LITMIR.BIZ

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What if this rocket had split in two long before? The debris would likely follow only slightly deviated trajectories. One half collided with the crawler, and our search revealed the other half, which despite its high velocity was still in the vicinity of the collision point."

      Sharita closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and turned to the hyperdetection officer. "Omer, go through the stored hyperdetector data. Search for particle clouds. Maybe there's one with a mass that roughly matches that of the crawler plus a piece of debris like the one in the hangar ... even though I hope not."

      The result came a few minutes later. There actually was a particle cloud in the specified sector, and its direction, velocity and mass were within the parameters of what would be expected after a collision between the crawler and a piece of debris.

      Sharita quietly thanked the hyperdetection officer. "At least now we are certain." She turned to Rhodan and stared at him for a moment. "You suspected this all along, didn't you? Why didn't you say something?"

      Rhodan met her gaze. "Because it wouldn't have made any difference. None of you would have wanted to believe me. You would have gone on looking anyway until you fell over from exhaustion. And I understand completely. In your place, I would have done exactly the same thing if the lives of my friends were at stake."

      Pearl Laneaux opened her mouth, but Sharita waved her off with a militarily abrupt gesture. "I know, I know. He has a point." She straightened the belt from which her beamer dangled. "It's now confirmed. The three crawler crew are dead. Pearl, inform their families. See to it that they get the risk bonus they're entitled to. And now I want to take a look at the thing that is responsible for the loss of my people."

      The commander of the Palenque stalked out of the control center. Rhodan joined her, and Sharita accepted his company without a word.

      5

      "Are you sad?"

      Lemal Netwar carefully turned his head in the direction from which the voice came. His caution was rewarded; he felt only a fleeting twinge of pain.

      He looked at the blank wall. The Net chose not to manifest itself today. It had been manifesting less and less often. Perhaps the projector had broken down and the Net had not found a substitute. It would be one more in a long list of devices on the Nethack Achton that had failed.

      "Why do you ask?"

      Netwar was a large and powerful man; he remained so despite the sickness that ate away at his joints. With his broad shoulders (though lately he found himself slumping), he could have been mistaken for a metach who had been assigned to heavy labor his entire life. But the appearance was deceptive. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      "I know you, Lemal." The voice came from a different direction. Netwar made no effort to turn toward it. He was not in the mood to play games with the Net. Here in his private rooms, it heard every word he said, whether he liked it or not. And he had to take it easy on himself, try not to provoke pain by unnecessary movements.

      "The wrinkles on your forehead tell me everything I need to know," the voice continued. It resonated with a human warmth that would have convinced a casual listener a real person was talking. If the same listener had been asked if the voice was that of a man or a woman, they could not have answered with any confidence. "It runs straight up from the bridge of your nose and branches out on your forehead to both sides. You always have it when you're worried."

      "Always?"

      "In 97.355 percent of all cases." The voice sighed. "Why do you compel me to unnecessary precision? To remind me that I am only a machine?"

      Netwar did not reply. He often wished he had never begun tinkering with the Net. By doing so, he had upset the natural order of things. He was the Naakh, the ruler of the Nethack Achton. The Net was designed to monitor everything that happened on the Ship, gathering information he used to exercise his rulership for the good of all metach. It was what the Builders had intended.

      And what had driven him to make changes? He had a lot of reasons. Even good ones. Standing still meant going backwards, was one. To make progress, they had to use the limited resources available to them on the Ship to maximum effect. Netwar hadn't realized what he was getting himself into, was another. The only honest excuse was: he was lonely. The other metach did not regard him as an ordinary mortal. Most worshipped him, many hated him, and without exception they both respected and feared him. If he had tried to discuss his cares and problems, the burden of his responsibility with other metach, he would have met blank incomprehension, even outright rejection.

      Netwar had a strikingly sharp mind, but he didn't need to be a genius to recognize his problem. Once, a long time ago, in one of his darkest hours, he had tossed this intelligence to the winds. Naturally, he had reclassified the woman in whom he had confided to lifelong labor in the fields on the Outer Deck, as far away from him as was possible aboard the Ship. This decision was not only for his own good, but for that of the entire Ship.

      Soon after this incident, he had started to fiddle with the Net. The Net's hardware was fixed; the Ship had not been given resources to make expansions or large-scale changes to the system, but the hardware was not the important element for what Netwar wanted to do. It was only the skeleton. What he wanted to shape was the software—the flesh—and that he had changed according to his whims.

      He was the Naahk. He made all life-and-death decisions on board the Nethack Achton. But being allpowerful did not make him all-knowledgeable. It had taken Lemal Netwar a long time to learn the basic concepts of programming, and still longer to achieve the first tiny successes. The Builders had, of course, laid the foundation. They had equipped the Net, the decentralized union of all the Nethack Achton's computers, with simple speech recognition and voice control. Netwar wanted to elevate the Net interface to the point that interaction with the Net would be indistinguishable from interaction with a person.

      His first attempts had been laughably primitive. The Net had been designed to react to a series of only two-hundred-fourteen precisely defined commands. Naturally spoken language lay outside its capabilities. In order to be understood by the Net, Netwar was forced to use a syntax that was rigidly simple. In the first phase of elevation, he had succeeded only in giving the Net a pseudo-intelligence, essentially the ability to play a question-and-answer game that quickly grew tiresome. The Net had replied to every statement with a question. No matter what he said, he received only questions—never answers.

      "You are sad," the voice declared.

      Now, Netwar regretted what he had done. He had hoped for someone to talk to, someone on whom he could unload his worries—not someone who confronted him with them.

      The Naahk said nothing. He tried to concentrate on the data on his master display.

      "It's the children, isn't it?"

      Netwar immediately lost his patience. He looked up; an absurd gesture, since to look at the screen was to look directly into the Net's face. And it caused him pain, as well. He groaned softly.

      "Don't call them that. They aren't children—not any more."

      "Oh. So you no longer consider those on board to be your children?"

      "We are a community. We must work together to survive. Everyone must serve the community in his assigned place. We ... "

      "Spare me the lecture, great Naahk," the Net interrupted. "I wrote that one myself, remember?" Netwar heard an exhalation like a deep sigh come from all around him. Then the voice continued with exaggerated calmness. "I didn't want to talk to you about that. We need to talk about the children."

      "Their leader was twenty-two, and the rest were about the same age."

      "Please, Lemal. What does physical age say about a person? You, of all people, know better than that."

      Netwar ran a hand through his short black hair. He wanted to run away—from himself, from the responsibility he had voluntarily accepted. But the Ship was too small; there was no escape.

      "Have it your way," he said ungraciously. "Call them what you like."

      "I

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