Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra Read online

  “What kind of answer is that?” Treet kept his temper down, barely.

  “It’s a phenomenon on the level of a black hole,” said Crocker. “Very difficult to describe.”

  “Apparently,” puffed Treet indignantly. “Am I supposed to believe that we’re going to fly through some phenomenon to get to the colony? Like diving through a hole in a wedge of Swiss cheese?”

  “That’s it!” Pizzle nodded vigorously. “But more like pinching Jello. Say you had a block of Jello—that’s space, see?” His hands described a large cube. “You pinch it in the middle and push the two opposite sides together—collapse the center, see?” He brought his index fingers together through the imaginary Jello. “Well, the distance you have to travel decreases the more you pinch, see?”

  “And since in space,” added Crocker, “distance and time are one and the same thing … Voila! Decrease distance and you decrease time, see?”

  Treet was silent for some moments, looking from one to the other of them and back again, a dark frown lowering his brow and pulling his mouth down. “I see,” he said finally, “but I don’t like it.”

  “Take it easy,” Crocker soothed. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “How do you know? You just said nobody knows what happens inside a wormhole.”

  “Our best guess is that you just pop on through—like riding a trolley through a tunnel. Only you’ve carved about forty or fifty years off your travel time.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Treet softly. “Both of you are crazy. You can let me off right here. I’ll walk back.”

  “Look,” said Pizzle, “it’ll be all right. There’s a book I can call up for you that’ll tell you all about wormholes—what there is to tell, that is.”

  A chime sounded over the speaker system. “Back to the bridge,” said Crocker, jumping up, obviously glad for an excuse to leave. “You read that book, Treet, and we’ll talk again later.”

  Treet watched the pilot pull himself hand-over-hand up the wall toward the cockpit. Even at one-quarter gravity, Treet doubted he could have managed the feat. Feeling Pizzle’s eyes on him, he turned and glared at the gnome. “Well?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking that it’s going to be a long trip. We might as well be friends.” He paused, waiting for Treet to say something polite, like: Oh, of course, let’s by all means be the very best of chums. When Treet said nothing, he continued. “You play Empires?”

  “No,” Treet said coldly. “I detest games of chance.”

  “Oh, there’s no chance involved—all intellect. It’s a lot like chess, only bigger and more subtle.” He grinned his snaggle-toothed impish grin again. “I’ll teach you. How about it?”

  Treet shrugged, getting up. “Some other lifetime perhaps. If you’d call up that book for me, I’d appreciate it.” He turned and bounded from the table, leaving Pizzle to clean up.

  “That slime devil Varro,” Treet muttered, “better have a wonderful explanation for all this, or there’s going to be a mutiny!”

  EIGHT

  “I am sorry, Mr. Treet, but as I have already explained, Mr. Varro is in Maracaibo for at least three weeks. He cannot be reached due to the recent severance of diplomatic relations. No calls are being transmitted between Venezuela and League countries.”

  Treet felt his temper rising dangerously. He wanted to reach through the screen and shake the smug young lady on the other side. “Then I must have a word with Chairman Neviss. It concerns a matter of utmost importance. Life and death,” he added. “Please, you must let me speak to him.”

  “Mr. Treet, you know I would like to help you. I cannot. No one may speak to the Chairman without clearance.”

  “Get me clearance!”

  “I would love to arrange for clearance, Mr. Treet, as soon as you give me your personal identification code. As you refuse—”

  “Refuse! I don’t have a code, dammit!”

  “Anger won’t help you, Mr. Treet. Perhaps you would like to call back when you have calmed down.”

  “Wait, don’t hang up. Look, there must be someone there who can authorize clearance without a PI code—”

  “Only Mr. Varro—”

  “Besides him. Who else? There must be some other way.”

  “Well,” the young lady paused, “I could have Chief of Security do a PSP on you—that’s a Personnel Security Probe. Upon completion of the PSP you would be issued a personal identification code, but—”

  “Do it.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Just do it.”

