lunar coordinates, or I can even work out the Mollanian equation for you.”

“I doubt very much that you could—it will be enough if you simply tell me its position.”

“Not so fast, man.” Hargate renewed his grin. “Do we have a deal?”

“Most certainly—as soon as you demonstrate that you can fulfil your side of the bargain.”

“Okay.” Ignoring Lorrest’s desperate efforts to shout him down, Hargate summoned from his memory the precise coordinates given to him earlier and slowly called out the figures. Vekrynn nodded repeatedly as he absorbed the information.

“I’m grateful to you,” he said, gazing intently at Hargate as though seeing him for the first time. “Now we must hurry. Can you reach the top of this hummock unaided?”

“I believe so.” With Hargate struggling to overcome some loss of strength and feeling in his arms, and the Mollanian progressing by ludicrously small steps, they reached the crest at approximately the same time. The Warden’s broad face was drawn and liberally streaked with perspiration, evidence of the tremendous physical effort he was making in order to move at all. Bending his arms with agonised slowness, he fumbled with one of the square links of his golden belt, causing it to spring open like a locket. Inside was a small piece of what looked like dark red glass which Vekrynn touched briefly before closing the link again.

“Dome field generator,” he explained. “We must take air with us.”

“With us? I don’t want to go to the Moon.”

“But it’s so close to your final destination,” Vekrynn replied reasonably. “A very small detour.”

“Does this mean you don’t trust me?”

“Of course not! I trust you every bit as much as you trust me.” Vekrynn extended his left hand for Hargate to clasp it and, eyes narrowing with the exertion, gradually raised his right hand in preparation for the tracing of a mnemo-curve.

The Moon! Hargate had expected to feel terror, but instead a deep, searching sadness diffused through him as he considered what he had to do, the obligation he had accepted on behalf of every man, woman and child now living on his home world, and with the mute authority of all those who had gone before. Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my wheelchair of fire…

The transfer took place.

In spite of his foreknowledge of where he was going and the fact that he had seen a thousand pictures of the Moon’s surface, Hargate gasped aloud as the sky went black. His previous jumps between habitable worlds, dramatic though they were, had not equalled the emotional shock of seeing a carpet of living turf instantaneously replaced by the ancient and sterile dust of the Oceanus Procellarum. The plain stretched without interruption to the horizon, with the few distant mountain peaks that were visible rising from beyond the curve of the lifeless world. A blindingly brilliant sun hung almost at the zenith, drenching everything with a harsh vertical light, and closer to the horizon Earth was visible as a blue-white hemisphere.

Taking his bearings from familiar star groupings, Hargate swung his gaze around the plane of the ecliptic and almost immediately found what he was seeking. Low down in the sky was an object that had no right to be there, a celestial trespasser. The asteroid Ceres was visible as a first-magnitude star. In Hargate’s imagination he could see it growing brighter by the second as it bored its way in at inconceivable velocity from beyond the orbit of Mars. He glanced at his watch and his eyes dilated as he saw that the collision time quoted to him by Lorrest was closer than he had realised. In a scant eighteen minutes a ball of rock seven hundred kilometres in diameter was going to impact with the force of millions of H-bombs, and he—Denny Hargate—was sitting at the precise centre of what would become a continent-sized crater.

“Where is the machine?” Vekrynn shouted, tottering away from Hargate. “I don’t see the machine.”

Wrenching his thoughts away from visions of hell, Hargate shielded his eyes and scanned his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was that there were numerous footprints in the dust beneath his chair. They formed an irregular swathe leading to an area, perhaps fifty paces away, where the surface had been extensively disturbed, apparently by excavation.

Lorrest didn’t tell me they’d buried the machine, he thought. So much the better.

“Over there,” he called out. “It seems to be under the ground.”

