Inherit the Stars Read online

  Inherit the Stars

  by

  James P. Hogan

  Table of Contents

  Inherit the Stars

  James P. Hogan

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2006 by James P. Hogan. Inherit the Stars © 1978

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books eBook

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN-10: 0-3453-0107-2

  First printing, May 1977

  Cover Art by Darrel K. Sweet

  To the memory of my Father

  Prologue

  He became aware of consciousness returning.

  Instinctively his mind recoiled, as if by some effort of will he could arrest the relentless flow of seconds that separated nonawareness from awareness and return again to the timeless oblivion in which the agony of total exhaustion was unknown and unknowable.

  The hammer that had threatened to burst from his chest was now quiet. The rivers of sweat that had drained with his strength from every hollow of his body were now turned cold. His limbs had turned to lead. The gasping of his lungs had returned once more to a slow and even rhythm. It sounded loud in the close confines of his helmet.

  He tried to remember how many had died. Their release was final; for him there was no release. How much longer could he go on? What was the point? Would there be anyone left alive at Gorda anyway?

  "Gorda . . . ? Gorda . . . ?"

  His mental defenses could shield him from reality no longer.

  "Must get to Gorda!"

  He opened his eyes. A billion unblinking stars stared back without interest. When he tried to move, his body refused to respond, as if trying to prolong to the utmost its last precious moments of rest. He took a deep breath and, clenching his teeth at the pain that instantly racked again through every fiber of his body, forced himself away from the rock and into a sitting position. A wave of nausea swept over him. His head sagged forward and struck the inside of his visor. The nausea passed.

  He groaned aloud.

  "Feeling better, then, soldier?" The voice came clearly through the speaker inside his helmet. "Sun's getting low. We gotta be moving."

  He lifted his head and slowly scanned the nightmare wilderness of scorched rock and ash-gray dust that confronted him.

  "Whe—" The sound choked in his throat. He swallowed, licked his lips, and tried again. "Where are you?"

  "To your right, up on the rise just past that small cliff that juts out—the one with the big boulders underneath."

  He turned his head and after some seconds detected a bright blue patch against the ink-black sky. It seemed blurred and far away. He blinked and strained his eyes again, forcing his brain to coordinate with his vision. The blue patch resolved itself into the figure of the tireless Koriel, clad in a heavy-duty combat suit.

  "I see you." After a pause: "Anything?"

  "It's fairly flat on the other side of the rise—should be easier going for a while. Gets rockier farther on. Come have a look."

  He inched his arms upward to find purchase on the rock behind, then braced them to thrust his weight forward over his legs. His knees trembled. His face contorted as he fought to concentrate his remaining strength into his protesting thighs. Already his heart was pumping again, his lungs heaving. The effort evaporated and he fell back against the rock. His labored breathing rasped over Koriel's radio.

  "Finished . . . Can't move . . ."

  The blue figure on the skyline turned.

  "Aw, what kinda talk's that? This is the last stretch. We're there, buddy—we're there."

  "No—no good . . . Had it . . ."

  Koriel waited a few seconds.

  "I'm coming back down."

  "No—you go on. Someone's got to make it."

  No response.

  "Koriel . . . ?"

  He looked back at where the figure had stood, but already it had disappeared below the intervening rocks and was out of the line of transmission. A minute or two later the figure emerged from behind the nearby boulders, covering the ground in long, effortless bounds. The bounds broke into a walk as Koriel approached the bunched form clad in red.

  "C'mom, soldier, on your feet now. There's people back there depending on us."

  He felt himself gripped below his arm and raised irresistibly, as if some of Koriel's limitless reserves of strength were pouring into him. For a while his head swam and he leaned with the top of his visor resting on the giant's shoulder insignia.

  "Okay," he managed at last. "Let's go."

  Hour after hour the thin snake of footprints, two pinpoints of color at its head, wound its way westward across the wilderness and steadily lengthening shadows. He marched as if in a trance, beyond feeling pain, beyond feeling exhaustion—beyond feeling anything. The skyline never seemed to change; soon he could no longer look at it. Instead, he began picking out the next prominent boulder or crag, and counting off the paces until they reached it. "Two hundred and thirteen less to go." And then he repeated it over again . . . and again . . . and again. The rocks marched by in slow, endless, indifferent procession. Every step became a separate triumph of will—a deliberate, conscious effort to drive one foot yet one more pace beyond the last. When he faltered, Koriel was there to catch his arm; when he fell, Koriel was always there to haul him up. Koriel never tired.

