The Grand Wheel

TEN

Shane was whimpering, his head down on a table already wet with his tears. Hakandra watched sadly, aware that the boy’s faith in his own ability had been badly eroded.

‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ he said inadequately. ‘You’re in a new situation.’

Shane shook his head. Hakandra put a hand on his heaving shoulder, patting it gently.

He gazed through the window of the tent they shared, looking up into the sky. He could see a star, shining in the fading evening with a steady, cool light. In thirty years, as viewed from here, it would flare up and take on the vivid aspect of a nova.

In fact, the event had already occurred. Thirty years might seem a fair stretch of time in local terms, but when translated into stellar distances it was nothing. A star had gone nova, only thirty light years away, and Shane hadn’t known anything about it: that was the plain, irreducible fact. Hadn’t predicted it, hadn’t even felt it when the explosion came, though he did claim to have received a sudden, dramatic convulsion some hours later – probably that was hysterical in origin, Hakandra thought, since by then the news had already arrived over the narrowbeam.

Self-induced or not, Shane was reacting to his experience – and even more so to his failure – with a typical lack of resilience. Hakandra continued to watch while the youth’s high-pitched sobs subsided into sleepy sniffles under the action of the sedative he had been given. Soon he fell into a drowse.

Wishom entered the tent. He glanced at Shane.

‘Is he all right?’

‘For the moment. Help me get him to his couch.’

Shane’s body was unresisting as they eased it to the bunk bed at one end of the tent. The youth mumbled his way into a deeper sleep.

The scientist straightened and sighed. ‘Well, there doesn’t seem much doubt of it,’ he said, his clipped voice holding a repressed excitement. ‘It was the machine.’

Hakandra paced the floor, looking again out of the window before replying. ‘That machine caused the star to go nova?’

Wishom frowned. ‘It may be going too far to put it quite like that. Cause and effect isn’t the correct law to apply where random effects are concerned. We would have to describe it in synchronistic terms.’

‘Please spare me the sophistries.’ Hakandra waved his hand. ‘I want concepts we can use.’

‘All right. We can definitely say that the machine had something to do with it. The nova coincided with that new jolt we fed in. We believe the machine operated so as to raise the probability of a nova in this area.’

‘My God!’ Hakandra sat down, suddenly weak. ‘We’re playing with fire. It could have been this sun. And Shane…’ He tailed off.

‘That’s what makes me certain the machine was responsible,’ Wishom said. ‘Shane would have predicted it otherwise. It isn’t that the machine’s influence overrides Shane’s talent – it doesn’t. But it produces synchronistic forces that are too wild for him to handle. Poor kid.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Hakandra’s face creased, showing the strain he was under.

His guilt feelings were beginning to get the better of him. He was aware that they were abusing Shane. They were no longer using him as a safety device, to predict novae, but as a research tool. Shane’s cold-senser ability picked up the probabilistic distortion emanating from the machine. Through him, they could know when they were getting a response from it.

The effect on Shane of the weird probability-field was cruel. It was steadily destroying him. Hakandra was not sure how much more of it the boy could take, and he himself was torn in an agonizing conflict of loyalties. The need to see the work through, urgent though it was, flew right in the face of his feeling of responsibility for Shane.

Yet in the end, the requirements of the Legitimacy came before everything.

‘The ability to trigger a nova isn’t quite what we’re after,’ he pointed out. ‘We want to be able to prevent them, to make the Cave safe for us to work in.’

Wishom gaped. He had not expected to be criticized. ‘The controlled production of novae might itself be of military interest,’ he said. ‘An enemy fleet might be lured into a position where the exploding sun would destroy it. Or a nova could be used as a safety screen behind which to withdraw.’

Hakandra smiled indulgently. The scientist plainly had no grounding in military matters. ‘Your suggestions are naïve,’ he told Wishom. ‘No commander, Hadranic or otherwise, concentrates his forces in space. Neither will Hadranic ships get close to any Caspar sun if they can help it. Only if they were to set up planetary bases, as we are doing, would the capability prove useful.’

Seeing Wishom’s rueful expression, he smiled again. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be discouraging. I realize you’ve already worked miracles. I realize, too, that your discoveries have implications going far beyond our present situation here in Caspar… How much further do you think you can go?’

‘It’s all a matter of time.’

‘Time…’

Hakandra tried hard not to show his gloom.

Although the High Command had now assigned him permanently to the project, he felt he would have been better employed in doing what he had originally been doing – helping to set up the defensive pattern that was designed to prevent the Hadranics from crossing the Cave. He knew, by now, that the chances of any immediate usefulness coming out of the alien machine were infinitesimal. This latest result, spectacular though it was, merely demonstrated how little they understood the machine, and the High Command’s insistence that they continue the work on the spot, instead of moving the machine further back, was a kind of reflex action that symptomized the Legitimacy’s refusal to let anything go.

Isolated though he was from the mainstream of activity, Hakandra still heard how things were going in the Cave, over the narrowbeam. And the news was that there was very little time. The attempted evacuation of the far side of the Cave had failed when the thin defensive screen collapsed. There were horrifying tales of massacre. And the Hadranic forces were now poised to invest Caspar.

‘Everything would be different,’ Hakandra said, ‘if we had more time.’

On the bed, Shane muttered and whimpered.