Vekrynn turned in the direction indicated, broke into a hobbling run and promptly pitched forward. The semi-paralysis that still affected his mobility prevented him from breaking the fall with his hands, even though it seemed to Hargate that he had gone down in a dreamlike slow motion. Vekrynn lay prone in the dust for a moment, then struggled to his feet and resumed his progress at a more prudent speed. It took Hargate several seconds to appreciate that the lesser gravity of the Moon was actually making walking more difficult for the Mollanian in his present condition.

He switched on the wheelchair’s power and moved the drive control. As he had expected, the chair surged forward, its partially rested batteries more than adequate for propulsion when the whole assemblage had only a sixth of its weight on Earth. For the time being, he was in the novel situation of being more mobile than his adversary.

“It’s all working out my way, Vekrynn, you bastard,” he whispered vindictively, reaching into the hiding place between his right hip and the back of his chair. “Perhaps there is some justice in this universe—perhaps there’s just a trace.”

Vekrynn, having finally reached the site of the excavation, studied the broken ground for a short time and looked up with evident surprise as Hargate brought his chair to a halt close by. “What did they think they were achieving?” he said. “I may not be able to deactivate this type of machine from here, but I can do it from there.” He nodded in the direction of Ceres.

Hargate glanced at the oncoming asteroid and was positive he could now discern an increase in its brightness. “How?”

“That region of space is filled with Bureau engineers and equipment. I can contact my men from here and in less than a minute have this site vaporised to a depth of a thousand metres. That will take care of any number of cone field generators.”

“I daresay.” Hargate frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose it will also take care of us if we don’t transfer out of here.”

“Your grasp of the situation is excellent,” Vekrynn said, beginning to smile. “The Ceres operation is being directed from a small space habitat centred on a drifting node little more than a light second from here. That will be my vantage point for the final minutes of this affair.”

“Suits me fine—Let’s go.”

“I’m afraid your understanding of the situation isn’t quite as good as I thought.” Vekrynn turned and began to shuffle towards the point at which they had arrived, exercising great care with his balance. “I’m not taking you with me.”

“You can’t leave me here,” Hargate said in a kind of startled whinny, going after the retreating figure. “The stuff they pour in here is bound to kill me.”

“Wrong again!” Vekrynn did not look back, but his voice carried clearly. “When I transfer away from this dismal spot my dome field and the air it contains will go with me. No, I don’t think you need worry about being vaporised.”

Hargate swore loudly and increased his speed. “Let’s drop all the phoney Agatha Christie politeness, Vekrynn. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”

The Mollanian continued his ungainly progress, still without looking back.

“Listen to me, Vekrynn, you great bag of dung,” Hargate shouted, acutely aware that Ceres was no longer a star-like point of light. Within a very short time it had begun to exhibit a visible disc—testimony to its frightening speed.

Vekrynn kept on lurching forward, seemingly oblivious to everything in his determination to reach the nodal point.

“Lorrest put one over on you,” Hargate said gently. “We found the sixth copy of your Notebook. We know you, Vekrynn.”

The Warden stopped abruptly, a huge clockwork figure whose mechanism had jammed. Hargate steered to the right and went in a semi-circle which enabled him to halt directly in front of the Mollanian. In the relentless vertical light Vekrynn’s face was no longer human, the eye sockets reduced to blind black cavities. He remained motionless for a few seconds, then started forward with increased urgency.

“I told you I wasn’t letting you go anywhere.” Hargate reached down behind his right hip, brought out his most treasured possession—the complex, glittering shape of the Mollanian travel trainer—and held it aloft like a talisman.

“Look at this, Vekrynn,” he gloated. “Look at the curve, Vekrynn—it’s the one you just used to get to this place. I’ve got you.”

Vekrynn uttered a single word in Mollanian and swayed directly towards Hargate. Remembering the effect on Lorrest of one brief contact with the Warden’s tunic, Hargate hastily selected maximum speed and swung the chair out of Vekrynn’s path. Vekrynn changed direction and came after him.

