Chapter Twenty-seven

THE LONG WAY AROUND

All of them did try.

Zak Destan tried, without even knowing what it was about. There was a lot of work for his people to do, not so far different from what they had done before—planting and plowing and sowing for the new plants in the new-made domes, fertilizing and composting for next season’s plant life, reclaiming and recycling all the debris and biomass from the wreckage of past dome failures.

But there were other jobs, too, that weren’t anything like farming. One of the biggest jobs was the disassembly of the Ignition Day Power Reception Array panels, followed by the reinstallation of the individual receptors themselves on new panels.

There was a strong prejudice against hand labor in the highly automated, upper-heavy culture of Greenhouse. Even their agriculture had been largely automated, and perhaps would be again, someday. But Zak knew he had a winning hand. “You need warm bodies,” he told the Greenhousers, over and over, “because there’s not enough cold machines. And that means you needus .”

He said it loud enough, and often enough, to be heard. Soon his peasants were busily cannibalizing Groundside Power, working by hand, stripping the receptors off the Array panels as fast as the service robots could remove them from their stanchions and bring them inside.

 

Villjae Benzen tried, constantly pressed forward, not only by what DeSilvo and Koffield had said but also by all that he had learned from the near disaster of Ignition Day. But more than either, he was endlessly haunted by what Beseda Mahrlin had said, in her strange, clipped cadence, once Ignition Day was all over. She’d warned him then of the pattern that seemed burned into the Solacian culture.“Always the same. Big delays, then the quick fix, the rush job. That’s how we started. DeSilvo spent forever telling everyone he’d found a way to terraform fast, lost time getting ready—then cut enough corners to say he got done on time.” Now they were all in another crash program, to build a time machine—a time machine!—and dive a million years into the past.

Even so, the words she had said next were the words that echoed loudest for him.“We can’t go on this way,”she’d said.“Have to change. But I don’t know. Might be too late. Maybe the way things are, the way we are—maybe we find out that we just plain can’t go on at all.”

And yet, what choice did they have? There was so little time. Solace was dying, failing, even as they worked. Greenhouse could be a lifeboat, but it could not support the whole population of Solace forever. They needed a new world, as fast as possible. They had to find a suitable candidate world. And just to begin work on the hardware they would need to use instruments, power systems, generators that did not yet exist.

That was part of DeSilvo’s plan for securing the massive power supplies that would be required. His solution was typically audacious: They would refuel, refurbish, and restart the old SunSpot, reorienting it so that its light beam shone outward. No one had ever considered restarting it before, or even thought of it as possible. Once the NovaSpot project was under way, there had been no reason for restarting the SunSpot. But now there would be, and DeSilvo was making it happen.

The cannibalized receptors were part of that plan. They would be boosted into orbit and put to use there, channeling power from the SunSpot to the Harmonic Rings, beginning with the Test Articles they were already starting to build.

 

Elber Malloon tried, because he knew far more than he wanted. After the massive security lapse that had resulted in Elber and Villjae being present at that first big meeting, it was a near thing indeed that Elber wasn’t slapped into detention for the duration, just on general principles. It was, ironically enough, Olar Sotales who vouched for him, saying flatly that Elber could be trusted. Sotales, in fact, went farther out on a limb than anyone could quite understand. Elber, however, was not going to argue.

Nor was he going to tempt fate by not living up to Sotales’ assurances of his loyalty and honesty. He was instrumental in making the deals that got Zak Destan’s people to work replanting the domes. He endlessly pestered Beseda Mahrlin, who had taken over for Villjae, to get more work, more responsibility, not only for “his” people, but all of the lowdowns and peasants who were starting to pour in.

Elber also simply tried tounderstand, studying the problems, the history, the physics as best he could. He tried out what he had learned on Villjae, late one night, back in the common room by the dormitory. Villjae had fished out a couple of beers from somewhere, and the two of them were doing their diligent best to relax. “So,” said Elber, “the core problem is, thefaster you terraform a planet, the faster it dies, right?”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that, but yeah, close enough.”

“So they figure they have to take a long time—areal long time—to terraform a planet, so it’ll last? Work a million years, and it’ll last another million?”

