Renegades of the Future Read online

  Reginald Bell watched him with narrowed eyes.

  Rhodan continued. "Maj. Ostal's operation has met with considerable success. As we all know, the Robot Regent on Arkon has placed top priority on one particular objective these past number of years—and that is to discover the galactic position of the Earth. Ostal has succeeded in giving him a false lead. A powerful fleet of robot ships is presently on its way to the planet which was indicated as the Earth by the false coordinates on board Ostal's ship. It's a world that lies deep in the interior of the Milky Way. The Regent will eventually find out that we've led him on a wild goose chase."

  He fell silent, failing to note Sikerman's astonished expression. The latter was unable to see any connection between Maj. Ostal's mission and the disappearance of the Gazelle.

  "But that's not the main point," continued Rhodan. "The important thing is that we recognize how badly the Regent is itching to locate the Earth and that he will strike at the first moment he obtains the correct information."

  Sikerman could not suppress his curiosity any longer. "Please, sir!" he blurted out as Rhodan made a slight pause. "I can't see what the hijacking of the Gazelle has to do with the Arkonide robot's curiosity!"

  Rhodan turned and raised his brows at him. "But it's all quite simple," he answered in some surprise. "You know what kind of men Walt Hollander had around him. All that most of them wanted was to get rich in a hurry and they figured a revolution would be the shortest route. You know there were very few of the Nature Philosophers who were serious about their stated ideals. And those few have long since seen the error of their ways. So the culprits we're dealing with now are of the first type. They're looking for the big payoff, nothing else. Can you possibly imagine where? "

  Sikerman appeared to be grasping the import of this but before he could answer Rhodan explained it himself:

  "1st Lt. Chellish's Gazelle is the same ship that we sent to Grautier several years ago with the assignment to stand watch over the settlers. Its positronic data bank contains everything that could be of importance to a certain galactic power—namely the true coordinates of the Earth's position!

  "There's no doubt about it at all. Suttney and his two cohorts are on their way to Arkon to betray the Earth and sell our location to the Robot Regent."

  2/ WANTED: AN ARKONIDE CONTACT

  Under dateline of 5 Oct. 2042, an announcement appeared in the Terrania Times, an independent tabloid:

  With reference to the Daily News article of Oct. 3 concerning the escape of three deserters from the Myrtha 7 Fleet Base, our informants have learned that Solar Administrator Rhodan is presently on Myrtha 7 and that the incident in question turns out to be a matter of high priority concern. Apparently the situation created by the theft of the Gazelle class scoutship is considered to be so serious that it has occasioned the imposition of a news blackout at the base. This appears to indicate that from now on the public may expect to have only the synthetic reassurances of the Ministry of Information dished out to them.

  Our own opinion of the situation is that if we are actually endangered then Earthmen and all inhabitants of the Solar Empire should be considered sufficiently stable to be able to face such a threat openly. The practice of releasing obviously false and security-edited bulletins to the world should be avoided. This kind of information only breeds distrust and creates confusion precisely when the danger presents itself in spite of all attempts at concealment and at the moment when everything depends on a full and clear understanding.

  • • •

  The man who stood in the bulkhead hatchway of the control room was Ronson Lauer. Gunther Chellish knew that his game was up.

  Slowly his habit of cool deliberation returned to him.

  He looked from Lauer to Suttney, who still stood next to his chair, and suddenly Suttney's strategy became clear to him. Suttney knew that he would try to resist doing whatever was asked of him. But the man also knew that Chellish would be relying on his and Roane's inexperience in matters of galactic navigation and would count on being able to fool them about the course of the Gazelle instead of offering resistance to two armed men while he himself was unarmed. So Suttney had kept Lauer in the background so that the takeoff could proceed without friction of any kind. At the right moment he had presented him in order to convince Chellish he'd have to stop fooling around.

  For Ronson Lauer would be sitting right next to him when he worked out the coordinates for the next hyperjump. And Lauer was not a man who could be taken in by any navigation trickery.