There followed a nightmarish sequence in which the Mollanian, in spite of repeated falls, pursued him in a snaking course throughout the vicinity of the nodal point. A minute and then another minute went by, and Hargate made two unnerving discoveries—that his batteries were growing perceptibly weaker, and that Vekrynn was learning to cope better with the lunar gravity. Instead of simply trying to overtake the wheelchair, he began launching himself at Hargate in a series of sprawling dives which carried him several metres through the air and which at times brought him dangerously close. Hargate had to assist the chair’s slowly fading drive with his hands in order to evade the hurtling giant, and he began to panic as he realised that were he to topple over Vekrynn would be upon him before he could hope to move again.

He was profoundly relieved therefore when the bizarre hunt came to an unexpected end. Vekrynn, his face and clothing caked with grey dust, struggled into a crouching position, but instead of turning towards Hargate he remained doubled over, staring at the sky. Hargate followed the direction of his gaze and quailed as he saw that Ceres, closer now to the horizon, had become an irregular patch of brilliance whose intensity changed every few seconds. The asteroid was tumbling in its course, bearing down on them, winking like a malign eye. As he watched in frozen fascination, a bluish glow sprang into existence off to his left at the site of the buried machine, and he knew that the awesome rendezvous had become inevitable.

Vekrynn gave a tremulous sob, straightened up and—turning his back on Hargate—floundered towards the nodal point with the dragging gait of a man wading in deep water. Hargate rolled after him, getting as close as he dared. On reaching the node Vekrynn stumbled to a halt and raised his right hand. Circling round to the front, Hargate saw that the Mollanian’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving silently.

“It’s no use, Vekrynn!” Hargate grasped the bright shape of the training device in one hand and began running his fingers along its curvatures. “You can’t concentrate. You can’t get away from me. You’re in the middle of a third-order whirlpool and you’re going to stay in it.”

He began to chant the terms of the equation which had brought him to the Ocean of Storms, using them like an incantation which gave him power over Vekrynn’s mind and body. The new phase of the duel between the two men lasted more than a minute, then Vekrynn sagged on to his knees, and covered his face with his hands.

“Why are you doing this?” he breathed, his voice barely audible. “I can’t die, I can’t die, I can’t die.”

“You’re not about to,” Hargate said peacefully. “Provided you do exactly as I say.”

Vekrynn was silent for a moment. “I can’t die.”

“Right. I want you to switch on your communicator—the one you were going to use to call your engineers—and I want you to put it on the ground where it can see and hear us.”

Vekrynn removed a bracelet from his wrist with unsteady fingers and set it in the dust in front of him.

“I want proof it’s working,” Hargate snapped. “I want a response.”

Vekrynn mumbled a few words in Mollanian. There was a brief silence and three or four voices answered simultaneously. By a technology that Hargate could not even visualise, the fidelity of the reproduction was almost perfect.

“That seems good enough,” he said. “I’m sure you know what to do next.”

Vekrynn remained silent, head bowed, face again hidden in his hands.

Hargate numbered off sixty seconds before saying, “Vekrynn, you must tell us what is in the preface to the sixth copy of your book. And I want it in English.”

When there was no response he counted a further sixty seconds and said, “Vekrynn, I think you ought to take another look at Ceres—it’s becoming quite a spectacle.”

He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke and was appalled by the gross changes in the asteroid’s appearance. It had swollen sufficiently for its rotation to be visible as a continual alteration of its shape. It appeared to be alive, quivering and bristling with menace, and the knowledge that the colossal energy it contained would atomise the plain on which he was sitting for hundreds of kilometres in every direction filled Hargate with a near-superstitious dread. The amount of overkill was irrelevant—but the sheer magnitude of the impending destruction had a desolating effect on his soul. We’re not much, he thought. We don’t amount to…

“Confession?” Vekrynn suddenly blurted. “Confession! Since when has total dedication to the Preservationist goal been a crime?”