“Or even longer. After a while, the terraformed planet will develop a lot of the self-correcting features of a natural ecosystem—it’ll be able to fix itself, more or less. If something throws it out of balance, the natural feedback systems will respond and correct. It ought to last a lotlonger than a million years.”

“But how can they keep at the job that long?”

“They can’t, of course. That’s the beauty of it. The problem with all the previous terraforming techniques was there wasn’t enoughtime for each process. Instead of, say, giving algae ten thousand years to convert an atmosphere to a nitrogen-oxygen mix, they’d give the algae fifty, doing everything possible to force it along—and they’d be doing ten other jobs at once. This way, they drop the algae, and leave it alone for ten thousand years—maybe twenty thousand, just to be on the safe side. Let it really dig in, take over the place.” Villjae thought for a moment. “Like Mars, sort of. You’ve seen pictures. Basically one life-form took over the whole place. It’s had time to establish itself.”

“But they don’t want to end up with something like Mars!” Elber protested.

“No, of course not. We don’t want to endup like Mars—but an interim step might look that way. What the symbiote-molds on Mars have done is mostly stuff you’dwant to have happen, in the early stages of terraforming. The molds have processed the soil, broken up the surface, generated a lot of dead organic matter. And, sooner or later, that mold will have eaten up all there is to eat on the planet. It’ll die, or go dormant, or something. That’s when you drop in something—maybe five or six somethings—that really like to eat dormant mold. Then you wait another ten thousand years, and drop in twenty species that like to eat those five or six somethings. And so on, and so on.”

“I guess I get it. Go on.”

“So, anyway, they wait a long time. Then they come back, see what’s worked, what’s gone wrong—taking as much time as they like to study things, make corrections, get everything just right before they take the next step. And there are other things where it’s good to take more time—like comet drops.”

Cometdrops?”

“I’m no expert, but that’s the usual way to get water to a planet that doesn’t have enough of its own. Go out to the outer system and redirect comets to drop on the planet. Trouble is, it takes alot of comets to do it, and they beat the hell out of the planet. Big impacts, that can kill off everything you’ve been trying to grow. On a regular terraforming job, where you’ve only got a few centuries for the job, youhave to drop them in as fast as you can. But if you have a million years—hell, just set some robots loose. Program them to find comets, slice them up into little pieces—snowballs, say a meter across—and throw them at the planet, over and over and over again. Instead of maybe a couple of dozen, or even a few hundred major impact events, you get a few million snowballs that all get vaporized when they hit the atmosphere. Much gentler. You do everything that way—slowly, carefully, finishing one step before going on to the next. Leave the planet alone in between, and just keep coming back every few thousand years, until you’ve reached the present.”

“All right. I guess I’ve got all that. But what’s the bit about having to use an undiscovered planet?”

“Well, strictly speaking, anunsurveyed one—one that no one knows anything about, aside from its mass, orbit, and what star it’s orbiting. But my guess is that they’d like to find their own completely undiscovered planet, just to be sure. See, right now, before we’ve done the job, the planet we’re going to do is just dead rock. But once we start messing around in its past, itscurrent appearance is gonna change. Even from a few light-years off, you’ll be able to detect water, oxygen, temperature changes, and so on. But, if we know that, in our future, we’re going to go back into that planet’spast and change the planet—well, if we check its spectrum and temperatureright now —what will we find?”

Elber frowned. “Wait a minute—if we haven’t already changed it, but we’re going to change it, then right now if we look at it—” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Neither does anyone else. They figure the safest thing is not to look at all—pick someplace no one has ever looked at, so there’s no prior record that could produce a paradox. The plan is that they never evenlook at the present-day planet until the job is done. They’ll do all their time traveling from as far away from it as possible, so they won’t be close enough to see it from now. They’ll drop into the past light-years from the target, and go to and from it on slowboat ships using cryonics. They sure as hell don’t want to risk taking FTL drives or timeshafts or temporal confinements a million years into the past.”

“But that’s crazy!”

“Yeah, but the math works. So we pick a planet, but don’t peek at it, then go back in time and terraform it.”