  At last they stopped. They were standing in a gorge perhaps a quarter mile wide, below one of the lines of low, broken cliffs that flanked it on either side. He collapsed on the nearest boulder. Koriel stood a few paces ahead surveying the landscape. The line of crags immediately above them was interrupted by a notch, which marked the point where a steep and narrow cleft tumbled down to break into the wall of the main gorge. From the bottom of the cleft, a mound of accumulated rubble and rock debris led down about fifty feet to blend with the floor of the gorge not far from where they stood. Koriel stretched out an arm to point up beyond the cleft.

  "Gorda will be roughly that way," he said without turning. "Our best way would be up and onto that ridge. If we stay on the flat and go around the long way, it'll be too far. What d'you say?"

  The other stared up in mute despair. The rockfall, funneling up toward the mouth of the cleft, looked like a mountain. In the distance beyond towered the ridge, jagged and white in the glare of the sun. It was impossible.

  Koriel allowed his doubts no time to take root. Somehow—slipping, sliding, stumbling, and falling—they reached the entrance to the cleft. Beyond it, the walls narrowed and curved around to the left, cutting off the view of the gorge below from where they had come. They climbed higher. Around them, sheets of raw reflected sunlight and bottomless pits of shadow met in knife-edges across rocks shattered at a thousand crazy angles. His brain ceased to extract the concepts of shape and form from the insane geometry of white and black that kaleidoscoped across his retina. The patterns grew and shrank and merged and whirled in a frenzy of visual cacophony.

  His face crashed against his visor as his helmet thudded into the dust. Koriel hoisted him to his feet.

  "You can do it. We'll see Gorda from the ridge. It'll be all downhill from there. . . ."

  But the figure in red sank slowly to its knees and folded over. The head inside the helmet shook weakly from side to side. As Koriel watched, the conscious part of his mind at last accepted the inescapable logic that the parts beneath consciousness already knew. He took a deep breath and looked about him.

  Not far bel
ow, they had passed a hole, about five feet across, cut into the base of one of the rock walls. It looked like the remnant of some forgotten excavation—maybe a preliminary digging left by a mining survey. The giant stopped, and grasping the harness that secured the backpack to the now insensible figure at his feet, dragged the body back down the slope to the hole. It was about ten feet deep inside. Working quickly, Koriel arranged a lamp to reflect a low light off the walls and roof. Then he removed the rations from his companion's pack, laid the figure back against the rear wall as comfortably as he could, and placed the food containers within easy reach. Just as he was finishing, the eyes behind the visor flickered open.

  "You'll be fine here for a while." The usual gruffness was gone from Koriel's voice. "I'll have the rescue boys back from Gorda before you know it."

  The figure in red raised a feeble arm. Just a whisper came through.

  "You—you tried. . . . Nobody could have . . ."

  Koriel clasped the gauntlet with both hands.

  "Mustn't give up. That's no good. You just have to hang on a while." Inside his helmet the granite cheeks were wet. He backed to the entrance and made a final salute. "So long, soldier." And then he was gone.

  Outside he built a small cairn of stones to mark the position of the hole. He would mark the trail to Gorda with such cairns. At last he straightened up and turned defiantly to face the desolation surrounding him. The rocks seemed to scream down in soundless laughing mockery. The stars above remained unmoved. Koriel glowered up at the cleft, rising up toward the tiers of crags and terraces that guarded the ridge, still soaring in the distance. His lips curled back to show his teeth.

  "So—it's just you and me now, is it?" he snarled at the Universe. "Okay, you bastard—let's see you take this round!"

  With his legs driving like slow pistons, he attacked the ever-steepening slope.

  Chapter One

  Accompanied by a mild but powerful whine, a gigantic silver torpedo rose slowly upward to hang two thousand feet above the sugar-cube huddle of central London. Over three hundred yards long, it spread at the tail into a slim delta topped by two sharply swept fins. For a while the ship hovered, as if savoring the air of its newfound freedom, its nose swinging smoothly around to seek the north. At last, with the sound growing, imperceptibly at first but with steadily increasing speed, it began to slide forward and upward. At ten thousand feet its engines erupted into full power, hurling the suborbital skyliner eagerly toward the fringes of space.

  Sitting in row thirty-one of C deck was Dr. Victor Hunt, head of Theoretical Studies at the Metadyne Nucleonic Instrument Company of Reading, Berkshire—itself a subsidiary of the mammoth Intercontinental Data and Control Corporation, headquartered at Portland, Oregon, USA. He absently surveyed the diminishing view of Hendon that crawled across the cabin wall-display screen and tried again to fit some kind of explanation to the events of the last few days.

  His experiments with matter-antimatter particle extinctions had been progressing well. Forsyth-Scott had followed Hunt's reports with evident interest and therefore knew that the tests were progressing well. That made it all the more strange for him to call Hunt at his office one morning to ask him simply to drop everything and get over to IDCC Portland as quickly as could be arranged. From the managing director's tone and manner it had been obvious that the request was couched as such mainly for reasons of politeness; in reality this was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had no say in the matter.