Turning in the direction of the voice, Hargate saw that Vekrynn had risen to his feet. Instinctively he started to roll his chair backwards, but checked himself when he saw that the Mollanian was no longer aware of his existence. Vekrynn had begun to brush the lunar dust from his tunic with slow and uncoordinated movements, and had turned his face to the sky, possibly in the direction of his home world.

“The Government of Mollan can only guide our social evolution by means of one instrument—and that instrument is knowledge. Surely the greatest gift the Bureau of Wardens can bring to the people of Mollan is knowledge. It is my intention, my ambition, to give you sociological data in its ultimate form—the detailed chart of a technological culture from its earliest beginnings to its self-inflicted end.” Vekrynn paused and drew himself up to his full height.

“I am a patriot, and if I am guilty of any wrong it is that of personal pride—I longed to perform the greatest possible service for my people. It is true that when I found the planet Earth in my youth the life expectancy of its inhabitants was close to the human norm, but what is the value of a life spent in that insane chaos? Who could want to endure centuries of such an existence?

“For a culture trying to evolve in that turmoil of third-order forces there could be only one outcome, one inevitable fate. Better by far to accelerate the whole process…to have done with it…and to salvage something of permanent value…” Vekrynn’s tone became uncertain and he lapsed into silence.

“You’re not finished yet,” Hargate prompted. “And time is running out.”

Vekrynn stared briefly at the ominous patch of light which pulsed and pounded low above the horizon. A visible tremor coursed through his body.

“The torpedoes were upper atmosphere coasters of the type used on Mollan during the Second Epoch to seed the biosphere with longevity agents. But in the case of Earth…”

“Go on,” Hargate said, a black chill filtering downwards from his brain, numbing his whole body.

“In the case of Earth they contained a thymosin degrading agent which—over a period of several centuries—had the effect of reducing human life expectancy to…to seven decades.” Vekrynn paused, and when he spoke again his voice was stronger. “My life’s work, my Analytical Notes on the Evolution of One Human Civilisation, will soon be completed and will be of incalculable value to all Mollanians. That is my personal statement, my justification, my boast.”

Hargate gave a deep involuntary sigh which, even to his own ears, sounded like the relinquishment of life. He had expected Vekrynn’s words, the naked confession of a crime that was beyond comprehension, to engulf him in a plasma of hatred and fury—but there was only a melancholic detachment, a sense of resignation. I guess it hardly matters, he thought. It’s just as easy this way, and the end result will be the same.

“I trust you are satisfied,” Vekrynn said loudly and with a hint of manic jubilation. “I am ready now to face my peers, to accept their judgement.”

“I dare say you are.” Hargate backed his chair off a short distance and raised the Mollanian travel trainer from his lap. “But that’s not the way it’s going to be.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you—as well as being a mass-murderer—are a liar, Vekrynn. I’m no psychoanalyst, but I know you don’t really care a shit about preserving the Mollanian culture. You are pathologically afraid of dying, and that’s the real reason for everything you’ve done. Your Notebook is symbolic immortality. You’ve cast yourself in the role of God—overseeing all that happens on Earth, from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelations—and gods aren’t supposed to die. Are they, Vekrynn?”

Hargate turned his gaze towards the sky and looked at the face of Ceres. It was bloated, poisoned, grinning, visibly swelling. He began to speak faster.

“I’m also saying that you will answer for your crimes right here—not on Mollan. I know that your people don’t believe in the death penalty—but I do. You are looking at your judge, Vekrynn, and I’m sentencing you to death.”

“No! This can’t…” Vekrynn swayed once in a complete circle, like a monolith that was being undermined. “You don’t want to die.”

“That’s right,” Hargate said, summoning up his lop-sided grin. “But I’m a vindictive little bastard.”

He tensed himself for flight, fearing that desperation might enable Vekrynn to overcome his slow-fading paralysis, but the Mollanian stood perfectly still, transfixed, mumbling. His eyes were locked on the fell apparition that had begun to dominate the lower sky.

