"Steve, did the fact that you are William Wrightwood Junior have
anything to do with this order?"
"What difference does that make?"
Wrightwood sat back in his chair. "Steve, I hate to do this to you,
but your answers have confirmed my suspicions. This order and its
impossible fulfillment is more like an attempt to have you resign. This
smacks of unfair tactic, and upon that fact I am making my final bid."
"What final bid?"
"Since the Guardians have proven themselves unable to operate as a
completely impersonalized agency, they fail in the one thing they
claim--which is to operate for good or bad, for rich or poor alike.
As such, I can prove the ability to operate the Guardians as a more
efficient agency, and I shall do it!"
"Not if I can help it."
"Tell me, Steve, what can you do?"
"I can--"
"There was a faulty generator on the _Astarte_. How did it get there?
Would you maliciously try to wreck my ship?"
"What do you think?"
"Of course you wouldn't, knowing that the lives of a hundred people
were in the balance. Would I try to wreck my own ship to get you
discredited?"
"Hardly, since you'd lose too much."
"Might the Guardians try?"
"No."
"But there are your three possibilities, Steve. One of them is it!"
"So--"
"So it must be your little friends, who knew they could set a fire,
then put it out without harm to anybody but the man they want to be rid
of."
"That's not my fault," snapped Steve.
"No," smiled Wrightwood, "it's all mine. Remember--I told you that no
matter what you did it would ultimately work toward my success? Why
don't you try aiding me instead of bucking me?"
Steve found himself answering slowly, instead of snapping out a reply.
"Just what do you hope to gain from this?"
"I've gained it," smiled Wrightwood. "I've recordings of this entire
meeting, and the tone of your voice during what you have to say is
sufficient evidence to prove my point: that the Guardians have been
wasting the taxpayers' money by ordering an impossible investigation by
a valued man for the spite they hold against his father."
"I might have expected something like this. You've got no news of the
_Astarte_."
"Yes--I have. Play along with me until I control the Guardians and I'll
see to it that your position is granted back to you. There's no need of
investigating the _Astarte_ anyway; and your Commissioner Morehouse is
going to eat crow before he's finished."
"Bah!" growled Steve. Once more he turned and left his father's
presence abruptly.
* * * * *
He was whisked back to his waiting ship and he took off as fast as he
could. It was no more than a fifty minute run across the star trails to
Base One, and Steve was going to make it as fast as he could.
But ten minutes out of Sanaron, the alarm whispered and then broke into
full clamor.
No danger alarm, this. This was the real thing!
Steve swapped his ship around in space and headed for the spacial
co-ordinates given in the alarm. In his mind's eye he could see the men
tumbling out of their quarters and into the waiting Guardian ships and
hurtling into the black.
Steve found the stricken ship as the squadron came into detector range
and deployed. It was a superliner, one of Interstellar's finest. And as
Steve came up to the _Lunalight_ the life-craft broke the spacelocks
and streaked out and away.
Once more the englobement of warping planes started; plate to plate
they formed, jockeying to make their forward-flung planes of warp lie
against one another, edge to edge so that the volume enclosed was
contained without leak. Tractor ships hurtled up and latched onto the
ship and started to bring it down in speed.
But this was not the time; one of the plane ships faltered and the
edge of its warp plane broke contact with its neighbor. The spacewarp
fractured, and then with the enigmatic peculiarity of a collapsing
warp, the volume began to drop back toward prime space from the center
out. The warp generator itself, in the bowels of the ship, broke into
prime space first.
Matter, at a thousand times the velocity of light, dropping into a
space where matter cannot exceed the velocity of light!
Where the tiniest speck of matter will have infinite mass when the
speck reaches the velocity of light.
Where the time-field of the mass becomes zero as the velocity of light
is reached.
It was like a stellar nova.
A searing intensity of energy trailed out behind the ship and left
a streak a million miles long in a matter of microseconds. The ship
itself collapsed over the trail of energy, and the whole exploded
finally in a hundred-billion mile long course leaving the trailer of
raw, unbound energy spread out for the span of a solar system.
Then the trailer itself exploded, blowing streamers of torrential
energy deep into space. Bits and shags of the blazing stuff flew away,
great gouts, shapeless and viciously scintillating, roared along the
ship's course.
The tractors fled; the plane ships had been hurled back, away, and now
were lost in the sky--far behind. They hurried to catch up, for they
could hurl their planes of spacial warp against a flaming mass of raw
energy and bat it aside like a ping-pong paddle slaps the ball aside.
The swampers circled in and the cone projectors fenced with the darting
spears of flaming power.
It was Steve that remembered Sanaron. "Charlemagne!" he roared into his
mike.
"Who's calling?"
"Hagen. Remember Sanaron."
"Sanaron?"
"Ten minutes back at full drive lies Sanaron!"
"God!"
And then, for the first time in the history of space, in the history of
the Guardians, came the dreaded Black Alarm.
* * * * *
Sanaron was a complete stellar system, eight habitable planets well
inhabited by every possible form of sentient life. The star, Sanaron,
was a nondescript G-zero that would not have had even a number in
the Terran catalogs before the conquest of space, but Sanaron was a
full-grown star in the flush of its energic cycle. Once the raving
centroid of raw energy erupted from the _Lunalight_ fell into the
gravitational field of Sanaron it would drop into the star. And then
mankind would see, a supernova in operation--for a brief instant before
this system cremated itself.
The Black Alarm!
Across the galaxy it went. Guardians from every base in Sector One
alerted and took off within a matter of minutes. Guardians from joining
sectors moved into Sector One, spreading out through the sector to
keep the sector protected; Guardians from outlying sectors moved in,
again spreading out. Thinned but active, the Guardians released useful
personnel to go out and fight the Black Alarm.
"Charlemagne!"
"Now what?"
"Can I help?"
"Yes," came the cryptic reply; "stay out of our way."
Steve snarled, but he got no reply.
A gout of energy flashed past his viewport, blinding him. Then he
realized that he was unprotected, and only a nuisance here.