Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

had broken out of its hyperbola and taken up its present orbit under the hormonal and mechanical inveigling of its human passengers, and it was just settling down to enjoy the sunlight only to be subjected to the rude yank of the tether again.
    Slowly, the tree began to outdistance the gnats that were pursuing it. The one-hundred-thousand-mile orbit straightened out into a larger curve. The pursuing craft were in no danger from the photon exhaust yet, but they would be when their interception trajectory intersected the line where Yggdrasil had been.
    After an hour, when the tree had built up a velocity of twenty miles a second and it became obvious that the gap would continue to widen, radar showed that the dragonfly landing stages had simultaneously flip-flopped.
    “Now, why would they do that?” Bram asked.
    “I’m afraid I know,” Jun Davd said.
    The answer came a moment later. Once again, a cloud of orange sparks twinkled into life. The burn lasted for several minutes, then extinguished.
    “They used their retrorockets to give themselves an extra boost!” Bram said unbelievingly. “There’s no way they can come to a soft landing on the Moon, now! All they can hope to do is—”
    “Crash into Yggdrasil,” Jun Davd finished for him. “Project our delta-vee and gamble that by the time they intersect our path, the angle will be acute enough and the relative velocity close enough to zero to enable them to survive the crash.” His face was somber. “They don’t care about being able to get back, of course.”
    Bram scrambled for a console and punched out figures, while Mim watched him, biting her lip in apprehension. After a bad couple of minutes, he gave her a reassuring smile and turned to Jun Davd.
    “They can’t catch up to us,” he said.
    A general sigh of relief went through the observatory, though anxiety still showed on many faces.
    Jun Davd said, “No, an eye—even a wondrous thing like a dragonfly eye—isn’t a computer. Orbital interceptions can be misleading. But they had to try. It seems to be an imperative with them. Spread their wings, figuratively speaking—the wings they haven’t got—and set out for new worlds. Nature can be profligate. It doesn’t matter if most don’t survive.”
    Something like pity appeared on Mim’s face. “Can they be rescued, Jun Davd?”
    “I doubt that the lunar dragonflies would care to make the effort,” Jun Davd said. “Their territory’s overcrowded as it is. In any case, the question is immaterial.”
    It took another hour to demonstrate that. Jun Davd slid back the cover of the observation well in the floor. It gave a good view backward along their line of flight, between the twin puffs of foliage and foliated root. The people in the observatory crowded around the safety rail and stared downward.
    Jun Davd fiddled with dials, and the tough, transparent membrane became a magnifying lens. The expanse of tree crown fled past in a blur as the focus came to rest somewhere beyond. Filters masked the glare of the caged sun, spitted on the slender shaft of the probe; the darkened circle of eclipse also made bearable the beam of virtual photons, briefly swollen with abnormal energy by a factor of ten billion before it satisfied quantum theory by decaying into pions.
    The swarm of dragonfly vehicles peppered the view. They were harshly lit on the side facing the hadronic beam, and their shape could be clearly seen as squat bells, with the spent cone of the descent engine for a clapper.
    “No way they can stop,” Jun Davd said. “Nor can we.”
    The beam was very tight, but there was a certain amount of scattering. To the watching humans, it seemed that each bell instantly evaporated while still some distance away. One by one, they flicked out of existence, soaked up by the terrible light.
    In minutes, space was swept clean of the glittering cloud.
    “We’re safe,” Dal said. “Let’s get out of this cursed system.”
    He spoke too soon. Yggdrasil’s straightening course was taking it past the Moon. It lay before them, huge and yellow through the grand observation blister that formed one wall. Through sulfurous wisps of clouds could be seen a landscape of round lakes, patches of sparse unhealthy vegetation, pocked scars softened by weather, oily seas dotted with ring islands that had once been craters.
    And popping up through the murky atmosphere was a shower of orange sparks.
    An alarm went off. Jun Davd picked up the interphone, said