  “Mr. Treet, it takes six weeks to do a thorough PSP.”

  “Grrr!” Treet growled and slammed his fist down on the EOT button on the console, ending the transmission. Instantly he regretted the move. There were still several things he wanted to say to the officious young witch on the other end.

  Due to sunspot interference, it had taken him the better part of thirty-four hours to get a call through to Cynetics. All that time the Zephyros streaked ever closer to rendezvous with the wormhole, and with every passing hour the possibility of turning back diminished even further.

  Not that there had ever been much chance of turning back in the first place. But Treet had at least hoped to scorch Varro with a few well-chosen words. Apparently even that was impossible. He had begun to think that Varro had caused the sunspots in order to avoid being contacted. And as far as Treet was concerned, the story about Varro’s trip to Maracaibo was an out-and-out lie. The scumbag just didn’t want to talk to him. It was the oldest tactic in the executive manual: don’t call us, we’ll call you.

  Treet sat with clenched fists and teeth, grimacing at the empty screen. He knew now that he had been tricked, and that Varro also knew that he knew and was therefore avoiding him. That more than anything else angered him: the impotence of playing the dupe.

  He shoved back his chair, gliding halfway across the room with the force of his movement. They were under thrust most of the time now, flying perpendicular to the orbital plane of Earth— that was as much as he had been able to get from Crocker about their route—and the acceleration created a comfortable one-half G, which allowed them near-normal conditions.

  He was still sitting in the center of his compartment when he heard a muffled thump—a sound he had come to recognize as someone knocking on the padding around his door. “What do you want?” he hollered.

  “Can I come in?” Pizzle yelled back.

  “No!”

  The door folded back regardless. “Sorry, Treet. I feel silly talking to closed doors. Let me in, okay?”

  “It seems I can’t keep you out!”

  “Look, I brought you something.”

  Treet still stared at the blank computer screen across the room. “What is it?”

  “It’s that book I told you about. Some of it, that is. I only printed up the pertinent chapters. Here, take it.”

  “Go away. I’m not in the mood.”

  Pizzle put the book on the bed and took a seat there himself. “I was wondering if you’ve seen our fellow passenger yet.”

  “No, I haven’t. So what?” Treet turned and looked at his guest for the first time.

  “Well, I haven’t either. And it’s going on two days now. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Not particularly. He probably just wants to avoid having to play that stupid game with you.”

  “You said you liked Empires. You almost won last time.”

  “I lied. Besides, you let me win just so I will keep playing with you, which I won’t.”

  “Two days though. That’s a long time. One of us should have seen him.”

  “Did you ask Crocker?”

  Pizzle nodded. “Sure. He said he didn’t know who it was, but that he wasn’t concerned and furthermore it was none of my business.”

  “There you are. It’s none of your business.”

  “But two whole days, Treet. What if something happened to him? Maybe he had a heart attack on liftoff or somethin
g like that.”

  Treet thought about this. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Be a spy with me. Help me find out who it is.”

  For a moment Treet considered this. “It does seem a trifle strange, as you say. But then,” he added grumpily, “it wouldn’t be the first strange thing about this trip.”

  “Like what?” Pizzle sat cross-legged on the bed, elbow on knee, resting his receding chin in his hand.

  Treet got to his feet. “You really want to know? Okay. First, there’s the supposedly oh-so-secret nature of this trip. Only I find out from you in casual conversation that you were one of five hundred applicants. Seems like everybody and his mother knows about this colony but me. Secondly, how come I’ve never heard of this wormhole business? I’m an intelligent person; I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve never heard mention of the alleged phenomenon. Thirdly, why were they so anxious to get me aboard this crate? The ink wasn’t even dry on the line when I was hustled aboard. Why the big hurry? And why won’t Crocker tell me anything? What more is there I’m not supposed to know? Shall I go on?”