“Suppose it turns out that something’s wrong with the planet—something they couldn’t tell because they didn’t look?”

“Then they move on to the next planet on the list.” Villjae shook his head. “A hell of a way to do business, if you ask me. There ought to be a better way.”

Elber Malloon nodded thoughtfully, finished the last of his beer, and frowned down at the table, trying to understand.

 

Olar Sotales, ordered to provide security and keep the project secret, tried, and succeeded quite well, at least in his own area of expertise. The number of persons in the inner circle increased only a little as time went by. His office concocted plausible cover stories, prevented any number of potential leaks, conducted a most efficient rumor control service, performed regular inspections of facilities, and also conducted weekly security interviews with those in the know. It was during his second such interview with Malloon, about three weeks after DeSilvo and Koffield had dropped their bombshells, that Sotales noticed something about Malloon that no one else had—not even Elber himself.

Elber had developed four small, almost undetectable red blemishes—one at the outside corner of each eye, and one on each earlobe. Sotales found excuses to wander into Malloon’s office several times over the next few days so that he could check on the blemishes. As best he could tell, they only lasted a day or so, and didn’t ever cause Elber any particular distress.

The blemishes were, of course, the only outside indication that the microcameras and microphones were breaking down, dissolving away. Presumably, there were larger, and perhaps more tender, blemishes on Elber’s upper arms as well.

So much for what had been a most productive intelligence source. There was no practical way he could see to arrange installing a new set of microbugs in Elber. It was over. Sotales took the matter philosophically enough. He had gotten a great deal of use from the bugs.

At least, he thought he had. His own actions had in large part been guided by what the bugs told him on the one hand and by the necessity of protecting their secret on the other. One could almost make the case that Elber had been runninghim, instead of the other way around.

He wasn’t the first spymaster to get tangled up inside the web he himself had spun. Besides, it was due to him that Elber got to Destan, and thus set in motion the chain of events that led to the smooth and orderly journey to Greenhouse of all the Wilhemton refugees. The propaganda surroundingthat accomplishment had allowed the movement of refugees to Greenhouse to be generally smooth and orderly as well. Result: no major panics, just a few minor riots, hardly any mob violence. That was no small accomplishment.

No one would ever know the role he had played, but still he had his rewards. Founder’s Dome was a small place, and he met little Zari Malloon a time or two. The knowledge that he had contributed, however tangentially, however secretly, to making that little baby girl happy and safe, and that he had done the same for quite a number of others, was compensation enough.

It wasn’t easy, being a secret policeman with a heart and a conscience. Sotales had always tried to keep the fact that he had both strictly secret.

But even he knew, deep in his heart, that if anyone ever spotted him watching Zari on the playground, his cover was going to be blown wide open.

 

Marquez, and the remaining crew of theDom Pedro IV, tried. Sotales had been most insistent that they keep the ship herself concealed, simply to prevent the sight of her from exciting gossip. He was even more emphatic in saying that under no circumstances could she use the FTL drive.

For all they knew, theDom Pedro IV ’s FTL drive would light up the right sort of detector like a nova bomb from twenty light-years away. If there were such detectors, it was a sure bet the Chrono Patrol had them. And if they had them, then it was a virtual certainty that those detectors were powered up and operating.

Therefore, until they had the time to bring in some physicists and theorists and engineers who could study the drive, and its potential field effects, in detail, or unless some dire emergency required it, theDom Pedro IV would stay out of sight and powered down.

That, of course, left the crew at loose ends, but not for long. TheDom Pedro IV had been designed to take care of herself for fifty or a hundred years at a time, self-navigating the transit between stars. She could easily be left in standby mode for a month or two, even a year or two. The two auxiliary craft still with theDP-IV —theNova Sol ’s sister shipTerra Nova and theCruzeiro do Sul —could certainly be put to use—there was a systemwide shortage of spacecraft of all types. The whole ship’s complement came on in—but not before following, to the letter, DeSilvo’s infuriatingly detailed instructions on what cargo should be brought along and what should be left behind. There were parts, tools, equipment, training manuals, and any number of other things they would absolutely have to have to build the first Harmonic Gates.

