The Chaos Weapon Read online

  Crouching low, he fired, and the dim tracer told him his aim had been sufficient. Instantly he turned away to protect his ears, as the compression wave gave him a stinging slap across the shoulders. The softness of the broken ground and the picosecond duration of the pulse made it unlikely that the noise would have been detectable at any great distance. Nonetheless the cat slowed to an untidy halt as its stunned driver relinquished control. Instantly Hover was at the cat’s door hatch, making a swift entry and securing the stunned occupant against quick reentry into the game by sticking a self-adhesive drugpatch anaesthetic inconspicuously behind the sleeper’s ear. Then he turned on the headlights to create a visual signal and leaped again out into the darkness.

  He traced a great circle to prevent himself from entering into the radius of the lights, then finally pressed up against a rough bank waiting to see what his trap would draw. He did not have long to wait. Soon a dark figure streaked from cover and ran straight toward the cat. From the mode of the man’s approach it seemed doubtful that he realized anything was amiss with the driver. So he scrambled overtly through the hatch door. Hover managed to project a gas pellet precisely through the opening before it could be closed. He counted twenty slowly to allow for the dispersal of the short-lived knockout gas, then drew out another anaesthetic drugpatch and went to secure his second prisoner.

  That was his biggest mistake. Somebody leaped out from the darkness and with incredibly strong hands dealt the marshal a series of well-placed blows that even through his warm-suit crippled his limbs with a numbing paralysis. Conscious, shocked, yet virtually unable to move, the marshal toppled like a log. He was rolled into the beam from the headlights by an expert foot while his attacker peered down to establish his identity.

  “A space-marshal, indeed! Even so, you’re way out of your league, I think. Don’t try to join the game until you can give it a name and understand the rules. Give that message to Saraya. Tell him Kasdeya sent it.”

  After a short delay the cat started up again. Swinging to face its new direction, the tracked vehicle was hastily reversed. Hover was actually glad of the creeping numbness from the blows. He felt virtually nothing of the pain as the tracks crushed both his legs. On his shoulder, Talloth flickered uncertainly, not finding it necessary to intervene because the marshal’s wound was unlikely to be fatal.

  THREE

  “WHAT do you see across the valley, Roamer?”

  “Two men repairing damage from the storm.”

  The Terran Institute for the Study of Chaos Phenomena was more generally known as ChaosCenter. Knowing of the Institute’s reputation, Space-Marshal Jym Wildheit was full of curiosity as he entered the wide glass portals of the administration block and registered his presence at the desk. Not the least of his interests was why he had been summoned here from half the galaxy away.

  “Watch carefully, and describe the detail.”

  “The hammer falls on the bright-green shingles, out of phase with the sound. I can roughly work out the distance from the intervals.”

  As he entered the lecture suite it was suddenly obvious why the security had been so strict. This was probably the first time all twelve space-marshals had ever gathered together on one planet. Now in the room were the full dozen, men whose duties were to safeguard civilization over the vast sprawl of the galactic empires. These were the legendary untouchables of space, whose authority outranked planetary governors and kings and whose powers were feared by tyrants and space-pirates alike. Considering their influence in the galaxy, it was reassuring to Wildheit to note his comrades still remained quite ordinary men. In fact Marshal Hover’s electric carriage, which had to serve him until his cloned replacement legs had been cultured, underscored the mortal fragility of which they were all only too aware.

  “Close your eyes, little one. What see you now?”

  “I see small pulses of entropic change. Muscles drive the hammer: the nail responds; a little order comes out of chaos: entropy falls; the universe winds back.”

  There was one other man in the room, a stranger to Wildheit. Dressed entirely in black, his style of flowing cloak proclaimed him to be from some far outworld. He acknowledged none of those who entered, but sat hunched, his knuckles supporting his chin, directly under the great portrait of Bron the Warlord, founder of the Federation. His dark eyes were constantly questing, as if searching for answers to something to which no one was able to supply even the questions.

  “Look into time, Roamer. What see you there?”

  “Sparks in the brain, bidding the muscles. Mind versus Chaos; entropy lessened.”

  Chief-Marshal Delfan, alone among those in the room to have decorations on his otherwise strictly functional uniform, brought the assembly to swift order.

  “I expect you’re wondering why we took the undoubted risk of calling all twelve space-marshals off-station and having them report to Terra. The fact that we found it necessary indicates the extreme gravity of the situation. Gentlemen, the truth is that the Galactic Federation is under attack by a weapon so serious and insidious that ten years of its action threatens to destroy all we’ve built in two thousand years in space.”

  A ripple of dissension swept through the audience. Marshal Tun Tse voiced the disagreement.

  “I find that concept difficult to swallow. I’ve personal knowledge of three space sectors, and my colleagues cover the rest. If any such threat existed, we’d be the first to be aware of it.”

  “You are aware of it. It’s just that you don’t see it for what it is. Take the death of General Caligori near Harmony, for instance.”

  “A sunflare sterilized his ship. An act of God.”