  Pizzle shrugged. “You’re making more of this than there is, really. I can explain everything.”

  “Go ahead; be my guest. I wish you would.”

  “Well, the mission is secret. Sure, they took applications, but that’s standard for any transfer situation. I knew only that there was a hefty pay bonus and a promotion for going. I’d been looking for a way out of the Northwestern Hemisphere Division for over a year and when the chance came up, I grabbed it.”

  “Even though you didn’t know where you were going or what your assignment would be?”

  “Didn’t matter to me. Anything was better than NH under Oberman, not to mention there were at least seven guys ahead of me in line for promotion. I’d have been eighty-five before I joined senior staff!”

  “Still, you knew about it. Varro told me it was a secret.”

  “It was for me too, up until the time I boarded the Zephyros. There was a confidential packet waiting for me in my cabin: length of trip, our destination, my assignment, that sort of thing. I’d never heard of Empyrion Colony either, until after I read my packet.”

  “What about wormholes?”

  “Sure, I know about them. The concept has been around a long time. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them, really. But then again, they’re not exactly common knowledge. In fact, they were entirely a mathematic speculation until Cynetics discovered one lurking on the rim of our solar system. On second thought, maybe you wouldn’t have heard of them unless you read astrophysics abstracts or professional journals.”

  “How did you get so chummy with them then?”

  “I read old SF novels.” Pizzle’s close-set eyes gleamed impishly.

  “Sci-fi, huh?”

  “Speculative fiction, if you please. There were some great books written about wormhole travel just before the turn of the century. Great stuff! Timeslip is a classic. My favorite, though, is Pyramid on the Thames.”

  “Okay, so I’m out of touch,” Treet sniffed. “Now, why the big hurry to get me on board? Was that so I wouldn’t change my mind?”

  “Well, if you know anything about wormholes at all—”

  “Which I don’t.”

  “—you’d know that one of the major theories is that they are not a constant event.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They come and go. They change. They move around. One might appear one place for a while and then disappear, only to reappear somewhere else. They’re sort of elastic, like I said. Where a black hole is a fixed phenomenon, wormholes—displacement tubes or dilation tunnels, as they’re sometimes called—are more unpredictable.”

  “Therefore?”

  “Therefore, you have to move when there’s one open or you miss your chance. Obviously—”

  “Cynetics found out the wormhole was open now and didn’t want to lose the opportunity.”

  “Righto mundo! Who knows when it might come again.” Pizzle took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt.

  “You just said they move around.”

  “Relatively speaking. As far as anyone knows, they usually occur in the same general vicinity of space. Whatever kind of force or disturbance creates a wormhole operates in a localized region—you know, like a whirlpool in a river. It swirls around, opens, and closes, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, stronger one time, weaker another, and so on. That’s how it is.”

  “And we’re going to dive through the eye of this whirlpool.”

  “Banzai!”

  Treet gazed balefully at Pizzle, his brow wrinkled in thought. “Granting for the moment that what you say is true—which I intend to check out thoroughly—but say that it’s true, just how did the first transport know that they’d reach Epsilon Eridani by jumping through this wormhole? How could they know that?”

  “My guess is they didn’t.”

  “Great heavens! You mean they dove in blind?”

  Pizzle shrugged lightly. “It was a colony ship, remember. They were outfitted to start a colony, which they were intent on doing anyway, so what difference would it make where? They were pioneers. Someone had to be the first.”

  “But how do we know they made it?”

  “You’ve got me there,” Pizzle admitted. “Ask Crocker; maybe he knows something.”

  “We could be diving into … well, anything. Or nothing. There might be a sun at the other end and we’d burn up, or maybe an asteroid field and we’ll be smashed to cosmic dust. What happens if the wormhole closes while we’re still inside? What then?”

  “Look, what do you want from a bookworm? Nobody has ever done this before, so we’ll just have to wait and find out.”

  “Wrong. The first transport found out, didn’t they?” Treet huffed. “Well, where are they now?”