Once they arrived, Marquez and the members of his crew were immediately put to work on any number of transport jobs—anything where it might be necessary for someone in the know to do the work. By using theDom Pedro people to the fullest, Sotales was able to hold to an absolute minimum the number of people who had to be informed.

On the same principle, Wandella Ashdin was made administrative director. Her scholarship had always been focused and organized—but nothing else in her life ever had been. But Sotales judged that a marginally competent, but utterly trustworthy, head of admin who was already fully briefed was preferable to a briskly efficient and experienced bureaucrat who would immediately start asking some very awkward questions.

Norla and Koffield tried—tried to be everywhere at once, meeting with everyone who needed a meeting, coordinating a thousand different details, helping Ashdin unsnarl her paperwork when it got too far out of control, troubleshooting—and frequently helping DeSilvo in his work.

For DeSilvo was trying, too. Perhaps trying harder than anyone else.

They had gotten away with his wearing an improvised disguise and risking movement through the public areas of Research Dome on first arrival, but no one wanted to take any more chances than necessary on his being recognized. Rumors had started to circulate, despite Sotales’ best efforts. One or two of the wilder stories floating around actually mentioned DeSilvo by name. That put his face and image in people’s minds, and so vastly increased the odds that he would be spotted if he did go out.

If DeSilvo were to appear publicly, it would cause the sensation of the century. The founder of Solace, returning from the dead—there would have been no hope of suppressing the story.

Sotales absolutely forbade him to go out in public, and even DeSilvo was forced to see the logic of that. So he was a prisoner, of sorts—but he was also the managing director of a massive engineering operation, working closely with Berana Drayax. He also served as a sort of one-man faculty, running training sessions on a half dozen subjects, from Harmonic Gate operations to FTL navigation. It was a strange situation. The teacher knew only the basics of the subjects, but he knew more than any other person alive. It was a question of telling his students as much as he understood, then getting out of the way and letting them at the source materials he had brought along from Glister.

Terraforming of any sort was a nearly forgotten discipline, a topic generally regarded as being for historians to study. What the researchers at the Terraformation Research Center called terraforming might more accurately be called climate repair, or ecology maintenance. Here too, DeSilvo—the Founder of Solace, the grand old man of terraforming, rediscoverer of the works of Ulan Baskaw, who knew the subject backward and forward—was the teacher.

It was perfectly reasonable for him to present his lectures on the subject, but it was also deeply ironic. After all, he was, of course, also Oskar DeSilvo, the wrecker of Solace, the grand old fraud of terraforming, and the plagiarizer and bowdlerizer of Baskaw’s work, who didn’t know the subject well enough to have kept Solace from its present crisis.

There was further irony in that he had spent his career seeking ways to make terraforming faster—and now he proposed to do it a thousand times more slowly than it had ever been done. All of them did try.

The wonder of it all was how close they came to success.

 

They did let DeSilvo out, occasionally, under controlled circumstances, and by prearrangement. One evening Sotales set things up for him to stroll about in Founder’s Dome, and he asked to be accompanied by Koffield, Wandella Ashdin, and Norla Chandray. All of them agreed at once.

Norla understood what the walk was for and felt quite sure the other two had guessed as well. DeSilvo’s crimes might have been unspeakable, beyond any possibility of suitable punishment—but the man was clearly doing penance, along with making heroic efforts to make amends. He had no right to require their presence, but they were willing to give it to him if he asked.

It was hard not to think of the last time the three of them had made the same journey. They had traveled on the surface, in pressure suits, because Founder’s was about to be destroyed, and all the tunnels had been sealed.

He was waiting for them just outside the airlock entrance of the tunnel that led back to Research Dome. “Good evening to you all,” he said, his courtesy much more practiced, and at the same time far more real, more natural, than it had been when first they had seen him on Glister. It was clear to Norla that he was relearning the skills of living among people and making good use of the lessons. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Captain Sotales’ people have cordoned off a large portion of the dome for our use, but they’ve made it clear it can only be for an hour or so. Shall we be on our way?”

