THE ENORMOUS CREATURE ENTERED THE SMALL DOMED enclave easily, pressing the passwords as if it had set them up, which it had. No one was present to greet it, which mildly irritated it, but it stalked down the entry corridor and into the main room where it found a lone Earth-human sitting with a glass and a bottle.
“You’re late,” the man said. “I’d offer you some, but I know it would be a waste.”
“You should lay off that stuff,” the creature admonished. “Those substances that dull the mind are dangerous.”
The man chuckled. “And you should know, right? So I lay off the drinking and the smoking and maybe an occasional pleasure pill and I won’t die young? I’m already dead, remember? I sure as hell do. Scared the living shit out of me, too. Damn it, if you can’t even sin in hell then what’s the use of living any kind of life?”
The creature let that pass. “You have been monitoring the progress of our friends?” it asked.
“Naturally. That’s what this floating mausoleum was designed to do, wasn’t it? After all, we reprogrammed Star Eagle back on Earth. You know, I wonder when Hawks is gonna think of that? He’s a pretty clever fellow.”
“Perhaps too clever for his own survival. The real question is what are their chances of success?
The man sighed and took another sip of his drink. “This stuff’s good. Like the old country. Not like that synthetic crap we’ve endured all these years. Anyway, what can I say? We front-loaded Janipur as much as we could, even lucked out in spotting the Indrus just ahead of the troopers and sending it a divert message to the rest of that refugee fleet. Stroke of luck. Makes me think even God is on our side, if I only could figure out who God was and what He, She, or It wanted.”
“Then you rate their success as probable?”
The man shrugged. “Hey! We did all we could, but short of going in and getting it ourselves and handing it to them on a silver platter, there is no way in hell we can do more now. For the first time, and not the last, they are now truly on their own. We couldn’t interfere if we wanted to. You know the rules that bind us. Even with everything, this one’s not gonna be any snap, although I think they came up with some real original touches in their planning. Now they got two ignorant girls soon to be in very strange clothing whose only gift to the universe is that they can pick any lock ever imagined by machine and man, one girl who knows the route but is gonna still hav’ta learn to be a hoofer, and one creature—whatever the hell that thing is—against maybe sixty troops, the entire Center security system and its personnel and computers, and a shipload more troops lurking around under the command of a Val. How can they lose?”
“You are not amusing.”
“I do not intend to be. And if they somehow manage to pull this one off, the next one has its own real problems, and the third’s a dilly and a half. And we won’t mention number four, considering even we aren’t real sure where it is, but they got some clues and bright ideas. Did your people bring in this Ikira girl? She’s a real asset.”
“We had no knowledge of her or her ship being involved in this. I am pleased to hear it, though. The more they depend upon themselves and the less they need us, the more—comfortable—I am. This is no easy thing for any of us, as you should know.”
“You really don’t believe they’re gonna do it, do you?”
The creature paused a moment. “No. I cannot see how they can, with or without our help. Each victory will make defeat more certain down the road as Master System redoubles its efforts.”
“Yeah, well, we know well how infallible Master Systems is. Scratch one Val, build a pirate fleet, and maybe snatch one big fat ring to stick in Master System’s guts.”
“Perhaps. I do not like to hear you say that. I find this whole thing most distasteful, as you know. It is a logic loop of gigantic proportions. If it is mad, then am I not also mad by definition? And if I am mad, then am I abetting a mad thing by aiding this attempt at Master System’s destruction?”
“Beats the hell out of me, pal,” Arnold Nagy said, lighting a cigarette.
“You are no help at all, Nagy,” the Val responded.