Checkmate Universe Page 7

  Tifflor's hands were tied. True, he could try to make the Druuf commander aware of different possibilities for plaguing the Arkonides but even the commander could not act without authorization from his government. The evaluation of Tifflor's suggestions would take up time—and time was something Terra no longer had.

  In a few months the overlapping front would close. Then there would be no contact between the two universes and no more opportunity to set one enemy against the other.

  Depressed, Tifflor prepared for his new role as commander' of a section of the Druuf fleet. He was convinced that he would never have to exercise any authority in that role. Why not? Because there would not be any battle. The Druufs were staying over here; the Arkonides would stay over there. Before the overlapping zone closed, there would be at most a few small border skirmishes.

  But the plan had counted on a destruction of from 40,000 to 50,000 ships.

  • • •

  Pucky the mouse-beaver gave the roomy interior of the control room one last benevolent look although his vision of it was slightly hampered by the meshwork of the transmitter cage.

  Then he closed his eyes and pressed the button on which his paw had been resting for some time.

  He did not feel anything. When he opened his eyes once more, he found himself in a large hall hewn from solid rock. There were several rows of machines similar to the one Pucky was in and to the one he had been in a few seconds before on board the Drusus .

  He saw a few men standing in front of the transmitter cage door but he paid them no attention. He listened. He extended his telepathic tendrils and tried to pick up the signals broadcast by the man for whose sake he had come here to Hades.

  And he picked them up.

  They sounded like a gentle but clear chirping. They came from the depths of space and Pucky had no trouble learning from them that the man radiating them was enjoying the best of health, the signal transmitter that he carried in his body was a semi-organic device whose functional capability rose and fell with the bodily condition of its carrier.

  Pucky was satisfied. Julian Tifflor was somewhere in the area, no more than a few billion kilometers away by Pucky's reckoning. The telepathic signal transmitter, which Tifflor carried around with him as a sort of parapsychological beacon, was working at normal power.

  Meanwhile the men outside had opened the transmitter door. Pucky strutted out, his bushy beaver tail—a most peculiar addition to a spacesuit—dangling behind him. The men smiled. Pucky noticed and replied with a scornful look. He was used to humans smiling at his appearance. He looked like a cross between a beaver and a mouse that had by mistake gotten too large. People had a large number of fairy tales and fables in which speaking and intelligent animals appeared but when those people encountered in real-life a mouse-beaver, which could speak and think logically, then they didn't know what to make of it in their astonishment. So they smiled.

  Pucky sat on his rear legs, supporting himself with his tail. He made an effort to give his large-eyed mouse face a look of importance and said, lisping, "I was told to get in touch with Capt. Rous immediately. Please inform Capt. Rous I'm here."

  The men began to laugh but after a few seconds they stopped again. Captain Rous came down the corridor between transmitters.

  "I'm already here," he said. "Our transmitters seldom get green lights. Something seems to be going on there, right?"

  He knew how important it was to Pucky to be treated as a human, and gave him his hand. The mouse-beaver returned the greeting with a cheerful, almost charming gesture. "You'd better believe something's going on!" he answered importantly. "A whole lot of things are coming off. Colonel Tifflor and 14 men have taken an obsolete cruiser and gone into the Druuf Universe to tell the Druufs of an imminent attack by the Arkonide fleet." As he spoke, he narrowed his eyes—just as he had seen humans do.

  Rous laughed. I don't quite understand it all," he admitted, "but surely you're going to tell me the whole story."

  "Oh, of course!" Pucky assured him. "As soon as I have something to eat."

  Marcel Rous made a wry expression. "Good grief!" he exclaimed. "We don't have any carrots!"

  Pucky exposed his single large incisor, trying to produce something on the order of a smile. "That's alright," he said generously. "If I have to, I'll be satisfied with a can of whatever you have."

  He excited good humor on all sides. Suggestions were made as to what to offer their guest and Pucky, who loved all kinds of playing, including word-games, did his part to keep the merriment going.

  Meanwhile they crossed the transmitter hall and reached the section of the base where administration and personnel rooms were located, about in the middle of the complex. The entire base had been built in a gigantic mountain cavern. During that time, Pucky continually heard the chirping of the telepathic transmitter Tifflor was carrying, although the mouse-beaver was hardly paying any more attention to it.

  Pucky made it known that he would remain on Hades for a few days—until Tifflor's mission had been successfully carried out and the Newborn was on its way back to Earth. Pucky was shown his quarters and something to eat was brought to him there. Captain Rous gave him some company while the other men went back to their posts. Pucky took advantage of the opportunity to tell Rous what was going on out in Druuf and Einstein space and what was supposed to take place in the future.

  The plan was obvious enough. Rous understood it quickly. He also understood that the base on Hades, one of the inner planets of the Druufon system, would play an important role if Tifflor was in danger or even if the entire operation threatened to fall through.

  While he was occupied in such thoughts and tried to foresee future developments, Pucky calmly and with the best manners demolished the contents of two cans of food. With his meal he drank water from a large cup. He paid no attention to either Rous or the chirping signal from Tifflor's transmitter. He was hungry and when he was hungry he thought of nothing but eating. Rous had almost asked too much of him by wanting to be informed of the situation before Pucky had a chance to appease his hunger.

