“I’m not a cripple,” Roy grunted.

Brennan reclined Roy’s chair. “You’ll feel like one.” He lowered himself into the other chair with the same care. “They bit. They’re coming after me. We’ve been doing two point one six gee for two years now. I kept it that low because I was afraid they’d think I could outrun them.”

“Can you? How are they doing?”

“I’ll show you.” Brennan played with the keyboard, and a starscape filled the screen. “This is two years action telescoped into ten minutes. You’ll see it better that way. Can you spot the Pak ships?”

“Yah.” Three green dots, visibly elongated, visibly moving. Presently a brilliant white light — Sol — drifted on from stage left.

“I got some paralax on them while they were making the turn. Low acceleration, but a fast turn, about the same turning radius as ours. I think the individual ships must have turned separately. Now they’re back in tandem, coming at us at five and a half gee.”

“You guessed that almost on the nose.”

“Remember, I spent several days with Phssthpok as my mentor. I figured a healthy Pak could take three gee forever, and six gee for five years, which would kill him. They knew their limits and designed for ’em.”

Three green stars drifted toward Sol. Presently, one by one, they went out and came on again. Now their color was dimmer, yellower. Roy tried to sit up against his own weight, but Brennan’s hand pushed him back. “This is where they switched to acceleration mode.”

Roy watched for another minute, but nothing happened, except that the green stars brightened slightly.

“This is where we stand now. Those images are about a light-year away. The ships themselves would be two light-months closer, assuming they’ve been chasing us at constant acceleration. In a few months we’ll know whether any of them turned back. Otherwise the lead pair would reach us in about fourteen months ship’s time, except that at some point they’ll go into deceleration mode and see if they can hurt us with the backblast, which means it’ll take a little longer.”

“Fourteen months.”

“Ship’s time. We’re doing relativistic speeds. We’ll cover a lot more distance than that.”

Roy shook his head. “It comes to me that you woke me just a bit early.”

“Not really. I can’t think of anything they could do to me over this distance, but I’m not certain they haven’t thought of something. I want you awake and fully recovered if something happens to me. And I want these bombs back in the weapons pod.”

“It sounds unlikely. What could they do to you that wouldn’t kill me too?”

“All right, I had another reason for waking you. I could have rigged you a stasis box right after we left Kobold. Why didn’t I?”

Roy felt tired. Gravity pulling blood from his brain? “I had to be trained. Trained to fight this ship.”

“And are you in condition to fight? Like a pile of wet noodles you are! When things start happening I want you able to move.”

He did feel like a pile of wet noodles. Hell. “All right. Shall we — ?”

“No chance. For today you just lie there. Tomorrow we’ll walk you around a bit. Pretend you’ve been sick.” Brennan glanced sideways at him. “Don’t take it so hard. Let me show you something.”

Roy had forgotten that this was Phssthpok’s own control module, with a hull that could be made transparent at will. It startled him when the wall went invisible. Then he looked.

They were moving that fast. The stars behind were red-shifted to black. Ahead, above, they were violet-white. And from the zenith they swept back like a rainbow: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, in expanding rings. The effect was total; all of Protector’s interior partitions had turned transparent too.

“No man has ever seen this before you,” said Brennan, “unless you count me a man.” He pointed. “There. That’s Epsilon Indi.”

“It’s off to the side.”

“We’re not headed for it directly. I told you, I’m planning to make a right angle turn in space. There’s only one place I can do it.”

“Can we beat the scouts there?”

“Barely ahead of the second ship, I think. We’ll have to fight the first one.”

Roy slept ten hours a day. Twice a day he took long walks, from the control room around the exercise room and back, an extra lap each day. Brennan walked with him, ready to reach out. He could kill himself if he fell wrong.

It felt like he’d been sick. He didn’t like it.

One day they threw the ram field constriction wide open, and — in free fall, protected from the oncoming gamma rays by the scintillating dome of the inner ram field — they moved the radon bombs back to their nests in the weapons pod. For those two hours Roy had his strength back, and he gloried in it. Then he was back in two point one six gee, a four-hundred-pound weakling.

With Brennan’s help he worked out a calendar of events for the longest war on record:

33,000 BC: Phssthpok departs Pak.

32,800 BC: First emigration wave departs Pak.

32,500 BC: Second emigration wave.

X: Pak scouts.

2125 AD: Phssthpok arrives Sol. Brennan turns protector.

2340 AD: Kidnap of Truesdale.

2341 AD, October: Discovery of Pak fleet.

2341 AD, November: Departure of Flying Dutchman. Destruction of Kobold.

2342 AD, May: Discovery of Pak scouts.

2342 AD, July: Truesdale in stasis. Departure of Protector.

At this point relativity would begin to screw up the dating. Roy decided to go by ship’s time, given that he would have to live through it.

2344 AD, April: Pak ships sighted altering course.

2344 AD, July: Truesdale out of stasis.

HYPOTHETICAL

2345 AD, September: Meet first Pak ships.

2346 AD, March: Right angle turn (?) Lose Pak scouts.

2350 AD: Arrive Home. Adjust calendars.

Roy studied Home. Over many decades there had been considerable message laser traffic between Earth and Home. There were travelogues and biographies and novels and studies of the native life. Brennan had already read it all; at his reading speed he hadn’t needed anything like his two years’ head start.

The novels had an odd flavor, a nest of unspoken assumptions that he couldn’t quite pin down, until he asked Brennan about it.

Brennan had an eidetic memory and a fine grasp of subtleties. “Partly it’s a Belter thing,” he told Roy. “They know they’re in an artificial environment, and they feel protective toward it. This bit in The Shortest Day, where Ingram gets shot for walking on the grass — that’s a direct steal from something that happened early in Home history. You’ll see it in Livermore’s biography. As for their burial customs, that’s probably left over from the early days. Remember, the first hundred people who died on Home knew each other like you knew your brother. Anyone’s death was important in those days, to everyone in the world.”

“Yah, when you put it like that… and they’ve got more room, too. They don’t need crematoriums.”

“Good point. There’s endless useless land, useless until it’s fertilized somehow. The bigger the graveyard grows, the more it shows the human conquest of Home. Especially when trees and grass start growing where nothing ever grew before.”

Roy thought the idea over, and decided he liked it. How could you lose? Until the Pak arrived.

“These Homers don’t seem particularly warlike,” he said. “We’re going to have to get them on a war footing before the Pak scouts find Home. Somehow.”

But Brennan wouldn’t talk about that. “All our information is ten to a hundred years old. I don’t know enough about Home as it is now. We don’t know how the politics have gone. I’ve got some ideas… but mainly we’ll be playing it by ear.” He slapped Roy on the back: a sensation like being hit by a sackful of walnuts. “Cheer up. We may never get there at all.”