There was no false, coy, coming-upon-it-by-chance games about their walk. Perhaps the old DeSilvo would have led them around in circles for a half hour before arriving, by startling coincidence, at his own tomb. They would have been left to wonder if he was counting on their good manners not to point out he wasn’t fooling anybody, or if, instead, he was determinedly fooling himself, forcing some part of his mind at least to believe, most sincerely, that it was all chance.

That would have been his way in days gone by, Norla reflected. Now he led them straight to the place.

The tomb was, at first glance, much as they had left it. Their journey, in a very real sense, had begun there, on that very spot. It had led them to Asgard Five, to the Grand Library, to the Permanent Physical Collection, to Earth, to Mars, to Glister—and back again.

A low, six-sided marble building, one side open to the elements—or at least, to the interior of the dome—the open side aligned with the west. The whole affair was seated on a set of six stacked hexagonal platforms, each smaller than the one below and centered on it, thus forming low, broad stairs to the upper platform. The five exterior walls were decorated with somewhat overworked allegories and symbols.

But on second glance, Norla could see the changes time had wrought—the marble showed scars and scratches where the violence of the dome explosion had thrown shrapnel hard enough to mark it. Norla could see two or three places where the stone had been repaired, leaving a cemented-in patch of stone that did not quite match the original. There were still faint scorch marks noticeable on the lowest step, where some burning brand had fallen and remained there, roasting the stone, until the dome itself blew open, and all the air roared out.

“Around in a circle,” Norla said. “Here we all are again.”

“Notquite true,” said DeSilvo with a smile. “You three have been here before. I have not.” He laughed, but there was little of humor in the sound. “I wasn’t really those ashes in the urn. I was only pretending to be dead,” he said. “Again.”

He walked up the low steps, and into the structure, the others following. Norla stepped inside, then turned and looked out from the entrance. The last time they had been there, she had looked out through the same doorway and seen the fires of hell, the belching smoke of doom. Now the sun—no, NovaSpot—was setting over a cool green lawn, dotted with vigorous young saplings. Things had changed.

She turned back to the interior. There was more damage there, and less effort at repair, as if the inside of the tomb didn’t matter so much. And in a sense, it didn’t. After all, the man it had been meant for was right in front of her, gazing at the memorial he had designed for himself. A marble sphere in front of the wall of the tomb opposite the entrance, and a gold cylinder of understatedly simple design, sat upon the sphere. The single wordDESILVO was etched into the urn, and the legendTHE FOUNDER was carved into the floor beneath the sphere.

DeSilvo looked up at the urn that still purported to hold his ashes, for he was still dead so far as the outside world was aware. “When at last Ido die, truly die,” he said, “bury me anyplace but here. Stick me in the ground, cremate me, donate me to science, or to a medical school—or to a museum of prosthetics, or a carnival show, if you think it more appropriate—but do not put me here. This place is a lie. Let us not dignify the falsehood by making it true. When people know the truth about me, let them vandalize the place if they like, or turn this place into a storage shed, or a puppet theater for the children. That might even be a fitting indignity, somehow. I treated enough people like puppets, with me to pull the strings. You three perhaps most of all.” He was silent for a time, staring up at his own false tomb. “My apologies, to all of you.”

“We cut the strings a while back,” Koffield said, and gently put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “And somehow, I don’t think they will vandalize the place when they learn the truth—because they’ll learn thewhole truth. I promise you that. The good, the bad, and all that’s in between.” He looked around himself, considering the tomb’s interior. “Perhaps a monument to Ulan Baskaw,” he said. “Or perhaps a small museum, just a few small exhibits about her, about you—”

“And aboutyou, ” said DeSilvo. “You had something to do with what happened.”

Koffield smiled. “All right, something about me as well. Butnot a storage shed. And, with all due respect to a noted architect, I don’t think it would make a very good puppet theater.”

DeSilvo, in their presence, was saying good-bye—not to them, but to himself, to DeSilvo the myth, the hero, the DeSilvo who could be no more. Farewell to all of the things he had been, for they all required illusions and deceptions and concealments that simply weren’t there anymore.

He could never again play the part of the lord of all he surveyed. No more could he be the revered and spotless hero of the founding of Solace, his portrait hung everywhere. The acts he had set in motion made it inevitable: Sooner or later, the universe would know that he was far less—and far more—than the Founder.