  “Then God must have changed sides with remarkable alacrity. In the past year alone, one hundred and eighty specific individuals have died as the result of substantial natural disasters.”

  “A hundred eighty?” Tun Tse was enraged. “Galaxy wide, the death toll from substantial disasters must be in the billions.”

  “I’m not disputing that. But I said specific individuals. Specifically, these are the top intellects of our time—the scientists and administrators whose genius sets the direction for the whole human race. They’ve a statistical death rate greater than chance by over a thousand times. Gentlemen, our investigations leave no doubt that the best of those who shape our future are being deliberately culled. Humanity in space is being killed off from the top downward.”

  “By natural disasters?” Tun Tse was trying to make sure of his ground.

  “General Caligori was caught by a sunflare. Nobody ever had a more potent effect on the development of our space-weapons potential. President Bruant was killed by a major meteorite strike on Barbec. Without his administrative genius, the Hundred Worlds threaten to lapse back into mutual warfare. Julius Orain’s ship was destroyed in a tachyon storm. His brain took with it some theories of relativity that promised us access to unlimited energy for all eternity. The list is endless. Our entire occupation of space is threatened by this selective pattern of disasters.”

  “Look to the sky, Roamer. What see you there?”

  “Beyond the cloudrace and the great storm’s eye, there run the long, slow tides of entropy, peaked with sharp wavefronts of catastrophe.”

  “To me that seems a contradiction in terms. How can you have a selective pattern of random events?” asked Tun Tse, whose bafflement mirrored that of his comrades. “And what was that you mentioned about a weapon?”

  “To answer that I’m going to hand this discussion over to Saraya, director of ChaosCenter. The things he’ll tell you may seem hard to accept. But I ask you to listen carefully and with an open mind, because the shape of the future for humanity could well depend on your understanding.”

  The dark man ruffled his cloak as if it contained wings with which he intended to fly.

  “Gentlemen, Marshal Delfan has outlined the problem. ChaosCenter, aided by Marshal Hover, has for some time been trying to find the answers. We haven’t gotten very far, but what
we have found we don’t like. I’m going to start by asking you to make a rather subtle mental inversion: it’s not that great disasters happen to important men—but that important men are present when great disasters happen.”

  “A subtlety which eludes me entirely,” said Tun Tse.

  “It’s really quite easy. Every day, all over the galaxy, catastrophes occur. Some people die in them, some escape. And every man has a few incidents in life where he has missed death by a narrow margin. Marshal Wildheit, do you follow me so far?”

  “I can’t take issue with what you say. I’ve had many close calls myself.”

  “Then try this. Suppose one of those nearly fatal incidents had happened differently—perhaps a little sooner, or later, a bit to the left or the right, or quicker or slower.”

  “Then there are probably a few tales I shouldn’t be around to tell,” said Wildheit.

  “Good! We’re nearing the crux of the problem. Let me postulate the existence of a device capable of modifying the conditions of a catastrophe with such selectivity that for a given individual his chance of surviving the incident becomes almost nil.”

  “There you leave me. I don’t see how such a thing can be.”

  “Yet all our evidence suggests such a device does exist. Hover and I have seen its effect with our own eyes. For want of a better name, we call it the Chaos Weapon.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Tun Tse. “Are you saying this device creates catastrophes?”

  “No. It merely results in the displacement of an event that would have happened anyway. The event itself can neither be created or nullified, because its signature is already recorded in the patterns of entropy which we call Chaos.”

  “I may have it wrong,” said Hover, “but in Edel, didn’t the weapon actually add to the scale of the catastrophe?”

  “It did. And for a very good reason. You can’t hold up an event containing all those billions of ergs of energy without supplying an equal and opposite amount of energy to hold the balance. And the longer you hold it, the more energy you have to pour in. When your control finally does slip, all that energy is released at once.”

  “I’m still not convinced,” said Wildheit. “But assuming for the sake of argument that what you say is right, who built such a thing, and why is it being used on us?”

  “I don’t think there’s much doubt about why it was built. Since we broke into space, human expansion has grown at an exponential rate, and we’re already investigating the possibilities of populating other galaxies. Somebody wants us cut back—and fast. Chopping out our prime intellects must seem a more rewarding alternative than all-out spacewar. In the long run it could also be more effective.”

  “But have we no clues as to who?”

  “Would you care to speculate on how many alien races there may be in the universe? And how many of these might view our expansion with alarm? I do have a few suspects, Marshal, but not one shred of evidence. That’s why this meeting was called. You know the places and frontiers of space better than any other men alive. We need your help, because unless we can find and destroy the Chaos Weapon, it’s going to destroy us.”

  Delfan took control of the meeting again.

  “The matter has been discussed by the Security Committee of the General Council. Our instructions are that we cooperate with ChaosCenter in establishing the location of the weapon and identifying its operators. If we succeed in this mission, we can then call on aid from any of the armed services to secure its annihilation. Cass Hover has been posted to Chaos-Center to handle liaison work. Jym Wildheit will take over as the operating agent. The rest of you will be given specific assignments from time to time. The public will not be informed at this stage. Nonetheless it is my duty to instruct you that we are officially at war, though the first thing we have to do is find the enemy.”

