According to the first machine, the cryotanks were stored in regular rows within the main cryowomb. Drake strained his eyes into the darkness ahead. He could see nothing but the faint blue light in front of him. He was at the mercy of his robot guide, who must know the deep vault’s geometry and contents through programmed memory.
Encased within his double suit, Drake followed the blue glimmer, on and on. Finally it halted. Drake moved closer, and by its feeble illumination he saw the outline of a cryotank. It was like a great coffin, two meters long and a meter wide and deep. Although the cryowomb was kept at a controlled temperature, for double security each tank also contained its own temperature control and source of refrigeration.
“This is the one?” He crouched low, seeking the identification.
He was not sure that the blue pyramid could hear him, understand him, or talk to him, until he heard the sibilant whisper in his helmet. “It is the one.”
“I cannot see any identification. Are you sure it is the cryocorpse of Anastasia Werlich?”
“I am sure.”
“Then lift it carefully, and bring it with you. Lead us back to the surface and to my ship.”
He could see no way that the blue pyramid could exert force, but after a moment of hesitation the cryotank lifted in the low gravity. Two seconds more, and the blue gleam was moving again through the vault. It led the way steadily upward, to the first-level chamber where Drake’s outer suit was removed. Twenty minutes more, and he was supervising the careful placement of Ana’s cryotank in the aft storage compartment of his ship.
The machine attendants had gone and he was ready to tell the ship to lift from the surface of Pluto, when the communication panel lit with a busy constellation of red and yellow lights.
“The removal of a cryotank from the Pluto cryowomb, and its placement aboard this ship, is unauthorized,” said a quiet voice. “The cryotank must be returned at once.”
Drake cursed his own stupidity. The actions of the machines must be reported automatically to some central data bank. It was only his good luck that screening -for anomalies apparently took a few minutes to perform.
Rather than replying, he locked the outside ports and gave the order for instant departure from the surface.
“The removal of any cryotank from the Pluto vaults is forbidden without proper authorization,” repeated the voice. “You do not have such authorization. Do not attempt to leave Pluto. It will not be permitted. ”
Drake ignored the warning. He dropped into the pilot’s seat. Why hadn’t the ship taken off? When he left Earth and Mars, his commands had been executed immediately.
He could guess the answer: the ship’s automatic piloting system was being overridden from outside. If he wanted to leave, he would have to assume manual control. He knew how to fly the ship in theory, from his crash courses in astronautics and space systems. In practice, he had never tried anything like it.
He hit the switches to turn off the ship’s computer control, cursing the messages that came back to him:
“The requested action will remove the vessel from automated path guidance. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes.”
“The requested action will inhibit the use of all trajectory planning functions. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes.”
“The requested action will also disconnect this vessel from the solar system protective navigation system. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
He was hitting the manual lift sequence, over and over, convinced that outside the ship more direct methods were being put in place to prevent takeoff.
Finally — at last — he saw that the ship was rising. Pluto’s surface of rock and ice receded below them.
He set a simple outward course, directly away from the Sun. He did not care where he went, provided it was away.
It should have been easy. The Pluto approach corridor had been completely deserted on his arrival. Now it was buzzing with ships. His control board showed scores of them in the space ahead. Where had they all come from? Was it like the automated service that had caught Melissa, a whole invisible safety net of ships that sprang into action exactly when it was needed?
No time to worry about what or why. The ships ahead were converging, moving to intersect the course that he had set for the solar system perimeter. Somehow they knew his flight plan. It must be transmitted automatically, even when he was flying manual.
“DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED.” The command was louder and more peremptory. “RETURN AT ONCE TO PLUTO.”
Drake set the ship to maximum acceleration and kept going, driving toward the heart of the converging cluster of ships.
“TURN OFF YOUR DRIVE. YOU ARE MOVING IN EXCESS OF FORTY KILOMETERS PER SECOND, AND
ACCELERATING. IMPACT AT SUCH SPEED CAN HAVE FATAL CONSEQUENCES.”
It was a great understatement. Impact with another ship at forty kilometers a second would leave random bits of melted metal and vaporized plastic.
“YOU ARE ON A COLLISION COURSE.”
A grating siren sounded in Drake’s ear. The ship’s own detection system was blaring its warning. Collision and destruction were no more than a split second away.
And then, at the last moment, the other ships sheered off. The center of the cluster became open. Drake flew on through.
He wondered what had saved him. Did the interceptors have their own prohibition against causing harm to a human? Or against permitting their own destruction?
He angled wide of another group of ships that had appeared far ahead. They moved toward him, but he was racing along too fast. He was soon past them. Still at maximum acceleration, he fled for the edge of the solar system.
As soon as the sky was clear ahead, he set a course for Canopus.
At last he was able to breathe. If he might have been judged a murderer in an earlier generation for what he and Tom Lambert had done to Ana, he was certainly considered a thief or worse in this one.
Who cared? He and Ana were together, that was all that mattered. Although pursuit was still possible, he could see no signs of it. And he would be hard to catch. The ship was still accelerating monstrously. Soon it would crowd light speed, moving just 125 meters per second slower than a traveling wave front. Even that was not the limit. If need be, he could reach within a meter a second of light speed.
But it should not be necessary. He examined the control board. Unless he saw signs of pursuit, their planned top speed would be just right. Relativistic time dilatation was going to be a powerful factor. Years would pass on Earth for every day of shipboard time. The trip out to Canopus and back would be a few months for him, but almost three hundred years back on Earth.
And for Ana?
She was still trapped outside of time, in her personal fermata, a temporal hiatus without end where duration and interval did not exist.
He felt a great urge to gaze upon her face within the sealed cryotank. Instead he moved forward to peer ahead to the distant star that he had chosen as their destination. Even from a hundred light-years away, by some miracle of the ship’s imaging system Canopus was already revealed as a tiny bright disk.
He went to where the ship’s computer was housed. Now that they were far beyond pursuit, he had returned to automatic control. He was curious to see what the computer looked like, the multipurpose processor that with equal ease planned trajectories, cooked meals, and maintained all the onboard life-support systems.
He lifted the plastic access panel to the main processor, and peered into a small dark cavity. He saw a lattice of red beads, each one no bigger than a pinhead. Tiny sparkles of violet light passed among them. A soft voice from the ship’s address system said in mild rebuke, “Exposure to external light sources is discouraged, since it causes the computer to operate with reduced speed and efficiency.”