 

They did not remain inside long, and DeSilvo was unusually silent as they came outside. He turned and considered the structure for a long time. “Dr. Ashdin—back on Glister, you noted at some length my habit of repeatedly finding ways to simulate death, to pretend that I am dead—and this place proves your point. But I think there is another side to the story.

“I have spent most of my adult life being afraid of life itself—of human life, of real contact, real events, of emotion and passion. I know that is why I was attracted to architecture. Clean, straight lines, solid, permanent shapes, right angles and the ideal shapes of geometry brought as close as possible to being real.

“Being dead was one way to hide, to keep my distance. I think perhaps that being revered, lionized, was another. Who would dare come near me? Perhaps building my own world was just a way to let me escape from the universe of humanity and be turned into a nice, safe, sterile icon.”

“You can paint a lot of pretty pictures with psychology,” said Wandella Ashdin. “But it doesn’t mean they are true. And a lot of people deal with a fear of life’s disorder without terraforming planets. You are what you are, and you did what you did.”

“All granted,” he said calmly. “I seek an explanation for my actions—not an excuse.”

Norla decided it might be wise to change the subject.

“They’ll be ready soon,” she said, gesturing upward toward the sky. No one had to be told she meant the first tests of a Harmonic Gate Ring. “It’s all gone amazingly fast. Another week or two, and they’ll be ready to do the first engineering runs.”

“Yes,” said DeSilvo. “They’ve done very well, and they’re learning quickly. Soon, they won’t need me at all.” There was something halfway between pride and wistfulness in his voice.

“They’re using theLodestar VII as the command center for the first tests,” DeSilvo said. “I hope you’ll all be aboard.”

Wandella Ashdin smiled. “Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

 

As Captain Marquez remarked several times as the day of the first test approached, everything was harder and took longer. There were inevitable delays, waiting for this component to arrive, for that ArtInt to be properly programmed, for those two or three construction mistakes to be repaired—and for the correction of one design flaw that would have caused the gate to fail within nanoseconds, if a junior engineer hadn’t had the nerve to question an obvious mistake that had been approved four times already. The delays were almost comforting, the sorts of headaches that attended any technical construction job.

Every department that didn’tcause a given delay was grateful for the gift of time each delay supplied. When Department A caused a delay, Departments B, C, and D used the time to upgrade, improve, and make right whatever had been done on the rush—with the result that Department B wasn’tquite ready once A had sorted things out. And, inevitably, A, C, and D also thought of things that needed doing while they were waiting . . .

Koffield didn’t envy Drayax her duties as test director, and especially didn’t envy Villjae Benzen the even worse job of assistant test director. Still, somehow, they managed to ride herd on all of the problems, allowing the absolutely needed repairs while keeping the endless fiddling and tweaking to a minimum. Somehow or another, only a month or so later than expected, they were ready—or nearly ready.

They were using the same shipboard command center as had been set up for Ignition Day. However, the first Harmonic Gate test was a secret, and a closely held one at that. There were seats for twenty-five controllers on the main level, but only eight were in use. And though the observation platform was large enough for a hundred or more, even after Koffield’s party came aboard there were usually only about half a dozen or so people actually there. There were ten or fifteen observers aboard the ship, but there was precious little to observe until one or two last glitches were ironed out, and the test itself could take place.

Koffield guessed that most of his companions were in theLodestar VII ’s legendary Executive Bar, reputed to be the best-stocked ship’s lounge in all the Solacian system. He planned to investigate the truth of that for himself presently, but for the moment he was content to lean over the railing and watch the test crew at work and to look upon the object of their attention.

The large display was showing a medium close-up of the most unromantically named Harmonic Gate Test Article, with inset images of different views set in the four corners, and blank bits of the screen filled up with the sorts of charts and diagrams that seemed to make people feel better.

The Test Article was in a distant orbit of Comfort, withLodestar VII station-keeping, a few kilometers ahead in the same orbit, close enough for telescopic lenses to provide an excellent view. The main structure of the Test Article consisted of three rings, each nested inside the other. There was no physical connection between the rings, but they were held rigidly in position relative to each other by induced gravity fields.