Holding the pliant metal of the travel trainer before his face, whispering its mathematical spell, Hargate engaged the drive of his chair and slowly circled around the nodal point to a position from which he could see both Vekrynn and the hurtling mass of Ceres. The asteroid now occupied an area many times larger than that of the Moon as seen from Earth, and its tumbling motion was clearly apparent, giving it an intimidating solidity not associated with celestial objects. It was easy for Hargate, staring at the expanding asteroid, to appreciate that the energy bound up in it would be enough to set the Moon spinning wildly on its axis, to bring about the gravitational destruction of an entire world.

It can’t be long now, he mused. Two minutes, three at the most—then everything will be the way it was before I was born.

He considered the prospect with a kind of wan disbelief, and his consciousness ricocheted away into the past. Again he felt the handgrips of the duralloy crutches become buttery with sweat, again he heard the purposeful drone of insects and rustle of dry grasses. The yellow hillside shimmered before his eyes and the plume of field maples beckoned at its crest against a wind-busy sky. He was going again to Cotter’s Edge, to the secret place, and there he was going to meet…

“Gretana!” He called her name involuntarily as the slim, auburn-haired figure—looking exactly as she had done when he was twelve years old—materialised at the nodal point close to Vekrynn, as though he had conjured her by the sheer force of his nostalgic longing. She glanced once at Vekrynn, who was still lost in communion with his blind executioner, then came running towards Hargate. Boosted by the weakness of the lunar gravity, she covered the intervening ground in two precarious steps, lost her balance and pitched on to her knees at Hargate’s side, gripping the arm of his chair for support. The miracle of her presence swamped his senses.

“You’ve got to let Vekrynn go,” she pleaded, green eyes seizing on his. “You’ve done enough, Denny—hundreds of people at the habitat heard what he said.”

“That isn’t enough,” he said dully, wondering how he could deny her anything. “Not for Vekrynn.”

“But you don’t want to be a killer.”

“You’re wrong, Gretana.” He reached out and touched the face that had haunted most of his days, then a new kind of fear geysered through his mind. “For God’s sake, get out of here! Get away from this place!”

Almost smiling, she touched the gleaming sculpture of the travel trainer. “How can I, Denny? You’re holding me here.”

Hargate sobbed once in his anguish as he collapsed the artifact into the neutral configuration.

He tried to beg Gretana to run for the nodal point and save herself, but the words died in his throat as he looked beyond her and saw the monstrous, glowering countenance of Ceres now filling an eighth of the sky.

For a moment he tried to resist as Gretana swung herself round to the back of the chair and began pushing him in the direction of Vekrynn and the node, then he realised she was not going to let go and that his suicidal perversity was threatening her life. He urged the chair forward, and Ceres swelled hugely, rushing to meet them, completely outlining the motionless figure of Vekrynn.

Hargate felt Gretana’s left hand close on his. Obeying her unspoken command, he snatched for Vekrynn’s hand, but a shrilling, gibbering voice told him it was already too late…because the whole sky was a convexity of falling rock…

Within twenty seconds of skording to the Bureau’s nearby habitat, Gretana had positioned the wheelchair at one of the solid-image projectors which were providing the Mollanian engineers with a magnified view of the Moon.

But by that time Ceres had already kissed the surface of the Sea of Storms, and had half-exploded, half-blossomed into a spray of whirling fragments which were racing on divergent courses towards the outer darkness of the solar system.

And, although it was not immediately apparent, the Moon had been jolted out of its aeons-old quiescence, and had begun to spin. Destructive stresses were sundering ancient geological strata as they sped towards the Moon’s core.

Hargate watched the spectacle in silence, rediscovering the meanings of words like awe and blasphemy and pride, then he looked up at Gretana. “Do you think Lorrest is right?” he said. “Is this the start of a new age?”

“I don’t see how anybody can hold it back,” she murmured. “Not now. Not on Earth. Not on Mollan.”

“In that case maybe I’d like to go back to Earth, after all,” Hargate said reflectively. “Just for a while.”