  The communicator on the conference table shrilled a sudden summons. Saraya took up the handset and listened to it gravely, asking a few crisp questions. Then he dropped the instrument suddenly and rose to his feet.

  “Gentlemen, we already have an emergency on our hands. One of our Chaos computers uses a reference baseline centered on this building. That baseline trace has just disappeared off the top of the graph. If our interpretations are correct, we’re just four minutes away from another catastrophe—right here. I suggest we evacuate the building fast.”

  “What are the portents you see in the sky?”

  “Vaster than storms, dark forces are building: blacker than absolute, redder than fire. Mammoth disaster, death, and destruction. Minds meshed in chaos …

  … the war has begun!”

  The space-shuttle Spanier coasted into Earth-orbit and prepared to shed its speed over three complete circuits of the globe. Course calculation was entirely automatic, so on the control deck the captain had little to do other than cast an occasional eye over the instrument registers and sip the green-eyed Venus-lime from a null-G bag. Upon cessation of the powered drive, the ship had been in a free-fall condition, and now the gentle action of the retro units began to bring a welcome sensation of low gravity back to the craft and its three hundred space-weary travelers.

  On completion of the first orbit, the instrument readings were true to specification, and the computers themselves opened up a communications channel and began to feed data to their destination port at Alaska Field. Then something went wrong. One of the onboard triplexed course computers began to disagree with the other two, and a fault was signaled right across the boards. The captain hastily evaluated the situation, decided that two computers in tandem could make the landing without his intervention, and switched out the manual controls which had been activated when the first computer had fallen out of accord. He reported the fault on the voice channel to Alaska Field and relaxed warily in his harness in case any further trouble showed up.

  It did. Halfway through the second orbit, the temperature sensors in the titanium hull indicated a reading climbing above the safety limit, then the integrating altimeter protested that their rate of descent was far too high. Cursing, the captain reached to take back control, but in the instant before his fingers contacted the switch, the errant electronics played their last and final joke. A massive burst of the retro units killed the ship’s momentum, subjecting the occupants of the shuttle to dangerously high G-forces. The shuttle nosed deeply into the stratosphere, and the airfoils were powerless to restore its flight path in the thin atmosphere. Like a stone, the shuttle dropped toward the Earth, then the stone quickly became white hot and coalesced into a ball, and the ball became a flaming mass. A strange tension in the continuum shaped its final trajectory so that the fireball hit Chaos-Center like the bursting of a bomb.

  From the center of the parkland where they had gathered, the group watched the missile fall. With a crash like rampant thunder, the building seemed momentarily to expand in all directions, then to collapse inward upon itself. Very few seconds after the strike there was little left of the ChaosCenter main building but a pile of rubble overhung by a cloud of dust and smoke. Rising straight into the clear skies above, the vapor trail left by the descending missile stood like the shaft of a spear which had been plunged out of heaven.

  “What the hell was that?” Delfan asked, after a long silence.

  “Some sort of spacecraft, I think.” Saraya’s face was grave. “We’ll get a report on it later. We’ve lost nearly a third of our Chaos computing capacity there. But I wonder if the information we’ve gained wasn’t worth the exchange.”

  “What information?”

  “The fact that such an incredible incident happened exactly when and where it did. In Chaos work, we frequently start with a resultant and scan back to locate the cause. I suspect our unknown enemy has run through a similar exercise—looked at some future event which gave him reason for concern, then tracked the cause back to this place and this point in time.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Entirely possible. The entropic shockpoints of a c
ause or an effect expand like bubbles in the ether. But only two related events have exactly coincident axes. If you start with a cause, you can usually locate its effect, and the converse is also true. In this case it’s a reasonable guess that our deliberations today are destined to have a measurable effect upon the future. In fact, so worried do our opponents seem about what will result that they seem to have produced a panic reaction. In terms of entropy, this is a relatively small disaster.”

  “Does this mean that we’re now all candidates for the Chaos Weapon’s attention?”

  “I think not. It’s more likely to be only one of us. Multiple Chaos patterns become too diffuse to follow. Both Hover and I were present at the Edel catastrophe and nothing was directed against us there, so I think we’re both in the clear. The new factor today, Marshal Wildheit’s involvement with ChaosCenter, is a coincidence that can’t be overlooked. Marshal Wildheit, how does it feel to be looking down the wrong end of the Chaos Weapon? I wonder what you’re going to do to justify such powerful attention, Jym?”

  “It’s an attention I could afford to do without,” said Wildheit ruefully. “But in any case, they missed.”

  “Certainly they missed. But that was because you had the benefit of advance-scan Chaos information. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in our computer room, you’re unlikely to have sufficient warning the next time they make a try against you. Unless …”

  “Unless what?” Delfan asked.

  “It’s a crazy idea, but one that might be worth considering. During the Great Exodus, many minority groups on Terra left to establish colony worlds of their own. One of them, a way-out cult, was dedicated to reestablishing human senses they believed had been allowed to atrophy in the human animal.”