  Now that he knew everything, he ought to be quiet.

  "Say," Rous began after awhile, contrary to Pucky's expectation. "What's..."

  Pucky heard no more. Rous was still talking but Pucky was not listening. Something had changed. He did not know what but since he was a cautious creature by nature he tried to get to the bottom of the mystery. It was as though a clock had stopped. The ear was so used to the ticking it no longer noticed it. When the ticking stopped, the change was immediately noticeable even though one might not at first know what had happened.

  The comparison with a clock took Pucky down the right track. He suddenly realized what had happened, Tifflor's chirping signal had decreased in intensity. It was not coming in regularly. It had grown weak, fading out and then fading back in. That could mean only one thing, something had happened to Tifflor!

  • • •

  Even before Pucky had left the Drusus by transmitter to begin his visit of several days on Hades, Rhodan had carried on a number of discussions with the Robot Regent on Arkon. The main topic of all of them was the search for the deserters' ship. The Regent wanted to know why, if the ship had been on the way to the Druuf Universe, it had not appeared in the vicinity of the overlapping zone. Rhodan explained to the Regent that there was always the possibility the deserters had slipped through unnoticed the ranks of the blockade ships while on their way to give themselves over to the Druufs.

  The Regent informed his logic sector of the last possibility and received the information that slipping through the blockade front was not at all impossible for a small, inconspicuous ship. In fact, the logic sector calculated a not inconsiderable probability that such an unnoticed penetration of the lines had already been accomplished by the Terran ship in the previous few hours.

  The Regent suddenly found himself facing an entirely new situation. He had been out to capture a ship manned by deserters. He was not interested eit
her in the ship itself or in the fact its crew consisted of deserters. What the Regent wanted was information about the galactic position of Rhodan's home world Terra, and it seemed likely to him that it would be easier to get such information from deserters who had originally planned to defect to the Druufs than from war prisoners, for example, who were captured by force and who remained loyal to their home planet.

  The Regent had done everything possible to block the deserters' path and now he found out that even so there was still the possibility that they had eluded him after all. That meant they were already in the Druuf Universe.

  The Regent began to seriously weigh the possible effects of an invasion of Druuf Space. Before he had shied away from the idea. He was a capable and competent positronic mechanism but his builder had either neglected to equip him with an understanding of the mathematical-physical theory of different time rates or else had not considered it necessary. At the time the Regent was being built, the theory was just being formulated and was considered as the useless product of fantasizing mathematicians. No one believed that a situation would develop in which the theory would be useful. The theory was not thought to have any practical value at all and the Regent was not burdened with it. The result was that the Regent had no 'feeling' for the passage of time. He was a machine, an immortal machine. He could count seconds, yes, but that meant nothing to him. He could not grasp the concept of 'time'.

  Thus the Druuf problem had been incomprehensible, if not uncanny, to him from the first moment on. He had been forced to call on Perry Rhodan for help. When the overlapping front opened up, the Regent had posted a gigantic blockade fleet in front of the gap and was more or less satisfied as long as the Druufs did not succeed in forcing their way into Einstein Space.

  In this case it was necessary to weigh two things against each other, the uncertainty about the consequences of a massive penetration of the Druuf Universe by the Arkonide fleet, as opposed to the possibility of capturing the ship of Terran deserters and in that manner acquiring information concerning Terra's galactic position.

  After several hours of calculations, the Regent decided that the second point decided the issue. Assuming that the Druuf danger was stemmed by the presence of the blockade fleet, there was nothing of more importance to Arkon than learning Terra's position and so having a possibility of knocking this powerful and potential enemy out of galactic politics before it was too late.

  The Regent had therefore decided to send his fleet into Druuf Space. He was of the opinion that the most advisable course would be not to send in the entire fleet but only that portion of it commanded by Door-Trabzon.

  The two Terran super battleships, the Kublai Khan and the Drusus, still stood at the entrance to the Druuf Universe and the Regent hoped to kill two birds with one stone: learning Terra's galactic position and at the same time destroying the ship Perry Rhodan was in. That, if successful, would forever condemn Terra to galactic obscurity.

  Of all this, Perry Rhodan of course knew nothing. Nothing compelled the Regent to keep his worst enemy up to date on his thoughts and plans. Rhodan could only hope that his hint that the Newborn could have slipped unnoticed through the blockade front would be enough to give the Regent ideas—even if not inspiring him to send his fleet into the Druuf Universe.

  Just a few moments after Pucky disappeared in the transmitter, Rhodan learned that his calculations had been right. The Arkonide fleet was in motion, 20,000 ships were preparing to go through the overlapping front into Druuf Space. 20,000 ships were taking off on an adventure with uncertain consequences—and that only to capture a single Terran vessel and take its occupant's prisoner.

  The alarm sounded aboard the Drusus and the Kublai Khan. The great game had begun. In a few moments the Arkonide ships would run up against the defensive front of the Druuf fleet. Rhodan's tactic's were a prime example of how through carefully chosen hints even a master of logic such as a positronic robot brain could be induced to following the will of a human being.