  "Alright, you heard what Suttney wants you to do," he said by way of opening their relationship. "Turn on the stellar scan and pick out a sector where we'll be safe. Move! What are you waiting for?"

  Ronson Lauer was a small man with a ferret-like shiftiness and quickness about him. Chellish could not place his age easily, figuring it to be somewhere between 30 and 50. He appeared to be a bit boisterous and with a certain capacity for humor but there was a flavor to it that didn't quite set well with Chellish.

  He decided to ignore Lauer's orders and to center on Suttney as the responsible spokesman of the group. He looked at Suttney questioningly.

  "That's right," Suttney nodded, "we can't lose any time. Start working out the data for the next jump. You've got an assistant now..." He indicated Lauer. "So you should be able to speed things up. Right?"

  Chellish did not feel obliged to answer. He turned his seat back to the flight console and pressed a readout select button. The intercom screen over the panel began to flicker. While the readout screen was warming up, he took the time necessary to scan his flight instruments.

  Relative to Myrtha the Gazelle was moving along at 900 miles per second. The course veered radically away from the Myrtha System. Within a circumference of 10 light-years there was no object of sufficient mass to even get a rise out of the proximity sensor. According to a not too exact parallax measurement, the nearest star was about three light-years away.

  Meanwhile the title page of the Galacticatalogue had appeared on the readout screen. Chellish turned once more to Suttney. "Don't you have any definite spot in mind at all? Where am I supposed to transit to?"

  When Suttney glanced at Lauer again, the latter shrugged his shoulders carelessly. "More or less up for grabs, I'd say. Main thing is, don't put us in a hot spot. Give any Earth spaceships a wide berth. I'd suggest somewhere in the center of the galaxy."

  Chellish nodded. He pulled the readout terminal board closer to him, which with its button rows of numbers and letters was reminiscent of a desk calculator. He depressed a series of the buttons and then activated a red switch. The title page of the catalog disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by another. It consisted principally of a dizzying mass of points, ciphers and letters. Between individual points, lines had been drawn in, most of them dotted. A heading on the upper edge read: General Index Map, Sector 10000-12000 parsecs, Theta 0–1°, Phi 89-90°.

  "Good!" Lauer spontaneously. "That's just the bailiwick! Look at the breakdown sheet on parsecs 11000 to 11100, Theta 0–0, 10 minutes, Phi 89° 50 minutes to 90°."

  Chellish complied. Skilfully he fed the instructions into the terminal board and then switched on the data retrieval button. A few moments later a new index map appeared on the readout screen which showed the heading Lauer had called for. Chellish noted that outside of a white background and the black points and lines the map did not contain any other colors. This made him feel more insecure than ever. The region Lauer had selected was not under anybody's control or influence. It seemed as though these three deserters actually wanted to search out some inconspicuous spot where they could spend the rest of their lives without being disturbed by anybody.

  He stared at the screen and waited for Lauer to say something. His eyes wandered over the numbers marked alongside the black dots representing the stars without actually reading them, since he was held in suspense as to which of these 2000 or so points Lauer would decide on.

  The Galacticatalogue
was an Arkonide product as were all star catalogs used in Terranian space navigation. More than 10,000 years had been necessary to create an Atlas of this magnitude and degree of comprehensiveness. Thousands of registry ships had been involved in gathering all this stellar information.

  Of course this didn't mean that the catalog contained all the stars in the galaxy. Experts on Earth had estimated the work to be abut 75 or 80% complete but actually only about 7% of the stars listed had ever been visited. The rest had been indicated by numbers and letters, which was quite sufficient for galactonautics officers to find their way around.