The whole affair was twenty-five meters across. The rings had been painted white, with location numbers to aid in later image-analysis of their interactions. The inner ring was numbered in red, the center in green, and the outer in blue. The camera had the center ring face on and it was easy to read the labels: 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D. One wag had suggested labeling one location 2B and all the others Not2B.

The opposite side of the rings were studded with some of the power receptors scavenged from Groundside Power Reception. The SunSpot wasn’t going to be anywhere near refurbished or ready for use in time for the first tests, but then, the Test Article wouldn’t require anywhere near as much power as the SunSpot could provide. A much smaller, off-the-shelf conventional power-sender beam would be sufficient to charge the Test Article’s power accumulators.

Each of the three rings would generate its own distinct field, and the fields would interact with each other. Once they achieved a certain precise pattern of interference, their harmonic resonances would interact as well, cutting a three-dimensional hole in time. In theory, once the gate was activated, anything within the volume of space defined by the spinning inner ring would be projected into the past.

For the first runs, at least, the plan was to leave that volume empty and to expend terrifying amounts of energy merely to send a sphere of high-grade vacuum back in time. Later they would send calibrators back to give them at least some idea of temporal range. The calibrators were barely off the drawing board, but in essence they were to be extremely durable cameras attached to thrusters that would boost them away from Comfort and into highly stable orbits. From there, they would photograph the apparent positions of the stars, and the planets in the Solacian system.

After the calibrators had been launched into the past, special teams would go search for them in their predicted orbits. If any of them were found, the images they had preserved would, with a little luck, provide the needed dating information.

Koffield could not help but wonder. Would this latest last-ditch, all-out effort be enough to save them, or would this effort, coming on top of the Ignition Project and the renewal of Greenhouse, be enough to bankrupt them, defeat them, once and for all? Wandella Ashdin had warned them, long ago, that it was one all-out effort, and then another, and another, that had finally left Glister too exhausted to survive. And yet what choice did they have? It was either take the chance of later failure, or give up and die now.

The key thing was to get past this initial phase. They had to be close to the workshops and resources of Greenhouse and Solace, but that proximity made them easy to spot and vulnerable to attack. Koffield did not speak much of his fears on that point, as there was very little that could be done about them in any event.

But once they got their initial engineering done and were able to transport the Harmonic Gate equipment well away from Solace, to some secret location out between the stars—then they would be much harder to find, far harder to interfere with. Not completely safe, perhaps, but far better-off than they would be here. For the moment, they were months away from any chance of cutting loose from the machine shops and the expertise and equipment available at Greenhouse.

Koffield glanced away from the giant images of the Test Article, and over to the other people lingering on the observation platform. He noticed Elber Malloon, who was looking intently down at the control center itself, as if trying to read its secrets from on high.

He walked over to where the young man was leaning over the railing. “Hello,” he said.

Elber looked up, startled. “Oh. Hello, ah, Admiral. Ah, sir. Is there, ah, something—something wrong?”

“No, no, it’s all right,” Koffield said, well used to people feeling too nervous to talk with him. “It’s just that I like to know the people I’m working with, and we’ve never really had a chance to talk.”

“We—we nearly did, once,” Elber said. “From what I heard about later, it was your first day on SCO Station. You—you and Officer Chandray were on a runcar, going through Ring Park. My family was, ah,staying there. Your car stopped for a minute, right in front of us.” Koffield thought Malloon was blushing, but it was hard to tell in the dim light. “I was, ah, thinking of that, just now, when you were looking at the Test Article. I was just thinking we both took the long way around to get next to each other again.”

Koffield chuckled. “So we did—both of us. The long way around. All of us. Sometimes I feel as if I can’t remember the last time I went straight for what I wanted to get. And now we’re going to go a million years into the past to build the world we want for the future.”

Elber nodded solemnly. “Yes, sir. I’ve thought about that a lot. Seems like such a big, complicated,risky thing to do, going back in time to make a living world.”