  The only question now was whether Julian Tifflor and the Newborn would find themselves in the middle of the conflict or if they were already safe on Druufon.

  • • •

  Tifflor had given up the Newborn. He had done it with a heavy heart but he saw that he could do nothing else. The 12-man-crew led by Lt. Lubkov was taken on board the Druuf ship and some minutes later the Newborn was blown up according to plan.

  There were two reasons for it. Tifflor was remaining on the Druuf ship so he had to bring his men over if this undertaking was to have even a slight chance of success, he needed every one of them.

  On the other hand, he could not let the Newborn fall into the hands of the Druufs. No one could predict how much the Druufs would find out about Terran technology by dismantling the ship.

  And so the Newborn was destroyed. Lt. Lubkov left the ship last and it was he who armed the bombs. The Newborn became a glowing white cloud of gas slowly expanding into space, its luminosity fading. Half an hour after the explosion there was not the least trace of the old cruiser.

  The Druufs seemed to have no objections to that action. They were probably satisfied with Tifflor's explanation that he had not come to them out of sympathy for the Druuf cause but out of hate for the Arkonides. He played the role of a man who though having acted contrary to the will of his superiors still did everything he could to protect the homeland from which he had defected.

  Tifflor had developed a new plan. If his earlier intentions had proved unworkable, he still did not want to go back to Earth empty-handed. There were two things that made a certain amount of risk worthwhile: the camouflage that made Druuf ships almost invisible and the mysterious engines that enabled their ships to fly faster than light without transitions and springs through hyperspace. Tifflor was convinced that the possession of both secrets would give the Terran Fleet technical superiority over the Arkonides.

  He had been given the control room of the Druuf ship as a headquarters. A squad of Druuf robots stood ready to carry out his every order as quickly as possible and to man the equipment which he could not operate because of his unfamiliarity with Druuf technology. Since Tifflor had taken command, no more Druufs had appeared in the control room.

  Tifflor understood the situation correctly. The robots were not there only to carry out or relay his orders, they also fulfilled the most important function of keeping a watch over him and his companions and preventing any misuse of the power assigned them.

  The fleet section, whose command Tifflor had been given, consisted of a total of 14,000 units. That was three times the total strength of the Terran Fleet

  As before, Tifflor was certain that it would not come to an all-out battle with the Arkonides. He had informed his men of his new plans and was waiting now for the first favorable opportunity to put his ideas in action.

  Of course they were at a disadvantage now that the Newborn had been destroyed. They no longer had a spacecraft in which they could escape when it became necessary. They could not steer a Druuf ship by themselves and the robots would refuse to do it when they became aware of what kind of game the Terrans were trying to play.

  Even so, Tifflor figured he had a chance of making contact with the base on Hades and getting help from there when it was needed. The Druufs would inevitably find out sooner or later that their guests had nothing else in mind than stealing two technical secrets. At the same time they found out, there had to be a spacecraft from Hades lying somewhere near the Druuf flagship, ready to take the 15 Terrans aboard and transport them to safety. The chances of that being so arranged were not especially large but Tifflor reasoned that the gains he might possibly make outweighed the risks he would have to take.

  He knew nothing of the steps Rhodan was taking in the meantime to accelerate events, so he could not know that all his reasoning would shortly prove fruitless.

  As yet he suspected nothing of the disaster rushing towards him.

  • • •

  The cosmos experienced a s
pectacle of vast proportions.

  The firmament began to glow when Admiral Door-Trabzon's Arkonide fleet broke through the overlapping front. The discharge funnel, till now a dull red, half-dark figure, lit up as the break-through of 20,000 ships interrupted and dammed up the equalizing flow of pulsating energy. The universe suddenly seemed to be divided into two halves, one dark, in which the light of stars seemed only a faint glow, and one glowing yellowish red, in which the energy of eons was concentrated and beginning to shine.

  It was a sight such as the galaxy had never before witnessed.

  Even Perry Rhodan was impressed. He had previously calculated that the break-through of so many ships would affect the structure of the contact zone and cause a number of extraordinary effects but he had not believed that one of those effects would be so clearly visible as the bright glow of the entire overlapping front was.

  It looked as though the universe had been ripped apart and through the hole one could see the fires of hell. It was a sight that none who saw would ever forget as long as they lived.

  For more than an hour the orgy of radiant brilliance endured. Then the intensity of the glow began to fade and within a few minutes sank back to its original state. The overlapping front stood once more as a dimly glowing cloud in the middle of space.

  Door-Trabzon's fleet had gone through Remaining behind were 20,000 ships, half the Arkonide blockade fleet, as well as the two Terran spaceships, the Kublai Khan and the Drusus. Each of the Terran ships was powerful in its own way and abounding with energy but in case of trouble hopelessly inferior to the 20,000 Arkonide ships.

  Ten minutes after Door-Trabzon's ships had disappeared, the mouse-beaver Pucky returned via transmitter on board the Drusus, bearing bad tidings.