  To Hunt's questions, Forsyth-Scott had stated quite frankly that he didn't know what it was that made Hunt's immediate presence at IDCC so imperative. The previous evening he had received a videocall from Felix Borlan, the president of IDCC, who had told him that as a matter of priority he required the only working prototype of the scope prepared for immediate shipment to the USA and an installation team ready to go with it. Also, he had insisted that Hunt personally come over for an indefinite period to take charge of some project involving the scope, which could not wait. For Hunt's benefit, Forsyth-Scott had replayed Borlan's call on his desk display and allowed him to verify for himself that Forsyth-Scott in turn was acting under a thinly disguised directive. Even stranger, Borlan too had seemed unable to say precisely what it was that the instrument and its inventor were needed for.

  The Trimagniscope, developed as a consequence of a two-year investigation by Hunt into certain aspects of neutrino physics, promised to be perhaps the most successful venture ever undertaken by the company. Hunt had established that a neutrino beam that passed through a solid object underwent certain interactions in the close vicinity of atomic nuclei, which produced measurable changes in the transmitted output. By raster scanning an object with a trio of synchronized, intersecting beams, he had devised a method of extracting enough information to generate a 3-D color hologram, visually indistinguishable from the original solid. Moreover, since the beams scanned right through, it was almost as easy to conjure up views of the inside as of the out. These capabilities, combined with that of high-power magnification that was also inherent in the method, yielded possibilities not even remotely approached by anything else on the market. From quantitative cell metabolism and bionics, through neurosurgery, metallurgy, crystallography, and molecular electronics, to engineering inspection and quality control, the applications were endless. Inquiries were pouring in and shares were soaring. Removing the prototype and its originator to the USA—totally disrupting carefully planned production and marketing schedules—bordered on the catastrophic. Borlan knew this as well as anybody. The more Hunt turned these things over in his mind, the less plausible the various possible explanations that had at first occurred to him seemed, and the more convinced he became that whatever the answer turned out to be, it would be found to lie far beyond even Felix Borlan and IDCC.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a voice issuing from somewhere in the general direction of the cabin roof.

  "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Mason speaking. I would like to welcome you aboard this Boeing 1017 on behalf of British Airways. We are now in level flight at our cruising altitude of fifty-two miles, speed 3,160 knots. Our course is thirty-five degrees west of true north, and the coast is now below with Liverpool five miles to starboard. Passengers are free to leave their seats. The bars are open and drinks and snacks are being served. We are due to arrive in San Francisco at ten thirty-eight hours local time; that's one hour and fifty minutes from now. I would like to remind you that it is necessary to be seated when we begin our descent in one hour and thirty-five minutes time. A warning will sound ten minutes before descent commences and again at five minutes. We trust you will enjoy your journey. Thank you."

  The captain signed himself off with a click, which was drowned out as the regulars made their customary scramble for the vi-phone booths.

  In the seat next to Hunt, Rob Gray, Metadyne's chief of Experimental Engineering, sat with an open briefcase resting on his knees. He studied the information being displayed on the screen built into its lid.

  "A regular flight to Portland takes off fifteen minutes after we get in," he announced. "That's a bit tight. Next one's not for over four hours. What d'you reckon?" He punctuated the question with a sideways look and raised eyebrows.

  Hunt pulled a face. "I'm not arsing about in Frisco for four hours. Book us an Avis jet—we'll fly ourselves up."

  "That's what I thought."

  Gray played the mini keyboard below the screen to summon an index, consulted it briefly, then touched another key to display a directory. Selecting a number from one of the columns, he mouthed it silently to himself as he tapped it in. A copy of the number appeared near the bottom of the screen with a request for him to confirm. He pressed the Y button. The screen went blank for a few seconds and then exploded into a whirlpool of color, which stabilized almost at once into the features of a platinum-blonde, who radiated the kind of smile normally reserved for toothpaste commercials.

  "Good morning. Avis San Francisc
o, City Terminal. This is Sue Parker. Can I help you?"

  Gray addressed the grille, located next to the tiny camera lens just above the screen.

  "Hi, Sue. Name's Gray—R. J. Gray, airbound for SF, due to arrive about two hours from now. Could I reserve an aircar, please?"

  "Sure thing. Range?"

  "Oh—about five hundred . . ." He glanced at Hunt.

  "Better make it seven," Hunt advised.

  "Make that seven hundred miles minimum."

  "That'll be no problem, Mr. Gray. We have Skyrovers, Mercury Threes, Honeybees, or Yellow Birds. Any preference?"

  "No—any'll do."

  "I'll make it a Mercury, then. Any idea how long?"

  "No—er—indefinite."

  "Okay. Full computer nav and flight control? Automatic VTOL?"

  "Preferably and, ah, yes."