Koffield nodded at the spot where he had just been. “I was just standing there, thinking pretty much the same thing. But I keep coming back to the question: What choice do we have?”

Malloon didn’t seem to have any answer for that. The two of them stood there in silence, watching the test crew, each console in a pool of warm yellow light, each set about with the calm glowing colors of its display screens and their operations panels, islands of light that seemed to float in the dim-lit expanses of the command center. The image of the Test Article looked down from the main display, three neatly lettered concentric rings of purest white, hanging in the still darkness of space.

The first intimation that something was wrong came from the Test Article itself. The bright green lettering on ring two was suddenly blazing, glowing, while the letters on the other rings started to blacken and bubble. The whole ring took on a distinct greenish glow, and then the Test Article seemed to lurch to one side.

Down below, the test controllers, moments earlier calm and collected, were suddenly moving frantically. Red lights and warning buzzers went off on every panel. Suddenly people were calling to each other, shouting out alerts that no one could hear in the sudden pandemonium. Koffield heard one voice clearly through the welter of voices. “Temps off scale high!”

That was enough for him. He turned and ran to the comm panel on the back wall of the observation platform and punched in an emergency code.

“This is Koffield to ship’s bridge. This is an emergency! No drill, emergency. Get away from the Test Article, as fast and far as you can. Now, now, now!”

“This is the duty officer,” a puzzled voice answered. “Say again.”

“This is Admiral Koffield,” he said again, hoping his name and title would for once do some good and get the fool to listen. “Look at your views of the Test Article! It’s going to go up! Get us away from it, now!”

Acceleration Klaxons sounded, and there was a massive jolt that knocked Koffield off his feet before the acceleration compensators corrected. In fact, they corrected so well, it was impossible to know if the ship was accelerating at all. He looked behind him, at the big screen, and saw that the view had not changed. Then he realized the imagery must have been coming from a remote camera platform in the first place. There was a small display on the comm panel, and he managed to use it to pull up a tactical display. Good. Good. TheLodestar VII was boosting away at high acceleration.

He turned his attention back to the view of the Test Article. Even in the few seconds his attention had been elsewhere, things had plainly gotten worse. The lettering on rings one and three had burned off completely, the surface of ring two was turning black, and the paint was bubbling up on ring two’s lettering as well. A white-green plume suddenly sprouted from the edge of ring three, the outermost ring. Something was venting violently. The Test Article’s drunken tumble grew worse, more violent. Then whatever had been venting gave way all at once, a bright flash-puff of gas that dissipated at once, revealing an ugly black hole torn in the ring’s outer hull.

Any second now,Koffield thought.Any second .

It happened far too fast to see. One moment the Test Article was still there, badly damaged, but still recognizable. In the blink of an eye later it was gone, replaced by a flash of light, a flaring green-white cloud, and a sky full of cartwheeling debris.

After it was far too late, people started to rush in. DeSilvo, Norla, Sparten ran out onto the observation platform. Down below, Berana Drayax was rushing to her console and starting a hurried—and now pointless—conference with Benzen.

“What happened?” Norla demanded of no one in particular, and suddenly everyone was talking at once. “What was it?” “Did you see it?” “Did it go off by itself?” “What happened?”

Elber Malloon just shook his head, still in shock. “I don’t know. I don’t know.No one knows what happened!”

“No,” Koffield said. He stared out at the expanding cloud of debris that had been all their hopes. “Iknow what happened,” he said.

He had seen it with the eyes of the captain of a fighting ship, the perceptions of a practiced tactician. A long tracking burn shot from a gigawatt laser meant to disable, to pin the target and keep it from escaping. A green laser, which was why the green lettering reflected the light best, and held out the longest. Then, a volley of iron shot launched from a railgun at near-relativistic speed, the kill shot, intended to destroy. A very carefully timed and targeted attack, for the railgun shot must have been fired before the laser in order for the time-on-target to work out. At a guess, the attacking ship would be about fifteen thousand kilometers out, just coming up from behind Comfort’s disk.

A ship that would smash more than just the Test Article. A ship that would turn all their effort, all their hopeful new beginnings, into nothing more than so much smoking wreckage.

“What happened,” he said quietly, “is the end.”