  Terra had reproduced the Arkonide catalogs in their entirety, retaining the Arkonide names and converting only the linear and angular measurements in order not to have to also assimilate Arkonide mathematics. The unit of distance was the parallax-second, abbreviated parsec, and the unit of angular distance was the degree of arc. The point of origin of the coordinate system that was the basis of the catalog was Arkon. Various people on Earth had taken the view that this should be changed. As a rising new power, Terra should not have to use a catalog that had Arkon as its central reference. Basically it would not be a difficult task to convert all the catalog values using Terra as a new central reference but it would represent a tremendous investment in computer time.

  But the actual reason in favor of keeping Arkon as the coordinate center had been quite something else. If the Solar Empire was to continue to develop without interruption, Terra's galactic position had to remain secret. In view of the many and varied means that were at the disposal of the potential enemy, maintaining this particular secret was no mean task. It required a great deal of costly and tedious preparations and precautions. In fact it would have been completely insurmountable if there were catalogs showing the Earth or rather the Terran sun as a central point of the coordinates. Anybody wishing to discover the galactic position of the Earth then would only have to compare a few entries of the Arkonide catalog with equivalent entries in the Earth catalog. So it was that Arkon had been kept the center of coordinates.

  The coordinate system was spherically symmetrical. The radius vector gave the distance of the object from the coordinate origin, that is Arkon, in parsecs. The angle formed between the radius vector and the vertical axis was Theta, and that formed with the horizontal axis was Phi. The system was so standardized that the center of the galaxy lay at coordinates Theta 90° and Phi 0°. The length of the radical vector to the center point amounted to 10,936 parsecs.

  The individual data cards or sheets of the catalog represented galactic sectors and they were selected in such a manner as to be nearly all equal in terms of cubic space covered. Since the microfilm record of these sheets was necessarily 2-dimensional, the altitude or distance of individual stars above or below the film surface was again designated by parsec measurements.

  The star points were accompanied by still other markings which were the coordinates used for fixing a stellar position in hyperspace. These added coordinates were transferred by a constant conversion factor into energy units that a propulsion system would have to yield for a spaceship to reach a specific star via transition, that is by means of a hyperjump. So these latter were closely related to what were referred to as 'jump data' in the jargon of the galactonauts.

  Meanwhile, Ronson Lauer had made his decision. He reached for the terminal control set which looked so much like a calculator. Turning a small thumbwheel, he brought one of the 2,000 stars to the center of the viewscreen. When the black dot representing the star reached the cross-hair lines, Lauer pressed another button which caused the displayed field of vision to be magnified. Now the almost microscopic data near the selected star became readable.

  "That one," said Lauer tersely. "A Sol-type—just the right one for us."

  Chellish noted that Lauer turned toward Suttney. "Whatever you think," agreed the latter with a nod.

  Lauer gestured carelessly at the viewscreen. "So start your calculations, Chellish," he ordered. "You know, of course, how it works: parsec differential between our location and the point of destination; the ship's mass, and energy conversion of the catalog data. So move it, will you? What are you waiting for?"

  Chellish realized that Lauer wanted to show off his knowledge to him but since it was relatively schoolboy routine he regarded the demonstration as somewhat ridiculous. As he initiated the calculations somewhat mechanically and absently, his mind was on the three deserters who had stolen a Gazelle and he wondered what business they had snooping around in the vicinity of a nameless sun that was 7500 parsecs or about 25,000 light years distant and where neither Terranians nor Arkonides had ever ventured before.

  For the present he didn't have the slightest idea...

  • • •

  "It's perfectly clear what we have to do," explained Perry Rhodan. "We have to search for the missing Gazelle. It must be found before those three succeed in causing us trouble. I'm counting on their uncertainty, though, to make them trip themselves up sooner or later so we can track them down. And I'm also relying on first Lt. Chellish, in case he's still alive. He'll find a way to give us some kind of a signal."

  "At the moment there is nothing more important than the search for that ship. We still have a number of months yet before the expected overlap of the two time planes, so we don't have to hurry ourselves in that regard. We can call up the entire fleet to look for the Gazelle."

