Resurgence

Not so good. “If it can still work, is it controlled at the planet I just came from?”

“It is controlled from here, and only from here.”

Fifty-fifty on the answers he hoped for. As good as it was likely to get. But the difficult part lay ahead. Guardian of Travel seemed friendly enough to humans, but all its allegiance must lie with the Builders. Also, its sentience was inorganic and presumably completely logical. You had to imagine that you were trying to persuade E.C. Tally—and hope you remembered at least some of the facts correctly from the last time you were here.

“As servant to the Builders you once provided access to many worlds, including the surface of this one. Little by little, the service that you provide was diminished; not because the Builders wished it so, but because another group has been at work, destroying what the Builders made. Now you have access to only one world.”

“One world; but a special world to the Builders.”

“Special, but not special enough to save it. Unless you take action, that last world will suffer the same fate as all the others.” This was the trickiest piece of what Ben had to say. From most points of view Marglot was already a dead world. “That world is not yet in the hands of the Builder adversaries. It can perhaps be saved from possession by them, if you take the right action here.”

“If it can be saved by such action on our part, do you wish to return to it?”

That was a question to which Ben had given not one moment’s thought. Go back? It was his turn to say, “I do not know. Why do you ask?”

“Because connection to the super-vortex at the heart of the world can be made at any time, while use of a transport vortex to the surface is possible only at precise times, when the configuration of other events permits it.”

Die here of eventual starvation and dehydration? Or return to die on Marglot, in whatever strange condition that planet might be at the time of his transfer?

“May I postpone a decision on that?” Ben felt a paradoxical sense of exhilaration. Sure, he was going to die. But he had taken another step toward his goal, and he would keep stepping as long as he had breath. “Let me tell you what must be done to save the world from possession by the adversaries of the Builders.”

“We will listen.” The pentagonal disk bobbed up and down on its long silver neck. “Be aware, however, that we too may postpone a decision.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Escape clause

“It has happened before, if you are willing to believe some of the ancient stories.” Teri Dahl’s arms felt ready to fall off and she was taking a brief break. “An old man pushed a rock up a hill all day. Whenever he reached the top it rolled back down and he had to start over.”

Torran Veck had been digging furiously, clearing away new snow and old ice from the runway in front of the Have-It-All. He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what they meant by an old man, but I doubt if he was much older than I’m feeling. We’ve done this three times so far. How many more?”

“As often as we need, until we can get out of here. I heard Louis Nenda talking with Hans Rebka. No one, not even E.C. Tally, can calculate the weather patterns. At least the temperature seems to be holding steady. Nenda says we just have to keep the thrustors free from snow and ice as often as they become clogged, and hold the runway open.”

“That’s easy for him to say. He’s not down here digging.”

“In some ways this is harder on Nenda than anyone else. It’s his ship that’s being torn to pieces and thrown away. Look at that.”

A flash of green showed at one of the upper hatches, and four storage lockers came sailing out to land on the snow.

Torran stared up. “That’s Claudius at the hatch. If they have him working, things must really be bad.”

“Nenda let him sit inside the shields on the forward reactor for a few hours, and it made all the difference. See how light a green he is? He’s drunk. In his condition he’s likely to throw himself out along with everything else.”

“Who’s keeping overall track of things?”

“E.C. Tally. That kind of job was made for him. He knows to the gram the mass of everything being thrown away, and he provides a running total anytime you ask for it—or even if you don’t.”

“How close are we to a decision, Teri? I’ve been too busy even to ask.”

“Asking won’t help. Tally says he doesn’t know. Nenda and Rebka do, and maybe Julian Graves. They know all the facts. But not one of them is telling. My guess is that we still have a long way to go, because internal fixtures are bring thrown away faster than ever.”

A fat disk, three meters across and half a meter thick, went spinning away through the air from an upper level of the ship. It flew thirty or forty meters before it plowed sideways into deep snow.

Teri said, “I think that’s Louis Nenda’s special luxury bed. The only one aboard who could throw it like that is Archimedes. I wonder where Nenda will sleep now?”