"Games," said Garrard sourly. "Games of chance in a preordained
world--Bah!"
* * * * *
Jenna hit the table with her small fist. "Stop it, all of you! A finer
collection of neurotics I've never seen collected under one roof
before. And not one of you dare suggest that Ralph pick a man. Haynes
would be wild if he knew that Ralph had been put into a psychological
hole by being forced to send any man into ... into ... into that."
Deigning to name the menace was itself a psychic block, but Jenna did
not care. Instead of talking further, she reached for the deck of
cards. "The thirteenth card," she said, starting to deal them off,
"One, two, three," placing them face up before her. "Lacy, hearts;
Harris, spades; Grant, diamonds, and Garrard, clubs.--Ten, eleven,
twelve, and thirteen!"
The ace of spades.
Harris smiled, got up cheerfully, and went to get his trappings ready.
Garrard grunted. "Games of chance," he sneered. "In a--"
Grant jumped up. "Look, Ed," he snarled. "In this completely
preordained world of yours, how can an inhabitant know the will of
the Gods of No-chance? What criterion would _you_ have used to select
Harris, huh? So if nothing else, the laws of chance do that much,
to at the very least tell us who the Gods select. And so long as we
ourselves do not know the answer, who cares if it is preordained?"
Having delivered this, Grant looked at Jenna. "Bright girl," he said.
"An instrument, if you admit Ed's plan, of the Gods."
Jenna smiled. "You mean 'whom the Gods--select,'" she corrected
blithely.
Grant hauled out a flask, unscrewed a one-ounce cap and poured it full.
"Here," he snapped, practically forcing it into her mouth.
Jenna spluttered. "Thanks," she said, calming. "I know how Lindsay
feels, and it is not up to him to tell us. But I don't care whether it
is predestiny or not, and whether we're all non-gamblers or goody-goody
boys. But we'll use this set of cards for any future guesswork. See?
And, we'll cut, ourselves. See? We'll not make the mistake of forcing
Jenna or Ralph into dealing out a poisoned arrow."
"I wish people would stop worrying about my peace of mind," growled
Lindsay. "I admit all that's been said. I am not to undergo any
personal emotional strain. But being psychologically packed in cotton
and linseed oil isn't good for me either."
"And all over one problematical bomb," smiled Jenna. "Why don't we
wait. If the first one was coincidence, certainly the rest, after
solution, will make us all feel like overwrought schoolgirls."
Harris returned at this point. "Ready," he said with a smile. His eyes
were bright, and he seemed eager. There was an exultation about Harris,
a bearing that might have been sheer theatrical effort, yet it seemed
as though he were going out to do personal battle with his own personal
devil.
Lindsay nodded briefly. "Give us every single smidgin of information.
If you scrape your feet, tell us. Understand?"
"I get it. O.K., there's been enough time wasted. S'long."
* * * * *
His voice came clearly, and in the dawning light, the automatic
television cameras adjusted the exposure as the dawn came brighter by
the moment. The battle wagon headed out across the rough ground where
the teeming city of Gary had lived a hundred years ago. A mile or two
beyond, the battle wagon entered the parking area, now cleared of its
horde of parked 'copters by the fleeing personnel.
The ship lifted and retreated a few miles, finding level enough ground
to continue observation, and Harris went on and on.
"I'm stopping," he said, and it was faithfully recorded. "I'm about
a hundred feet from the crater, setting up detectors and radiators.
Shall I drive back or will you come in and pick me up? Seems to be safe
enough. He hasn't gone off yet."
"We'll pick you up but quick. Ready?"
"Ready. Everything's set on the servos."
"O.K."
They met, immediately whisked into the sky and back to more than a
safe distance. Then they went to work, searching etheric space and
subetheric space for radiations. They hurled megawatt pulses of radio
energy and subradio energy at the ticking thing. They thundered at
it with audio, covering all known manner of vibration from a few
cycles per minute of varying pressure to several megacycles of sheer
air-wave. They mixed radio and audio, modulated the radio with the
audio and hurled both continuous waves and pulsed waves, and mixed
complex combinations of both. Then they modulated the subradio with
radio, which was modulated with audio and they bombarded it with that.
Rejecting the radiation bands entirely, they went after it, exploring
the quasi-optical region just below the infra-red in the same complete
manner. They fired at it constantly, climbing up into the heat waves,
up into visible light and out into the ultra-violet. They hurled
Brentz rays, Roentgen rays, and hard X. They tuned up the betatron
and lambasted it with the most brittle of hard X rays. They hurled
explosive charges at it, to shock it. Then they sent drone fliers,
radio controlled, and waved reflecting masses at it gently and harshly
by flying the drones back and forth above it.
After three hours of this--and three more incoming robombs of the same
type had been reported, they gave up.
"They're piling up," grunted Lindsay.
"Wish we could move it," said Grant.
"You always wish that. You tell us how to grapple with three hundred
tons of glass-slick, super-hard ovoid with a high diamagnetic surface
and a built-in radiation shield. Moving them is the easiest answer--and
the one initially avoided."