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"Holy-Klono's-Indium-Intestines! What makes you think I've got jets enough to
swing that load?"
"I haven't any idea whether you can or not. If you can't, though, nobody
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can; and in spite of all the work we've done on the thing we'll have to
operate as a mob, the way we did before; not as a fleet. If so, I shudder to
think of the results."
"QX. If you'll send for Worsel we'll try it a fling or two. It'd be a shame
to build a whole ship around an Operations tank and then not be able to use
it. By the way, I haven't seen my head nurseûMiss MacDougall, you knowûaround
any place lately. Have you? I ought to tell her 'thanks' or somethingûmaybe
send her a flower."
"Nurse? MacDougall? Oh, yes, the red-head. Let me seeûdid hear something
about her the other day. Married? No... took a hospital ship somewhere.
Alsakan? Vandemar? Didn't pay any attention. She doesn't need thanksûor
flowers, eitherûgetting paid for her work. Much more important, don't you
think, to get Operations straightened out?"
"Undoubtedly, sir," Kinnison replied, stiffly; and as he went out Lacy came
in.
The two old conspirators greeted each other with knowing grins. Was Kinnison
taking it big! He was falling, like ten thousand bricks down a well.
"Do him good to undermine his position a bit. Too cocky altogether. But how
they suffer!" "Check!"
The Gray Lensman rode toward the flagship in a mood which even he could not
have described. He had expected to see her, as a matter of course... he wanted
to see her... confound it, he had to see her! Why did she have to do a flit
now, of all the times on the calendar? She knew the fleet was shoving off, and
that he'd have to go along... and nobody knew where she was. When he got back
he'd find her if he had to chase her all over the galaxy. He'd put and end to
this. Duty was duty, of course... but Chris was CHRIS... and half a loaf was
better than no bread!
He jerked back to reality as he entered the gigantic teardrop which was
technically the Z9M9Z, socially the Directrix, and ordinarily GFHQ. She had
been designed and built specifically to be Grand Fleet Headquarters, and
nothing else. She bore no offensive armament, but since she had to protect the
presiding geniuses of combat she had every possible defense.
Port Admiral Haynes had learned a bitter lesson during the expedition to
Helmuth's base. Long before that relatively small fleet got there he was sick
to the core, realizing that fifty thousand vessels simply could not be
controlled or maneuvered as a group. If that base had been capable of an
offensive or even of a real defense, or if Boskone could have put their fleets
into that star-cluster in time, the Patrol would have been defeated
ignominiously; and Haynes, wise old tactician that he was, knew it.
Therefore, immediately after the return from that "triumphant" venture, he
gave orders to design and to build, at whatever cost, a flagship capable of
directing efficiently a million combat units.
The "tank"ûthe minutely cubed model of the galaxy which is a necessary part
of every pilot room-had grown and grown as it became evident that it must be
the prime agency in Grand Fleet Operations. Finally, in this last rebuilding,
the tank was seven hundred feet in diameter and eighty feet thick in the
middleûover seventeen million cubic feet of space in which more than two
million tiny lights crawled hither and thither in helpless confusion. For,
after the technicians and designers had put that tank into actual service,
they had discovered that it was useless. No available mind had been able
either to perceive the situation as a whole or to identify with certainty any
light or group of lights needing correction; and as for linking up any
particular light with its individual, blanket-proof communicator in time to
issue orders in space-combat...!
Kinnison looked at the tank, then around the full circle of the million-plug
board encircling it. He observed the horde of operators, each one trying
frantically to do something. Next he shut his eyes, the better to perceive
everything at once, and studied the problem for an hour.
"Attention, everybody!" he thought then. "Open all circuitsûdo nothing at
all for a while." He then called Haynes.
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"I think we can clean this up if you'll send over some Simplex analyzers and
a crew of technicians. Helmuth had a nice set-up on multiplex controls, and
Jalte had some ideas, too. If we add them to this we may have something."
And by the time Worsel arrived, they did.
"Red lights are fleets already in motion," Kinnison explained rapidly to the
Velantian. "Greens are fleets still at their bases. Ambers are the planets the
reds took off fromûconnected, you see, by Ryerson string-lights. The white
star is us, the Directrix. That violet cross 'way over there is Jalte's
planet, our first objective. The pink comets are our free planets, their tails
showing their intrinsic velocities. Being so slow, they had to start long ago.
The purple circle is the negasphere. It's on its way, too. You take that side,
I'll take this. They were supposed to start from the edge of the twelfth
sector. The idea was to make it a smooth, bowl-shaped sweep across the galaxy,
converging upon the objective, but each of the system marshals apparently
wants to run this war to suit himself. Look at that guy thereûhe's beating the
gun by nine thousand parsecs. Watch me pin his ears back!"
He pointed his Simplex at the red light which had so offendingly sprung into
being. There was a whirring click and the number 449276 flashed above a board.
An operator flicked a switch.
"Grand Fleet Operations!" Kinnison's thought snapped across space. "Why are
you taking off without orders?"
"Why, I... I'll give you the marshal, sir..."
"No time! Tell your marshal that one more such break will put him in irons.
Land at once! GFOûoff.
"With around a million fleets to handle we can't spend much time on any
one," he thought at Worsel. "But after we get them lined up and get our
Rigellians broken in, it won't be so bad."
The breaking in did not take long; definite and meaningful orders flew
faster and faster along the tiny, but steel-hard beams of the communicators.
"Take off... Increase drive four point five... Decrease drive two point
eight... Change course to..." and so it went, hour after hour and day after
day.
And with the passage of time came order out of chaos. The red lights formed
a gigantically sweeping, curving wall; its almost imperceptible forward crawl
representing an actual velocity of almost a hundred parsecs an hour. Behind
that wall blazed a sea of amber, threaded throughout with the brilliant
filaments which were the Ryerson lights. Ahead of it lay a sparkling, almost
solid blaze of green. Closer and closer the wall crept toward the bright white
star.
And in the "reducer"ûthe standard, ten-foot tank in the lower wellûthe
entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer
and much more readily seen: but it was so crowded that details were
indistinguishable.
Haynes stood beside Kinnison's padded chair one day, staring up into the
immense lens and shaking his head. He went down the flight of stairs to the
reducer, studied that, and again shook his head.
"This is very pretty, but it doesn't mean a thing," he thought at Kinnison. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]