  Treet sat hunched on a folding stool in the crowded cockpit of the Zephyros. Pizzle sat next to him with his elbows on his knees, trying to take up less space. Crocker swiveled in his captain’s chair, twirling his hat in his hand. After their discussion, Treet and Pizzle had gone directly to the Captain to find out what he knew of the fate of the first colonists.

  “Epsilon Eridani,” Crocker said, “is an extensive system. We know that it has at least thirteen planets in the OLZ—that’s Optimum Life Zone.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know that the colony ship even reached Epsilon Eridani, let alone started a colony?”

  “We had communication, of course. I have read all the transcripts myself. There were three communications received—one month apart for the first three months. Earth-time. The first one came when the ship reached the system—we know that they got through the wormhole without any problems. The second was sent when they identified Empyrion—that’s what they named it—and decided to settle there. The third and last came when they had finished their survey of the planet and had started raising the environment dome.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing after that.”

  “What happened?”

  “The wormhole closed. No more signals could be sent through the conduit, so to speak.”

  “No doubt they’re still sending signals,” offered Pizzle, “but without the wormhole it takes a whole lot longer. We just haven’t received them yet.”

  “Maybe the signals stopped because they all died!”

  “Possible,” Crocker allowed, “but highly improbable.”

  “But why? You said anything could happen. Anything!”

  “Theoretically yes. But you have to figure that once they reached the planet they knew what to expect. Colony ships are prepared for the unknown. Empyrion is uninhabited by any thinking creatures, and has little second-order animal life—certainly nothing to worry about. The probes would also have verified atmosphere, weather patterns, and climatic trends. There were no surprises there.”

  “Microorganisms, viruses, bacteria—what about those? Maybe they got down there and succum
bed to a killing virus.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. They would not have disembarked until the environment dome was raised and the air and ground beneath it sterilized. Only then would they have actually set foot on the soil.”

  Treet remained silent. He had exhausted all his objections for the moment. He looked around at Pizzle, who sat nodding. “It’s just like the IASA colonization manual recommends.”

  “Right by the book. All contingencies foreseen.”

  Crocker looked at Treet’s unhappy face. “Look, it’s going to be all right. Believe me. I read the transcripts. By all reports the planet is an absolute paradise. You’ll love it. When we get there you’ll see what I mean. An absolute paradise.” Crocker spun in his huge, padded chair as an electronic chime sounded. “Now if you two will excuse me,” he said, “I’ve got a little housekeeping to do.”

  Treet stood. “Thanks, I feel so much better,” he said without meaning it. “See you later.”

  Pizzle rose and followed Treet out of the cockpit. They clambered into the connecting gangway and through the forechamber along to the passenger compartments. At Pizzle’s door they paused, and Pizzle yawned. “I’m going to get some sleep. Maybe you’d better, too. It might be a long night.”

  Treet glanced up quickly. “Huh?”

  “We’re spying tonight, remember? You said if I went with you to talk to Crocker, you’d help me spy tonight. Well, I went with you, didn’t I?”

  “But you were on his side. You were supposed to be on mine.”

  “His side? There were no sides. You had some questions and we got answers. What more do you want?”

  Pizzle had him there: what more did he want? Why was he still not satisfied? “All right,” Treet agreed reluctantly. “I’ll help you spy.” He turned and went into his stateroom.

  “Good,” called Pizzle after him. “I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.” He watched Treet disappear into his room and the door sigh shut behind him. “Loosen up,” he called. “You’ll live longer.”

  NINE

  Pizzle’s idea of spying was to hide in some cramped place and wait long hours for the quarry to show up. He reasoned that unless separate supplies had been stocked in the mysterious stranger’s cabin, which he doubted, then the man must eat when the others were sleeping. So far he had seen no evidence that anyone had been surreptitiously using the galley, but then as long as the person cleaned up after himself, there was no way anyone could tell.