  "And as for the 20,000 micro-technologists of the Swoon race now living on Earth, we can give them the job of developing a piece of equipment that will make it possible to trace a ship in transition in spite of its built-in resonance frequency absorber."

  He remained silent for awhile and then began to smile. "It turns out that our highly celebrated invention of the absorber is working to our disadvantage here. We've installed an apparatus on board the stolen craft that now makes it impossible for us to find a trace of it. So we have to develop a weapon to counter our own weapon in order to extricate ourselves from this dilemma!"

  He paused a second time to glance along the row of officers who were seated before him, until his gaze rested on Lt.-Col. Sikerman. "I'll have to requisition a lot of your men, Sikerman," he continued. "The ships stationed on Grautier must be fully manned. Meanwhile, you will continue constructing the base. But don't think for one moment that the importance of your work here has diminished—you keep it rolling!"

  Then his gaze wandered to Maj. Van Aafen, or 'Teldje' as he was known to his men. "Van Aafen, I want you to make a flight to Earth. You will be given written notes and instructions which will inform Marshal Freyt concerning the situation here. You are hereby commissioned to hand the pertinent documents personally to the Marshal. A cruiser will be placed at your disposal as a courier ship."

  As van Aafen acknowledged the assignment with a nod of his head, Rhodan fixed his gaze on the man next to him, Capt. Aurin. "You get the main spotlight, Aurin," he said. "You're going to be the one to send out the Fleet alarm. You will get your forming up and deployment instructions in... say 40 minutes. In the meantime you'd better make the necessary preparations."

  Rodes Aurin stood up, saluted and exited.

  "That is all, gentlemen," Rhodan concluded. "I thank you!"

  Instantly there was a scraping of chairs and a shuffling of feet and within seconds after Perry Rhodan had uttered his final word the small briefing chamber was empty.

  A mighty force was set in motion. The Earth prepared to protect its secret, arming itself against an enemy who would strike as soon as he discovered where the Earth was located. Earth prepared to demonstrate its power—a power which had been created in less than 70 years and yet dared to compete with that of the 10,000-year-old Empire of Arkon.

  • • •

  They had left him alone with Oliver Roane. They had also disconnected the intercom so that from the pilot's position he would not be able to know what was going on. Suttney had told him to go into the transition within one half hour and Chellish would have given his eye t
eeth to know what Suttney and Ronson Lauer would be up to during that time. But under the circumstances there was no possibility of finding out.

  Oliver Roane sat behind him, more or less in the center of the control room, and still held the pistol in his hand, the barrel of which was aimed unwaveringly at his back. The control panel of the telecom transceiver equipment lay within easy reach of Roane but not himself. Chellish closed his eyes and mentally reviewed the switch settings necessary to make the transmitter beam out a trace signal. There were only two: turning on the main power switch that would put the transmitter 'on the air', and hitting the code button which would feed in a prepared I.D. trace to the transmitter. That was all. It was a move that a practiced technician could accomplish in half a second.

  But even if it had only required a hundredth of a second and only one switch, Chellish could not have manoeuvred it. Roane was fully alert and he had twice demonstrated already how swiftly he could react.

  Gunther Chellish found himself trapped in a condition of unalleviated frenzy.

  He began to fool with the flight console board. Before leaving the room, Ronson Lauer had looked it over carefully and explained to the others that Chellish could not get into any mischief with it. After the jump data had been fed to the propulsion section, the main release lever for the hypertransition had been electrically blocked with a time relay. It would only release when the prescribed half hour was up.

  So Oliver Roane took no particular exception to Chellish's handling of the controls. Out of boredom he turned back to the stellar catalog and reexamined the visual readout concerning their target star. When he saw that the data here were equally boring, he switched to the adjacent sector sheet.

  This area was partially colored in yellow, which meant that this part of the galaxy lay within an Arkonide realm of influence. The yellow portion penetrated the displayed star sheet like an inundation, spreading from the right-hand edge to the middle of the screen. Chellish switched on the sectional magnification and observed the star points' names and navigational data.