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Concerning Agent Rebecca Thanarat, Havot was considering several courses
of action, all of which had certain drawbacks. For the moment he had to be
sure, at all costs, that she was in love with him, content with their
relationship. Havot smoothly stepped up the pace of his campaign of seduction,
keeping in mind that getting her into bed was infinitely less important than
winning her total devotion. Frequently, he had observed, the two did not go
very closely together.
Havot tended to believe Rebecca's assurance that no other copy existed
of the incriminating message. But naturally he could not be absolutely sure.
He had disposed of the first paper copy very carefully.
Like many of the other women who had fallen in love with
Havot at one point or another, Becky wanted to know all about his background.
He repeated to her with some elaboration his earlier lie that he had
worked as a dealer in educational materials.
The story had now expanded to make him a former teacher.
She wasn't that interested in pursuing details of Havot's fictitious
teaching career. "You were going to tell me how you got into trouble with
that awful police department."
"Well& it had to do with an abused child." By now Havot had had the time
necessary to prepare a prizewinning narrative. He knew Becky well enough to
know how her sympathies could be most easily aroused and enlisted.
Aboard the several ships of the pursuing task force-now preparing for
the first c-plus jump out of the system-the commodore and his chief
advisers, including the subordinate ship captains, were gathered in
electronic conference, the optelectronic brains of the ships themselves
exchanging speech in the form of scrambled signals.
The leaders summoned into conference by the commodore were military
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people, except for the Carmpan-who this time courteously declined the
honor-
and the
Humanity
Superintendent.
The planners continued to struggle with the problem of the enemy's
motivation in their sudden withdrawal and flight.
The electronic spoor of the mysterious lone raider of three centuries
ago had long since dissipated. But on the old records the course of
Dirac's berserker was easily discernible, and telescopic observations
confirmed the fact that today's powerful but swiftly fleeing force of death
machines were indeed staying very close to their predecessor's vanished track.
Havot was not usually invited to sit in on Prinsep's strategic
planning sessions. But much of what was said in these discussions soon became
common knowledge aboard ship, as did the observed behavior of the
contemporary enemy.
To anyone who studied the problem, it began to seem that the modern
berserkers' discovery of their predecessor's escape route must indeed have
been the event that triggered their own abrupt flight from the Imatran
surface, virtually in midraid.
One of Prinsep's advisers was thinking aloud. "The conclusion seems
irresistible that the enemy just pulled out the instant they identified the
path taken by their predecessor, Dirac's berserker, on its way out of the
system-in fact the evidence strongly
suggests that this year's berserkers came to Imatra primarily to gain that
information
. The record they took from the underground archive contains nothing
else that could conceivably be of interest to them."
"No! No no no!" The commodore was shaking his head emphatically.
"Quite unacceptable! We can't be satisfied with the conclusion that they
must be pursuing one of their own machines."
"And who can say dogmatically what our enemies will find interesting
and what they will not? The record they went to such pains to steal
contains an astronomical number of bits of information."
Prinsep made a dismissive gesture. "So does a picture of a blank
wall. A great deal of what technically must be called information is
really meaningless. What else in that recording, besides their
colleague's route, could have any importance for berserkers?"
Prinsep paused for emphasis: "When a berserker computes that saving a few
seconds is more important than terminating one more Solarian human
life-you may take it that from that berserker's point of view,
something very unusual, very important, is going on."
Meanwhile, the OH superintendent who had privately doubted
Prinsep's determination sat silent and thoughtful, looking less knowing
and more grave. The retreating berserkers continued to follow very closely
the route followed by the chase of three hundred years ago. Therefore,
so did the hunting pack of Solarian humans and machines.
The contemporary chase wore on, hour after hour, day after day, with
the Solarian fleet now seeming to gain a little ground and now again to
lose a little. All of the human pilots were
military people trained in formation flight, and worked smoothly with their
associated computers. Commodore Prinsep was pushing the chase hard, but
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not hard enough to have cost him any ships.
The first c-plus jump essayed by the fleet's astrogators was far from a new
experience for Havot, who in his comparatively short lifetime had seen a
great many of the Galaxy's thousands of
Solarian-settled worlds. Many more than most people ever got to see.
But travel outside and beyond the limitations of normal space was a totally
new experience for agent Thanarat.
The first jump lasted for a subjective ship's time of some ten seconds, long
enough for Becky, with Havot romantically at her side, to be initiated into
the sensation of looking out through a cleared port into the
eye-watering, nerve-grating irrelevance of flightspace-a scene often
described as dim lights behind a series of distorting lenses.
Their cabins were both too far inboard to boast an actual cleared
port. And to call up such a port on holostage was not the way, Havot assured
her, to experience the full effect. There was something in the quality of the
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